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Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

Also Known As Lula

Education

  • little formal education -

Overview

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a Brazilian politician who is the 39th and current president of Brazil. A member of the Workers' Party, he previously served as the 35th president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010.

he began his career as a metalworker and became a trade unionist. During the military dictatorship in Brazil, he led major workers' strikes between 1978 and 1980, and helped start the Workers' Party in 1980, during Brazil's political opening. Lula was one of the main leaders of the Diretas Já movement, which demanded democratic elections. In the 1986 Brazilian legislative election, he was elected as a federal deputy in the state of São Paulo, with the most votes nationwide. He ran his first major campaign in the 1989 Brazilian presidential election, losing in the second round to Fernando Collor de Mello. He went on to lose two other presidential elections in 1994 and 1998 to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, before becoming president in the 2002 Brazilian presidential election, in which he defeated José Serra in the runoff. In 2006, he was re-elected as president, defeating Geraldo Alckmin in the second round.

After his first presidency, Lula remained active in politics, and began giving lectures in Brazil and abroad. In 2016, he was appointed as Rousseff's Chief of Staff, but the appointment was suspended by the Supreme Federal Court. In July 2017, Lula was convicted on charges of money laundering and corruption in a controversial trial that was later nullified in April 2021 by the Supreme Court Justices, due to the court lacking proper jurisdiction over his case. Lula attempted to run in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election but was disqualified under Brazil's Ficha Limpa law. Before the annulment of his cases, he was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison, and after an unsuccessful appeal, Lula was arrested in April 2018 and spent 580 days in jail, until being released in November 2019, when the Supreme Federal Court ruled that his imprisonment was unlawful. In March 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal judge presiding over the case, Sergio Moro, who served as Minister of Justice and Public Security in the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, was biased, and all of the cases Moro had brought against Lula were annulled in June 2021. Following the court ruling, Lula was legally allowed to make another run for president in the 2022 elections, defeating Bolsonaro in the runoff. He became the first Brazilian president to have been elected to a third term, and the first to have defeated an incumbent president in an election. At age 77, he was sworn in on 1 January 2023, as the oldest Brazilian president at the time of inauguration. A week later, the Praça dos Três Poderes was attacked in an invasion led by pro-Bolsonaro rioters. Lula condemned the attack and promised to punish everyone involved.

Lula has been married three times. In 1969, he married Maria de Lourdes, who died of hepatitis in 1971 while pregnant with their first son, who also died. In 1974, Lula had a daughter, Lurian, with his then girlfriend, Miriam Cordeiro. The two were never married, and he only began participating in his daughter's life when she was already a young adult. In 1974, Lula married Marisa Letícia Rocco Casa, a widow, with whom he then had three sons. He also adopted Marisa's son from her first marriage. Lula and Marisa remained married for 43 years, until her death on 2 February 2017 after a stroke. Still in 2017, he met and started a relationship with Rosângela da Silva, known as Janja, but it only became public in 2019 while he was serving time in jail in Curitiba, