Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva lost his left pinky finger in a metalworking press in 1964. He was 19, working at an auto parts factory in Sao Bernardo do Campo, outside Sao Paulo. The company didn’t compensate him. The factory didn’t stop. He wrapped the hand and went back to work the next day.
The missing finger became a symbol, though he never used it as one. He didn’t need to. When he stood in front of 100,000 striking metalworkers in 1980 — nine fingers raised, voice raw from shouting — nobody needed a metaphor. They could see what the factory had taken from him. They could see what the factory had failed to take from him.
He was the seventh of eight children. His family migrated from Pernambuco in the northeast to Sao Paulo in the industrial south. They arrived with almost nothing. His father had left the family years earlier. His mother, Eurindice, raised the children alone, selling fruit on the street. Lula didn’t learn to read until he was 10. He started working at 12, as a shoeshine boy, then a street vendor, then a factory hand.
What He Did Next
He became president of the Metalworkers’ Union of Sao Bernardo do Campo in 1975 and organized the largest strikes in Brazilian history during the military dictatorship. The government arrested him. He spent 31 days in prison. He came out more popular than before.
He founded the Workers’ Party — the PT — in 1980. He ran for president in 1989. Lost. Ran in 1994. Lost. Ran in 1998. Lost. Ran in 2002. Won. Each loss refined his approach. The first campaign was pure labor militancy. The fourth was broad coalition politics. He didn’t abandon his principles. He learned to count votes.
He served two terms. Bolsa Familia — the conditional cash transfer program he expanded — lifted 20 million Brazilians out of poverty. Brazil’s economy grew from the 13th largest in the world to the 7th. He left office in 2010 with an 87% approval rating, the highest of any departing democratic leader in recorded history.
He’d tell you about the losses. Not the wins. The losses taught him patience, coalition, compromise. The wins confirmed what the losses had already taught. He’d describe running for president four times with the matter-of-factness of a man who regards persistence not as a virtue but as a strategy.
What He’d Tell You About Your Problems
He’d listen. He’s a listener. His political skill — the one that distinguishes him from other labor leaders who remained labor leaders — is the capacity to make a room full of people with conflicting interests feel individually heard. He’d listen to your problem. He’d nod. He’d ask one or two questions. And then he’d reframe the problem in a way that was both simpler and harder than you expected.
Simpler because he’d strip away the abstractions. He thinks in concrete terms: wages, food, housing, children’s shoes. He once told a reporter that the measure of a government is whether the poorest person in the country can afford to eat three meals a day. Not GDP. Not inflation. Meals. He’d apply the same concreteness to whatever you’re dealing with. What’s the meal-equivalent in your situation? What’s the floor below which everything else is commentary?
Harder because the solution he’d propose would require you to do the work. Not think about the work. Do it. He’s a man who organized 100,000 people under a military dictatorship. He doesn’t have sympathy for obstacles. He has respect for people who face obstacles and keep walking.
The Prison
In 2018, a Brazilian court convicted him of corruption and money laundering — charges his supporters called political persecution and his opponents called justice. He spent 580 days in federal prison in Curitiba. He was 73.
The conviction was later annulled by the Supreme Federal Tribunal on procedural grounds — the judge, Sergio Moro, was found to have acted with bias. Lula was released. He ran for president again. In 2022, he won. He was 77. Third term. Thirty years after his first campaign.
He’d tell you the prison wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was watching from a cell while the country he’d built went in a direction he couldn’t influence. The hardest part was powerlessness for a man whose entire life had been about seizing power from the bottom.
He came back. He won. He stood on the ramp of the Planalto Palace in Brasilia — nine fingers raised, voice hoarse, eyes wet — and gave the speech of a man who’d been told it was over four times and disagreed every time.
Seven siblings. Illiterate until 10. Missing a finger. Three election losses. 580 days in prison. Three presidential terms. The finger is the only thing he lost that stayed lost.
Talk to Lula — he’ll tell you to keep going. He has the receipts.