The PT has consecrated Lula as candidate for president in Brazil: the seven lives of the former metal worker

Lula da Silva was the son of peasant misery, an expert metallurgist, trade union leader and the first worker president of Brazil. He was a minister for a few hours and a prisoner for 580 days. Now, at the age of 76 and officially consecrated by the PT, rises as a favorite for victory the elections against Jair Bolsonaro.

he considered himself as a “walking metamorphosis”Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was born in the poor northeast of Brazil on a day he himself does not know, months after his father, Arístides da Silva, an illiterate and violent farmer, fled the poor northeast with a cousin of his wife.

Years later, his mother, Dona Lindú, left with the offspring and, after traveling for thirteen days in the crate of a truck, she settled in Santos, a few meters from where her husband had raised a family.

Lula learned to survive on the street as a salesman and shoe shine, until, as a teenager, he trained as a mechanical lathe operator in San Paolo, thus becoming the first son of Dona Lindú to have a profession, a minimum wage and a home.

The origins

It was in the factories that Lula entered the trade union movement, reaching he chairs the most important trade union in the countryand stood out as a skilled and pragmatic strategist with a devastating verb.

Syndicalism was the springboard for his career towards the Presidency. In the 1980s he founded the Workers’ Party (PT), a force of Trotskyist origin which ended up becoming a center-left formation who allied himself with the conservatives and who four decades later continues to lead alone.

After several electoral defeats, Lula even thought of giving up politics, but was dissuaded by the then Cuban president Fidel Castro: “You have no right to do this to the working class,” he told him.

Lula followed the commander’s advice and in 2002, on his fourth consecutive attempt, he became the first worker president of Brazil.

When he came to power, the feared leftist showed his other face: that of “Lulinha peace and love”. He lowered the fist he proclaimed “revolution”, dressed in elegant clothes and, with the more moderate version of him, he managed to win the trust of the market and the banking system.

It has led a vibrant economy benefited from the commodity boom as well it lifted 28 million people out of povertya company for which it has been recognized internationally.

But his enormous popularity, which reached 87% in January 2011, when his second term ended, it was marked by corruption.

It managed to survive the “Mensalão” scandal politically, a network of bribes to parliamentarians that decapitated the leadership of the PT, but a decade later it suffered great usury due to another anti-corruption investigation, “Lava Jato”, a case for which he went to prison, even though his sentences were overturned years later.

the awakening

“If they wanted to kill the snake they had to hit it in the head, but they hit it in the tail and the snake is more alive than ever“, Lula said in 2016, in a media press conference after she was taken from her home by the police and taken to testify in a police station.

Lula added several corruption convictions and peered into the political abyss after he was barred from participating in the 2018 elections, which ended with Bolsonaro’s victory, which he will face for the first time at the polls.

During the judicial enclosure also the former union leader He lived through the most difficult moments of his life.

in 2017 he lost his second wife, Marisa Letizia Rocco, with whom he was married for 43 years and had three of his five children. Two years later, and already behind bars, he receives a new blow when he learns of the death of his brother, a victim of cancer, and that of his 7-year-old nephew due to a generalized infection.

But, like other times in her life, Lula resurfaced among its ashes.

While still in prison, he began a romantic relationship with 55-year-old sociologist and PT activist Rosangela Silva, known as “Janja”, whom he married last May in a civil and religious ceremony in Sao Paulo which was attended by a hundreds of guests.

He also regained his political rights, verified how justice quashed most of his trials, and continued to lead a progressive front that leads all polls on voting intentions less than three months before the election.

“I’m 76, but with energy of 30 and libido of 20,” Lula reiterates over and over.

EFE agency

PB