Twenty-five years ago, one of the titans of contemporary Latin American politics set off on a gruelling 2,600-mile bus journey across Brazil to take the pulse of the region’s biggest democracy and hear the voices of its forgotten masses.

“I’ll have a mouth like a cricket and ears like an elephant,” future president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vowed as he began a 20-day listening tour later dubbed “The Journey to the Heart of Brazil”.

A quarter of a century later, with Lula in jail and Brazil facing its most unpredictable and divisive presidential election in decades, the Guardian retraced that historic expedition through seven Brazilian states to get a sense of the issues driving the vote – and what might happen when Brazil’s 147 million voters go to the polls on 7 October.

Recife

The journey begins in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, Lula’s birthplace and the launchpad for his 1993 caravan.

Brazil’s north-east is the second most populous region, with more than 39 million voters. Traditionally they have been loyal to Lula, the man who still enjoys hero status here for his crusade against poverty during his 2003-2011 presidency. Until Lula, who is now serving a 12-year sentence for corruption, was barred from running , polls showed about 60% of voters here backed him.

Matheus Henrique Santana Souza isn’t one of them. The president of a group called Direita Pernambuco (Rightwing Pernambuco), he is one of tens of millions of conservative, and overwhelmingly male voters backing far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro who leads polls with about 28% of the vote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jair Bolsonaro gestures while flying towards election engagements. Photograph: Reuters

“It’s a cultural war,” Souza, a 22-year-old history student, explains during an interview at a luxury oceanfront apartment in Pernambuco’s capital, Recife, owned by one of the group’s wealthy benefactors.

Souza slammed Lula as a “scumbag” who, with his Workers’ party (PT) comrades, hoodwinked the Brazilian people and plunged Brazil into economic turmoil.

Profile Lula's famous 1993 journey Show Hide The 'Citizenship Caravan' On 23 April 1993 Brazil’s future leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, arrived in the northeastern city of Recife to kick off a historic expedition called the ‘Citizenship Caravan’. For the next 20 days, Lula and a group of leftist politicians and thinkers retraced the 1952 road-trip his family had undertaken when they fled rural poverty in Brazil’s drought-stricken north for the southeastern city of Santos. The journey, made in two passenger buses, was partly driven by politics. Lula hoped to garner support ahead of the following year’s presidential election. But it was also an attempt to shine a light on some of Brazil’s most deprived and forgotten corners; ramshackle urban favelas; riverside gold-mines; sun-scorched, famine-stricken villages such as the one where Lula’s unlikely ascent to the presidency had begun. “We are changing the way you do politics in this country,” Lula told one of the reporters who accompanied the journey. After the inaugural caravan - which took in seven states from Pernambuco to São Paulo - Lula organized six subsequent expeditions, including a ‘Water Caravan’ through the Brazilian Amazon. “Today we can say no-one knows this country like we do,” one organizer, the journalist Ricardo Kotscho, later recalled of what became known as “The Journey to the Heart of Brazil”.- Photograph: Daniel Ramalho/AFP

“He’s a crook! A thief!” agreed another of the group’s members, Maxwell Cavalcanti.

Polls show 60% of north-easterners are so disgusted by Bolsonaro’s poisonous views on gender, race and sexuality, they would not even consider voting for him. “He’s a devilish goat,” sneered one voter. “A rat’s fever,” said another.

But for Souza and many others, Bolsonaro represents deliverance from what they say is a communist cabal determined to decriminalize abortion, mollycoddle criminals, and indoctrinate students with dangerous leftist values.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alfeu França voted Lula before but is now a Bolsonaro supporter. Photograph: Alan Lima/The Observer

Further up the beach, banner-waving Bolsonaro campaigners had set up shop near Brasília Teimosa, a seaside favela known as a hotbed of Lula support. Alfeu França, a speedo-sporting bank clerk with a Brazil flag draped over his shoulders, said he voted Lula in 2002 but was now Bolsonaro to his bones. “The truth is [the PT] has become a criminal faction … at the service of evil.”

Garanhuns and Iati

With Lula sidelined, he is relying on his surrogate, Fernando Haddad, to derail the Bolsonaro juggernaut. But for that to happen Lula must persuade supporters to back his stand-in – and fast.

Haddad has soared in polls since being confirmed as Lula’s replacement and now occupies second place, with 22% of intended votes. Among Brazil’s south-eastern intelligentsia the 55-year-old former philosophy lecturer is admired for creating hundreds of miles of bike lanes while São Paulo’s mayor.

But in Lula’s hometown – the official starting point of the 1993 caravan – many still have no idea who is he.

“It’s Bada. Dada. It’s a funny name, isn’t it?” grinned Geraldo Alves de Araújo, a 53-year-old fruit-seller.

