Lula da Silva

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born on October 27, 1945, in Caetés, a small rural settlement in the interior of Pernambuco state in northeastern Brazil ^[1]. He was the seventh of eight children of Aristides Inácio da Silva and Eurídice Ferreira de Melo, subsistence farmers in one of the country's poorest regions. His father left for the port city of Santos shortly before Lula's birth, seeking work as a dock laborer, and the boy did not meet him until years later ^[2].

In 1952 his mother packed the family onto the back of an open truck, a vehicle Brazilians called a pau de arara, and made the journey of nearly two weeks south to the state of São Paulo ^[1]. The family settled first in Guarujá and later in the city of São Paulo itself. Lula's formal schooling ended after only a few years. As a child he sold peanuts and shined shoes on the street to help feed the household, and at twelve he found work in a dry-cleaning business ^[2].

At fourteen he entered a metalworking factory, and through a government training program he qualified as a lathe operator, or turner, a skilled trade that gave him steadier wages than most of his family had ever known ^[1]. An industrial accident in his late teens cost him the little finger of his left hand, an injury he later described as common among metalworkers of his generation. He did not learn to read fluently until he was ten, a fact he often cited when discussing education policy ^[3].

Lula's political education began on the factory floor of the ABC industrial belt outside São Paulo, home to Brazil's automobile industry. His older brother, a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, persuaded him to join the Metalworkers' Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema in the late 1960s, during the military dictatorship that had seized power in 1964 ^[2]. Lula rose steadily through union ranks and in 1975 was elected president of the union, which represented roughly 100,000 workers ^[1].

Between 1978 and 1980 he led a series of mass strikes in the ABC region that challenged the wage controls of the military government. The stoppages, involving hundreds of thousands of metalworkers, were the largest labor actions Brazil had seen in decades and made Lula a national figure ^[4]. In 1980 the regime jailed him for a month under national security legislation, a detention that raised his profile rather than diminishing it ^[2].

That same year, Lula joined intellectuals, union colleagues, and Catholic activists to found the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, or PT), the first major Brazilian party built from the labor movement rather than from established elites ^[4]. As Brazil returned to civilian rule, he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1986 with one of the largest vote totals in the country, and he helped write the democratic constitution of 1988 ^[1]. He ran for president in 1989, 1994, and 1998, losing each time, first narrowly to Fernando Collor de Mello and then twice to Fernando Henrique Cardoso ^[3].

In October 2002, on his fourth attempt, Lula won the presidency with more than 52 million votes in the runoff, at that time the largest total ever recorded for a Brazilian candidate ^[1]. He took office on January 1, 2003, becoming the first former industrial worker to lead the country. Anyone asking who was Lula da Silva at that moment received a simple answer from his supporters: a man who had gone from shining shoes to the presidential palace in Brasília ^[3].

His government combined orthodox economic management, which reassured financial markets that had feared a leftist administration, with expansive social spending. The flagship program Bolsa Família, launched in 2003, consolidated earlier cash transfer schemes and paid poor families a monthly stipend conditioned on school attendance and vaccination of their children ^[5]. By the end of his second term the program reached more than 12 million households, and studies by the World Bank and Brazilian researchers linked it to steep declines in extreme poverty and child malnutrition ^[5].

Among the most cited Lula da Silva achievements are the growth of a new Brazilian lower middle class, a rise in the real minimum wage well above inflation, and the expansion of federal universities and technical schools ^[3]. Abroad, he raised Brazil's diplomatic profile, championing South-South cooperation, helping to launch the BRIC grouping with Russia, India, and China, and lobbying successfully for Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympic Games ^[4]. He was re-elected in 2006 and left office on January 1, 2011, with approval ratings above 80 percent in major polls, handing power to his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, the country's first female president ^[1].

