Lula: A Political Biography
Although he is widely recognized throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a founder of the Brazilian Workers' Party and the odds-on favorite to win the upcoming October 3 presidential elections, is barely known in North America.
Lula, as he is popularly called by both supporters and opponents, was born in 1946 in the small village of Garahuns, in Northeastern Brazil's Pernambuco state, one of the poorest regions of the country. Like many peasants from the Northeast, his father migrated to Sao Paulo state, Brazil's industrial center, to find work, and the family followed several years later.
In Sao Paulo, life was hard. Lula, his mother, and seven brothers and sisters lived in a tiny apartment in back of a bar. As a boy, Lula sold candy and fruit on the street to help his family, and did not begin school until he was ten years old. Although he was a good student and finished primary school, his education was interrupted at age twelve, when he took a job delivering laundry. At fourteen, he was hired to work in a general store, and at fifteen he got a job in a screw factory while taking a technical course in metallurgy at a state-sponsored school.
In 1966, at the age of twenty-one, Lula became a metalworker at Villares, a big auto-parts factory, where he lost a finger in a work accident.
Lula's first marriage in 1969 ended tragically when his wife, Maria de Lourdes da Silva, died during childbirth and the baby was stillborn. In 1972, he lived for a while with Miriam Cordeiro. This relationship did not last long, but from it Lula's first child, a daughter Lurian, was born. Lurian has remained close to her father and is an active worker in his presidential campaign. After separating from Cordeiro, Lula met and married his present wife, Marisa, with whom he has four sons.
Lula first took up the fight for autoworkers' rights in the late 1960s, when he joined the Metalworkers' Union of Sao Bernardo dos Campos, an industrial city near Sao Paulo. He was elected director, and soon after, president of the union. Being a union activist was particularly tough during this time of military dictatorship in Brazil. The government frequently harassed the labor movement and took repressive measures against it, arresting leaders and activists, and beating, torturing, and even killing many of them. The 1975 arrest of Lula's brother, Jose Ferreira da Silva ("Frei Chico"), who was an activist in the Communist Party, had a profoundly radicalizing effect on Lula.
Throughout the last half of the 1970s, workers continued massive organizing drives, and in 1978 and 1979 huge strikes that paralyzed Sao Paulo's multinational-owned automobile factories occurred. Lula played a prominent role in these activities.
Corporate representatives tried to bribe Lula and others to end the strikes, but failed in their attempts. Next, the federal government banned the Metalworkers' Union and arrested Lula. He was indicted and held in jail for a month, but following national and international protests he was finally released. Eventually, the workers won the strikes, but the government enacted new laws that restricted wage increases and benefits. This action by the government forced the labor movement to begin considering activity that would go beyond workplace organizing and into the political arena.
During the late 1970s, trade union activists, as well as representatives from Brazil's varied social movements, began holding meetings to discuss the necessity for and feasibility of forming a new labor party, and in 1980 the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or Workers' Party, was formally constituted.
A new labor federation, Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT), was founded in the early 1980s. Under military rule, any unions not under the control of the Ministry of Labor were outlawed. Thus, the CUT had to be organized clandestinely and operate underground. This situation continued until 1985, when a mass movement demanding direct elections forced the military government to step down from the presidency and allow a civilian president, elected by the Congress, to succeed it.
In 1982, public pressure brought an end to the Supreme Military Court's prosecution of Lula and other labor activists. Four years later, Lula won a seat in Congress, receiving over 650,000 votes, the largest share in Brazil's history. He and the handful of other PT members of Congress began formulating a new post- military constitution, fighting the conservative majority for inclusion of workers' rights, and won some impressive victories. The new Constitution recognizes the right to free education and healthcare for all, paid maternity leave, the right to strike, a four-hour reduction in the workweek with time-and-a-half pay for overtime work, vacations with one-third pay guaranteed, and cost- of-living adjustments for pensioners. But major components of the PT's vision for Brazil, particularly agrarian reform, were still unrealized.
The PT ran Lula for president in 1989. The campaign mobilized millions of people from all over Brazil and the social movements, including those of urban and rural workers, neighborhood associations, Christian-based communities, women, blacks, Amazon indigenous peoples, and ecology activists, threw their resources into the effort. By the end of the campaign, PT rallies throughout the nation were drawing up to a million people. PT campaign advertisements on television were a immensely popular and depicted real-life scenes and situations of the Brazilian working class. Issues like political corruption and police repression were given intense scrutiny, and the achievements of municipal PT governments, which had been ignored by the mass media, were publicized.
Lula's main opponent was millionaire Fernando Collor de Melo, a front man for the establishment during the years of the massive strikes in the 1970s. Collor was the owner of a major media company, and had the full backing of the giant television, radio, and press conglomerate Globo. Capitalizing on his handsome and youthful appearance, Collor, a politician who was not widely- known in Brazil, was portrayed by the media as "Mr. Clean," the candidate who would end political corruption. He won by a narrow margin amid charges of vote fraud. In 1992, in one of the biggest political scandals in Brazilian history, Collor was impeached by Congress for corruption and for pilfering government money.
Since the 1989 Presidential election, the PT has grown and enlarged its base of supporters, gained new seats in Congress, and won some important municipal elections. After being defeated in three Presidential elections, Lula is decidedly the frontrunner in the opinion polls, with the support of over thirty-five percent of the electorate. His closest opponent, Jose Serra, Fernando Henrique Cardoso's candidate, is polling only seventeen percent of the vote. Lula has not held elective office since 1990 and instead concentrates on PT organizing and expanding alliances with grassroots organizations and social movements.
The PT government agenda and program resulted from years of discussions and debates within the trade unions, neighborhood associations, rural, environmental, and academic organizations, social-based movements, and within the party itself. Its platform was formulated through the collaboration of millions of Brazilian workers who voiced their ideas during its drafting process. Perhaps 2002 will be the year when their efforts start coming to fruition.