“Never heard of him,” admitted Arlindo Pereria da Silva, a 64-year-old painter. “But Lula says it’s a good idea.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria Laurentino, 49, a resident of the Rua da Taba favela in Garanhuns, said: ‘Lula left this place with a full stomach.’ Photograph: Alan Lima/The Observer

West along Highway 423, on the depressed outskirts of a town called Iati, where many lack running water and some eat protected birds to survive, few though had doubts about supporting team Lula. “If Lula backs a donkey, I’ll vote for a donkey,” said Paulo da Silva, 54, a subsistence farmer who, like many here, survives on a 95 reais (£18) monthly welfare allowance called bolsa família that was rolled out under Lula.

“Lula left this place with a full stomach,” said Maria Laurentino, a 49-year-old mother in Rua da Taba, a Garanhuns favela Lula visited in 1993.

And Bolsonaro? “He’s a demon,” she replied, as her neighbours nodded in agreement. “He’s no good.”

Delmiro Gouveia

The next stretch of the caravan cuts across Brazil’s sertão, a scorched backcountry of cactuses and cattle carcasses long notorious as the fiefdom of ruthless oligarchs.

When Lula visited, famished, cactus-eating peasants flagged down his two-coach convoy and pleaded for help. “My problem’s hunger, sir,” one woman told him.

Lula blamed a “shameless” clique of corrupt politicians for allowing such poverty to persist. “Brazil’s political elite has failed,” he proclaimed, in language similar to that now being used by Bolsonaro.

Twenty-five years on the hunger has receded but Lula is behind bars, and the finagling goes on.

In June the former mayor of Canapi, one town Lula visited, was sentenced to 28 years in jail for siphoning off millions in public funds. Further west, in Delmiro Gouveia, the mayor was forced from office in 2013 for misuse of public funds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Cloves is fighting corruption for Psol. Photograph: Alan Lima/The Observer

“Politics should be an art, not a business,” complained Tony Cloves, a candidate for the Socialism and Liberty party (Psol) in Delmiro who has spoken out against the thievery.

That this region, like Brazil as a whole, suffers a chronic corruption problem is obvious from a billboard at the town’s entrance that reads: “It’s not politics that turns a candidate into a crook. It’s your vote that turns a crook into a candidate.”

Cloves, known locally as the Obama do Sertão or Backlands Barack, lamented how many saw politics as a way to get rich: “We feel this everywhere from Delmiro’s town council to the national congress. It’s a corrupted system.”

Cloves said powerful caciques (chiefs) continued to dominate the region’s politics; a vote could be bought for 100 reais (about £19) making it almost impossible for upstanding politicians to gain power.

Meanwhile, politically driven contract killings remained common, with two councillors gunned down in recent months.

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With Brazil reeling from one of the greatest corruption scandals in world history, presidential hopefuls have vowed to purify their country’s politics.

But such pledges have been heard before. “There’s so much pilfering,” said Marinita de Menezes, a 64-year-old housewife. “The whole lot of them should be in jail after everything they’ve stolen.”

Feira de Santana

Two hundred miles south down Highway 110, it is the killing voters are worried about.

Feira de Santana, Bahia state’s second largest city, has seen its homicide rate increase sharply, and is now one of the deadliest cities in a country where a record 63,880 lives were lost last year.

A duel between drug factions means scarcely a day passes without murder.

Crime reporter Gleidson Santos, whose blog chronicles the bloodletting, said many were turning to Bolsonaro for hardline solutions to the violence.

But Santos, a PT-voting journalist – who races to crime scenes on a motorbike adorned with a sticker of Lula and Haddad – said Bolsonaro’s iron fist would do nothing but accelerate the slaughter of young black men. “He’s not the way forwards. I’m certain of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Security forces in Feira de Santana. Photograph: Alan Lima/The Observer

Zé Neto, a local PT politician, agreed bullets were not the solution. “[We need] more education, more social projects.”

But on Feira’s dirt-poor outskirts, there is little sign of that help arriving. “We’re totally forgotten,” complained Gisélia Miranda, the leader of one rundown favela. “The politicians only remember us when elections come around.”

Two days earlier a boy had been shot dead metres from where Miranda stood – Feira’s 296th murder victim this year. A T-shirt hanging from a nearby washing line carried the name of a man many see as a potential saviour: “Bolsonaro Presidente!”

Teófilo Otoni

Catholic social worker Maria Graciela Bartesaghi Silveira was part of the Movement for Marginalized Women when she started working with sex workers in Teófilo Otoni’s brothels in 1981. She has given her life to defending some of Brazil’s most vulnerable women and children.

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To this day she remembers the day Lula and his caravan dropped in on O Ninho, the social project she founded here beside Highway 116 to protect the offspring of the sex workers she was supporting.

“The kids loved it,” Silveira recalled. “Lula truly is a very special person … It was a joy to have him here.”

Fast-forward 25 years and that delight has been replaced with dread at what the election of Bolsonaro – who has called female rivals idiots, tramps and unworthy even of rape – might mean for Brazil and its 108 million women.

Women represent 52.3% of Brazil’s electorate and could decide October’s vote. Yet many have lamented the dearth of proposals about women’s issues in this year’s race, not to mention their participation in it.

