Vidal was a controversial figure. He was egocentric and a good orator. He was conservative in his political attitudes, and accused perhaps unfairly of fingering some communists to the dictatorship's police. When ten Ford workers came to see Lula in late 1973, suggesting they go on strike, Vidal discouraged them, warning that they could be caught by the dictatorship's National Security Law, and even tortured. But in union circles he was regarded as more progressive, organizing the first national metalworkers' congress in 1974 and seeking to modernize the union.
Shortly after that, the factory in which Vidal had worked moved, making him ineligible to preside over a union based in the municipality of São Bernardo. Vidal therefore put forward Lula as candidate for president in the 1975 elections, with himself as secretary. This controlling faction was challenged by a leftist slate, supported by the illegal and persecuted Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).
Lula had various indirect contacts with the communists, but only one formal meeting with one of its leaders, Emilio Maria de Bonfante, whom he talked to on a bench in the square in front of the mother church of São Bernardo. He strongly disliked the atmosphere of subterfuge and paranoia in which the communists worked, telling his brother Frei Chico frankly that he would not be a party to secret meetings. He wanted to act in the open.
He also learned that what he liked about the union was the sense of solidarity with workers, not its bureaucratic technicalities. Shortly before the 1975 elections, Vidal had called a massive rally, threatening a loss of medical benefits to those who failed to turn up; many assumed that they were going to be called out on strike, but Vidal made what Lula called a “Vaseline” speech and handed over the chair to one of the union's lawyers. It was another example of Vidal's lack of courage, consistency, and empathy. Nonetheless, the slate including Lula as president and Vidal as secretary was elected with 92 percent of the vote. Lula suspected that Vidal was hoping to continue to pull the strings in the union.7
Lula took up his post on Saturday, 19 April 1975, at a big ceremony. There were ten thousand people present—workers; Paulo Egydio Martins, the governor of São Paulo; Dona Lindu; and Marisa, who was pregnant with their first baby, Fábio. Lula was very nervous when he spoke, using a text written for him with terms he would not normally employ. But his balanced approach, reflecting Catholic social teaching, gave a clear insight into the thinking of a man who was still not thirty years old and had been given sudden responsibility.
He argued that the moment through which Brazilians were living was “one of the blackest for the individual and collective destinies of the human being.” On one side, in the Soviet bloc, the people were crushed by the state, enslaved by Marxist ideology, and restricted in their freedom to think and demonstrate. But on the other, in the West, the people were enslaved by the economic power of capitalism, exploited by other men, deprived of the dignity of labor, affected by greed, and joined to mad production rhythms. Implicitly he rejected both the capitalist model being pursued by the military regime and any communist alternative to which the regime's divided revolutionary opponents adhered.
By the end of the year, however, Lula himself was faced with one of his blackest moments. In October, as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers, he had gone to a world Toyota congress in Tokyo. It was his first international outing, and he did not enjoy it. He had little money, knew no one, and disliked Japanese food. While in Japan, he was telephoned by a lawyer for the metalworkers' federation, who told him that his brother Frei Chico had been imprisoned on 4 October. Frei Chico, who was by then a member of the PCB, had been elected vice president of the metalworkers of Santo André only the week before. He had been eating lunch at a bar near his home with one of Lula's predecessors as president of the São Bernardo union when he was picked up by members of the feared DOI-Codi, a military intelligence outfit in São Paulo.8
This arrest was part of a much bigger anticommunist sweep throughout Brazil but carried out with particular viciousness in São Paulo, which was a center for the most ruthless security thugs who were only partly under the control of the military presidents. A major scandal erupted over the murder there of a well-known journalist, Vladimir Herzog.
The sweep aimed to destabilize the regime's more respectable opponents in the tolerated Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, MDB) by showing that some of its parliamentarians had links with the underground communists. The MDB had done well in elections in 1974, particularly in the big cities. It was also a strike against President Ernesto Geisel, who had launched a strategy of distensão—or relaxation—aiming to take some of the sting out of the dictatorship.9
The lawyer who telephoned Lula in Tokyo warned him to stay away, as he risked being arrested if he returned to Brazil. Subsequently, the security services tortured Frei Chico to get him to state that Lula had been passing a letter to Luis Carlos Prestes, the veteran leader of the PCB, now in exile. It was nonsense. Lula had made clear that although he was biologically related to Frei Chico, he had nothing to do with the Communist Party.
Lula dismissed the lawyer's caution and decided to fly home at once. He was greeted at the São Paulo airport by union colleagues and advisers. No attempt was made to arrest him. The following day he went to the prison to try and find out what had happened to Frei Chico and also to Osvaldo Rodrigues Cavinato, another party member who had been working at the São Bernardo union, and who had been tricked into going with security men who had told him they were taking his father to the hospital. At that time it was risky to inquire about political prisoners, and Lula was insulted when he tried.
Frei Chico, who had been picked up with an incriminating document from a European communist party, was beaten, tied up, and tortured on the “dragon's chair.” The soldiers who tortured him were very young and were paid extra for their work. The interrogators faked a confession, but Frei Chico totally denied the story that Lula had been a messenger for the party. After seventy-eight days in prison, Frei Chico and sixtyfour others were released, and only nine were sentenced; confessions obtained by torture were rejected by the court.
A number who had been arrested in the sweep died, and Lula and the family were worried about Frei Chico's fate. But more significant was the radicalizing effect on Lula himself. He asked himself: What was the logic of arresting a worker simply because he was against social injustice? Frei Chico, the father of a family, had been working since he was ten years old. What possible order or ideology could justify the arrest and torture of men like him? Lula was simply revolted. At the same time, he lost most sense of personal fear.
But Lula also concluded that the approach of the PCB was all wrong, as was the nonconfrontational approach of his union. Although the communists might want social justice, they were crippled by their conspiratorial methods and their obsessive secrecy. Furthermore, his own union was letting down its members by opting out of any serious effort to improve wages and working conditions, and settling for a quiet life. Although the national security laws sought to outlaw strikes, other more militant groups were finding the courage to push against wage restrictions.
While the political scene was restrictive, the economic picture was more helpful to workers in the advanced industries around São Paulo. Foreign money had been pouring in to Brazil, offsetting deficits on the current account, buoyed up by talk—promoted by the military—of an “economic miracle.” In fact, with tight controls on wages and the political system, annual growth in the gross national product from 1969 to 1974 had been running at 11 percent, with the lowest levels of inflation since the 1950s. Although occasionally hitting 9 percent, the average growth from 1973 to 1981 was only 5.6 percent a year.10
But there was a particular spurt in investment in Brazil after the oil shock of 1973, when petrodollars were sloshing around international markets. In conjunction with conservative economic management by the military, Brazil was able to take on new foreign bank loans. The fact that the country was building dangerous and ultimately unsustainable levels of debt was