LUIS INACIO LULA DA SILVA
Name: Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Born: 27 October 1945 Caetés, Pernambuco
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (born Luiz Inácio da SilvaSurname on October 27, 1945,
popularly known as LulaNickname, is the current President of Brazil,
and a founding member of the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores).
Lula was elected to the post in October 27, 2002
with 61% of the votes (run-off), and took office on January 1, 2003. He was
elected on the same ticket as his vice-president, José Alencar. On October 29,
2006, Lula was re-elected with more than 60% of the votes, extending his
position as President until January 1, 2011.
Lula was born to a very poor, illiterate peasant family in Caetés (then still a
district of the municipality of Garanhuns) in the state of Pernambuco. His date
of birth was registered as October 6, 1945, although he prefers to use the date
which his mother remembers him being born on, being October 27.
Soon after Lula's birth, his father moved to the coastal city of Guarujá (in the
state of São Paulo). Lula's mother and her eight children joined his father in
1952, facing a journey of 13 days in a pau-de-arara (name for a truck's open
cargo area). Although their living conditions were better than in Pernambuco,
life was still very difficult.
Lula had little formal education. He did not learn to read until he was ten
years old, and quit school after the 4th grade. His working life began at age
12 as a shoeshine boy and street vendor. By age 14 he got his first formal
job in a copper processing factory. Lula eventually studied for and received a
high school equivalency diploma.
In 1956 his family relocated to the city of São Paulo, which offered greater
opportunities. Lula, his mother and seven siblings lived in a small room in the
back area of a bar. At age 19, he lost a finger in an accident while working
as a press operator in an automobile parts factory. After losing his finger
he had to run to several hospitals to receive attention. This
experience increased his interest in participating within Workers' Union.
Around that time, he became involved in union activities and held several
important union posts. Brazil's dictatorship strongly curbed trade unions'
activities, and as a reaction Lula's views moved further to the political left.
In 1969 he married Maria de Lourdes, who died of hepatitis later that year.
In 1974, Lula married Marisa, with whom he had three sons. He had a daughter out
of wedlock this same year, with Miriam Cordeiro.
In 1978 he was elected president of the Steel Workers' Union of São Bernardo do
Campo and Diadema, the near-São Paulo cities home to most of Brazil's automobile
manufacturing facilities (such as Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and others)
and among the most industrialized in the country.
In the late 1970s, Lula helped organize major union activities including huge
strikes. He was jailed for a month, but was released following protests.
On February 10, 1980 a group of academics, union leaders and intellectuals,
including Lula, founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers' Party, a
left-wing party with progressive ideas created in the middle of the military
dictatorship.
In 1982 he added the nickname Lula to his legal name.Nickname In 1983 he
helped found the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) union association.
In 1984 PT and Lula joined the popular Diretas Já campaign, demanding a direct
popular vote for the next Brazilian presidential election. According to the
Brazilian 1967 Constitution, Presidents were then elected by both Congress
houses in joint-session, plus representatives of all State Legislatures, but
this was widely recognized as a mere sham as, since the March 1964 military coup,
only high-level military personnel (all retired generals) chosen after a closed
military caucus had been so "elected". As a direct result of the campaign and
after years of popular struggle, the 1989 elections were the first to elect a
president by direct popular vote in 29 years.
In 1992 Lula joined the campaign for the impeachment of president Fernando
Collor de Mello after a series of scandals involving public funds.
State visit to Mozambique, Nov. 2003. Lula aims to build Brazil's relationships
with other Portuguese-speaking countries.
Lula first ran for office in 1982, for the government of the state of São Paulo.
He lost, but helped his party to gain enough votes to remain in existence.
In the 1986 elections, Lula won a seat in Congress with a medium percentage of
the votes. The Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) helped write the country's post-dictatorship
constitution, ensuring strong constitutional guarantees for workers' rights, but
failing to achieve redistribution of rural agricultural land. Though
participating on its development, Lula and his party refused to sign the new
constitution when it was finished.
In 1989, still as a Congressman, Lula ran as the PT presidential candidate.
Although he was popular with a wide spectrum of Brazilian society, he was feared
as an opponent by business owners and financial interests, and was submitted to
a thorough vilification by the media, as well as to election-rigging on a local
level (sudden absence of busing facilities in places — mostly poor neighborhoods
— where Lula was expected to win, etc.) something which contributed
significantly to his loss in the election. The fact that his party was formed as
a loose confederacy of trade unionists, grassroots activists, left Catholics,
left-center social democrats and small Trotskyist groupings, although dampening
overtly ideological issues, also earned him the distrust of better-off
Brazilians precisely because of the ability of the PT to represent itself as the
first working class mass movement organized on a grassroots basis. Conversely,
Vargas' Brazilian Labor Party was mostly a top-heavy organization built around
the top brass of the State-led trade-union bureaucracy.
