Brazil: “Lula is a Survivor”

By Gustavo Veiga October 9, 2022 from São Paulo

An interview with Fernando Morais, journalist, writer and biographer of Lula.

-Who is Lula for you?

It is very difficult to define him. Having been a journalist for sixty years and a good part of that time, a political journalist here in Brazil and a little bit in Latin America, I had the privilege, the opportunity to meet a lot of leaders, heads of state, in Argentina, in almost all the continent. People from before and after… For example, I interviewed Somoza inside his office and I was struck by the fact that he was dressed very elegantly. It looked like he had a Prada suit or something but he was wearing a cowboy hat. It was a very short time before the fall of the dictatorship and afterwards I did a long interview with Daniel Ortega and his younger brother, Humberto.

Lula and Fidel

– So Fernando  Lula went to Nicaragua after the fall of Somoza. How did he make the association with Fidel?

The thing is that at that time Lula went immediately to Nicaragua. A year and a bit later, I was participating in Havana in an International Meeting for the Non-payment of the foreign debt. Something called by Fidel. And when it was over, I went to say goodbye to him in his office and he asked me: “Are you already going to Brazil?” And I told him: “No, I am desperate because I need a ticket to go to Managua. Tomorrow is the first birthday of the Revolution and I know that Arafat is going to be there and I want to ask for an interview with him. And Fidel told me: “come with me”. We went with an empty plane. Just me and Manuel Piñeiro, Barbarroja. When we went down the stairs of the plane in the Sandino airport in Managua, Fidel in front and me behind, we were met by Daniel Ortega, next to the chancellor, father Miguel D’Escoto, and my childhood friend Frey Betto, because we are from the same state, Minas Gerais. And next to him appeared Lula, whom I knew from the strikes here in Sao Paulo. We had the privilege of introducing me and Betto to Lula and Fidel. It was July 19, 1980. And there two parallel friendships were born. Betto’s with Fidel, which in the end became the book Conversations with Fidel, and a relationship with Lula that lasted until Fidel’s funeral, to which we traveled together.

– Over the years, how did that bond between Castro and the current Brazilian presidential candidate continue?

Fidel went on to play a very significant role in Lula’s story… Lula had lost an election and would be depressed for several years about it . One time Fidel told him: “I was told that you had a million and some votes and he replied, yes”. Fidel then added: “Are you depressed about this? Yes, yes, I am going to return to union life, I am going to make a more significant contribution to the workers”. And Fidel commented: “No, no, may I disagree with you? Since the institution of election in a community to choose someone has been known, since this was invented, there is not a single case of a worker with a strong hand and missing a finger, who has received one million two hundred thousand votes in a society as conservative as Brazil. I am sure this is the best service you can do…”

-Did you witness this dialogue?

Yes, and there was no immediate reaction from Lula. He took Fidel’s advice and the truth is that the first election he was in months later, he was a candidate in the constituent assembly at the end of the military dictatorship. Lula received the highest votes in Brazil until then. Fidel’s hand was essential to recapture Lula in political life and to get him out of a certain prejudice he had about politicians in general.

Lula and hunger

-How much of that trade unionist Lula, who created the PT, who was imprisoned during the dictatorship, do you see in this current Lula, the candidate who is running for his third presidency?

– All of it, all of it. And he is not shy to say it. Many people ask him here, they ask him in Germany, they ask him in South Africa, what was the secret? the trick to make the miracle of a real revolution, to be able to feed forty million people without making a bloody revolution and people ask him: what economic line did you follow? What school of economics? What was the method you adopted? and he says: ” No No, it was my mother, we were seven children and our father abandoned us and we all had to work and at the end of the month we all gave our salaries intact to her. She made a general bolo (well) and redistributed, first the basics to everyone: the pharmacy, the butcher, the clothes and I don’t know what… If there was anything left over she redistributed it again among the children but not in the same proportion that each one had given. She socialized. She would say, your sister is going to turn fifteen, she is going to dance at the club and then she would say to another son this month you are not going to have money for cigarettes. So, Lula says there is no secret to that. You have to know from whom you are going to get it and how to distribute it to the others. It is the method of Mrs. Lindú, from Pernambuco that he adopted. The old woman was tough. She separated from her husband because he drank too much and she couldn’t stand the violence against the kids anymore. She hit them and hit them hard.

-It can be said that Lula is resilient for everything he went through, including the loss of two wives, jail, the prohibition to go to his brother’s funeral when he was in prison in Curitiba, the persecutions.

I think Lula is a survivor. Not only because he survived the conditions in the Northeast at that time, which were miserable in the 1940s. First, to survive that is already a prodigy. Then, to earn a living with the difficulty he went through. To go to prison as a union leader, to lose several elections or by vote manipulation, as happened with Collor, which was a set-up, a trap set up by TV Globo. He lost the first election with that fraud and the second, and the third, and when the people already imagined that this guy could not stand any more, he won. He won in a country of selfish, primitive elite. Going out at night in São Paulo is something that cuts your heart because of the misery, a brutal thing… Lula is very touched by the situation of these people because he lived through times of hunger, not having anything to eat.

