union leaders, and some lawyers, including the president of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, were arrested. They were held under the regime's National Security Law. The strike went on, coordinated by the improved and decentralized organization of the union.
Although the military occupied much of São Bernardo, dragging unionists from churches, the Catholic Church defended the legitimacy of a strike that the government had labeled “political.” The hierarchy was vocal in support, with Cardinal Evaristo Arns and Bishops Mauro Morelli and Cláudio Hummes speaking out.30 Volunteers provided food and money for the strikers, and there were weekly lines outside churches as the strikers' families came to collect food and money.
Lula was relatively well treated in prison. When he had a toothache, Romeu Tuma, the director-general of DOPS, the political police that detained him,31 arranged for him to see a dentist. Marisa visited him in jail with the children, and Fabio Luís, then five years old, said, “Mommy, my father is in Tuma's Hotel.”32 When Lula learned that his beloved mother, Dona Lindu, had been taken to the hospital with cancer of the uterus, he was allowed to visit her. When she died on 12 May, he was allowed to attend the burial.
Lula and the other union prisoners were given preventative detention and went on a hunger strike in protest. Outside, the real strike went on. But strikers were trickling back to work, and on 11 May the strike was called off. On 20 May, after thirty-one days in prison, Lula was released along with the other unionists. When he got home, he set free his caged birds in an act of solidarity. In 1979, some had attacked him as a traitor for being willing to give up the strike too soon. In 1980, he resolved to stick it out to the end.
Less than a week after his release, on 26 May, Lula assumed leadership of the national executive of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT, and a new chapter in his life opened. State intervention in his union ended, the workers went back to work, and Lula finished his second term as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers. His authority within the union was demonstrated afresh.
Much to everyone's surprise, he chose Jair Meneghelli, a thirty-fouryear-old worker from the tool shop at Ford, to be the presidential candidate on “his” union slate. Meneghelli was little known in the union and, like Lula when he was first involved in union affairs, was more interested in soccer than the details of wage negotiation or the labor movement. He was up against knowledgeable and well-known candidates backed by the PCB and by the MR-8, one of the formerly armed antimilitary groups. The MR-8 ran a smear campaign, alleging that Lula's group had made off with the union's strike fund.
Meneghelli had not wanted to be a candidate and, in a press conference with representatives of both slates, Lula answered questions on his behalf. But when the results were declared he had won overwhelmingly, with more than twenty-seven thousand votes, or 89 percent. It was an extraordinary testimony to Lula's popularity.
The real importance of the industrial campaigns spearheaded by the São Bernardo metalworkers from 1977 to 1980 was in the raising of consciousness, rather than in the raising of wages. Many in the São Paulo industrial belt had come, like Lula, from a rural background in the northeast or other areas. Politically and socially they were often naïve, and many lacked formal education. The succession of strikes over these years, with their discussions, mass meetings, and personal hardship, provided a tough and practical schooling. It put them in touch with Catholic radicals, students, and those politicians who were opposed to the military regime.
The “new unionism” of these years, led by better-paid workers in the more advanced industries, was honed in the face of constant repression and the presence of police spies at meetings. The workers involved felt they had to rely on themselves alone. They wanted their own representatives. They wanted to break out of the narrow compartmentalism imposed by the corporatist labor structure, in which union leaders known as pelegos were in the pay of the bosses and the government. They recognized that freedom for themselves and their own bargaining could come only in the context of a freer, more democratic Brazil.
By 1980, there was a growing alliance between the more assertive unions, the Catholic grassroots movement that had originated in the 1960s but had taken on a new life in reaction to the dictatorship, the church hierarchy, and professionals and politicians. Labor unrest had spread widely. In that year there were strikes by primary and secondary teachers in Minas Gerais and the northeast. More remarkably, 240,000 sugar workers, underpaid on the cane plantations in Pernambuco but now seen by the regime as providing a source of biofuel, went on strike. They had often been intimidated in the past but in this year forty-two rural unions got together, efficiently coordinated by the Catholic land pastorate (Pastoral da Terra da Igreja Católica), to organize a strike. It showed the range and capacity of labor solidarity.
The self-confidence of increasing numbers of workers, as the military regime looked to control the timing and nature of its own demise, was paralleled by the ferment of other types of social movement in the cities and the countryside. There was a do-it-yourself and democratic spirit to many of these, although ideological conflicts between Marxists and Catholic radicals were not far from the surface.
In the shantytowns or favelas of the big cities, the residents were getting together in local organizations to demand basic services—drinking water, sanitation, electricity, child daycare, and schools. There were thirteen hundred of these associations in greater São Paulo, and one per week was being formed in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 1980. In 1978, organized favelados managed to collect 1.5 million signatures on a petition calling for a price freeze on basic foods.
In the countryside, where the church's Comissão Pastoral da Terra had been formed in 1975 to improve the lot of laborers, dissatisfaction was growing with the conservatism of CONTAG, the Confederaçao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura. CONTAG was the old grouping of rural unions. Calls for land reform, which had been championed by peasant leagues in the run-up to the 1964 coup—and were a major reason why the takeover had been supported by rural landowners—were bubbling up again. In 1979 and 1980, there were successful land occupations in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and São Paulo; these led to expropriation of a few properties and their transfer to the landless.
Although some of these social movements were purely secular, many were influenced by the Catholic Church. Since the 1960s, the church had stimulated a network of grassroots communities (Comunidades Eclesias de Base, CEBs) that were involved in social action as well as practical Christianity. They were regarded with suspicion by the military governments, and Dom Helder Camara, a prominent supporter and the archbishop of Recife, was seen as a crypto-communist. But the CEBs, like the Brazilian bishops, had been influenced by the social teaching of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Some too were persuaded by liberation theology that it was the duty of Christians to end exploitation of man by man.
The forthright position of the Catholic bishops in favor of human rights and against growing income inequality under the military dovetailed with the local action by the grassroots CEBs. Both came publicly to the aid of the metalworkers when they were on strike, and both were contributing to a restlessness for social and political change in many parts of Brazil in the late 1970s.
The period from 1976 to 1980 saw Lula transformed from a shy speaker, drawn gradually into the union movement, into a national figure with thousands of workers hanging on his every word. He loved the oxygen of publicity, the mass meetings, the shouting of his name by enthusiastic crowds. He was unafraid.
But in his own attitudes he was still somewhat naïve, still giving absolute commitment to the working class, specifically to the metalworkers and those like them. He was not well-read, though he had The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a biography of Gandhi, and John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World on his bookshelves when he was interviewed for Playboy in 1979. Asked whom he admired, he listed Tiradentes, the dentist who was executed in an early attempt to win Brazil's independence from Portugal, Gandhi, and Che Guevara;
