changed Brazil more profoundly than the end of the empire in 1889 was the revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930. Vargas had been the state president of Rio Grande do Sul and had run in a federal presidential election that year as the candidate of the Liberal Alliance. His father and maternal uncle had been commanders on opposite sides in a brutal statewide civil war, and he inherited a ruthless streak. He had backing from Minas Gerais and the northeastern state of Paraíba in the 1930 election. But there was no secret vote, and elections were fixed through a carving up of spoils among state political machines. After the 1930 election, the outgoing president, Washington Luís, claimed that his candidate, Julio Prestes—the state president of São Paulo, so a Paulista like himself—had won by a two-to-one majority.
The country was ripe for a revolution. Stocks had crashed in 1929, and in the same year there had been a crisis of overproduction of coffee, the key export earner—output had almost doubled in five years, outstripping demand. Foreign capital fled Brazil. The government's gold reserves, healthy at the end of World War I, had dropped to zero by the end of 1930. And over the previous decade there had been bubbling dissent and minirevolts among young army officers, the phenomenon of tenentismo.
Launched in Rio Grande do Sul on 3 October after careful planning, the insurrection was successful relatively quickly. Vargas was in the Catete, the presidential palace in Rio, by 31 October. He was greeted by tumultuous crowds. A canny, introverted man with a fatherly smile, he was to be the key figure in Brazilian politics until his suicide in 1954. He defeated a rebellion in São Paulo in 1932 and an attempted communist coup in 1935, and he was imprisoned for a few hours in a nearly successful putsch by the Integralistas, the Brazilian fascists, in 1938. Having introduced a personal dictatorship with his fascist-style Estado Novo in 1937, he brought Brazil into World War II on the side of the Allies in 1942.9
Two key elements of the Vargas era, which resurfaced when Vargas was democratically elected president in 1951, were the incorporation of the growing working class and significant gestures of economic nationalism within a context of industrialization. Fascist ideology, which in Europe had done little for organized workers except to destroy their autonomous unions, was reinterpreted by the Estado Novo in Brazil to give unionized workers a stake in society. The approach was paternalist and clientelistic, with much power vested in the Ministry of Labor and not much freedom for workers' elections. Strikes were outlawed under the 1937 Constitution. But with a minimum wage in some industries, and attempts to provide pensions and social protection, it seemed like progress for poor people who were moving from the countryside into a free-for-all industrial society.
The biggest symbols of economic nationalism were in steel and oil. Late in 1940, when the United States was still trying to keep the Americas out of World War II, it authorized its Export-Import Bank to loan twenty million dollars for the construction of a steel plant in Volta Redonda; it was already known that Brazil had substantial reserves of iron ore. In December 1951, after he returned as president, Vargas sent the Brazilian Congress a bill to set up a national oil corporation, Petrobrás, which would have a monopoly on extraction and new refineries. The Petrobrás question became a major unifying force among Vargas supporters over the next two years—the popular slogan was “The oil is ours”—before the bill became law. At the same time, it discouraged foreign investment in other sectors, as well as in petroleum.10
From 1930 to 1945, Getúlio Vargas had been a dictator. But in the early months of 1945, the illogicality of Brazil's political situation caused the Estado Novo to crack, and calls for democracy, freedom, and elections became unanswerable. The military had become politicized and was now opposed to Vargas. In October, when there was doubt as to whether Vargas would permit elections, and the appointment of Vargas's brother Benjamim as police chief enraged his now wide range of opponents, the generals overthrew Vargas. Eurico Dutra, who had been Getúlio's defense minister, was elected president. Vargas, who was elected senator by the Partido Social Democrático (PSD), one of the two parties he founded—he showed more affection for the Partido Trabalhista Brasileira (PTB), set up by his supporters in the Labor Ministry and controlled unions—retired to his home in São Borja, in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. In October 1950, however, he was elected president by nearly a majority, backed by the PTB and PSD.
Getúlio's final government was not a success, and it stimulated more military plotting. Although the Korean War had resulted in a boom in primary products, the government kept chopping and changing its economic policy, inflation grew, and there was serious corruption, some of it linked to thugs in the presidential bodyguard. The murder of an air force major, Rubem Vaz, killed in an attempt on the life of a noisy anti Vargas journalist, Carlos Lacerda, led to a military ultimatum. On 24 August 1954, Getúlio committed suicide rather than be forced out of office for a second time. There was a nationwide outpouring of emotion at the death of a man rebranded as “the father of the poor.”
Plots and counterplots punctuated the next couple of years. There were two temporary presidents, Café Filho and Carlos Luz. Only a “prolegality coup” by Henrique Lott, a minister of war who refused to be sacked, enabled Juscelino Kubitschek and his running mate from the PTB, Joao Goulart, to assume the offices to which they had been elected.
All of this may have seemed rather remote to a street boy like Lula, still only ten years of age when Kubitschek became president at the end of January 1956. But the next five years, with the optimism and showmanship of the new president, marked the consciousness of all Brazilians and were certainly influential for a young teenager. Dubbed “the country of tomorrow” in the 1940s by Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who ended his days in Brazil, the strategy of “goals” and the breakneck building of a new capital, Brasília, did suggest that the country could escape its stagnation, poverty, and backwardness. Kubitschek and those around him were advocates of the doctrine of development, desenvolvimento, even if this led to high rates of inflation and a row with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
But for Lula's family, now in Vila Carioca in São Paulo, life was still tough. They lived in a room behind a bar belonging to an uncle. There was no chair for the doctor who came to see Frei Chico, then known as Ziza, when he had pneumonia. The road outside was unpaved, often a sea of mud. People around were very poor. Though Lindu was washing clothes and Lula was shining shoes, the family could not afford meat. Lula borrowed a jacket to enter a cinema, then a requirement, and when his friend Cláudio asked for it back, Lula was not allowed in.
The family moved several times, gradually acquiring more furniture. Lula worked for a dry cleaner and life looked up. He worked six months in an office, and then in a factory that made screws—the Fábrica de Parafusos Marte. It was here that he worked as part of his course in SENAI, when he trained as a lathe operator.
SENAI, Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial, was a national industrial training program originally launched under Vargas. It became increasingly important in the São Paulo area with the arrival of automakers and other new industries in the spurt of industrialization promoted by Kubitschek. The program was quite hard for a teenager to get into, and Lula took the entrance exam twice. The first time, the only vacancy was for a welder, which did not attract him. Because his educational attainment became an issue more than thirty years later, when he first started campaigning for the presidency, it is worth stating that the entrance requirement was equivalent to that of a good high school.
Interviewed by Denise Paraná in the 1990s, Lula said that his SENAI time was the happiest period of his boyhood.11 His mother was exceedingly proud of him; they had come a long way together, from Vila Carioca to Ipiranga, when he went to take the test. His two-year SENAI training was what is sometimes described as a sandwich course, involving linked classes and practical experience, and also some physical education.
He spent five months in classes, six months in the factory, and had a month's holiday. All this time he was being paid, at a rate of half the minimum salary. He was the first member of his family to have a trade or profession that required training, and he was able
