The decade of the 1970s was actually a high point for the alternative press, following in the tradition of the satirical and irreverent pamphlets of the Regency period and the anarchist publications of the First Republic. The writers, artists and publishers were passionate about their point of view, sought a new direction for the political process, and proposed social, cultural and behavioural transformation. Some of these publications were aligned with political organizations or clandestine groups of the left, such as Opinião, Movimento, Hora do Povo and Em Tempo. Others originated from cooperatives formed by journalists, as was the case with Coojornal, De Fato and Ex. There were also small-scale newspaper publications that combined humour, behaviour and social criticism, the most famous of which was O Pasquim.22 In addition, there were publications featuring new cartoonists, a long tradition in Brazilian journalistic humour, such as O Bicho and Humordaz. And there were the iconoclastic magazines such as Beijo, and its anarchistic companion, O Inimigo do Rei.23 Many of their readers were university students, and they helped bring about a radical transformation in the concept of ‘revolution’ – the possibility that it could be a revolution in behaviour, customs and culture. The student movement began to undergo a significant change. There was now a new generation of students that joined the 1970s opposition, young people who had not experienced the 1964 and 1968 defeats. Instead, they witnessed the victory of the Brazilian Democratic Movement in 1974. They rejected the notions of older leftist groups that had believed in an armed struggle.
The quintessence of this generation was a Trotskyite organization that had no more than a thousand student members all over the country, but that ignited the spark of all the cultural, aesthetic, behavioural and political experiments that occurred in the 1970s. It was called Liberdade e Luta (Freedom and Struggle), and was nicknamed Libelu. Members of this organization completely rejected anything reminiscent of the rigid and authoritarian line adopted by the Stalinist Communist Party. They were mainly students at universities in São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraíba and Bahia. There were not very many of them, but they made a lot of noise. They listened to the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Lou Reed and Caetano Veloso, read Walter Benjamin and venerated the Dadaists. Unafraid of the dictatorship – they were convinced that it was the dictatorship that was afraid of them – they used every possible opportunity to repeat their slogan, created by one of their sympathizers, the poet Paulo Leminski: ‘We will overcome – without thinking about it’ (Distraídos venceremos).24
But it was not necessary to be a member of Libelu to realize that both the student movement and the alternative press were voicing a new type of countercultural subversion in the 1970s.25 The Brazilian offshoot of the countercultural movement began four years after the 1966 Flower Power happenings in San Francisco. There was a great deal of interest in drugs, especially hallucinogens, pacifism, oriental mysticism and communes. Their clothes also transgressed the norms. Originally based on the kind of clothes worn by Native Americans and gypsies, in Brazil they adopted Afro-Brazilian and African styles. The counterculture movement wanted paradise here and now. They brought the dream of a small community, a mythical space held together by ties of solidarity, by people working and living together, and creating art compatible with their philosophy. A whole generation of poets sold verses from door to door, outside cinemas, bars, museums and theatres – short poems expressing facts and feelings about daily life, characterized by bewilderment and good humour. For example, the Nuvem Cigana (Gypsy Cloud) collective in Rio de Janeiro would hold book launchings that were veritable spectacles, a new kind of ‘happening’ – the Artimanhas26 – which sometimes lasted for days and included dramatized poetry readings and almost always ended with a party or at the police station.27
These cultural events redefined the political movements in the universities and, from 1977, when the movement returned to the streets in full force, student activists definitively adopted the slogan ‘For democratic freedoms’. The students always wanted to be in the frontline, but there were others who were equally keen to join the opposition. In August 1977, during a public event to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the University of São Paulo Law School (USP – São Francisco), Professor Goffredo da Silva Telles read out his ‘Letter to the Brazilians’ in a courtyard packed with students. It was a protest in the form of a speech that defended a legally constituted state.28 He was lifted up by the students and carried away in triumph. The Brazilian Lawyers’ Association then used the professor’s speech as a manifesto. In a meeting in Brasília, when asked by President Geisel what he expected from his administration, the president of the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association, Raimundo Faoro – a lawyer who was not engaged in political militancy, and author of the classic Os donos do poder29 – replied, ‘I want very little, Mr President: just the restoration of habeas corpus, the extinction of the Institutional Acts and the end of torture in the dungeons of DOI-Codi.’ And he concluded, ‘So that Your Excellency does not go down in history as a bloody dictator.’30
Mr Faoro’s remarks surprised even Ulysses Guimarães, who in 1975 had compared General Geisel to the dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin Dada – and almost lost his mandate as a result.31 And the military were to receive a similar surprise in 1978, with the dissemination in the press of the ‘Manifesto of the Group of Eight’, which showed the extent and the social visibility of the opposition alliance. The manifesto argued for re-democratization, brought together a group of the country’s most powerful entrepreneurs: Antônio Ermírio de Moraes (Grupo Votorantim), Jorge Gerdau (Grupo Gerdau), Paulo Villares (Indústrias Villares S.A.),32 Severo Gomes (Cobertores Parahyba), Laerte Setúbal Filho (Itaú S.A.), José Mindlin (Metal Leve), Claudio Bardella (Bardella Indústrias Mecânicas S.A.) and Paulo Vellinho (Grupo Springer-Admiral).33
