But life in Santos, with a sometimes drunk father and a mother who was far from happy that she was sharing her husband with another, was no idyll. It involved much drudgery, which included hauling water and firewood. Within three years Lindu had had enough and decided to break away from Aristides. Although he tried to win her back with feasts and relatives' attempts at persuasion, and by hanging around her new home at night, she was finished with him. One day she and her family left the joint home early, leaving behind only a daughter to hand him the keys.
Lindu never married again, though she had an offer, and she bore Aristides little ill will after the separation, even bringing up one of his other children. For Lula and her other children, however, this separation was like a cry of liberty. They could begin to live a normal childhood and adolescence, go to the movies, play soccer, and have boyfriends and girlfriends.
But they were still toiling hard, and Lindu was sorting coffee beans and then washing clothes to make money. She got behind with her rent. Her fortunes changed in 1955, however, when Vavá found a package wrapped up in a newspaper on the ground at the market where he was working. It contained 5,855 cruzeiros—more than thirty-four times the legal minimum monthly salary.
After waiting a week to see whether anyone would claim the money and giving 500 cruzeiros to the man he had asked for advice, Vavá handed over the money to his mother. She promptly paid off the rent she owed and moved with four of her children to Vila Carioca, an industrial suburb of the city of São Paulo. Two of her daughters, working as domestics, stayed behind in Santos; Frei Chico and Lula lived with Aristides and Mocinha for an uncomfortable year—during which Aristides was stabbed in a drunken brawl and lost a kidney—before rejoining their mother in 1956.
What sort of a Brazil was it that Lula was growing up in, as he arrived in Brazil's industrial capital? It was an exciting time. In 1955, Juscelino Kubitschek had been elected president, backed by two parties, the Partido Social Democrático and the Partido Trabalhista Brasileira, both of which traced their origins to Getúlio Vargas. He promised fifty years of progress in five, a program of thirty metas (goals), rapid industrialization based on import substitution, and a deepening of Brazil's rather fragile democracy. This was a democracy that was only a decade old, where an elected president had committed suicide in 1954, blaming malign pressures, where illiterates such as Aristides could not vote, where there had been constant rumors of military intervention, and where Kubitschek could be elected with only 35.63 percent of the vote.
Historically, Brazil had been an exception in Latin America. It was Portuguese-speaking, largely surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries. It had been created by the diplomacy of Portugal and the ruthless westward advance of mixed-race bandeirantes, of Portuguese and American Indian heritage, in the era of Portuguese discovery and the following century. Two years after Columbus “discovered” the New World, Portugal persuaded the pope to arbitrate between the two Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal, in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. Under the terms of the treaty, Portugal would get land 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. Six years later, Pedro Cabral “discovered” Brazil, and a rather lackluster mother country oversaw a steadily expanding occupation by her more energetic offspring.
In the succeeding four centuries there was a gradual colonization of the vast space of modern Brazil. Rivals such as the Dutch, who briefly occupied the northeast in the seventeenth century, were defeated. Negro slaves were brought from Africa, after the local Indians proved resistant to coercion and manual labor. There were periodic booms in sugar, gold, and cotton, but Portugal, initially more interested in a route to India and the spice trade, took a while to find much economic advantage in its South American possession.
While the coastal strip saw a semifeudal world consolidate, with plantation houses and slavery, a more dynamic and lawless society was growing up in São Paulo and in the west, the south, and up the Amazon tributaries. Intermarriage and sexual promiscuity among Europeans, Africans, and Indians were commonplace. Brazil joined the European world of the early nineteenth century extremely suddenly following Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807. Guarded by the British Navy, the royal court and ten thousand hangers-on arrived in Rio de Janeiro, where they were to stay from 1808 to 1821.8
A new opera house, botanical gardens, and a surge of modernity followed. But the experience also marked out differences between Brazil and its Spanish-speaking neighbors. The ideas of the enlightenment and the American and French revolutions led to violent rebellion against the Spanish crown. In Brazil, by contrast, the king's younger son, Pedro, with his grito do Ipiranga—his cry of “Independence or death”—led the colony into independence from Portugal in 1822. This launched the long anomalous period of the Brazilian Empire, finally concluded by an army mutiny in 1889. One year earlier, Brazil had belatedly abolished slavery, an indication of the social conservatism of the empire.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the era in which Lula's parents were growing up, Brazil's politics were dominated by coffee and milk—the states of São Paulo, with its powerful coffee growers, and Minas Gerais, with its dairy farmers. The northeast was in thrall to the coroneis— reactionary local landowners who may or may not have once been colonels in the militia. In the south, along the border with Uruguay and Argentina, European immigration and a cowboy tradition had led to a certain impatience with the sloth and corruption of the federal government in Rio de Janeiro. Politics was elitist, subtle, and personal, and habits of accommodation and the exchange of favors persisted from the imperial era.
Brazil was still overwhelmingly agricultural, but in the big cities of the central south there was the start of modern capitalism and an industrial working class. Francisco Matarazzo, an entrepreneur, opened his first textile factory in São Paulo in 1904, and thirty years later the combined revenues of his businesses represented 87.5 percent of the income of the state. The Brazilian Communist Party was founded in 1922, and the federation of São Paulo industrialists six years later.
What changed Brazil more profoundly than the end of the empire in 1889 was the revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930. Vargas had been the state president of Rio Grande do Sul and had run in a federal presidential election that year as the candidate of the Liberal Alliance. His father and maternal uncle had been commanders on opposite sides in a brutal statewide civil war, and he inherited a ruthless streak. He had backing from Minas Gerais and the northeastern state of Paraíba in the 1930 election. But there was no secret vote, and elections were fixed through a carving up of spoils among state political machines. After the 1930 election, the outgoing president, Washington Luís, claimed that his candidate, Julio Prestes—the state president of São Paulo, so a Paulista like himself—had won by a two-to-one majority.
The country was ripe for a revolution. Stocks had crashed in 1929, and in the same year there had been a crisis of overproduction of coffee, the key export earner—output had almost doubled in five years, outstripping demand. Foreign capital fled Brazil. The government's gold reserves, healthy at the end of World War I, had dropped to zero by the end of 1930. And over the previous decade there had been bubbling dissent and minirevolts among young army officers, the phenomenon of tenentismo.
Launched in Rio Grande do Sul on 3 October after careful planning, the insurrection was successful relatively quickly. Vargas was in the Catete, the presidential palace in Rio, by 31 October. He was greeted by tumultuous crowds. A canny, introverted man with a fatherly smile, he was to be the key figure in Brazilian politics until his suicide in 1954. He defeated a rebellion in São Paulo in 1932 and an attempted communist coup in 1935, and he was imprisoned for a few hours in a nearly successful putsch by the Integralistas, the Brazilian fascists, in 1938. Having introduced a personal dictatorship with his fascist-style Estado Novo in 1937, he brought Brazil into World War II on the side of the Allies in 1942.9
Two key elements of the Vargas era, which resurfaced when Vargas was democratically elected president in 1951, were the incorporation of the growing working class and significant gestures of economic nationalism within a context of industrialization. Fascist ideology, which in Europe had done little for organized workers except to destroy their autonomous unions, was reinterpreted by the Estado Novo in Brazil