Lula refused to run for re-election as a congressman in 1990, busying himself
with expanding the Workers' Party organizations around the country. He continued
to run for President in 1994 and 1998. As the political scene in the 1990s came
to be under the sway of the real monetary stabilization plan, which ended
decades of rampant inflation, Lula lost in 1994 (in the first round) to the
official candidate, former Minister of Finance Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who
ran for re-election (after a constitutional amendment ended the long-held rule
that a president could not have a second term) in 1998, also having a first-round
win.
In the following 2002 campaign, Lula forswore both his informal clothing style
and his platform plank of conditioning the payment of Brazil's foreign debt to a
prior thorough audit. This last point had worried economists, businessmen and
banks, who feared that an even a partial Brazilian default along with the
already ongoing Argentine default would have a massive ripple effect through the
world economy.
Lula became President after winning the second round of the 2002 election, held
on October 27, defeating the candidate José Serra of the Partido da Social
Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB).
On October 1, 2006, Lula narrowly missed winning another term outright in the
first round of elections. He faced a runoff on October 29 which he won by a
substantial margin.
In an interview published on August 26, 2007, he said that he had no intention
to seek a constitutional change so that he could run for a third consecutive
term; he also said that he wanted "to reach the end of [his] term in a strong
position in order to influence the succession".
From the beginning of his political career to the current days, Lula has changed
some of his original ideals and moderated his positions. Instead of deep social
changes as proposed in the past, his government chose a reformist line, passing
new retirement, tax, labor and judicial laws, and discussing a university reform.
Some wings of the Worker's Party disagreed with these changes in focus and have
left the party to form dissidences like the Workers' Cause Party, the United
Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialism and Freedom Party.
Lula da Silva put social programs at the top of his agenda during his campaign
and since his election. Lula states that one of the main problems in Brazil
today is hunger. According to FAO, Brazil has 15.6 million malnourished people.
In order to tackle this issue, the Lula government devised Fome Zero (Zero
Hunger). This program unifies a series of programs with the goal to end hunger
in Brazil; including programs to create cisterns in Brazil's semi-arid region,
to fight child-labor, to strengthen family agriculture, to distribute a minimum
amount of money to the poor and many other things. The biggest program of Fome
Zero is Bolsa Família, it gives financial aid to families with a very-low income
(below R$60 per person, or R$120 for families with children up to 15). It
requires that the families send their children to school and keep their
mandatory personal vaccination-booklets duly updated. Fome Zero has a
governmental budget and accepts donations from the public and international
community. The Bolsa Família program is criticized for using the revenue from
the CPMF tax (which was originally created to finance the public health system
during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration) for political and electoral
purposes, in detriment of the public health system that currently faces
enormous difficulties.
Lula with Bono. The U2 singer donated a guitar to Fome Zero program.
Name: Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Born: 27 October 1945 Caetés, Pernambuco
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (born Luiz Inácio da SilvaSurname on October 27, 1945,
popularly known as LulaNickname, is the current President of Brazil,
and a founding member of the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores).
Lula was elected to the post in October 27, 2002
with 61% of the votes (run-off), and took office on January 1, 2003. He was
elected on the same ticket as his vice-president, José Alencar. On October 29,
2006, Lula was re-elected with more than 60% of the votes, extending his
position as President until January 1, 2011.
Lula was born to a very poor, illiterate peasant family in Caetés (then still a
district of the municipality of Garanhuns) in the state of Pernambuco. His date
of birth was registered as October 6, 1945, although he prefers to use the date
which his mother remembers him being born on, being October 27.
Soon after Lula's birth, his father moved to the coastal city of Guarujá (in the
state of São Paulo). Lula's mother and her eight children joined his father in
1952, facing a journey of 13 days in a pau-de-arara (name for a truck's open
cargo area). Although their living conditions were better than in Pernambuco,
life was still very difficult.
Lula had little formal education. He did not learn to read until he was ten
years old, and quit school after the 4th grade. His working life began at age
12 as a shoeshine boy and street vendor. By age 14 he got his first formal
job in a copper processing factory. Lula eventually studied for and received a
high school equivalency diploma.
In 1956 his family relocated to the city of São Paulo, which offered greater
opportunities. Lula, his mother and seven siblings lived in a small room in the
back area of a bar. At age 19, he lost a finger in an accident while working
as a press operator in an automobile parts factory. After losing his finger
he had to run to several hospitals to receive attention. This
experience increased his interest in participating within Workers' Union.
Around that time, he became involved in union activities and held several
important union posts. Brazil's dictatorship strongly curbed trade unions'
activities, and as a reaction Lula's views moved further to the political left.
In 1969 he married Maria de Lourdes, who died of hepatitis later that year.
In 1974, Lula married Marisa, with whom he had three sons. He had a daughter out
of wedlock this same year, with Miriam Cordeiro.
In 1978 he was elected president of the Steel Workers' Union of São Bernardo do
Campo and Diadema, the near-São Paulo cities home to most of Brazil's automobile
manufacturing facilities (such as Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and others)
and among the most industrialized in the country.
In the late 1970s, Lula helped organize major union activities including huge
strikes. He was jailed for a month, but was released following protests.
On February 10, 1980 a group of academics, union leaders and intellectuals,
including Lula, founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers' Party, a
left-wing party with progressive ideas created in the middle of the military
dictatorship.
