Humberto Lucena: o verbo e a liderança

Abstract

Life reserves moments of extreme difficulty for us to make decisions. When the writer Fátima Araújo invited me to write the preface for this book, I was torn between the emotion of talking about a friend and the sadness of having lost him. In fact, Paraíba lost. With the death of Humberto Lucena, a conciliatory style of doing politics also died. Conciliation is one of the basic rules of politics, without this meaning capitulation. On the contrary, at certain moments in history there is a need to make decisions that may at first seem extreme, but which in fact reflect the imposition of principles that a public figure cannot abdicate. Humberto Lucena was like that. He was conciliatory when he gave up his candidacy for governor in 1986, in 1990 and 1994, with the sole objective of uniting his party, the PMDB, without these gestures reflecting weakness, since during this period he faced two elections for the Senate and was victorious in both. When he opposed the military dictatorship in its darkest period, during the Médici government, risking his life or even the revocation of his political rights, he did so because he could not accept that the country should live with a regime of oppression that was above all and any institution. His democratic principles did not accept that political situation.