Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne

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      The sweep aimed to destabilize the regime's more respectable opponents in the tolerated Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, MDB) by showing that some of its parliamentarians had links with the underground communists. The MDB had done well in elections in 1974, particularly in the big cities. It was also a strike against President Ernesto Geisel, who had launched a strategy of distensão—or relaxation—aiming to take some of the sting out of the dictatorship.⁹

      The lawyer who telephoned Lula in Tokyo warned him to stay away, as he risked being arrested if he returned to Brazil. Subsequently, the security services tortured Frei Chico to get him to state that Lula had been passing a letter to Luis Carlos Prestes, the veteran leader of the PCB, now in exile. It was nonsense. Lula had made clear that although he was biologically related to Frei Chico, he had nothing to do with the Communist Party.

      Lula dismissed the lawyer's caution and decided to fly home at once. He was greeted at the São Paulo airport by union colleagues and advisers. No attempt was made to arrest him. The following day he went to the prison to try and find out what had happened to Frei Chico and also to Osvaldo Rodrigues Cavinato, another party member who had been working at the São Bernardo union, and who had been tricked into going with security men who had told him they were taking his father to the hospital. At that time it was risky to inquire about political prisoners, and Lula was insulted when he tried.

      Frei Chico, who had been picked up with an incriminating document from a European communist party, was beaten, tied up, and tortured on the “dragon's chair.” The soldiers who tortured him were very young and were paid extra for their work. The interrogators faked a confession, but Frei Chico totally denied the story that Lula had been a messenger for the party. After seventy-eight days in prison, Frei Chico and sixtyfour others were released, and only nine were sentenced; confessions obtained by torture were rejected by the court.

      A number who had been arrested in the sweep died, and Lula and the family were worried about Frei Chico's fate. But more significant was the radicalizing effect on Lula himself. He asked himself: What was the logic of arresting a worker simply because he was against social injustice? Frei Chico, the father of a family, had been working since he was ten years old. What possible order or ideology could justify the arrest and torture of men like him? Lula was simply revolted. At the same time, he lost most sense of personal fear.

      But Lula also concluded that the approach of the PCB was all wrong, as was the nonconfrontational approach of his union. Although the communists might want social justice, they were crippled by their conspiratorial methods and their obsessive secrecy. Furthermore, his own union was letting down its members by opting out of any serious effort to improve wages and working conditions, and settling for a quiet life. Although the national security laws sought to outlaw strikes, other more militant groups were finding the courage to push against wage restrictions.

      While the political scene was restrictive, the economic picture was more helpful to workers in the advanced industries around São Paulo. Foreign money had been pouring in to Brazil, offsetting deficits on the current account, buoyed up by talk—promoted by the military—of an “economic miracle.” In fact, with tight controls on wages and the political system, annual growth in the gross national product from 1969 to 1974 had been running at 11 percent, with the lowest levels of inflation since the 1950s. Although occasionally hitting 9 percent, the average growth from 1973 to 1981 was only 5.6 percent a year.¹⁰

      But there was a particular spurt in investment in Brazil after the oil shock of 1973, when petrodollars were sloshing around international markets. In conjunction with conservative economic management by the military, Brazil was able to take on new foreign bank loans. The fact that the country was building dangerous and ultimately unsustainable levels of debt was sometimes brushed aside.

      The military regimes were not homogenous. There were running battles inside them over political and economic policy, and zigzags almost month to month. Each military president followed a slightly different line, with different cabinets. General Garrastazu Médici (1969-74) had pursued a tough anticommunist strategy with nationalist flourishes such as the attempt to “occupy” Amazonia with a vast road network and incentives for poor northeastern colonists to migrate there. He was followed by General Ernesto Geisel (1974-79), a political general and a technocrat, whose brother Orlando had been Médici's defense minister.¹¹ He and General Golbery do Couto e Silva, the head of the Serviço Nacional de Informaçoes (SNI), the intelligence service,¹² were resolved to manage a gradual opening-up of the political system, but at their timing and under their control.

      Broadly speaking, the frictions over political stance were between, on the one hand, the so-called linha dura, the hard-line anticommunists, who believed in ruthless suppression of supposed enemies, with censorship and torture, and were prepared to rule for a long time, and, on the other hand, military men who saw the takeover in 1964 as a temporary aberration from the gentler, accommodating, and constitutional political traditions of Brazil. The latter wanted a clean-up of the system—limpeza or saneamento were the words used in Portuguese. They supported the post-1964 device of “military police inquiries” (Inquéritos Policias Militares, IPMs), which led to the stripping of rights from politicians, civil servants, union leaders, intellectuals, and artists, but they looked forward to going back to the barracks when the clean-up was complete.

      Although the military had been a factor in Brazilian politics since the overthrow of the empire in 1889, it had usually been in the background. The difficulties of governing Brazil could expose weaknesses in the high command and put at risk its status and privileges. In 1964, Castelo Branco had been one of those who had been in favor of a temporary takeover, but clear signs of opposition to the military whenever elections were permitted and small but embarrassing guerrilla activities had played into the hands of the linha dura.

      Uniting both factions was an ideology—the doctrine of national security. This had been developed, with some encouragement by the U.S. military, in the officers' own “university” in Rio de Janeiro, the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG).¹³ The doctrine held that Brazil was threatened, both internally and externally, by totalitarian, revolutionary communism. This might be Soviet communism, the Cuban communism of Fidel Castro, Maoism, or the ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. What was more important was that a mortal threat was perceived to the religious and social traditions of Brazil. It justified the overthrow of Brazilian democracy, censorship, and restrictions on free association and labor movements. Parallel ideas were influencing the officer class in Argentina and Chile also.

      There was also a more ambitious side to the teaching of the ESG. This was that Brazil must become a great power. It tapped into the positivist strain in the country's history, its pride in its size and extensive resources. This teaching led to some hyperbolic propaganda and use of the soccer successes in the World Cup to boost the nation's self-image.¹⁴ The concept of the national security state was, therefore, all-embracing.

      São Paulo, where Brazil's Second Army was based, was a stronghold of the linha dura. Since July 1969, the Second Army had been orchestrating “Operaçao Bandeirantes,” attempting to deal with the divided but visible urban guerrillas, and setting up the vicious DOI-Codi as its instrument.¹⁵ There had been a series of small guerrilla actions, including the theft of weapons from the fourth infantry regiment by Captain Carlos Lamarca in January 1969, a raid on the safe of the corrupt former São Paulo governor Adhemar de Barros, and the “execution” of a businessman who had helped finance Operaçao Bandeirantes, Henning Boilesen.¹⁶

      The dragnet that picked up Frei Chico led also to the murder of Vladimir Herzog, the head of journalism at TV Cultura, by agents of DOI-Codi; journalists and Catholic church groups, skeptical of the official claim that he had committed suicide, organized large demonstrations, and President Geisel flew to São Paulo, where the commander of the Second Army promised that there would be no more such suicides.

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