Latin American leader

– Lula is perhaps the most charismatic politician in Latin America. Is this condition natural for him or did he build it along the way?

No, no, it is something natural and he is a guy who portrays well what the average or lower-middle Brazilian is. When he speaks on TV or in campaign, people, mainly poor people, identify him as one of them. Because he is not talking about numbers, about the Faculty of Economics, he is not talking about the GDP, comparing ours and Argentina’s. The one who is talking there is him, about the life of his father, of his mother.  They have confidence in this guy because he is not making a dramatization and there is a fact, besides the social and personal origin, and that is that he is a very affectionate guy.

– In your book published in Portuguese, you link his two arrests, that of the strikes in São Paulo more than 40 years ago and the 580 days he spent in Curitiba between 2018 and 2019. Do you find any relationship between the two events?

– That’s why I decided that the first volume of Lula should not be a conventional biography. I’m going to take advantage now of the thought of a dead man, Godard, who left a few days ago and had a very curious phrase. I don’t know from which film of his. Maybe Pierrot Le fou (Pierrot the Madman), and when Cahiers de Cinéma gave him a very harsh review, because they said he had neither head nor tail, he replied, “Every good story must have a beginning, a development and an end, but not necessarily in this order. So instead of starting the book by putting Lula was born on such and such a day and lived in… I started it as an instant book, with a portrait of the prison where I was with him and by coincidence with that situation, when in 1980 the police also ran him out. So, I said to myself: I have two prisons of the same character in two different countries.

– Why?

The Brazil of 1980 is not 2020. And despite this, Lula becomes an enemy of the elite. Because the same people who had him arrested in 1980 are the ones behind the current persecution, why? Because the coup was not against Dilma. The coup was against Lula. Dilma was an obstacle, just for them to get to Lula. Because they wanted to prevent him from being president in 2018. And now they have seen that it was impossible to keep him in jail. I must say that I had no hope that he would get out so early because there were too many interests against his release, powerful interests, from political to material interests, of the elites, of the transnationals, of the United States….

Books and campaign

– You have been a politician who has held positions in public office: Secretary of Culture and Education in Sao Paulo, also a state deputy.

This time my role was much smaller than in the previous elections, because I was involved in the book. Lula did not read it, he did not see the originals. The only certainty I had with him is that the day we finished it and he authorized it, we had to resolve a question. Because otherwise there could be a fight and “I don’t want to fight with you, that’s why I’m not going to read the originals” he told me. Once it was ready and I got my hands on the first copy, I had it delivered to him on the stairs of an airplane before a trip to Germany to meet Merkel. I asked for it to be given to him. That is the first volume published in Brazil, which was launched in Argentina September 30.

– When will the second volume on Lula’s biography be published?

I want to wait for the election results and not publish it before. It is scheduled for June, in the first semester of 2023. The first volume is already in Argentina.

Contact in Argentina

– With which character did you have more affinity among Argentinean politicians?

I got very close to Néstor Kirchner, through his very affectionate relationship with Lula. I lived closer to Argentina during the dictatorship because I was there several times at the request of the church, of Cardinal Evaristo Arns. There is a very interesting passage because there was a girl whose brother was a leader of Montoneros, my namesake Fernando Vaca Narvaja. His sister, Patricia, was about to be arrested, Patricia. And the church in Argentina, a sector, because the hierarchy was with the dictatorship, asked the Cardinal of Sao Paulo to appoint two people to go to Argentina and clandestinely bring that girl who was being sought for her links with her brother. So with a nun who was from the international commission of Justice and Peace of the church, I went with a plan that had details that are not relevant. And we managed to bring her back to Brazil. Some time ago it crossed my mind: where is this girl who was so young and later became ambassador of Argentina in Mexico? I found Patricia Vaca Narvaja on Google.

The encounter with Spike Lee

-You built a bridge between filmmaker Spike Lee and Lula so that they could meet. The director of “Do the right thing” and “Malcom X” managed to interview him in Brasilia, about ten years ago. The memory of that meeting speaks of one of the qualities of the presidential candidate: his proximity to people, of whatever social status or popularity.

To give you an idea, Spike Lee was making a documentary about Brazil and he asked me to help him here on some things and one of them was to get an interview with Lula. He was no longer president and he was in Brasilia so we took him there to Lee, and I said to him, I don’t think much is going to come out, because the director was concerned with a question of racism. I left them with Lee’s interpreter and cameramen and took the opportunity to go out and smoke my cigar. I couldn’t take it anymore. When I came back, the two of them were talking as if they were friends of thirty years. It was a mutual thing. They were touching each other, Lula was running a hand over his head as if he were a son, and they were both discussing soccer, which he likes as much as Lula. He knew names of players from Argentina, from Brazil, from the 40’s, from the 50’s, from matches, when mengano scored a goal like that and they discussed. This is natural in Lula, whether with Spike Lee, with Mandela or with George Bush. I believe that much of the international authority he began to have came from this facility to charm people, no matter with whom it is.”

Source Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US