The year 1978 was surprising. On 12 May, a decade after the strike in Osasco had been crushed, around 3,000 workers entered the Saab-Scania truck factory in São Bernardo do Campo, near São Paulo,34 on what appeared to be an ordinary work day. They clocked in, sat down in front of the machines and crossed their arms. Two weeks later, 77,950 workers went on strike in Santo André, São Bernardo, São Caetano and Diadema, the industrial heart of the country, where the new consumer-durables and capital-goods sectors consolidated during the ‘economic miracle’ were located.35 The strike appeared to be motivated by economic causesand it was. But it signified much more. São Bernardo sparked off a cycle of strikes – the metalworkers strikes of 1979 and 1980, also in the ABC Paulista,36 and others throughout the country. Strikes affected more than four million workers in fifteen of the twenty-three states over the course of the following two years. They continued virtually uninterrupted until 1980, and these in turn encouraged collectivization in other areas, including the construction workers in Belo Horizonte, the sugar planters in Pernambuco, and the so-called boias-frias – temporary sugarcane harvest cutters – in the interior of Sao Paulo.37
Although the strikes and the organizing of the workers were largely due to the activism of the metalworkers’ union, they were joined by other sectors in what became known as Brazil’s ‘new trade unionism’.38 The expression was used to describe a trade union movement that not only opposed the dictatorship, but was also autonomous, free from the state controls established during the Vargas administration; unions that could negotiate collective contracts directly with employers and act independently of the Labour Courts. These trade unions started on the factory floor, took their decisions at large assemblies, and proved that it was not only football that could fill a stadium in Brazil. During the strikes of 1979 and 1980 more than 100,000 workers attended the famous assemblies in the Vila Euclides Stadium in São Bernardo. The cycle of strikes that began with the metalworkers in 1978 led to the consolidation of two major labour movements that emerged at the turn of the decade. The first, the Centralized Workers’ Union (CUT), founded in 1983, was a near-deployment of the ‘new trade unionism’. This organization represented a broad spectrum of w
orkers, including rural labourers, and it advocated agricultural reform. It was democratically run and supported autonomy for organized unions, and the freedom to form them inside the factories.39 The second major labour movement was represented by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT).40 It was founded in 1980, from the bottom up, and drew support from the trade unions and other mass movements. Members of the Workers’ Party planned to capture the vote of the impoverished populations in the city outskirts and the interior.41 The party was founded by workers to give shape to the social struggle and to the principle of an egalitarian society, within a democratic context. In the words of Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), one of the party’s founders, it grew quickly, spreading ‘like tiririca,42 sprouting up everywhere’.43 The Workers’ Party was formed from a wide range of political forces. It incorporated the trade unionist and workers’ movements, the progressive wing of the Catholic Church (via the Basic Christian Communities – CEB), the remaining revolutionary armed resistance groups, the Trotskyites, and a wide range of artists and intellectuals.
The Workers’ Party brought out the popularity and leadership of Lula, a factory worker and two-term president of the Metalworkers’ Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, who became famous throughout the country as the leader of the strikes in 1978, 1979 and 1980. In 1980, when he was thirty-five, Lula was extremely charismatic and thought of nothing but politics. He could never have imagined, however, that in 2002 he would be elected president of Brazil. The cycle of strikes that began in 1978 exposed the limitations of the government’s controlled abertura policy, which ignored the political participation of the workers. In 1979, as soon as the strike began, the Ministry of Labour decided to intervene in the Metalworkers’ Union in São Bernardo. As a result, the company bosses locked down the factories, and the governor of São Paulo, Paulo Maluf, ordered the military police to repress the pickets, the meetings – including those in the churches – the rallies and the street protests. The police violence was in stark contrast to the official discourse of gradual re-democratization. On 30 October 1979, Santo Dias da Silva, a trade union leader and member of the Pastoral Workers’ Association,44 was shot dead by the Paulista military police during a metalworkers’ protest march.45
During the 1980 strike, the Figueiredo administration abandoned its rhetoric and went on the attack. Photographs of two army helicopters, with the doors open and eight armed soldiers in each one, aiming their machine guns at the crowd in the Vila Euclides Stadium, were published in the press all around the world. In São Bernardo, troops occupied the trade union’s headquarters, the Praça da Matriz46 and the stadium itself. The companies were not permitted to negotiate with the strikers and fifteen union leaders were arrested – including Lula.
IN THE STREETS – WEARING YELLOW SHIRTS
The process of gradual re-democratization led to a reduction in political repression, which occurred slowly, and not always continuously. But President Geisel kept his promises: at midnight on 31 December 1978 the AI-5 was annulled. At the end of the same year the government modified the National Security Law, reducing the number of acts defined as crimes against the state and shortening the prison terms. But at the same time, the government decreed a series of authoritarian measures – the so-called ‘State protection measures’. They allowed the Executive to suspend legal guarantees, declare a state of siege, appoint governors and employ censorship without authorization from Congress.
