Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne
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the poverty of Brazil during the era in which he was growing up, were also a crucial context. It was part of that “biography” that was to enable him to empathize with other Brazilians, and for millions to empathize with him, when he came to run for the presidency. He had genuinely known hunger. He had been a shoeshine boy and had had to sell peanuts on the streets as a child. He had lived in small, poor shacks that were not rain-proof and were liable to flood. Money was hard to get and vulnerable to the constant devaluation caused by rampant inflation. Educational advancement, without the lucky SENAI break, would have been out of reach.
At the same time, for the da Silvas as for the country, there was an enormous desire for progress. The excitement of the Brasilia boom had come and gone. But when the da Silvas and other retirantes (internal migrants) had come down from the northeast to the central south, they had wanted to partake in a richer, more developed Brazil. Lula had longed for the “monkey-suit” of a well-paid engineer in an auto factory. The positivist national slogan, “Ordem e Progresso”—order and progress—influenced all parts of what was still a conservative society. It infected the anticommunist ideology of the military takeover of 1964, whose officers were also fed up with politicians' populism, bureaucratic muddle, and outdated systems from telephones to public finance.
And Brazil was doing things. The onward march to megalopolis of São Paulo, with its factories and skyscrapers, was symbolic. In 1970, amid national rejoicing, Brazil would win the World Cup in soccer. A better future seemed achievable.
Yet Lula had learned about the dark side of what military apologists would call the Brazilian economic miracle: poor safety in factories, depression of living standards, and an environment in which those who stood up for the rights of workers were spied on and arrested, and could lose their own rights. He himself had lost two jobs when trying to stand up for his own rights.
He had also been drawn into trade unionism in a way that was not exactly democratic, but which mirrored an enduring element in the country's politics and society. It reflected a widespread tradition of patronage and the significance of family connections. He had been invited to become a member of a union executive before he was even a union member, before any election, because he was Frei Chico's brother, and he was put on the winning ticket.
His own take on the military regime at this stage was much hazier and less confrontational than Frei Chico's. It was a world away from the leftist ideologies of the middle-class students and their professors, wrapped up in arcane Marxist disputes, moving toward different schools of armed revolution. To most Brazilians, a little fearful of the military regime and keen to keep their heads down and go about their business, the small guerrilla groups seemed eccentric if not threatening. In 1969, Lula's attitude and the anxieties of his new bride, Lourdes, were probably typical of a large chunk of Brazilian opinion. His own political education had hardly begun.
2 STRIKE LEADER
Both Lula and his mother cried when the newlyweds departed for their honeymoon. Lula and Lourdes seem to have been very happy together. Lula had been her first boyfriend. With a loan from the Villares firm's social fund, they were able to get their own two-room house in Vila das Mercês, close to Dona Lindu. Lourdes, who was working at a firm in Ipiranga, kept their home spotless. Lula's sister Maria and her husband, who was then out of work, stayed with them. But tragedy was about to strike the young couple.
Lourdes became pregnant. In her seventh month, in 1971, she started vomiting seriously. Initially the doctors said this was normal. She was then taken to the Hospital Model, in São Paulo, where she was diagnosed with hepatitis. The doctor in charge was an inexperienced trainee. Lula visited her and found her crying out in pain, with no nurse or doctor to attend to her.
On a Monday, he received a call to take clothing for mother and baby, as a cesarean birth had been scheduled. But when he arrived at the hospital, he was told that both mother and baby—a little boy—had died.1 Naturally, he was distraught. He would not permit a postmortem autopsy. Perhaps surprisingly, his father, Aristides, came up from Santos for the funeral; his mother stayed away.
The loss of his wife and baby, when he was only twenty-five, had a huge impact on Lula. It was a life-changing event. He was bitter about the hospital and its lack of care. This made him realize the importance of social assistance work for the union, his first portfolio as a full-time official. He felt that health services for the millions of Brazil's poor were utterly inadequate and second-rate.
Personally, he was depressed. For at least six months he would not go out. He did not want to meet people. Every Sunday he would place flowers on the grave. Many years later, the deaths of his first wife and baby still brought tears to his eyes. Dona Lindu, worried about him, asked another child to move out so that Lula could live with her for a while and she could keep an eye on him. In fact, he lived with her for three years.
When he did come out of the worst of his depression, he reacted. He took out a different girl every weekend. It was a phase that lasted three years. But he also became more serious with one, Miriam Cordeiro, who was working as a nurse in a clinic. Lula had gotten to know her from regularly taking twin girls, the children of the brother-in-law of his sister Maria, to the clinic for treatment.2 He took her out, the relationship became sexual, and when she was three months pregnant, she told Maria and Lula that she was expecting a baby. Lula was delighted.
The baby girl was born healthy and named Lurian—a combination of the names of her parents—but Lula soon broke up with her mother because he had met someone else. Miriam tried to cut off all contact between her child and Lula. In a dirty political trick in 1989, when Lula was running for the presidency the first time against Fernando Collor, Miriam was paid to go on television to say that Lula had wanted her to have an abortion. Lula's family says that this was rubbish.3
It was while he was still with Miriam that he first heard about the woman who was to become his second wife, Marisa Leticia Casa. Coming back late, up to midnight, after seeing Miriam, he would often take a taxi home. He got to know an elderly cab driver who told him how his son had been killed in a fight in the square. His daughter-in-law was pretty and was bringing up their little boy with his help.
Then, by chance, Lula met Marisa at his union office, where she had come in to get a form witnessed. Lula liked to talk to people when he was doing his social assistance duties—it was one of his skills as a union organizer—and he had given instructions to colleagues that he would personally attend to any good-looking widows who came in. As he drew her out in conversation, he realized that she was the daughter-in-law of the taxi driver.4
Very quickly, he fell in love with Marisa, who was working as a school secretary in São Bernardo. Lula's determination was shown when he persuaded Marisa to send away a former boyfriend—a Volkswagen worker—who then stalked them for a while. Lula insisted on staying put at her house early one evening, when the former boyfriend was due to visit her, until she told the man it was all over between them. She warned Lula that she would not live with him until they married. So, after knowing each other for only five months in a whirlwind romance, Lula and Marisa had a civil wedding. Lula became the adoptive father of her three-year-old boy, Marcos.
Marisa was popular with Lula's family. She was the eleventh child in a family of twelve, of Italian ancestry. She had been working since the age of nine as a nanny and a packer in a candy factory, before getting her position in a school.5
Although the couple were happy, Marisa's former in-laws were not. They felt they had lost both a grandson and a daughter. It was not until more than a year later that the couples were reconciled, when Lula and Marisa invited them to be padrinhos, or godparents, of their first son together, Fábio. It was an example, in family terms, of a talent for accommodation that Lula would demonstrate in wider fields.
His marriage to Marisa in 1974 provided real stability in his personal life, and they went on to have three children together. It also coincided with significant advances in his status and reputation in his union.
Lula had managed to recruit three hundred workers at Villares into the metalworkers' union, but he had needed some persuading to let his name go onto the slate of the controlling faction