Upon restoring the Mataripe power plant, Lula greets the people and honors Getúlio.

The Lula government's effort to bring the Mataripe hydroelectric plant back under Petrobras' control marks a significant step in a story that deserves careful consideration.

The privatization of Mataripe, sold for 1,6 billion dollars when the market indicated 3 billion, shows the bottom of the pit into which Brazilian institutions have been placed in the last decade and a half, marked by the coup against Dilma, the imprisonment of Lula and other sinister events of a historical regression.

What is also striking is the improvised manipulation of our political memory, intended to cover up particularly relevant facts.

At its inauguration in 1953, the plant was named after Landulfo Alves de Mataripe, a well-deserved tribute to the nationalist leader who drafted Law 2.004, better known as the Petroleum Law, which Getúlio Vargas signed on October 3, 1954, founding Petrobras and establishing a monopoly over reserves and refining.  

The benefits guaranteed by the 2004 law are well-known and help explain the peculiar pattern assumed by Brazilian industrial development in the second half of the 20th century. Even while retaining archaic elements of a colonial heritage, beginning with a profound and persistent social inequality, Brazil underwent a modernizing and relatively sophisticated industrialization process, which marked notable differences compared to countries with comparable historical formations, but which were unable to overcome the anachronisms of a socially primitive order.

Alongside other initiatives from the same historical period, such as the National Steel Company and the Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT), the creation of Petrobras was a fundamental reference point for change and the construction of an autonomous development project, elaborated from the 1930s onwards.  
As a reporter for Brasil 247, in 2017 I followed Lula's efforts—outside the presidency—to denounce the handing over of Mataripe to the hawks of imperialism, who, after the parliamentary coup against Dilma, began circling our riches in search of easy profit.

"In a country where everyone complains about voter apathy, Lula's caravan through the Northeast shows a very different situation," I wrote when I was in Currais Novos, a semi-arid city with 45,000 inhabitants, in Rio Grande do Norte (October 28, 2017).  

In an environment where popular mobilization was so intense that it took on the character of a celebration, the organizers even had difficulty coordinating the behavior of men and women from the region, who dressed in their best clothes to welcome a former president of the Republic already threatened by the coup forces that were going to send him to a cell in Curitiba.

Impatient with the wait in the blazing sun, fearing a mishap that would prevent a simple stop of a few minutes and direct contact with Lula, the population of smaller towns broke safety regulations to invade the road, forcing the bus fleet to make an impromptu stop to allow the population to pay their respects, in a scene that remains in everyone's memory -- including mine -- to this day.  

“If Lula is convicted, there will be war,” Antônio Ednilo Costa, 72, told me, while attending the public rally in defense of Lula that gathered nearly 30,000 people last Tuesday in downtown Quixadá, Ceará. “The people are very aware of what is happening,” he added (September 1, 2017).

In this atmosphere of celebration and struggle, the caravan crossed nine Northeastern states until its arrival at a huge rally in São Luís do Maranhão, led by Flávio Dino, then governor of the state, who organized a celebration befitting the visitor – immense, combative, and lively. It's hardly necessary to recall what happened in the following years.

In a macabre charade that shames democracy, Eduardo Cunha orchestrated the coup against Dilma Rousseff. In a sequence of the same sinister spectacle, a year later the Supreme Court denied Lula's constitutional rights, sending him to a cell in Curitiba.

Confirming an observation made by a 72-year-old farmer from Ceará to 247 ("the people are very well aware of what is happening"), as soon as they had the opportunity, Brazilians went to the polls to put Lula in his rightful place, the presidency. And it is from there that, seven years later, the president begins a fight to rebuild a heritage – economic, political and also cultural – that no people can forget. Mataripe occupies a place of honor in that past.
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