This aims to be an accessible political biography, eschewing psychological profiling or minutiae about what the president likes for breakfast. It assumes that many English-speaking readers will start with only a vague knowledge of modern Brazil or its politics. Translations from Portuguese are mine. I have depended heavily on books, articles, and those I have interviewed, particularly for the period in which my own knowledge of Brazil was secondhand and remote. Mistakes are all my own.
Nonetheless, in seeking to provide a balanced view of the Lula presidency up to the point of his reelection in October 2006, I hope that his own vital personality shines through, as well as my own affection and concern for his country.
I owe many people my thanks for their help, starting with my wife, Juliet, who has been enormously patient as I have researched this book, and Naomi Schneider, my editor at the University of California Press. The Leverhulme Trust generously funded my research in Brazil, under its scheme for Emeritus Fellows. I would also like to thank Dr. Sue Cunningham, who kindly read a draft, and was one of those who encouraged me to persevere when I was having difficulty in persuading publishers.
I would also like to remember with affection those who helped me in Brazil when I first arrived in 1965, most of whom are no longer with us: Jane Braga, who was with Reuters; Henry Hogg, who was a local correspondent for the Daily Express (and recorded the view then of the Duke of Edinburgh that “the Express is a bloody awful newspaper”); Michael Field of the Daily Telegraph; Roman Skowronski, son of the Polish Ambassador to Brazil in 1939; Dora Basilio, artist; and Carlos Widmann, then with Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Others I should like to thank by name include:
In northeast Brazil: Edson Barreto, who drove me around and helped with interviews; Eraldo Ferreira, secretary-general of the Garanhuns executive of the PT; Gilberto Ferreira in Caetés; Beti of Radio Sete Colinas, Garanhuns, and Aldo of Radio Marana, Garanhuns; Luciano Godoy and Vali Vicente, guides to the site of Lula's birthplace; Alamir Cardoso, president of the Partido Comunista do Brasil, Pernambuco; and Moacir Paulino Silveira, José Inácio Barbosa, and Augusto dos Santos Semente, all members of the Pernambuco state committee of the PCdoB.
In São Paulo: Maria Laura Canineu, invaluable research assistant; Denise Paraná, author of the comprehensive biography Lula, o filho do Brasil; “Gijo”—Juno Rodrigues Silva, São Bernardo restaurateur and former union activist; Denise Brito, journalist, invaluable for picture research; Epaminondas Neto Filho, journalist; Marco Moretto, director for Paranapiacaba in Santo André; André Skowronski; Flamarion Maues, editorial coordinator, Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo; Ana Stuart, coordinator for international relations, PT; Ana Luiza Leao, advocate; Heather Sutton, Sou de Paz; and Expedito Soares Batista of the Sindicato dos Metalurgicos, ABCD.
In Brasilia: Renato Janine Ribeiro, CAPES; Marco Aurélio de Garcia, special adviser on external affairs to the presidency, and subsequently president, PT; Senator Aloizio Mercadante; Senator Marco Maciel, former vice president; José Graziano da Silva; Oswaldo Bargas; Deputy Vicentinho (Vicente Paulo da Silva); Celsius Lodder; Denise Neddermayor; Hamilton Pereira, president, Fundaçao Perseu Abramo; Dr. Peter Collecott; United Kingdom ambassador; Winston Moore, ambassador of Trinidad and Tobago; Professor João Paulo Peixoto; David Cordingley, Brazil director, British Council; Minister Paulo Roberto de Almeida, Nucleo de Assuntos Estrategicos; Bernardo Kucinski, journalist; Kennedy Alencar, journalist; and Vicente y Pla Trevas, deputy minister of federative affairs.
In Rio de Janeiro: Nelson Franco Jobim, journalist; Carlos Magno, journalist; Minister Gilberto Gil, minister of culture; João Moreira Salles, filmmaker; Silvia Skowronski; and Tom Phillips, journalist.