Also in December 1978, President Geisel took the first step towards political reconciliation by revoking the banishment decree that had affected 120 exiled politicians. Then in June 1979, General João Figueiredo, his successor, continued moving forward in fits and starts when he sent Congress a draft of a government proposal for a general amnesty. Brazil had around 7,000 exiles and 800 political prisoners, and more time was needed before it could be discovered how many people had been killed, or whose whereabouts remained unknown, as a result of the activities of government authorities. A recent estimate for the period 1964 to 1985 puts the figure at around 434 people.47
The public demand for an amnesty had begun in 1975, with the creation of the Women’s Amnesty Movement (MFPA), in São Paulo. The movement was led by Therezinha Zerbini, a courageous lawyer and the wife of General Euryale Zerbini – a legalist officer who had refused to support the 1964 coup and had been forced into the Reserve.48 The movement soon had centres all over Brazil, was supported by the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) and the Catholic Church, and encouraged those in exile to unite around a single cause. In 1979 there were about thirty amnesty committees operating outside Brazil, the most active of which were in Portugal, France and Switzerland. It was only a question of time before the opposition forces realized that demand for an amnesty was at the root of the process of reconstructing Brazilian democracy. In February 1978, in Rio de Janeiro, the first Brazilian Amnesty Committee (CBA) was founded, and what had previously been seen as the restoration of justice became an affirmation of a basic right – ‘a vital part of democratic liberties’, according to the Charter of Principles of the Paulista CBA, which was founded in May the same year.
The Brazilian Amnesty Committees were the spark that ignited an unforgettable movement – the campaign for broad, general and unrestricted amnesty. This cause brought everyone within the opposition together. It was supported by artists and intellectuals, as well as the general public. The amnesty cause motivated large-scale street protests and political rallies, but its popularity was confirmed on 11 February 1979, in São Paulo’s Morumbi Stadium. During a match between Santos and Corinthians, the Gaviões da Fiel,49 a huge banner was unfurled on which the words ‘Broad, general and unrestricted amnesty’ appeared in gigantic letters. The scene was shown on nationwide television and printed by the newspapers on their front pages. There could no longer be any doubt what the Brazilian people were demanding.50
The draft legislation that President Figueiredo sent to Congress might have been an attempt to change the political environment, but it was also a measure of pragmatic compromise.51 It permitted the exiles’ return (including Leonel Brizola and Luís Carlos Prestes), freed political prisoners, and allowed those who had gone underground to reassume their identities. President Figueiredo’s legislation, however, proposed limited amnesty, restricted and reciprocal. It did not include the 195 political prisoners who had been condemned for armed attacks – officially known as ‘blood crimes’ – nor did it guarantee that those who had been forcibly retired or dismissed from public office during the dictatorship would be reinstated. In both of these cases, the law was eventually changed. What has never been changed, however, is the reciprocity clause whereby the military, who also committed political crimes, or were accessories to them, have been granted immunity. Today, more than thirty years later, this law prevents holding anyone to account who perpetrated state-sponsored crimes during the dictatorship. These crimes include torture, murder and forced disappearances. The amnesty law granted judicial immunity to the armed forces, making them unaccountable. Even so, this was not enough to appease certain sectors within the army that did not accept the abertura – especially those responsible for the violence and mechanisms of repression. This nucleus of authoritarian, reactionary officers blocked the progress of President Geisel and General Golbery do Couto e Silva – and after them, of President Figueiredo – as they attempted to administer a controlled transition. In addition to preventing the politicization of Brazilian society and neutralizing the opposition, they had to confront resentment from within the armed forces.
Those who had been involved in the violent political repression tried to justify their actions with vehement protests against the process of abertura.52 Their political identity was at stake; they simply could not abide the thought of losing their institutional role. The first signs of discontent were manifested in pamphlets. These circulated inside the barracks for ten years, between 1975 and 1985, attacking the strategy of re-democratization and making nu
merous accusations against General Golbery do Couta e Silva. This open rebellion within the military created a problem for the armed forces, and was a disaster for the government. After all, the president needed the unrestricted support of the barracks in order to successfully control the process of re-democratization. To make the situation worse, when these sectors confronted the abertura, they had a powerful weapon in their hands: the mechanisms of repression. President Geisel had considered Vladimir Herzog’s murder a provocation to the government and an outrage. Manoel Fiel Filho’s death a few months later represented nothing less than a political manifesto and a show of strength to the president. President Geisel may have been quite capable of justifying torture, as he demonstrated during an historic interview at the Research Centre for the Documentation of Brazilian Contemporary History (CPDOC),53 when he said ‘I think torture is necessary in certain cases, to obtain confessions’ – but he would not tolerate lack of discipline, nor would he have his presidential authority challenged. Manoel Fiel Filho’s death was offensive on both counts, and the president responded by dismissing the head of the Army Intelligence Centre, exonerating the commander of the Second Army and, much to his displeasure, allowing the country to catch a glimpse of the divisions within the armed forces.54
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