Of the 13 candidates, only two are women. Four of the 13 election manifestos fail even to mention the word “woman”; Bolsonaro’s 81-page document mentions it just once.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lula meets the people on his visit in 1993. Photograph: Collart Hervé/Sygma via Getty Images

Silveira, 73, said the lack of propositions reflected a broader lack of progress: “Women still come second. We see it on TV all the time: women being beaten, women being killed, women being raped. I think the situation has changed very little.

“I just don’t understand how a woman could want to vote for Bolsonaro.”

Eight-five miles further on, in the city of Governador Valadares, Cleuzenir Barbosa said she couldn’t understand why a woman wouldn’t. Millions have joined the #EleNão (#Not Him) campaign to scupper Bolsonaro’s bid for power but Barbosa – a black female candidate for his Social Liberal party (PSL) – denied her leader was chauvinist.

“He’s a marvellous person,” Barbosa, a 46-year-old evangelical Christian, gushed. “These feminists who preach the destruction of the family and abortion … they twist Bolsonaro’s words.”

A photo attached to the bumper of her car shows the rightwing populist flashing a Churchillian V-sign. “Brazil has spent nearly 20 years under leftist, almost communist regime,” she said. “We can’t take any more.”

Duque de Caxias, a suburb of Rio

Haddad’s key campaign pledge has been to bring back “the good times” of Lula’s boom years. Few places need that more than Parque Vila Nova.

A shabby, sewage-streaked shanty better known as the Favela do Lixão or the Rubbish Dump favela, the community is just 18 miles north of Ipanema beach but feels like another world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Vila Parque Nova, a favela on the outskirts of Rio, that Lula visited in 1993. Photograph: Alan Lima/The Observer

Alessia Almeida, the residents’ association president, said most of the settlement’s 11,600 inhabitants scraped by with the help of bolsa família. “Without it, I don’t know what would become of them,” she said.

Paulo César Gomes, a longtime PT member and resident, was among those who helped organize Lula’s 1993 visit, hoping to showcase the forsaken community. Twenty-five years on, “we are still invisible,” complained Gomes, whose redbrick shack overlooks a black swamp of sewage.

With Brazil struggling to emerge from the worst recession in its modern history, 13 million people out of work, and extreme poverty again on the rise, Haddad’s commitment to “make Brazil happy again” has struck a chord in places like this.

“When Lula was in power there were jobs for everyone – then the crisis came along and screwed everything,” said Eliane Oliveira, a 23-year-old mother-of-two.

Nearby, three more young, unemployed mothers – Angela, Yasmin and Raiane – sat with their babies and said they too would back Haddad.

“In Lula’s day, all you had to do to find a job was walk down the street. Now you walk and you walk and you walk and you find nothing,” said Raiane, jobless since 2011.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Allesia Almeida will be voting for Haddad. Photograph: Alan Lima/The Observer

Yasmin, 17, agreed: “Lula stole but he helped like hell.”

Almeida, the community leader, said she also was dreaming of a Haddad victory – and as a transgender woman she has more reason to than most. “I’m scared of what might happen if Bolsonaro gets elected,” she said, adding: “Did you know Brazil is the country that most kills LGBT? Just imagine what will happen if this man becomes president.”

São Paulo

After 20 days on the road – and at least one case of goat-meat induced food poisoning – Lula reached his final destination, São Paulo state, where he had launched an improbable political career that led to the presidency, then to prison – and which may yet hold some more surprises.

Twenty-five years later, eight pretenders to Lula’s former throne gathered in a hilltop TV studio on the outskirts of São Paulo’s capital for one of the final presidential debates.

For an hour and a half the candidates sparred over everything from tax policy, job creation and healthcare to Brazil’s “genocidal” war on drugs and the need for more women in politics.

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Two absent figures, however, towered over proceedings: Lula, forced from the race by his controversial incarceration, and Bolsonaro, confined to a hospital 15 miles south after he was stabbed at a campaign event on 6 September.

One by one, the candidates swore to save Brazil from the toxic fissure that has opened up between those who love Lula or loathe Bolsonaro, and those who love Bolsonaro or simply loathe Lula.

Ciro Gomes promised to end “this hateful confrontation that is driving our country towards violence”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bolsonaro leads in the polls. Photograph: Reuters

Geraldo Alckmin claimed he could rescue Brazil from both the PT’s economic incompetence and “the candidate of discrimination”.

Marina Silva, a former Lula ally and environment minister, claimed “a courageous woman” was now needed “to put the house in order”.

Once the cameras were turned off, Silva lingered on stage and reflected on the state of her bitterly divided nation.

“We must be very careful we aren’t left choosing between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “The rock of the PT government’s corruption and the hard place of authoritarianism and disrespect for democracy and women that Bolsonaro represents.”

As her rivals streamed out of the auditorium, Silva insisted: “We can choose a country that is politically democratic, socially just, culturally diverse, environmentally sustainable and economically prosperous.”

Similar ideals inspired Lula’s exhausting pilgrimage across Brazil 25 years ago. But with Brazilian voters enraged and disillusioned and desperate for change, they seem unlikely to be the values that will decide this, the most rancorous of races for power.