Gianpaolo Baiocchi in the Boston Review: Fernando Morais’s Lula, a new biography of Brazil’s current third-term president, describes the tension on the morning of April 7, 2018. The night before, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known simply as “Lula”—had been charged with corruption and given a day to turn himself in. He’d headed to São Paulo’s Metalworkers Union headquarters to discuss his next moves with a few close associates. “As the sun came up, fourteen of the twenty-four hours given by Judge Moro had come and gone,” Morais writes. “They can come and get me here,” Lula announces.
By that morning, the union hall has filled with union comrades, Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) members, clergy, and activists from Lula’s past, setting the stage for a dramatic standoff between Lula and his supporters—and by extension, ordinary Brazilians—and the powerful defenders of privilege who controlled the judiciary. Brazil’s media giant, Globo, had falsely reported that Lula intended to resist arrest, and emotions were running high. At one point, there are fears that power to the union hall would be cut, and Lula’s supporters discover hidden listening devices and cameras planted by police agents. Less than a kilometer away, riot police are ready to raid the building. Morais captures Lula’s back-and-forth with his closest allies, some of whom urge him to flee.
The wide-ranging—and at times, politically motivated—Operation Car Wash investigation that year had implicated hundreds, including Lula and several Workers’ Party officials, in systematic corruption and bribery involving Brazil’s largest construction firms and Petrobrás, its national oil company. Lula has maintained his innocence the whole time, but declares he will surrender to the authorities. “I would resist if I could,” Lula tells São Paulo organizer Guilherme Boulos, “but I am convinced this is the best decision.”
Lula turns himself in, but not before a mass is held in the union hall in honor of Marisa Letícia, his late wife, and Lula delivers a fifty-minute speech. “I dreamed that it would be possible to govern this country by bringing millions and millions of poor people into the economy, into the universities, and creating millions of jobs in this country,” he says, his audience imploring him not to surrender. “They ordered my arrest, but they’ll learn that the death of a fighter doesn’t halt a revolution.” Lula then steps into a car, but the crowd won’t let it leave.
He makes his way to another waiting car, which takes him to a police station to be processed. From there, he’s flown to Curitiba, where he will spend the next nineteen months in prison before being released on evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, well before the end of his nine-year sentence. Text messages exposed by a hacker had revealed collusion and manipulation in the case against Lula; eventually, he is found innocent altogether. Upon his release, he credits his supporters. “Every single day, you were the fuel of democracy that I needed,” he tells them. “These people have to know one thing: they didn’t imprison a man. They tried to kill an idea, and you can’t kill an idea. An idea doesn’t disappear.”
Lula’s arrest and vindication made for a spectacular drama. But it was just one of many challenges he’d had to overcome—the Car Wash incident wasn’t even the first time he had been jailed by political opponents. It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary political triumph. Lula was born in abject poverty, raised mostly by a single mother, and sent to work at age eight; by adulthood, he had founded a political party. He ran for president three times before winning the fourth time in 2002 and getting reelected in 2006. After his 2022 release from prison, he won his third presidential term with the most votes—some 60.3 million—in Brazilian history.
It is impossible to reflect on Lula’s life and influence without resorting to superlatives about his achievements. Barack Obama once called him “the most popular politician on Earth.” At least one journalist has speculated that if you tally all the votes Lula has received across his campaigns, he might be the most voted-for human being on the planet. It seems impossible to defeat him: neither the corporate media, nor trumped-up charges and imprisonment, nor fake news and right-wing mobilization, nor even cancer and personal tragedy has put a stop to him. His very name has become a political science concept—“Lulismo”—that describes both the doctrine of conciliatory leftism he developed and a historical epoch of economic growth and unparalleled social inclusion in Brazil. Morais’s book is the first to offer a detailed look at Lula’s early years, from his childhood to the run-up to his first congressional election win in 1986: a period crucial to understanding the politician he was destined to become.
