Lula Born: Factory Worker Who Became Brazil's President

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva rose from impoverished childhood and union leadership to the Brazilian presidency, where his Bolsa Familia program lifted tens of millions out of extreme poverty. Born in Garanhuns, Pernambuco, in 1945, the seventh of eight children, he migrated with his family to Sao Paulo at age seven. His father had left the family and moved south years earlier; when they arrived, they discovered he had started a second family. Lula shined shoes, sold tapioca, and worked in a laundry before becoming a metalworker at fourteen. He lost a finger in a factory press at nineteen. He rose through the metalworkers' union during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, organizing strikes in the late 1970s that challenged the regime's control of labor and helped accelerate the democratic transition. He co-founded the Workers' Party in 1980 and ran for president three times before winning in 2002. His first two terms, from 2003 to 2010, coincided with a commodity boom that funded massive social spending. Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program that paid poor families to keep their children in school and vaccinated, reached over forty million people and became the model for anti-poverty programs worldwide. Poverty fell from forty-nine million to twenty-nine million during his presidency. He left office with an approval rating of over eighty percent. Then came the corruption investigation. Operation Car Wash implicated politicians across the political spectrum, and Lula was convicted of money laundering and corruption in 2017, serving 580 days in prison before the conviction was annulled on procedural grounds. He won a third term as president in 2022, defeating Jair Bolsonaro by a narrow margin.