Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Portuguese pronunciation: [luˈiz iˈnasiu ˈlulɐ da ˈsiwvɐ] audio (help·info); born 6 October 1945, but registered with a date of birth of 27 October 1945), known popularly as Lula^[2] is the thirty-fifth and current President of Brazil.

A founding member of the Workers' Party (PT – Partido dos Trabalhadores), he ran for President three times unsuccessfully, first in the 1989 election. Lula achieved victory in 2002, and was inaugurated as President on 1 January 2003. In the 2006 election he was re-elected for a second term as President ending on 1 January 2011.^[3]

His administration is among the most controversial and popular in the history of Brazil. Social programs like Bolsa Família and Fome Zero are hallmarks of his time in office. Lula has played a prominent role in recent international relations developments, including the Nuclear program of Iran and global warming, and has been described as "a man with audacious ambitions to alter the balance of power among nations".^[4] He is featured in Time's The 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2010.^[5]

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born on 27 October 1945 in Caetés (then a district of Garanhuns), located 155 miles (250 km) from Recife , capital of Pernambuco, a Brazilian state. He was the seventh of eight children of Aristides Inácio da Silva and Eurídice Ferreira de Melo. Two weeks after Lula's birth, his father moved to Santos with Valdomira Ferreira de Góis, a cousin of Eurídice.

In December, 1952, when Lula was only seven years old, his mother decided to migrate to São Paulo with her children to rejoin her husband. After a journey of thirteen days in a pau-de-arara (the open cargo area of a truck), they arrived in Guarujá and discovered that Aristides had formed a second family with Valdomira. Aristides' two families lived in the same house for some time, but they didn't get along very well, and four years later, Eurídice moved with her children to a small room in the back area of a bar in the city of São Paulo. After that, Lula rarely saw his father, who became an alcoholic and died in 1978.

Lula was married twice. In 1969 he married Maria de Lourdes, who died of hepatitis in 1971, when she was pregnant with their first son, who also died.^[6] Lula and Miriam Cordeiro had a daughter, Lurian, out of wedlock in 1974.^[7][8] In 1974 Lula married Marisa, his current wife and at the time a widow, with whom he had three sons (he has also adopted Marisa's son from her first marriage).

Education and work

Lula had little formal education. He did not learn to read until he was ten years old,^[9] and quit school after the fourth grade in order to work to help his family. His working life began at age 12 as a shoeshiner and street vendor.^[10] By age 14 he got his first formal job in a copper processing factory as a lathe operator.

At age 19, he lost the little finger on his left hand in an accident while working as a press operator in an automobile parts factory.^[9] After losing his finger he had to run to several hospitals before he received medical attention. This experience increased his interest in participating within the Workers' Union. Around that time, he became involved in union activities and held several important union posts.^[10] Due to perceived incompatibility with the Brazilian military government and trade union activities, Lula's views moved further to the political left.

Union career

Inspired by his brother Frei Chico, Lula joined the labour movement when he worked at Indústrias Villares. He rose steadily in the ranks, and was elected in 1975, and reelected in 1978, president of the Steel Workers' Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema. Both cities are located in the ABCD Region, home to most of Brazil's automobile manufacturing facilities (such as Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and others) and are among the most industrialized in the country. In the late 1970s, when Brazil was under military rule, Lula helped organize union activities, including major strikes. Labour courts found the strikes to be illegal, and Lula was jailed for a month. Due to this, and like other people imprisoned for political activities under the military government, Lula was awarded a lifetime pension after the regime fell.

Political career

On 10 February 1980, a group of academics, intellectuals, and union leaders, including Lula, founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers' Party, a left-wing party with progressive ideas created in the midst of Brazil's military government.

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! (Direct [Elections] Now!) campaign, demanding a direct popular vote for the next Brazilian presidential election. According to the 1967 constitution, Presidents were at that time elected by both Houses of Congress in joint session, with representatives of all State Legislatures; this was widely recognised as a mere sham as, since the March 1964 coup d'état, each "elected" President had been a retired general chosen in a closed military caucus. 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.