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Lula’s political story begins almost four decades before his 2018 arrest, when, in 1980, he is jailed by the military dictatorship. A former metalworker, Lula had emerged as an important, and increasingly targeted, labor leader during a wave of strikes that were galvanizing the nation as they grew. As Morais writes, Lula’s response to his arrest already reflects his characteristic humor and fearlessness. When the police arrive at his house, Lula—still in bed—famously tells them, “They can go fuck themselves. I’m sleeping, damn it!” He needs to brush his teeth and have coffee before being taken in, he jokes.
unmarked van, flanked by six armed men, wondering if they will run him over to make his death seem like an accident—a realistic concern, given the number of activists murdered by the dictatorship in those years. Still, he musters courage. About a month later, after being held and interrogated, he is let go. If the dictatorship’s goal in arresting him had been to silence him, they had badly miscalculated the power of his charisma. The arrest made Lula a cause célèbre, propelling him to national and international prominence as a symbol of the resistance and a working-class hero.
The political party Lula had helped found in February of that year, the PT, would also grow in size and influence, due in no small part to his exploding fame. Why a political outsider would choose to invest in forming a political party takes some explaining, and Morais details the evolution of both the party and Lula himself during those early years. Lula had been famous for saying that “he [didn’t] like politics and [didn’t] like people who practice politics,” but as the one-party dictatorship started to loosen its grip on political life in the late 1970s, allowing for an official opposition party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement, it was becoming clear to Lula and others that workers would have little say or space within it. The actual idea of a Workers’ Party, according to Lula, came to him on July 15, 1978, at a petroleum workers’ strike in the northeastern state of Bahia.
From the outset, he was insistent that it be an authentic party of, and by, workers. “The place for students is in the schools. For priests, it’s in the churches. If someone wants to create a party for workers, he has to wear overalls,” he declares. Intellectuals, who would come to play a central role in the PT’s future, would only come later. Mario Pedrosa, the art critic, was the first of them to join. “The party will need people like us, at least as sympathizers,” he tells a skeptical fellow intellectual.
What an authentic party of workers would mean in practice was far from self-evident. The older Brazilian cadre left, represented by the Communist Party, as well as the armed insurrectionist movements of the 1960s, had either been obliterated or run out of the country by the military dictatorship. The socialist labor left, which some hoped would be reborn, was in disarray. The late 1970s were a heady time for a Brazilian left seeking to reinvent their political project. Though the Eastern Bloc had not yet fallen, Eastern European socialist parties were already seen as hopelessly ossified, mere apologists for statist repression.
So the PT looked inward, finding influence in liberation theology, a homegrown current of Catholicism in which salvation meant freedom from political and economic oppression, and Freirean popular education, which made critical thinking and freedom the primary goal of schooling. Social movements—urban, student, feminist, environmental—were important parts of this reinvention, too. Though the PT was founded as a mass party of workers committed to bottom-up democracy and socialism, the question of whose concerns, exactly, should be at that party’s center was never foreclosed. It’s unfortunate that Morais spends relatively little time on this crucial political history, choosing to focus more on capturing the larger-than-life personalities of those who attended the party meetings.
By the time the PT was officially announced at the auditorium of the Sion High School in São Paulo on February 10, 1980, it had been decided it would be an internally plural party, eschewing a strict party line. “Allowing the participation of groups with their own political ideologies and agendas and with formal representation in the directorate,” Morais writes, was an innovation that was “inconceivable up to then in Brazilian and even in foreign leftist parties.” The PT emerged as an often heterogeneous formation, held together by a delicate compromise, with Lula himself playing an outsized role in keeping it together.
As Brazil began its transition to democracy in the early 1980s, the Workers’ Party continued to grow across the country and consolidate its strength, particularly in São Paulo. For Lula, though, the path was less clear. His first electoral attempt, running for governor of São Paulo state in 1982, was a failure, leaving him disillusioned with politics. “It hurt. It hurt a lot. I became desperate. I lost my way. I was only sure of one thing: I was done with politics,” Lula admits. In 1985, a pivotal conversation between Lula and Fidel Castro during a visit to Cuba convinced him to return to politics. As Lula reports to Morais, Castro saw an enormous victory in the election results, even though Lula had lost, and delivered an impassioned speech begging for him not to give up the fight:
Listen, Lula: never since humanity invented the vote and invented elections, no worker . . . I repeat, no worker, no member of the working class, in any place in the world . . . has ever gotten a million votes like you did. You don’t have the right to abandon politics. You don’t have the right to do this to the working class.”
More here.
