Diretas Já: book rescues the role of the campaign in democracy – 03/19/2023 – Politics

When to Sheet invited the journalist Oscar Pilagallo to produce a report on the 40 years of the Diretas Já campaign, he replied: “I’ll do the article, but I think it’s better to write a book”.

Said and done: he played the report, published in the Ilustríssima section, and launched “O Girassol que nos Tinge: A story of Diretas Já, the Greatest Popular Movement in Brazil”, published by Fósforo.

“I thought there was room to tell the story of Diretas in a more multifaceted way. Of course, there is politics, but I valued other fields, such as the participation of athletes and artists”, says Pilagallo.

The very title of the book was taken from a document read by artists on February 14, 1984, in front of Spazio Pirandello, the epicenter of cultural manifestations in São Paulo.

The strong participation of civil society is, for him, the main moral of this story, because the population, in almost unison, took to the streets and decisively influenced the destiny of the country in those death throes of the military dictatorship (1964-1985).

“Sometimes, people summarize this episode by saying that the Diretas amendment was defeated and that was it”, says Pilagallo. “But it’s not the end of it. It’s a story that continued for a long time afterwards, until today. Civil society learned that it had a voice.”

Bearing in mind that three quarters of the current population was not born or was under the age of ten in 1984, the author of “O Girassol que nos Tinge” sought not only to recount the drama of Diretas, but also, and perhaps mainly, to paint a picture of the political and cultural environment of that time.

In its first part, the book presents the ingredients used in the effervescent broth that bathed the beginning of the 1980s.

There are, for example, the movements of ABC workers under the command of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the restlessness of Corinthian Democracy and the agitation in the world of music, where artists such as Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento and Fafá de Belém gave the tone.

The press was also a fundamental part of this cocktail, but not in a monolithic way. What stood out was Sheeta vehicle soon dubbed “Diário das Diretas” and in which a young Pilagallo worked as an economics writer.

With unequivocal editorials and reports slipping into militancy, the Sheet not only did it help to organize the demonstrations, but it also appealed to those who were slow to board, such as Organizações Globo.

Politics, of course, was not left out of this recipe. Page after page, cultural and institutional elements mix, embodying the movement and reinforcing its historical importance.

In one of the chapters, the reader learns, for example, of the unlikely rapprochement between the cartoonist Henfil, a caustic detractor of the dictatorship, and Alagoas senator Teotônio Vilela, a government politician who sided with the opposition and became one of the greatest inspirers of the Direct now.

In another, the work of Dante de Oliveira (PMDB) from Mato Grosso, a new federal deputy in the Chamber who was responsible for collecting signatures from his colleagues and presenting, on March 2, 1983, the proposal for an amendment to the Constitution to establish direct elections for president of Brazil.

As it should be, there is also space to discuss the role of Franco Montoro, Leonel Brizola and Tancredo Neves, in addition to Ulysses Guimarães, “Mr. Diretas”.

In the second part, Pilagallo reconstructs the sequence of events, large and small, that culminated in the vote on the Dante de Oliveira amendment on March 25, 1984.

In that one-year period, many people hesitated in the face of the Diretas or even worked against the campaign, calculating that the priority should be the convening of a National Constituent Assembly — and Pilagallo does not fail to mention those who were slow to understand the winds of history.

Despite all the civic energy invested in the campaign, the amendment fell through Congress, having received 298 favorable votes, 22 fewer than necessary to pass.

In the third part of the book, Pilagallo tells how the hangover of the defeat was, but makes a point of connecting that movement to the election, albeit indirect, of Tancredo Neves (PMDB-MG) for the Presidency —an opposition civilian who, in a betrayal of the fate, died before taking office.

For Pilagallo, this does not affect the analysis of that campaign. What matters is that, in the process of ending the dictatorship, the population tried to seize the nets of its own destiny. As he writes, without the Diretas, it is likely that the end of this story would have been different.