regularly to the household. “I feel that my mother's pride was the same that I feel when a son of mine goes to university,” he remarked later.12 This was the culmination of his formal education.
Lula was properly fed, and he was able to play soccer in lunch breaks at the factory and afford entertainment. One of his means of relaxation at the time was to go swimming in lakes around Vila Carioca. Other northeasterners were working at the factory, and as a youngster he was treated with affection. He was taken under the wing of an older man, a black lathe operator named Barbosa, who shared his refreshments with him, taught him on the job, and was a kindly father figure. Altogether he stayed at the screw factory for three and a half years, moving on in 1964, a baleful year in Brazilian history.
Although life had been getting more pleasant for Lula, the optimism of the Kubitschek years in Brazil as a whole had turned sour. Whether Kubitschek had achieved his intended fifty years of progress by the time he left office after the inauguration of Brasilia in 1960 is a matter for debate. But there certainly had been remarkable growth, with a combination of import substitution for the internal market, foreign capital, and national planning. Special executive groups were set up to stimulate the auto industry, shipbuilding, road building, production of agricultural, railway, and heavy industrial machinery and equipment, iron ore exports, and warehousing. Between 1957 and 1961, gross national product grew by 8.2 percent a year, and real income per capita by 5.1 percent.13
Growth was particularly striking in road building, where more than 10,000 miles were built; in the electricity supply, where 1.65 million kilowatts came online, much of it through hydropower; and in the auto industry, where production rose to 170,000 car and truck units a year, and international companies such as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz opened factories.
But there were substantial costs, both economic and political. Inflation soared in the last eighteen months of Kubitschek's term, when talks with the IMF had broken down; 1960 saw a record payments deficit; and by early 1961, three times the amount of cruzeiro money was in circulation as at the end of 1955. The dash to build the new capital of Brasilia, inaugurated in 1960 after work had started only four years earlier, was inflationary and involved substantial corruption. Construction firms made fortunes. That the city, with its sensational modern architecture, was a symbol of a new more developed Brazil did not disarm conservative critics.
Kubitschek passed on the presidency to a maverick from São Paulo, Jânio Quadros, who suddenly resigned in August 1961.14 He had been supported by the conservative, anti-Vargista party, the Uniao Democrático Nacional, and had won 48 percent of the vote. But his departure opened a worrying prospect for conservative groups, and especially those in the military who had been plotting on and off against Vargas and his legacy since 1945, because the vice president was Joao Goulart of the PTB, known as Jango to his supporters. Although he was a landowner in Rio Grande do Sul, he had always run on a populist platform of economic nationalism and benefits for organized labor.
Initially, Goulart was not allowed full powers, but an experiment in parliamentarism was swept away in January 1963, when in a referendum the people voted five to one to return to an executive presidency. Goulart by now was calling for basic reforms—tax reforms to hit the rich, land reform, and the nationalization of foreign-owned utilities such as the Canadian-owned Rio Light in Rio de Janeiro. While inflation rose, ineffective price controls were introduced. Social malaise was growing, with pro and anti-Goulart demonstrations, and the president seemed to dither.
Finally the crisis came to a head in March and April 1964. At a Rio rally on 13 March, organized by the trade unions that were part of the PTB machine, Goulart expropriated private oil refineries and decreed that underused landed estates close to roads, railways, or federal irrigation projects could be taken over by the state. He said that he was planning to introduce rent controls, to give the vote to illiterates and servicemen, and to change the Constitution. After a hostile demonstration, and a naval mutiny, which Goulart tried to resolve by sacking his navy minister, the army launched a coup, backed by governors in Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and the city-state of Guanabara, formerly Rio de Janeiro.
The coup was all over in three days, by 2 April, with little bloodshed although, in a warning of what was to come, there were allegations that opponents had been tortured in the northeast.15 It had received discreet help from the U.S. government, which, like Brazilian conservatives, was concerned about the possible spread of the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America. Many congressmen, union leaders, artists, and journalists were deprived of their political rights by the regime; a process of “cleansing” (called Operaçao Limpeza), with military police inquiries, was launched by the hard-line defense minister, General Costa e Silva.
The military was to rule Brazil for the next two decades and, as we shall see, Lula played a major part in getting them back to their barracks. The military dictatorship was the context in which Lula was to develop as a trade unionist and become a national figure.
Meanwhile, Lula himself, still a teenager in 1964, was trying to get on in the world as a lathe operator. He left the Fábrica de Parafusos Marte because it refused to raise his wages to the level of older men, even though he had worked there as long. In 1965, therefore, when the economic squeeze was biting, Lula found himself out of work for eight months. His brothers were also unemployed, and Dona Lindu's household was under strain. Lula would leave the house at 6 A.M., trudging around to the factories to see if any of them were taking on workers. Sometimes the staff would say there were no jobs. Sometimes they would take away Lula's professional card, hang on to it for a while, and then say that there was nothing available. His dreams of being well paid and working for one of the big automaking firms seemed far from reality.
The family moved around frequently, and several of the poor-quality houses they lived in flooded. There was not much to eat—just rice and potatoes cooked in oil, but no chicken or meat. Lula found the experience of unemployment profoundly depressing; he had no workplace friends or money for modest pleasures.
After what seemed a long time, he found a job in another factory, Fábrica Independencia, where he was employed as a lathe turner on the night shift. He could sleep a little on the job, waking up before the boss arrived. He earned enough to buy a secondhand bicycle. It was here that he lost the little finger of his left hand in an accident. A screw broke on a machine, and a heavy press fell, smashing the finger.16 It was painful, and he had to wait some hours before the factory manager arrived at 6 A.M. and took him to a doctor. The loss of the little finger gave him a psychological complex for months but won him compensation of 350,000 cruzeiros, a fair sum at the time; he used it to buy furniture for his mother and to help her buy a little piece of land.
Safety arrangements in the new factories springing up in the Sâo Paulo area left much to be desired, and many mechanics and lathe operators suffered industrial injuries. Other members of Lula's family were also victims of the largely unregulated rapid industrialization. One Volkswagen manager told the correspondent of a German newspaper that he preferred employing the uneducated northeasterners of Brazil, and that the car output in São Paulo was higher than with German workers in Wolfsburg.17
At Independencia, where the firm offered a flagon of wine with the thirteenth month's salary, Lula had his first experience of getting completely drunk. He and his fellow workers drained the flagon in a nearby bar and chased it with a number of beers. Fortunately, Lula had a short walk home. After eleven more months at this factory he went to another, Fris-Moldu-Car, where he was sacked after a minor act of rebellion. The boss there wanted him to work on a Saturday. But he wanted to go on a picnic to Santos with his brothers. So Lula refused to work that Saturday, went on the picnic, and lost his job.
At both Independencia and Fris-Moldu-Car, Lula had the experience of participating in metalworkers' strikes. The military regime of Humberto Castelo Branco was following the tight anti-inflationary policy of its finance minister, Roberto Campos.18 This squeezed the income of workers and, although there was a crackdown on communists,
