In Brazil’s semiarid northeast, Luiz Rodrigues measures government by the water in his cistern and the food his farm produces. His loyalty to Lula reveals how rural infrastructure, political dignity, and fear of abandonment shape a fiercely contested presidential election.
A Vote the Boss Couldn’t Own
Before the roosters announce morning in Potengi, Luiz Rodrigues is already working the red earth. At 71, he arranges his day around the heat. Rain comes for roughly four months each year. The rest requires planning, storage, and the stubborn business of keeping things alive.
This is the landscape behind an electoral number: his community gave President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 84% of its votes in the October 4 first round. More than five votes for Lula for every vote cast for someone else. That concentration measures allegiance, but it can’t explain why every voter chose him.
Rodrigues supplies one explanation. He recalls working for others and money disappearing almost as soon as it arrived. “Half went to buy food, the other half went to the boss,” he told EFE.
Then, in 1979, television brought news of strikes in São Paulo, about 1,550 miles away. A bearded union leader was challenging employers during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Rodrigues recognized a struggle that reached beyond the factory gates.
He joined the rural workers’ union and, later, Lula’s Workers’ Party. In 1989, he voted for Lula against his employer’s wishes. Other farmworkers questioned his defiance. His answer still carries the force of someone claiming something previously withheld: “If I don’t even own my own vote, what am I going to own, my friend?”
The chronology matters. His admiration began 24 years before Lula first became president. Public programs subsequently reinforced an attachment rooted in labor and dignity. Treating that relationship as an exchange of benefits for ballots would erase the moment when Rodrigues insisted his employer could not own his political judgment.
The Farm That Policy Built
Today, the family’s 20 hectares, roughly 49 acres, offer a practical explanation of how that attachment endured. Government support helped assemble several connected forms of security.
Rural microcredit initially provided for two pigs per household and two cement pens. Cooperation with neighbors brought eight pigs onto Rodrigues’s property. That is four times one household’s allocation, but it reflects pooled resources, not proof that his personal income quadrupled.
Government specialists taught the farmers to install underground pipes and biodigesters. Pig manure becomes biogas for cooking. An animal therefore contributes beyond its market value: its waste supplies another household need. The economic benefit includes purchases the family may avoid, as well as anything it earns. For a household accustomed to watching food consume its earnings, producing dinner and cooking fuel can change what remains available for needs and emergencies.
Beside the turquoise house, the garden depends on water stored in a publicly financed cistern. Electricity arrived through a universal access program launched under Lula in 2003. The water initiative dates to 2011, under his successor, Dilma Rousseff. The farm’s security built up across administrations rather than appearing as a single presidential gesture.
These investments work together. Credit can finance livestock, but animals require water and care. Technical assistance makes the energy system usable. Stored water helps sustain vegetables when rainfall recedes. Grain kept in metal silos inside earth-and-wood buildings extends the harvest’s usefulness.
Calling this merely assistance misses its productive purpose. The state provided equipment and services; Rodrigues and his neighbors did the work. The result is greater capacity to produce food and fuel for themselves, though it does not guarantee complete independence or protection against every drought.
Potengi’s output per person is less than one third of Brazil’s national average. That statistic describes economic production, not each resident’s paycheck. Still, it establishes the scale of the local disadvantage. A functioning cistern can matter enormously without producing the kind of income growth that would close such a gap.
Security With an Election Deadline
Residents now worry about losing the conditions that made those improvements possible. Luã Almino, the local Workers’ Party president, told EFE that people fear abandonment and the discontinuation of public policies if Flávio Bolsonaro wins the runoff.
His position matters: he speaks as a party leader, not an independent measure of public opinion. This fear reflects political insecurity. It does not establish that Bolsonaro would abolish every program supporting this farm.
Existing infrastructure would not disappear on election night. More consequential questions concern continued financing, maintenance, technical assistance, and access for families still waiting. An installed connection and a program that can reach the next household are different public achievements.
For Rodrigues, however, the election carries a moral charge that exceeds a budget debate. He invokes the biblical Israelites rebelling after Moses led them across the Red Sea, imagining voters turning against the leadership that helped deliver them from hardship.
Here, scripture gives the left a language of deliverance. His conviction also reveals the vulnerability of identifying public provision so closely with one political figure: an ordinary electoral contest can begin to feel like a threat to survival.
Rodrigues’s farm offers a more durable standard. Water, electricity, and productive credit should remain dependable when presidents change. Until that continuity feels secure, his ballot will carry the weight of everything he has learned to keep alive through the dry season.