On 1 January 2023, a few hours after being sworn in for his third stint as Brazil’s president, a ravenous Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sneaked away from a celebratory cocktail party packed with politicians and diplomats to grab a snack with one of his oldest friends.
“This is your penultimate term,” that friend, the Dominican theologian and writer Frei Betto, recalls telling Lula as the pair chewed the fat in a back room of the foreign ministry in Brasília.
Betto says Lula laughed off his provocation, insisting: “No, Betto! It’s the last one. I’m done!”
But the theologian was unconvinced. “I’m certain that in four years’ time you’ll stand for a fourth,” he assured the leftwing veteran during their 40-minute tête-à-tête.
“And sure enough, he did,” Betto added last month, as his forecast came true.
On 4 October, just a few weeks shy of his 81st birthday, Lula will indeed seek to extend his legendary five-decade career in what will be the former union leader’s seventh presidential election since his first in 1989.
Lula ran three unsuccessful campaigns before finally making history as Brazil’s first elected working-class president in 2002 and winning re-election in 2006.
In 2022 he staged a sensational comeback, defeating the far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, before thwarting a coup attempt masterminded by his rival a week into his third term.
Four years later, Lula will face Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator, in October’s election, with the pair neck and neck in the polls.
“I honestly don’t see how we can lose this election. I really don’t,” Lula told a podcast recently, although analysts say the vote is too close to call.
During a recent rally in the country’s north-east, a region traditionally associated with Lula, who was born into rural poverty there in 1945, Bolsonaro claimed: “You’re looking at the next president of Brazil.”
Betto, whose full name is Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo, remains confident his comrade of more than four decades will prevail and narrowly win one last term as president. “Politics is his calling,” he says of Lula. “He’s a political animal – he breathes it 25 hours a day.”
But the social activist fears that if his latest prediction is wrong, the consequences for Brazil’s 214 million citizens will be dire. “What’s at stake is the return of a neo-fascist government that washed its hands during the pandemic and dismissed as insignificant the deaths of 700,000 people in Brazil from Covid-19,” Betto says of Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, when the president’s anti-scientific response and sabotage of vaccination efforts was widely blamed for the high death toll.
Betto’s greatest fear is that a second Bolsonaro presidency would help Donald Trump to tighten his grip on Latin America, where he is trying to reassert Washington’s dominance as part of the so-called “Donroe doctrine”.
The most dramatic episode of that campaign came in January, when US special forces invaded Venezuela, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and in effect capturing the government he left behind.
Cuba, which Betto has visited regularly since becoming friends with Fidel Castro after they met in 1980, is also in Trump’s crosshairs. The US has been trying to topple its communist government by suffocating the economy and cutting off the country’s fuel supply.
Betto, 82, believes another Bolsonaro presidency would bring “complete alignment with the US”.
“We would become what Venezuela is today: an American protectorate,” he says. “There would be a devastating wave of privatisations, and social issues would get much worse. Rightwing governments are focused on the elites, focused on the financial markets, and aren’t concerned with the people.”
This week Lula’s campaign accused Trump of seeking to “colonise” Brazil and trying to sway the election in Bolsonaro’s favour to capture its natural resources.
The theologian also fears a Bolsonaro win would deal a body blow to the democracy he and Lula were trying to rescue when they became friends in São Paulo’s industrial heartlands in the early 1980s.
While Bolsonaro’s 2023 putsch flopped, Betto believes Brazil’s failure to punish those responsible for abuses during the 1964-85 military regime has left the door open to future power grabs.
“The problem is that we didn’t investigate the crimes of the dictatorship the way Chile, Argentina and Uruguay did,” he says. “So there’s a very strong dictatorial residue in the Brazilian armed forces … that could resurface at any moment.”
The civilians and soldiers responsible for the failed 2023 coup were arrested, tried and jailed during Lula’s third presidency. The ringleader, Jair Bolsonaro, received a 27-year sentence – hence his oldest son seeking the presidency in his place. “All of this could be overturned with Flávio Bolsonaro’s election, because he would have the power to pardon them,” Betto says.
Before the 2022 election there was a powerful outpouring of concern – in Brazil and around the world – over Bolsonaro’s overtly authoritarian plans. But Betto, who has personal experience of the dangers of authoritarian rule, does not detect the same level of alarm now at the prospect of Bolsonaro’s son winning power.
Betto was jailed twice during Brazil’s dictatorship: first suffering 15 days of beatings at the navy’s secret service base in Rio, then spending nearly four years behind bars in São Paulo for helping political dissidents to flee abroad.
“Honestly, the possibility of living under a dictatorship again is truly terrifying,” he says. “The only people who could possibly think a dictatorship is a good thing are those who haven’t experienced it first-hand, like I have.”
Betto says part of the blame for the far-right’s advance lies with the left, which has lost ground to evangelical churches and conservative forces in poor communities, where leftwing Catholic activists such as him were once deeply embedded. “We have to go back to the favelas,” he says. “We have to go back to rural areas. We have to go back to all the places where there are marginalised or excluded people.”
The bestselling writer also worries that Lula – who will be 85 by the end of his fourth term, if he wins – has failed to groom an heir. “I don’t see anyone in the Workers’ party today who has his charisma or political potential,” he says, calling possible successors too inexperienced or lacking in popular appeal.
Speaking during a recent visit to Rio, Betto described his euphoria at his friend’s historic victory nearly 25 years ago. “It was a moment of immense joy for all of us – and of immense hope for Brazil,” says the activist, who recalls reading Lula a passage from Psalm 72 at his home a few hours before his election was confirmed. The psalm says: “He shall have pity on the weak and poor. He shall preserve the lives of the needy.”
Betto believes Lula’s decision to seek re-election stems from his obsession with social justice – even if the theologian sometimes thinks his friend is insufficiently leftwing and missed a historic opportunity to implement agrarian reform when he first came to power.
“Lula is someone who is completely, viscerally dedicated to social issues, because of his personal experience with childhood hunger and abandonment,” he says, noting how four of the 12 children Lula’s mother, Dona Lindu, had died of starvation and extreme poverty.
“I hope Lula wins and I will do everything I can to make that happen,” he adds of next week’s crunch election, before admitting: “But things aren’t easy.”
