Fw: NYTimes.com article about Lula

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

 Workingman President, Maybe
 October 8, 2002
 By LARRY ROHTER

 RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct. 7 - As a child, he labored as a
 farmhand at his mother's side; as a teenager, forced to
 drop out of school by poverty, he worked 12-hour shifts in
 factories. But now, at 56, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stands
 just a step away from becoming the first workingman to be
 elected president of Brazil.

 More than 38 million people voted for Mr. da Silva,
 candidate of the leftist Workers Party, in Sunday's
 balloting, twice as many as supported his closest rival,
 José Serra, of the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic
 Party. The two men will face each other in a runoff on Oct.
 27, but Mr. da Silva is now the odds-on favorite, and not
 only because that day happens to be his birthday.

 "Patience! On the 27th we'll finish the task of convincing
 voters who rejected the economic model," Mr. da Silva said
 at a news conference today, brushing off suggestions that
 he was disappointed that he had not won it all in the first
 round, as polls suggested might occur. "Our mood is even
 better than that of the national soccer team," he added,
 referring to the team that won the World Cup three months
 ago.

 Mr. da Silva seems to be a lightning rod for the discontent
 of Brazil's 175 million people. The economy has stalled,
 unemployment is up, the value of the currency is way down,
 and he argues that his background and outlook will help him
 succeed where all the expert managers, technocrats and
 administrators have failed.

 "Lula has been profoundly marked by the experience of
 having gone hungry, lived in destitution and been part of
 the socially excluded himself," said Carlos Alberto Libânio
 Christo, a Roman Catholic friar who is one of Mr. da
 Silva's oldest friends and his biographer. "He likes to say
 the revolution he wants is to guarantee each Brazilian one
 plate of food a day."

 Luiz Inácio da Silva was born near Garanhuns, a peasant
 town in Pernambuco State, on Oct. 27, 1945, the next to
 last of seven children. Both his parents were farmworkers,
 but a few months after his birth, his father migrated to
 São Paulo State and a job as a stevedore.

 Seven years later, Mr. da Silva, his mother and siblings
 also moved south, only to find that his father had formed
 another family. To help his mother make ends meet, Mr. da
 Silva worked as a shoeshine boy and street vendor, selling
 peanuts and candy.

 At 12, after completing fifth grade, he began to work full
 time, finally being hired at a screw-manufacturing plant,
 where he remained for four years. During his free hours, he
 studied at a technical school and was certified as a lathe
 operator.

 Transferring to a sheet-metal plant, he often worked
 overtime and lost part of the little finger of his left
 hand in a job accident. When he was laid off during a
 recession, he spent six months going door to door until he
 was again able to find work in another factory.

 Though he now wears tailored suits - in a concession to
 campaign managers - those hardscrabble beginnings remain
 the source both of Mr. da Silva's demands for a more just
 Brazil and his mass appeal. While still in his 20's, he
 also suffered the loss of his first wife in childbirth
 because the couple could not afford adequate medical care.

 "A guy like Serra could never understand what we ordinary
 people have to put up with in Brazil," said Aderaldo
 Nascimento da Silva, 25, a delivery man who voted for the
 Workers Party on Sunday, in the first time he has ever cast
 a ballot. "But Lula, he's lived through a lot of hard times
 himself and feels the same things we do."

 Mr. da Silva began his union career at 22, urged on by an
 older brother, who was a member of the Brazilian Communist
 Party. In 1975, the year the brother was arrested and
 tortured by the military dictatorship, Mr. da Silva was
 elected president of the metalworkers' union in a São Paulo
 suburb, São Bernardo do Campo.

 By 1980, after leading a series of combative (and mostly
 successful) strikes, he had become a national figure. But
 when his union organized another walkout that year, he was
 arrested, stripped of his post and convicted of violating
 the dictatorship's draconian National Security Law, a
 verdict that was overturned on appeal.

 From that point, he and a small group of labor leaders
 broadened their focus and began organizing the Workers
 Party as a political entity more flexible than left-wing
 parties found elsewhere in Latin America. He likens his
 party to a tree whose trunk is resolutely socialist but has
 branches that accommodate social democrats and Trotskyites,
 advocates of liberation theology and gays, intellectuals
 and environmentalists.

 "There is no left-wing party in the world today that has
 the characteristics of the Workers Party," he said
 recently, where "dogmas do not win out and people with the
 most diverse political leanings can participate."

 The party first competed in elections in 1982, with Mr. da
 Silva as its candidate for governor of São Paulo, running
 on the slogan, "Workers vote for Workers." He lost badly,
 but clung proudly to his origins: when asked if he was a
 Communist, he would routinely reply, "No, I'm a lathe
 operator."

 He has been his party's candidate in each of Brazil's four
 presidential elections since the end of military rule in
 1985. His share of the vote has risen with each election,
 but until this year most political experts argued that his
 party had an "electoral ceiling" of 35 to 40 percent that
 would prevent him from ever becoming president.

 In recent years, though, "both Lula and the Workers Party
 have changed, because Brazil and the world have changed,"
 said José Dirceu, president of the party and one of Mr. da
 Silva's closest political associates. Today, Mr. da Silva
 seems to regard himself as a mainstream democrat, closer in
 temperament and ideology to France's Socialist Party than
 to Fidel Castro, an earlier idol.

 "Every now and then someone will say to me that my
 discourse in 1980 is not like the speeches I make today,"
 he said earlier this year. "What a good thing that is!"