In the United Kingdom: Sue Branford, journalist; Sue Cunningham, economic commentator on Brazil; Fernando de Mello Barreto, then Brazilian consul-general, now ambassador to Australia; Graça Fish; Edna Crepaldi, chief executive of Brazilian Contemporary Arts; Carlos Feres, who assisted me in researching foreign policy; Jan Rocha; Fiona Macauley; Professor Leslie Bethell, director, Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies; Professor Andrew Williams, St. Andrews University; and Ian Cooke.
1 A TOUGH START IN LIFE
Lula was born on 27 October 1945 in the neighborhood of Garanhuns, a small town about 150 miles inland from Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco.1 It was a Saturday. His father had left a month before to find work in São Paulo, and his mother, Dona Lindu, was already bringing up six children. Lula, Luiz Inácio da Silva, was the seventh.2 They were living in a small house, and she was scraping together a living by growing maize and manioc, potatoes, beans, and fruit.
The house where Lula was born no longer exists. But its site, up a dirt track some way off the main road from Garanhuns to Caetés, was pointed out to me in September 2005 by two boys on motorcycles, one a distant cousin of Lula's. Technically, the land is semiarid, but there are pools of water nearby and the soil is fertile.
A few of the farmhouses now have satellite TV dishes. But there is still much unemployment, and there are armed holdups on some of the rural roads at night. Garanhuns, “the city of flowers,” was founded in 1879; its railway station, long closed, has become a cultural center. It is a region of minifundios (smallholdings), not natural territory for the Partido dos Trabalhadores (the PT, the Workers' Party), and it was not until twentyfive years after the party's foundation that it managed to elect its first town councilor (vereador).3
It is an area that has seen a steady flow of out-migration for more than a half century. In 2005, as president, Lula opened a law school at the state university of Pernambuco in the town, in part a contribution to keeping young people in the area. At the dedication there was a crowd of ten thousand, and fifty of his relations were photographed alongside him.
If Garanhuns today looks tidy, with some new buildings, the smaller town of Caetés is closer to the history of forgotten places in Brazil's impoverished northeast.4 There are still donkey carts to be seen, and the occasional pau-de-arara (literally, “parrot's perch”), which is a truck converted to a people-transport with hard wooden benches.5 It is hard to know what anyone does for a living in Caetés, aside from subsistence agriculture. But the da Silva family of the president is acknowledged. Opposite the home of Lula's cousin Gilberto Ferreira is a new public health clinic named for Dona Lindu.
It does not take a lot of imagination to realize that when Lula was born this was a harsh region. There was no electricity in the countryside. People heated their homes and cooked with charcoal and firewood. They got water from wells and washed their clothes in streams. Whole families squeezed into self-built two-room houses. Lula's had been built by his father and uncle, with a wooden roof, a cement floor under the main room, and beaten earth elsewhere. Cobras would sit on the roof. There was no radio.
Surplus produce barely stretched to buy essentials, such as clothing or salt, and game was hunted to add to the diet. Brazil may have been among the victors in World War II, its expeditionary force coming home from Italy to a country that was sick of its semifascist Estado Novo regime, but in the northeast, regularly stricken by droughts, there was often hunger.
When she felt her labor pains beginning, Lula's mother, Euridice Ferreira de Melo, asked her brother-in-law José to fetch a midwife from Caetés. He was thin, she was large, and they fell off the horse more than once on the way back; by the time they arrived, Lula was in the process of being born. His mother was thirty. Her eldest son, José Inácio, known as Zé Cuia, was nine; Jaime was eight; Marinete was seven; Genival, known as Vavá, was six; another José—later known as Frei Chico because his baldness made him look like a monk—was three; and Maria was two. Two other babies had died before Lula's birth; Lindu also lost twins later, after Lula's birth. Large families and child mortality were sadly common in an era prior to birth control and in a region lacking health services.
What Dona Lindu did not know, when she cried as she waved her dry-eyed husband, Aristides Inácio da Silva, off on foot to pick up a paude-arara in Garanhuns to find his fortune in the southeast—he had sold two horses to raise the fare—was that he was not leaving alone. He was traveling with a young female cousin