There were discussions among unionists, intellectuals, and MDB politicians, and provisional PT committees were being set up in some states. These might be based on networks of friends, existing leftist or Catholic groups, or more structured union connections. But by 28 June, Lula was promising to distribute a draft program, suggesting that it would then be for the workers to decide whether to go ahead. Significantly, he widened the concept of “worker” beyond those who were unionized to include all wage earners and those involved in social movements such as the neighborhood associations.
At a large meeting in São Paulo on 18 August organized by politicians on the left of the MDB, Lula argued strongly for an independent workers' party because the union structure, however modernized, could not deliver everything that workers needed. Such a party should welcome politicians from the MDB. The party should not be constructed by unions as institutions, as this could compromise their own work. Union leaders might or might not belong to the PT. Hence the PT was launched on a different trajectory from that of the British Labour Party—founded at the start of the twentieth century as an offshoot of trade unions—and comparable parties such as the German Social Democratic Party.
The final pieces in the jigsaw were put together later in the year. At a meeting in a São Bernardo restaurant on 14 October, around a hundred people, including Lula, decided on a structure for the new party. Five days later, the government sent to Congress its party reform law, which abolished the two parties, ARENA and MDB, set up the year after the military takeover. The formal foundation of the PT took place in São Paulo in February 1980, at a meeting of three hundred people in an auditorium of the journalists' union named after the murdered Vladimir Herzog. The party adopted a red five-pointed star as its symbol, and Lula's wife, Marisa, sewed an example, using some Italian cloth she had kept by.
The new rules gave parties a year to get organized and required them to hold conventions in at least one-fifth of the municipalities in at least nine states. They also gave advantages to parties that had at least 10 percent of the membership of the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, and that had an inherited structure; state funding was also to be made available, 90 percent on the basis of the number of congressional representatives a party had succeeded in electing.
All this gave considerable assistance to the conservative PDS (Partido Democrático Social), the heir to ARENA, and to the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro), a continuation of the MDB. The PT, which acquired a small number of leftist deputies from the São Paulo state assembly, never had significant support from the existing Congress, which had not been freely elected. The other new “opposition” party was the PDT (Partido Democrático Trabalhista), formed by Leonel Brizola, who had returned after the amnesty for exiles, but who had failed to recapture the valuable PTB name, which instead was gained by Getúlio's great-niece Yvete Vargas for the party she headed. Over the next couple of years, PT organizers had to fight off constant criticism from those who thought that the PMDB, PT, and PDT ought to work closely together, if not merge outright.
Achieving the required number of party branches and following the new procedures to get registration required a heroic effort by the PT. Money for travel around the country was scarce, and organizers placed a high premium on genuine grassroots participation. Sectarianism was a constant risk, though Lula, perhaps naïvely, hoped that workers would elect their representatives based on merit rather than label. On 22 October, the party requested provisional registration from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, showing that it had regional commissions in eighteen states and municipal commissions in 647 municipalities in thirteen states.6 The PT was the last of the parties to get registration, yet by June 1981 it was claiming some two hundred thousand members.
The PT was the creation of a group of people who had been radicalized by their experiences fighting for union rights in the late 1970s. It was not a creation of Lula alone, though he was a symbolic, charismatic figure. It was part of a much wider context of the struggle for democracy and socioeconomic progress in the dying days of the military regime.
The end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s were a turbulent time in Brazil. The attempt by the military regime to secure itself a soft exit was under constant threat from its own right-wingers, who wanted no backsliding from a linha dura; from a wide range of opponents in civil society, who were hoping to build, for the first time, a truly democratic state; and from events that were often outside the government's control. An aggressive strike movement led to violent police repression, especially in 1980. And Brazil's systemic internal inflation and increased dependence on external loans meant that the economy could suffer unpredictable shocks.
A major campaign was under way to grant amnesty to the politicians, artists, and intellectuals who had lost their civic and political rights. Many had been forced into exile. In August 1979, in President Figueiredo's first year in office, and quite rapidly, Congress granted the amnesty. On one level, it was a response to the campaign and part of the government's strategy for relaxation (distensão). On another, it was designed to sow confusion among opponents, as returnees such as Leonel Brizola, Miguel Arraes,7 and Luis Carlos Prestes sought to resume political careers cut short in 1964.
Right-wing terrorism aimed to destabilize the relaxation strategy and was a challenge both to public security and to the authority of the military regime. Those behind it were torturers and blind anticommunist ideologues, loose cannons lurking in the shadows of the security apparatus. In 1976, ten bomb attacks, for which an “Anticommunist Alliance of Brazil” claimed responsibility, shocked the country; in the same year, the bishop of Nova Iguaçu, in the state of Rio, was kidnapped. Every year from then on until 1981 there were bomb attacks. In 1979, for example, a bomb exploded in a vehicle belonging to one of Lula's colleagues, Joao Pires de Vasconcelos, the president of the Metalworkers of Joao Monlevade, in Minas Gerais. It was difficult to guarantee Lula's personal safety.8
The culmination took place on the night of 30 April 1981, when two bombs went off at the Riocentro convention center in Rio de Janeiro. There, twenty thousand young people had gone to a concert to listen to musicians linked to the opposition. The explosions had a direct connection to the security apparatus of DOI-Codi, as indicated by the fact that one of the bombs went off prematurely in a car, killing a sergeant and army captain.
This led to a crisis within the regime. General Golbery do Couto e Silva, a Machiavellian figure who had been trying to steer distensão through two presidencies, resigned in protest against the loss of control over the security apparatus. President Figueiredo, who himself had commanded the SNI, the national intelligence service, brokered a deal within the system; those responsible for the attacks would not be tried, but the linha dura would have to accept that the government was committed to freer elections. In November, therefore, the government produced a package that would govern elections in 1982.
Opposition to the military comprised a broad and often disparate front. There were the liberal professionals, such as lawyers and journalists, whose work had been directly hampered by the dictatorship at its apogee. In September 1980, for example, a letter bomb addressed to the president of the Brazilian lawyers' association (OAB) killed his secretary. University lecturers, such as the future president Fernando Henrique Cardoso—who had had to flee to Europe via Chile—were opposed to the regime. Students, depoliticized in the 1970s at a time of university expansion, were recovering their voice of protest. Artists and writers had been overwhelmingly against the regime from the beginning, and famous musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Chico Buarque had been in exile.
The Catholic Church was, by the end of the 1970s, also largely against the dictatorship. This was not only on ideological grounds, related to human rights abuses and the soaring inequalities between rich and poor. It was also the product of the church's daily work with Catholic base communities, with workers involved in strikes, and with land conflicts in rural areas. In São Bernardo, an extreme case, priests were working hand in glove with the strike committees.
Several bishops were outspoken in their criticisms—Archbishop Dom Helder Camara in Recife, Dom Cláudio Hummes in