Vera Lúcia runs for president in Brazil under PSTU

The Unified Socialist Workers’ Party, or PSTU, unveiled at its national convention Sunday the name of shoemaker Vera Lúcia as presidential candidate in the October elections. As her running mate, the party also announced Kunã Yporã, also named Raquel Tremembé, of the Tremembé ethnic group, from Maranhão state.

In her address, Vera Lúcia advocated the nationalization of the 110 largest companies in the country, banks, and agribusiness corporations, and the repeal of reforms and laws that have removed the rights of workers. Her partnership with Raquel Tremembé is a ticket of indigenous people, black people, and workers, which answers to the most oppressed sections of the Brazilian working class, she declared.

“We make up the majority of the unemployed. We need to both build a government and mobilize the working class so it can step up. We want to govern the nation with the working class and the indigenous people, because we need to give them back their lands, just as we need to give back the lands of the quilombolas and the rights we have secured,” she stated.

Bio

Kunã Yporã is a 39-year-old educator and anti-government indigenous activist. She is a member of the Association of Indigenous Women Warriors of Ancestry (ANMIGA) and the National Executive Secretariat of unionist organization CSP-Conlutas.

Vera Lúcia, 54, was born in Inajá, Pernambuco. A shoemaker, Vera Lúcia has a degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Sergipe. She became an activist working in a shoe factory at the age of 19 and has been in the PSTU since its foundation, in 1994.

Vera Lúcia has run for the post of governor of Sergipe state, mayor of Aracaju, and a chair in the lower house. In 2018, she was a presidential hopeful alongside running mate Professor Hertz Dias, from Maranhão. In 2020, Vera Lúcia was the first black woman to run for mayor of São Paulo, the city where she lives today.