Lula first ran for office in 1982, for the state government of São Paulo and lost. In the 1986 elections Lula won a seat in Congress with the most votes nationwide.^[11] The Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) helped write the country's post-military government Constitution, ensuring strong constitutional guarantees for workers' rights, but failed to achieve a proposed push for agrarian reform in the Constitutional text. Under Lula's leadership, the PT took a stance against the Constitution in the 1988 Constituent Assembly, grudgingly agreeing to sign the convened draft at a later stage.

In 1989, still as a Congressman, Lula ran as the PT candidate in the first democratic elections for President since 1960. Lula and Leonel Brizola, two popular left-wing candidates, were expected to vie for first place. Lula was viewed as the most left-leaning of the two, advocating immediate land reform and a default on the external debt. However, a minor candidate, the governor of Alagoas, Fernando Collor de Mello, quickly amassed support among the nation's élite with a more business-friendly agenda. Collor became popular taking emphatic anti-corruption positions; he eventually beat Lula in the second round of the 1989 elections. In 1992, Collor resigned, under threat of impeachment for his alleged embezzlement of public money.

Lula refused to run for re-election as a Congressman in 1990, busying himself with expanding the Workers' Party organizations around the country. He ran again for President in 1994 and 1998, losing in both occasions to Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). As the political scene in the 1990s came under the sway of the Brazilian real monetary stabilization plan, which ended decades of rampant inflation, former Minister of Finance Cardoso defeated Lula in 1994 and again, by an even wider margin, in 1998.

In the 2002 campaign, Lula foreswore both his informal clothing style and his platform plank of linking the payment of Brazil's foreign debt to a prior thorough audit. This last point had worried economists, businessmen and banks, who feared that even a partial Brazilian default along with the existing Argentine default would have a massive ripple effect through the world economy. Embracing political consultant Duda Mendonça's advice to pursue a more media-friendly image, Lula became President after winning the second round of the 2002 election, held on 27 October, defeating the PSDB candidate José Serra.

Since the beginning of his political career to the present, Lula has changed some of his original ideas and moderated his positions. Instead of the drastic social changes he proposed in the past, his government chose a reformist line, passing new retirement, tax, labour and judicial legislation, and discussing university reform. Very few actual reforms have been implemented so far. Some wings of the Worker's Party have disagreed with this moderation in focus and have left the party to form dissident wings such as the Workers' Cause Party, the United Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialism and Freedom Party. Alliances with conservative, right wing politicians, like former Presidents José Sarney and Fernando Collor, have been a cause of disappointment for some.^[12] On 1 October 2006, Lula narrowly missed winning another term in the first round of elections. He faced a run-off on 29 October which he won by a substantial margin.^[13] In an interview published 26 August 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".

Lula put social programs at the top of his agenda during the campaign and since being elected. Lula's leading program since very early on has been a campaign to eradicate hunger, following the lead of projects already put into practice by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, but expanded within the new Fome Zero.^[15] This program brings together a series of programs with the goal to end hunger in Brazil: the creation of water cisterns in Brazil's semi-arid region of Sertão, plus actions to counter juvenile pregnancy, to strengthen family agriculture, to distribute a minimum amount of cash to the poor, and many other measures.

Brazil's largest assistance program, however, is Bolsa Família, which is an expansion based upon the previous Bolsa Escola ("School Allowance"), which was conditional on school attendance, first introduced in the city of Campinas by then-mayor José Roberto Magalhães Teixeira. Not long thereafter, other municipalities and states adopted similar programs. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso later federalized the program in 2001. In 2003, Lula formed Bolsa Família by combining Bolsa Escola with additional allowances for food and kitchen gas. This was preceded by the creation of a new ministry - the Ministry of Social Development and Eradication of Hunger. This merge reduced administrative costs and bureaucratic complexity for both the families involved and the administration of the program.

