takeover, unions had to respond to the desire of ordinary members to maintain their earnings.
But in the late 1960s, while the military regime was tightening its grip on power with Institutional Act number 5—after its friends proved incapable of winning elections in 1967—Lula's situation improved. Following his brother Frei Chico, who was already working there, he got a job in Aços Villares, a large engineering firm. The firm had a policy of not employing relatives, but because the personnel department had not figured out that José Ferreira da Silva and Luiz Inácio da Silva were brothers, he got the job.
Lula was embarrassed on his first day because, short of money before he got his first paycheck, he could not afford to buy lunch. He had to walk for an hour and a half or two hours to get to work because he had no money for the bus. He also had to work the night shift.
At this time Lula seemed to be a typical young working man—fanatical about soccer, not greatly interested in politics or trade unions, beginning to date girls. His first serious girlfriend was a pretty girl of Japanese origin—there was a large Japanese community around São Paulo—but she lost out to his interest in soccer. Although close to much of his family, he was completely out of touch with his father.
Even an apolitical worker, however, was neither immune to the labor unrest of the late 1960s nor totally unaware of the heightened tension in the country in 1968-69. As an ordinary worker, Lula had observed a number of strikes. Some were violent. When he was fifteen, he was advised not to go to work one day because the factory was being picketed. His sister Maria was one of two thousand strikers locked into a jute factory by management but rescued by fellow workers. Lula himself went on strike at the Metalúrgica Independencia.
Lula's brother Frei Chico had become increasingly active in the metalworkers' union. Although Frei Chico did not join the Communist Party (the PCB) until the early 1970s, he was angry at the unbridled capitalism unleashed by the military regime, with metalworkers' wages dropping by a third, accompanied by longer shifts and more Saturday work. In 1968-69, he threw himself into the campaign for higher wages, spoke up at meetings, and began to serve in various union offices. Lula, who attended one or two of these meetings, thought that his brother was too much of an activist. Behind the scenes the PCB did what it could to stimulate unrest, although Catholic anticommunism in the context of the Cold War, police arrests, and government repression all obstructed the party.
In December 1968 the regime, which had already removed the mandates of congressional representatives who might oppose it, decreed the fifth Institutional Act (AI-5). Institutional Acts were the decree-laws of the regime that substituted for a democratic constitution. Castelo Branco had handed the presidency over to Artur Costa e Silva in February 1967, following the collapse of his policy for a more suave military regime, which had envisaged continuing elections. Costa e Silva represented the hard-line anticommunist elements who opted for a much more frank dictatorship.
The excuse for AI-5 was a provocative invasion of Brasilia University by the hard-liners, which was matched by an incendiary speech by an opposition deputy and journalist, Marcio Moreira Alves, who denounced the army as a bunch of torturers and executioners, and urged the girlfriends of young officers and cadets to boycott them. AI-5 unleashed more censorship, waves of arrests, and repression.19 Leaders of the student movement such as José Dirceu, later to be a key organizer for the PT, were thrown in jail.
While the student movement in the United States was protesting the Vietnam war and that in France was protesting the presidency of de Gaulle, in Brazil the military regime and more parochial student concerns had led to a clandestine mobilization. But after AI-5, many leftists and Marxists who had managed to escape arrest—such as the young sociologist and future president Fernando Henrique Cardoso—went into exile. At the same time, inspired by urban and rural guerrilla movements elsewhere in Latin America, small cells, mostly of young men and women, decided to take up arms against the dictatorship.
The year 1969 was important for Lula. He married. He took a post in his union, the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos. And apolitical though he was, a dramatic incident—the kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador—showed him and all Brazilians that the military regime was not impregnable.
Lula's marriage and union involvement began almost simultaneously. He had known Maria de Lourdes Ribeiro, a textile worker, for some years simply as a friend and neighbor. She was dark and pretty, and she had come from Ipatinga, a town in the interior of São Paulo state, near the Minas border. Lula and his family found themselves living next to Lourdes, her three brothers, and her parents when they moved to a house in Jardim Patente, in greater São Paulo. Lula became friendly with Maria's brothers, especially Jacinto, and they all went to dances together.
Lula realized that he was becoming attracted to Lourdes, but he was very shy. He asked Jacinto how he should approach her and whether he ought to talk to her parents first. Jacinto said he should talk directly to her. At a weekend dance, after he had drunk four brandies and several dances had gone by, he summoned the courage to say that he loved her.
While Lula was falling in love, he was also becoming an active trade unionist, almost against his will. In September 1968 he signed up as a member of the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos de São Bernardo. São Bernardo was an industrial suburb of São Paulo with several motor and engineering factories. It was part of the industrial and working-class belt that was known as the ABCD region—along with Santo André, São Caetano, and Diadema. This region, and São Bernardo in particular, were to be the center of Lula's activity over the next fifteen years and his springboard to national prominence.
On 24 April 1969 Lula assumed a position as an alternate or substitute member of his union's executive. Just over a month later, on 25 May, he married Lourdes in a happy occasion, surrounded by their extended families. They went away in a horse-drawn carriage and had a brief honeymoon at a beautiful spot, Poços de Caldas.
But the wedding nearly did not happen, because Lourdes was anxious about Lula's enhanced status in the union. She was employed by a small textile firm, and the managers put pressure on her when they learned that her fiancé was to be a union official; to them (a sign of the oppressive atmosphere of the time), active unionists were probably communists, and union prominence would bring trouble from the police. Lourdes was not political, or especially conservative, but it was common knowledge that leftists and active unionists were being persecuted.
In fact, Lula himself had needed much persuasion to join the winning slate in the union elections. His general feeling was that the union was a waste of time, union meetings were occupied with trivial disputes and power struggles, and the real capacity of the union was limited to modest social assistance. The person who persuaded him to allow his name to be included in the slate of candidates was his brother, Frei Chico, who also got the metalworkers' leadership to talk to him.
It was Frei Chico, not Lula, who had originally been invited to run for the directorate of the union. But Frei Chico had by then moved on from Villares, where he spent less than a year, and had joined a firm of two hundred employees called Carraço, which made vehicle bodies. There was already a union man, older than Frei Chico, from the small company; if Lula's brother was successful in the election, it would debar the current union official because the rule prohibited more than one member of the executive from the same business. Frei Chico did not want to exclude the older man so, even before Lula had joined the union, he suggested his name as a candidate in union elections. Frei Chico knew the union's leadership well—Afonso Monteiro da Cruz, the president, Mário Ladeia, the secretary-general, and Paulo Vidal, the second secretary, who would shortly become president. Frei Chico said he knew someone good at Villares, a big firm, who was his brother. The leadership asked what he was like. According to Denise Paraná, Frei Chico replied, “He's young, he doesn't like the union, and he doesn't know anything…but who knows? He might agree to take a part.”20
It says a lot for the status of Frei Chico, and possibly the weakness
