Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been called Brazil's first workingman president. He was elected to the presidency in October 2002 as the candidate of the Workers Party. He helped to found the party, which first competed in elections in 1982. Lula was born in a peasant town in Pernambuco state in 1945. After his family moved to São Paulo state, he held full-time manufacturing jobs from an early age, but he also suffered through times of unemployment and poverty. As a union activist, his arrest during a labor walkout in 1980 helped to motivate his role in creating the Workers Party.

"Lula has been profoundly marked by the experience of having gone hungry, lived in destitution and been part of the socially excluded himself," Roman Catholic friar Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo, an old friend and biographer of Lula, told the New York Times in a 2002 article. Lula was a co-winner of the 2003 Notre Dame Prize for Distinguished Public Service in Latin America.

Photos