Fome Zero has a government budget and accepts donations from the private sector and international organizations The Bolsa Família program has been praised internationally for its achievements, despite internal criticism accusing it of having turned into a electoral weapon.

Along with projects such as Fome Zero and Bolsa Família, the Lula administration flagship program is the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC). The PAC has a total budget of $646 billion reais (US $353 billion) by 2010, and is the Lula administration's main investment program. It is intended to strengthen Brazil's infrastructure, and consequently to stimulate the private sector and create more jobs. The social and urban infrastructure sector was scheduled to receive $84.2 billion reais (US $46 billion).

As Lula gained strength in the run-up to the 2002 elections, the fear of drastic measures (and comparisons with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) increased internal market speculation. This led to some market hysteria, contributing to a currency maxi-devaluation on the real, and a rise in Brazil's risk factor by more than 2000 base points.^[16]

In the beginning of his first term, Lula's chosen Minister of Finance was Antonio Palocci, a physician and former Trotskyist activist who had recanted his far left views while serving as the mayor of the sugarcane processing industry center of Ribeirão Preto, in the state of São Paulo. Lula also chose Henrique Meirelles of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, a prominent market-oriented economist, as head of the Brazilian Central Bank. As a former CEO of the BankBoston he was well-known to the market.^[17] Meirelles was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2002 as a member of the opposing PSDB, but resigned as deputy to become Governor of the Central Bank.^[17]

Silva and his cabinet followed in part with the ideals of the previous government,^[18] by renewing all agreements with the International Monetary Fund, which were signed by the time Argentina defaulted on its own deals in 2001. His government achieved a satisfactory primary budget surplus in the first two years, as required by the IMF agreement, exceeding the target for the third year. In late 2005, the government paid off its debt to the IMF in full, two years ahead of schedule.^[19] Three years after the election, Lula had slowly but firmly gained the market's confidence, and sovereign risk indexes fell to around 250 points. The government's choice of inflation targeting kept the economy stable, and was complimented during the 2005 World Economic Forum in Davos.^{[citation needed]}

The Brazilian economy was generally not affected by the Mensalão scandal.^[20] In early 2006, however, Palocci had to resign as finance minister due to his involvement in an abuse of power scandal. Lula then appointed Guido Mantega, a member of the PT and an economist by profession, as finance minister. Mantega, a former Marxist who had written a Ph.D. thesis (in Sociology) on the history of economic ideas in Brazil from a left-wing viewpoint, is presently known for his criticism of high interest rates, something he claims satisfy banking interests.^{[citation needed]} So far, however, Brazil's interest rates remain among the highest in the world. Mantega has been supportive of a higher employment by the state.

Not long after the start of his second term, Lula, alongside his cabinet, announced the new Growth Acceleration Program (the Programa de Aceleração de Crescimento, or PAC, in Portuguese), an investment program to solve many of the problems that prevent the Brazilian economy from expanding more rapidly. The measures include investment in the creation and repair of roads and railways, simplification and reduction of taxation, and modernization on the country's energy production to avoid further shortages. The money promised to be spent in this Program is considered to be around R$500 billion (more than 250 billion dollars) over four years. Part of the measures still depend on approval by Congress. Prior to taking office, Lula had been a critic of privatization policies. In his government, however, his administration has created public-private partnership concessions for seven federal roadways.^[21]

After decades as the largest foreign debtor among emerging economies, Brazil became a net creditor for the first time in January 2008.^[22] By mid-2008, both Fitch ratings and S&P had elevated the classification of Brazilian debt from speculative to investment grade. Banks have had record profit in Lula's government.^[23]

