The President of Brazil

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born on 27 October 1945 in Caetés (then a district of Garanhuns), located 249 km from Recife, capital of Pernambuco. 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 sometime, 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 had little formal education. He did not learn to read until he was ten years old, 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. 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. 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. Brazil's dictatorship strongly curbed trade union activities, and during this time 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, 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).

In 1978 he was elected President of the Steel Workers' Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, cities in the Greater São Paulo, home to most of Brazil's automobile manufacturing facilities (such as Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota, 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. For many years he was President of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), a union federation that is strongly influenced by the PT.

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 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 ('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.

In 1992 Lula joined the campaign for the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello after a series of scandals involving public funds. As of 2006, however, Fernando Collor de Mello gained a seat in the Brazilian Senate, and Lula soon made an alliance with him, together with senators Renan Calheiros and José Sarney, in order to try to control the Senate and prevent it from investigating a series of scandals involving his administration, amongst which the misuse of public funds from Petrobrás, the scandal of the corporate credit cards of the federal government, among many others, as it was widely published and explained in the Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo newspapers.

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 a reasonable majority. The Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) helped write the country's post-dictatorship constitution, ensuring strong constitutional guarantees for workers' rights, but failed to achieve redistribution of rural agricultural land.

In 1989, still as a Congressman, Lula ran as the PT presidential candidate. The fact that his party was formed as a loose confederacy of trade unionists, grassroots activists, left-wing Catholics, left-center social democrats and small Trotskyist groupings, while dampening overtly ideological issues, also earned him the distrust of better-off Brazilians precisely because of the ability of the PT to present itself as the first working class mass movement organized at grassroots.

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. As the political scene in the 1990s came under the sway of the Brazilian 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, again winning in the first-round.

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. Lula became President after winning the second round of the 2002 election, held on 27 October, defeating the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira 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, labor 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.

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. 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 his campaign and since his election.The program has clearly contributed to Brazil's recent improvements in its fight against poverty, according research promoted by some universities and the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). An ex ante econometric evaluation of Bolsa Escola did find significant effects on both school attendance rates and the number of children involved in child labor.

The World Bank, which created on June 2005 a Bolsa Família Project to assist the Brazilian government in managing the Bolsa Família Program, declares that "Although the program is relatively young, some results are already apparent, including: contributions to improved education outcomes, and impacts on children’s growth, food consumption, and diet quality" .

A study by the UNDP Poverty Centre found that over 80% of the Bolsa Familia benefits go to families in poverty (making under half the minimum wage per capita), thus most of the benefits go to the poor. BF was also found to have been responsible for about 20% of the drop in inequality in Brazil since 2001, which is welcome in one of the most unequal countries on the planet. Research promoted by the World Bank shows a significant reduction in child labor exploration among children benefited by the Bolsa Família program.

One positive effect of the program which is not immediately apparent is that it makes a significant impact on the ability of the poorest families to eat. Children in public school receive one free meal a day -- two in the poorest areas -- and so less of their family's limited income is needed to pay for food. In a survey of Bolsa Familia recipients, 82.4% reported eating better; additionally, it was reported to increase the incomes of the poorer families by about 25% 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 administration, but expanded as Fome Zero (Zero Hunger). This program brings together a series of programs with the goal to end hunger in Brazil: the creation of watercisterns in Brazil's semi-arid region of Sertão, to counter juvenile pregnancy, to strengthen family agriculture, to distribute a minimum amount of cash to the poor, and many other measures.

The largest program is called Bolsa Família, which was based on the pioneer social program from Workers' Party (PT) called Bolsa Escola, a predecessor which was conditional only on school attendance, first introduced in Brasilia by then-governor Cristovam Buarque. Not long after, other municipalities and states adopted similar programs. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso later federalized the program. In 2003, Lula formed Bolsa Família by combining Bolsa Escola with Bolsa Alimentação and Cartão Alimentação (all part of Lula's Fome Zero anti-hunger program) and Auxílio Gas (a transfer to compensate for the end of federal gas subsidies). This also meant the creation of a new Ministry - the Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome (Ministry of Social Development). 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 public and international community. The Bolsa Família program has been praised internationally for its achievements, despite internal criticism accusing it of having turned into a governmental political weapon.

Along with projects such as Zero Hunger and Bolsa Família, the Lula's administration flagship program is the PAC, or Program of Acceleration of Development. The PAC program has a total budget to 646 billion reais (281 billion dollars) by 2010 and is the Lula administration's main social 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 (37 billion dollars).

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.

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. 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.

Silva and his cabinet followed in part with the ideals of the previous government, 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. By following the macroeconomic agenda of the previous government, 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.

The Brazilian economy was generally not affected by the Mensalão scandal. 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, which satisfy banking interests. Besides being unable to do so in practice, he been supportive of a higher employment by the state, what has been appointed by experts as being the main cause of the banks high interest, the state being the main captor of circulating money to keep its own expenses, i.e., non productive expenses, rolling. Banks have had record profit ever, in Lula's government, and this very fact has been denounced as incompatible with the self proclaimed social orientation in Lula's government economic policy.

Not long after the start of his second term, Lula, alongside his cabinet, announced the Growth Acceleration Program (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento), a vast series of measures created with the intention of solving 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, some have already generated negative reactions from organizations that consider them unfair, and governors of some states claim the share allocated to their regions is insufficient. Although a long-time critic of privatization policies, Lula and his government created public-private partnership concessions for seven federal roadways.

After decades as the largest emerging market debtor, Brazil became a net foreign creditor for the first time in January 2008. By mid-2008, both Fitch ratings and S&P had elevated the classification of Brazilian debt from speculative to investment grade.

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. 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. 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.

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.

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."

A major 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.

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 Science Merit, the Order of the Southern Cross, the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle and the Norwegian Order of Royal Merit. He also received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation in 2003 and was the chief guest at India's Republic Day celebration in 2004. On 20 December 2008, Lula was named the 18th most important person in the world by Newsweek magazine. He was the only south American person featured in a list of 50 most influential World leaders. On July 7th, 2009, he received UNESCO's Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France.