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 São Bernardo, and Dom Adriano Hypolito in Nova Iguaçu. Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, the archbishop of São Paulo, provided leadership in the country's fast-growing industrial and commercial capital. He decried the worsening poverty in São Paulo's periphery of slums.
There was also a significant campaign in the political class for democracy and civic freedom, reflected in the media. Lula, who defined the main division in Brazilian society as being between exploiters and the workers they exploited, had personally supported Cardoso as an MDB candidate in an election in São Paulo in 1978. In 1979, an “opposition” candidate, running against Figueiredo in the electoral college of senators and deputies, which chose the new president, had collected 266 votes to Figueiredo's 335.9 But MDB politicians were far from united, some being more willing than others to play along with the regime and its rules. Ulysses Guimaraes, for example, argued that their duty was to regain the rule of law for Brazil, not to put up candidates for the presidency who were bound not to win.10
The resurgence of inflation at the end of the 1970s and the second oil price shock of 1979 added to the unpopularity of the regime and the uncertainties surrounding its departure. The annual inflation rate rose from 40 percent in 1978 to 55 percent in 1979, 90 percent in 1980, and around 100 percent in the two following years. Higher world interest rates and the damage caused by frost and drought to Brazil's agricultural production also hurt the economy.
Hence, although the electoral package had required a two-thirds majority in Congress to change the Constitution under which the military had been operating, President Figueiredo was still taking a risk in permitting general elections in November 1982. State governors and deputy governors would be directly elected for the first time since elections were suspended by the military in 1966.
This was the first test for the PT. Lula, whose initial intention had been to stay out of the election to promote the party nationwide, was running for governor of his adopted state, São Paulo. The previous year he had taken the precaution of changing his name legally to incorporate Lula, the nickname by which he was best known, so that it could be more easily recognized on a ballot.11
Many of the PT candidates were young and new to politics. The election rules, designed to baffle the less sophisticated and barely literate, required a voter to vote six times—from the presidency