According to The Economist of 2 March 2006, Lula has a pragmatic foreign policy, seeing himself as a negotiator, not an ideologue. As a result, he has befriended both Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and former U.S. President George W. Bush.^{[citation needed]} Leading a large and competitive agricultural state, Lula generally opposes and criticizes farm subsidies, and this position has been seen as one of the reasons for the walkout of developing nations and subsequent collapse of the Cancún World Trade Organization talks in 2003 over G8 agricultural subsidies.^[24] Brazil is becoming influential in dialogue between South America and developed countries, especially the United States. It played an important role in negotiations in internal conflicts of Venezuela and Colombia, and concentrated efforts on strengthening Mercosur.^[25] During the Lula administration, Brazilian foreign trade has increased dramatically, changing from deficits to several surpluses since 2003. In 2004 the surplus reached $29 billion due to a substantial increase in global demand for commodities. Brazil has also provided UN peace-keeping troops and leads a peace-keeping mission in Haiti.^{[citation needed]}

Lula also gained increasing stature in the Southern hemisphere buoyed by economic growth in his country. In 2008, he was said to have become a "point man for healing regional crises," as in the escalation of tensions between Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. Former Finance Minister, and current advisor, Delfim Netto, said: "Lula is the ultimate pragmatist."^[26]

He travelled to more than 80 countries during his presidency.^[27] A goal of Lula's foreign policy has been for the country to gain a seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. In this he has so far been unsuccessful.^[27] And Lula was considered to have pulled off a major coup with Turkey in regards to getting Iran to send its uranium abroad in contravention of western calls.^[27][28]

The condemnation of Iranian Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani for the crime of adultery, and who was originally to be executed by stoning led to calls for Lula da Silva's intervention on her behalf. On the issue, Lula commented that "I need to respect the laws of a [foreign] country. If my friendship with the president of Iran and the respect that I have for him is worth something, if this woman has become a nuisance, we will receive her in Brazil". The Iranian government, however, declined the offer.^[29][30] Lula da Silva's actions and comments sparked controversy. Mina Ahadi, an Iranian left-wing politician and the main figure of International Committee against executions and International Committee against stoning, welcomed Lula da Silva's offer of asylum for Ashtiani, but also reiterated a call for an end to stoning altogether and requesting a cessation of recognition and support for the Iranian government.^{[31][32][33][34]} Jackson Diehl, the right-leaning Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post, called Lula da Silva the "best friend of tyrants in the democratic world" and criticized his actions.^[29] Shirin Ebadi, Iranian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, viewed Lula da Silva's intervention in a more positive light, calling it a "powerful message to the Islamic Republic".^[35]

Awards and recognition

Lula and his wife, First Lady Marisa Letícia, pictured in the Palácio da Alvorada, the official residence of the Brazilian president.

Since Lula began his term as President, he has attained numerous medals, such as the Brazilian Order of Merit, the Brazilian Orders of Military, Naval and Aeronautical Merit, the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit, the Order of the Southern Cross, the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle ^[39] and the Norwegian Order of Royal Merit. He also received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 2003^[40] and was the chief guest at India's Republic Day celebration in 2004.^[41]

One example of the foreign recognition Lula's government has received was Barack Obama's greeting at the G20 summit in London (April, 2009): "That's my man right there... The most popular politician on earth." ^[42]

Lula was chosen as the 2009 Man of the Year by prominent European newspapers El País and Le Monde. The Financial Times ranks Lula among the 50 faces that shaped the 2000s.^[43] On 20 December 2008, he was named the 18th most important person in the world by Newsweek magazine, and was the only Latin American person featured in a list of 50 most influential World leaders.^[44] On July 7, 2009, he received UNESCO's Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France. On 5 November 2009, President Lula was awarded the Chatham House Prize, awarded to the statesperson who is deemed by Chatham House members to have made the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year.^[45] On 29 January 2010, President Lula was awarded as a Global Statesman by the World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland, but could not attend the ceremony due to problems of high blood pressure.^[46]

In 2010, Time Magazine pointed Lula one of the most influential leaders of the world.

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