The PT era was also marked by serious corruption scandals. In 2005 the mensalão affair, a scheme of monthly payments to congressional allies, led to the conviction of several senior party figures, though Lula himself was not charged ^[4]. A decade later the sprawling Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) investigation uncovered systematic bribery involving the state oil company Petrobras and Brazil's largest construction firms ^[6].

In July 2017 federal judge Sérgio Moro convicted Lula of corruption and money laundering in a case centered on a beachfront apartment allegedly reserved for him by a construction company. An appeals court upheld and lengthened the sentence, and in April 2018 Lula began serving twelve years in federal police custody in Curitiba ^[6]. The conviction barred him from the 2018 election, which he had been leading in polls, and Jair Bolsonaro won the presidency that October ^[4].

Lula spent 580 days in prison before the Supreme Federal Tribunal changed its jurisprudence on imprisonment pending appeals, freeing him in November 2019 ^[6]. In 2021 the Supreme Court annulled his convictions, ruling that the Curitiba court had lacked jurisdiction, and separately found that Moro, who had joined Bolsonaro's cabinet as justice minister, had acted with bias in the proceedings ^[7]. The rulings restored Lula's political rights. He has always maintained his innocence, and the annulments meant he left the affair with no standing conviction, though the episode remains contested in Brazilian public debate ^[7].

Lula announced his candidacy for the 2022 election at the head of a broad coalition that stretched from the left to former centrist rivals, choosing his one-time opponent Geraldo Alckmin as running mate ^[3]. The campaign against the incumbent Bolsonaro was the most polarized in modern Brazilian history. In the runoff on October 30, 2022, Lula won with 50.9 percent of the vote, the narrowest margin since Brazil's return to democracy ^[7].

He was inaugurated on January 1, 2023, becoming the first Brazilian president elected to a third term. One week later, on January 8, supporters of the defeated Bolsonaro stormed the presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court buildings in Brasília; the institutions were secured within hours and thousands of participants were arrested ^[7].

In office, his third government has prioritized rebuilding social programs, relaunching Bolsa Família at higher benefit levels, and reversing deforestation in the Amazon, where official monitoring recorded sharp declines in forest loss during 2023 ^[8]. Lula has also returned to an active foreign policy, hosting the 2024 G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro and preparing Belém to host the COP30 climate conference ^[8].

Lula has married three times. His first wife, Maria de Lourdes da Silva, died in 1971 during a pregnancy complicated by hepatitis, a loss he has described as the hardest of his life ^[2]. In 1974 he married Marisa Letícia Rocco, with whom he raised five children; she remained his closest companion through strikes, campaigns, and the presidency until her death from a stroke in February 2017 ^[1].

In May 2022, during his comeback campaign, Lula married the sociologist Rosângela da Silva, known as Janja, in São Paulo ^[3]. In 2011, months after leaving his second term, he was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment at a São Paulo hospital, recovering fully by 2012 ^[1]. A lifelong football fan, he supports Corinthians of São Paulo and speaks often of the game in public appearances.

Few figures divide and define Brazil the way Lula does. To supporters he is the leader who proved that redistribution and growth could advance together: during his first two terms, according to Brazilian government statistics and international assessments, tens of millions of people rose out of poverty while the economy expanded and unemployment fell ^[5]. Barack Obama, at a 2009 G20 meeting, famously called him the most popular politician on earth, a remark widely reported at the time ^[4].

Critics point to the corruption scandals that flourished during PT rule, to the fiscal crisis that followed under his successor, and to what they see as excessive personal dominance over Brazilian left politics for four decades ^[6]. The annulment of his convictions settled his legal status but not the argument over what the Lava Jato years revealed about Brazil's political system ^[7].

Basic Lula da Silva facts nevertheless secure his place in history: the migrant child who lost a finger in a factory press became a three-term president, built Latin America's most successful labor party, and gave Brazil's poor a claim on the national budget that later governments found impossible to withdraw ^[3]. Whatever the verdict on individual policies, his life remains the most complete story of social mobility in modern Brazilian politics ^[1].