Broadly speaking, the frictions over political stance were between, on the one hand, the so-called linha dura, the hard-line anticommunists, who believed in ruthless suppression of supposed enemies, with censorship and torture, and were prepared to rule for a long time, and, on the other hand, military men who saw the takeover in 1964 as a temporary aberration from the gentler, accommodating, and constitutional political traditions of Brazil. The latter wanted a clean-up of the system—limpeza or saneamento were the words used in Portuguese. They supported the post-1964 device of “military police inquiries” (Inquéritos Policias Militares, IPMs), which led to the stripping of rights from politicians, civil servants, union leaders, intellectuals, and artists, but they looked forward to going back to the barracks when the clean-up was complete.
Although the military had been a factor in Brazilian politics since the overthrow of the empire in 1889, it had usually been in the background. The difficulties of governing Brazil could expose weaknesses in the high command and put at risk its status and privileges. In 1964, Castelo Branco had been one of those who had been in favor of a temporary takeover, but clear signs of opposition to the military whenever elections were permitted and small but embarrassing guerrilla activities had played into the hands of the linha dura.
Uniting both factions was an ideology—the doctrine of national security. This had been developed, with some encouragement by the U.S. military, in the officers' own “university” in Rio de Janeiro, the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG).13 The doctrine held that Brazil was threatened, both internally and externally, by totalitarian, revolutionary communism. This might be Soviet communism, the Cuban communism of Fidel Castro, Maoism, or the ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. What was more important was that a mortal threat was perceived to the religious and social traditions of Brazil. It justified the overthrow of Brazilian democracy, censorship, and restrictions on free association and labor movements. Parallel ideas were influencing the officer class in Argentina and Chile also.
There was also a more ambitious side to the teaching of the ESG. This was that Brazil must become a great power. It tapped into the positivist strain in the country's history, its pride in its size and extensive resources. This teaching led to some hyperbolic propaganda and use of the soccer successes in the World Cup to boost the nation's self-image.14 The concept of the national security state was, therefore, all-embracing.
São Paulo, where Brazil's Second Army was based, was a stronghold of the linha dura. Since July 1969, the Second Army had been orchestrating “Operaçao Bandeirantes,” attempting to deal with the divided but visible urban guerrillas, and setting up the vicious DOI-Codi as its instrument.15 There had been a series of small guerrilla actions, including the theft of weapons from the fourth infantry regiment by Captain Carlos Lamarca in January 1969, a raid on the safe of the corrupt former São Paulo governor Adhemar de Barros, and the “execution” of a businessman who had helped finance Operaçao Bandeirantes, Henning Boilesen.16
The dragnet that picked up Frei Chico led also to the murder of Vladimir Herzog, the head of journalism at TV Cultura, by agents of DOI-Codi; journalists and Catholic church groups, skeptical of the official claim that he had committed suicide, organized large demonstrations, and President Geisel flew to São Paulo, where the commander of the Second Army promised that there would be no more such suicides.
Herzog had died in October 1975. But in January 1976 there was another death at Codi in São Paulo, of Manuel Fiel Filho, a worker. Geisel saw this as a challenge to his authority over the army, as well as undermining his strategy of political relaxation by fueling more disgust throughout the country. He dismissed the commander of the Second Army, General Ednardo d'Ávila Melo. Later, he fired the army minister, Silvio Frota, and the head of his own military cabinet, Hugo de Abreu, for standing in the way of the strategy. The election in 1976 of a new U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, was not irrelevant. Carter was talking the language of human rights, and South American dictatorships were losing favor in Washington.
Just as there were political frictions within the military regimes, so there were economic divergences. Again it was not easy to generalize, and the economic partisans did not match the different political factions. The issues were various. There were those who were concerned to control inflation, a bugbear of the professional middle class since the 1940s. There were those who were keen to see more international investment in Brazil and an opening up of the economy, which still had high protectionist tariffs. There were those who still saw a strong case for state leadership in the economy—a continuance of the Vargas approach to nationalization and the Kubitschek emphasis on development.
The military regimes relied heavily on economic technocrats, and these debates were often a continuation of those that had taken place prior to 1964. But there were differences. Whereas there had been a strong push from the leftist parties before 1964 on income inequality, land reform, and unemployment, these matters received less attention under the military; income inequality increased dramatically. Also, by the late 1970s the import substitution model for Brazil, which had led to the local manufacture of cars and other goods that had formerly been imported, was losing its power as an engine to drive the economy.
The impact of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and its resulting oil shock, was delayed for Brazil. But by 1975, the year when Lula assumed the presidency of his union, the Geisel government was forced to react. Reis Velloso, the planning minister, prepared a second national development plan, to cover the five-year period through 1979. It aimed to reduce the nation's dependence on imported energy and promoted a national program to produce sugar-based ethanol to substitute for gasoline in vehicles; it led to a deal with West Germany, criticized by the United States, to build nuclear power stations; and it paid for two massive hydroelectric projects at Itaipú, on the Paraguay border, and Tucurui, in Amazonia. These and other infrastructure investments, for instance in steel capacity, were largely funded by foreign loans to state or parastatal agencies.
Although Brazil's economy had raced ahead in the “miracle” years and was still growing, at a more reasonable pace, under Geisel, the reality for workers was that most were suffering from a wage freeze. The pressure was intolerable at a time of so-called boom, when government propaganda was telling everyone how great it was to be Brazilian. The official minimum salary (salàrio mínimo, set by a law going back to Vargas) was not keeping pace with the cost to buy the minimum food ration, which had been laid down in 1938. Whereas in 1970 it would have taken 105 hours and 13 minutes per month to earn enough to buy basic nutrition for one adult, by 1974 the time taken was 163 hours and 32 minutes.17
Also increasing visibly, even though statistical evidence was unreliable for people living in poverty and on the margins of the cash economy, was social inequality. The newsmagazine IstoÉ estimated in 1979 that 50 percent of the poorest Brazilians had had 14.91 percent of the gross national product in 1970, but only 11.6 percent in 1976; the 20 percent who were richest had enjoyed 62.24 percent in 1970, and 67.0 percent in 1976. A very unequal society was getting more so.18
It was against this difficult and complex background that Lula began work as a union president. Vidal had achieved something significant in running a first congress of the metalworkers of São Bernardo in 1974. This had opened up discussion of wages and the hiring and firing practices of engineering firms. Several agents of the dictatorship, thinly disguised as factory workers, had managed to get into the meeting. In all, around 250 had attended.
Lula, now the president, made a practice