into the brutal regime it became later, and there was still active civilian opposition and a relatively free press. Over the following decade I made further visits, collecting material for three books. Then, in the early 1980s, my own career took a different turn. I left journalism and immersed myself in the affairs of the Commonwealth of Nations, undertaking a series of different activities.
It was only in 2005, when I was due to retire from the last of these, the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit at London University, that I was free to return to a Brazilian topic. The extraordinary and controversial life of Lula, the president of Brazil since the beginning of 2003, beckoned as a subject for a life-and-times biography.
What follows, therefore, is an attempt to provide a readable account of the current Brazilian president, set against the recent history of his country. The questions asked here relate not only to the unprecedented arrival in the presidency of an industrial worker who grew up poor, with many disadvantages, but also to the democratization of Brazil after the military was forced out; a new kind of leftist party built on a renewed union movement; the difficulties of progressive politics in an era of globalization and the free movement of capital; corrupt aspects of the Brazilian political system; and the ambition of Lula and many others that Brazil should become a major world power in the twenty-first century.
This aims to be an accessible political biography, eschewing psychological profiling or minutiae about what the president likes for breakfast. It assumes that many English-speaking readers will start with only a vague knowledge of modern Brazil or its politics. Translations from Portuguese are mine. I have depended heavily on books, articles, and those I have interviewed, particularly for the period in which my own knowledge of Brazil was secondhand and remote. Mistakes are all my own.
Nonetheless, in seeking to provide a balanced view of the Lula presidency up to the point of his reelection in October 2006, I hope that his own vital personality shines through, as well as my own affection and concern for his country.
I owe many people my thanks for their help, starting with my wife, Juliet, who has been enormously patient as I have researched this book, and Naomi Schneider, my editor at the University of California Press. The Leverhulme Trust generously funded my research in Brazil, under its scheme for Emeritus Fellows. I would also like to thank Dr. Sue Cunningham, who kindly read a draft, and was one of those who encouraged me to persevere when I was having difficulty in persuading publishers.
I would also like to remember with affection those who helped me in Brazil when I first arrived in 1965, most of whom are no longer with us: Jane Braga, who was with Reuters; Henry Hogg, who was a local correspondent for the Daily Express (and recorded the view then of the Duke of Edinburgh that “the Express is a bloody awful newspaper”); Michael Field of the Daily Telegraph; Roman Skowronski, son of the Polish Ambassador to Brazil in 1939; Dora Basilio, artist; and Carlos Widmann, then with Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Others I should like to thank by name include:
In northeast Brazil: Edson Barreto, who drove me around and helped with interviews; Eraldo Ferreira, secretary-general of the Garanhuns executive of the PT; Gilberto Ferreira in Caetés; Beti of Radio Sete Colinas, Garanhuns, and Aldo of Radio Marana, Garanhuns; Luciano Godoy and Vali Vicente, guides to the site of Lula's birthplace; Alamir Cardoso, president of the Partido Comunista do Brasil, Pernambuco; and Moacir Paulino Silveira, José Inácio Barbosa, and Augusto dos Santos Semente, all members of the Pernambuco state committee of the PCdoB.
In São Paulo: Maria Laura Canineu, invaluable research assistant; Denise Paraná, author of the comprehensive biography Lula, o filho do Brasil; “Gijo”—Juno Rodrigues Silva, São Bernardo restaurateur and former union activist; Denise Brito, journalist, invaluable for picture research; Epaminondas Neto Filho, journalist; Marco Moretto, director for Paranapiacaba in Santo André; André Skowronski; Flamarion Maues, editorial coordinator, Editora Fundação Perseu Abramo; Ana Stuart, coordinator for international relations, PT; Ana Luiza Leao, advocate; Heather Sutton, Sou de Paz; and Expedito Soares Batista of the Sindicato dos Metalurgicos, ABCD.
In Brasilia: Renato Janine Ribeiro, CAPES; Marco Aurélio de Garcia, special adviser on external affairs to the presidency, and subsequently president, PT; Senator Aloizio Mercadante; Senator Marco Maciel, former vice president; José Graziano da Silva; Oswaldo Bargas; Deputy Vicentinho (Vicente Paulo da Silva); Celsius Lodder; Denise Neddermayor; Hamilton Pereira, president, Fundaçao Perseu Abramo; Dr. Peter Collecott; United Kingdom ambassador; Winston Moore, ambassador of Trinidad and Tobago; Professor João Paulo Peixoto; David Cordingley, Brazil director, British Council; Minister Paulo Roberto de Almeida, Nucleo de Assuntos Estrategicos; Bernardo Kucinski, journalist; Kennedy Alencar, journalist; and Vicente y Pla Trevas, deputy minister of federative affairs.
In Rio de Janeiro: Nelson Franco Jobim, journalist; Carlos Magno, journalist; Minister Gilberto Gil, minister of culture; João Moreira Salles, filmmaker; Silvia Skowronski; and Tom Phillips, journalist.
In the United Kingdom: Sue Branford, journalist; Sue Cunningham, economic commentator on Brazil; Fernando de Mello Barreto, then Brazilian consul-general, now ambassador to Australia; Graça Fish; Edna Crepaldi, chief executive of Brazilian Contemporary Arts; Carlos Feres, who assisted me in researching foreign policy; Jan Rocha; Fiona Macauley; Professor Leslie Bethell, director, Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies; Professor Andrew Williams, St. Andrews University; and Ian Cooke.
1 A TOUGH START IN LIFE
Lula was born on 27 October 1945 in the neighborhood of Garanhuns, a small town about 150 miles inland from Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco.1 It was a Saturday. His father had left a month before to find work in São Paulo, and his mother, Dona Lindu, was already bringing up six children. Lula, Luiz Inácio da Silva, was the seventh.2 They were living in a small house, and she was scraping together a living by growing maize and manioc, potatoes, beans, and fruit.
The house where Lula was born no longer exists. But its site, up a dirt track some way off the main road from Garanhuns to Caetés, was pointed out to me in September 2005 by two boys on motorcycles, one a distant cousin of Lula's. Technically, the land is semiarid, but there are pools of water nearby and the soil is fertile.
A few of the farmhouses now have satellite TV dishes. But there is still much unemployment, and there are armed holdups on some of the rural roads at night. Garanhuns, “the city of flowers,” was founded in 1879; its railway station, long closed, has become a cultural center. It is a region of minifundios (smallholdings), not natural territory for the Partido dos Trabalhadores (the PT, the Workers' Party), and it was not until twentyfive years after the party's foundation that it managed to elect its first town councilor (vereador).3
It is an area that has seen a steady flow of out-migration for more than a half century. In 2005, as president, Lula opened a law school at the state university of Pernambuco in the town, in part a contribution to keeping young people in the area. At the dedication there was a crowd of ten thousand, and fifty of his relations were photographed alongside him.
If Garanhuns today looks tidy, with some new buildings, the smaller town of Caetés is closer to the history of forgotten places in Brazil's impoverished northeast.4 There are still donkey carts to be seen, and the occasional pau-de-arara (literally, “parrot's perch”), which is a truck converted to a people-transport with hard wooden benches.5 It is hard to know what anyone does for a living in Caetés, aside from subsistence agriculture. But the da Silva family of the president is acknowledged. Opposite the home of Lula's cousin Gilberto Ferreira is a new public health clinic named for Dona Lindu.
It does not take a lot of imagination to realize that when Lula was born this was a harsh region. There was no electricity in the countryside. People heated their homes