In 1982 he added the nickname Lula to his legal name.Nickname In 1983 he
helped found the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) union association.
In 1984 PT and Lula joined the popular Diretas Já campaign, demanding a direct
popular vote for the next Brazilian presidential election. According to the
Brazilian 1967 Constitution, Presidents were then elected by both Congress
houses in joint-session, plus representatives of all State Legislatures, but
this was widely recognized as a mere sham as, since the March 1964 military coup,
only high-level military personnel (all retired generals) chosen after a closed
military caucus had been so "elected". As a direct result of the campaign and
after years of popular struggle, the 1989 elections were the first to elect a
president by direct popular vote in 29 years.
In 1992 Lula joined the campaign for the impeachment of president Fernando
Collor de Mello after a series of scandals involving public funds.
State visit to Mozambique, Nov. 2003. Lula aims to build Brazil's relationships
with other Portuguese-speaking countries.
Lula first ran for office in 1982, for the government of the state of São Paulo.
He lost, but helped his party to gain enough votes to remain in existence.
In the 1986 elections, Lula won a seat in Congress with a medium percentage of
the votes. The Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) helped write the country's post-dictatorship
constitution, ensuring strong constitutional guarantees for workers' rights, but
failing to achieve redistribution of rural agricultural land. Though
participating on its development, Lula and his party refused to sign the new
constitution when it was finished.
In 1989, still as a Congressman, Lula ran as the PT presidential candidate.
Although he was popular with a wide spectrum of Brazilian society, he was feared
as an opponent by business owners and financial interests, and was submitted to
a thorough vilification by the media, as well as to election-rigging on a local
level (sudden absence of busing facilities in places — mostly poor neighborhoods
— where Lula was expected to win, etc.) something which contributed
significantly to his loss in the election. The fact that his party was formed as
a loose confederacy of trade unionists, grassroots activists, left Catholics,
left-center social democrats and small Trotskyist groupings, although dampening
overtly ideological issues, also earned him the distrust of better-off
Brazilians precisely because of the ability of the PT to represent itself as the
first working class mass movement organized on a grassroots basis. Conversely,
Vargas' Brazilian Labor Party was mostly a top-heavy organization built around
the top brass of the State-led trade-union bureaucracy.
Lula refused to run for re-election as a congressman in 1990, busying himself
with expanding the Workers' Party organizations around the country. He continued
to run for President in 1994 and 1998. As the political scene in the 1990s came
to be under the sway of the real monetary stabilization plan, which ended
decades of rampant inflation, Lula lost in 1994 (in the first round) to the
official candidate, former Minister of Finance Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who
ran for re-election (after a constitutional amendment ended the long-held rule
that a president could not have a second term) in 1998, also having a first-round
win.
In the following 2002 campaign, Lula forswore both his informal clothing style
and his platform plank of conditioning the payment of Brazil's foreign debt to a
prior thorough audit. This last point had worried economists, businessmen and
banks, who feared that an even a partial Brazilian default along with the
already ongoing Argentine default would have a massive ripple effect through the
world economy.
Lula became President after winning the second round of the 2002 election, held
on October 27, defeating the candidate José Serra of the Partido da Social
Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB).
On October 1, 2006, Lula narrowly missed winning another term outright in the
first round of elections. He faced a runoff on October 29 which he won by a
substantial margin.
In an interview published on August 26, 2007, he said that he had no intention
to seek a constitutional change so that he could run for a third consecutive
term; he also said that he wanted "to reach the end of [his] term in a strong
position in order to influence the succession".
From the beginning of his political career to the current days, Lula has changed
some of his original ideals and moderated his positions. Instead of deep social
changes as proposed in the past, his government chose a reformist line, passing
new retirement, tax, labor and judicial laws, and discussing a university reform.
Some wings of the Worker's Party disagreed with these changes in focus and have
left the party to form dissidences like the Workers' Cause Party, the United
Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialism and Freedom Party.
Lula da Silva put social programs at the top of his agenda during his campaign
and since his election. Lula states that one of the main problems in Brazil
today is hunger. According to FAO, Brazil has 15.6 million malnourished people.
In order to tackle this issue, the Lula government devised Fome Zero (Zero
Hunger). This program unifies a series of programs with the goal to end hunger
in Brazil; including programs to create cisterns in Brazil's semi-arid region,
to fight child-labor, to strengthen family agriculture, to distribute a minimum
amount of money to the poor and many other things. The biggest program of Fome
Zero is Bolsa Família, it gives financial aid to families with a very-low income
(below R$60 per person, or R$120 for families with children up to 15). It
requires that the families send their children to school and keep their
mandatory personal vaccination-booklets duly updated. Fome Zero has a
governmental budget and accepts donations from the public and international
community. The Bolsa Família program is criticized for using the revenue from
the CPMF tax (which was originally created to finance the public health system
during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration) for political and electoral
purposes, in detriment of the public health system that currently faces
enormous difficulties.
Lula with Bono. The U2 singer donated a guitar to Fome Zero program.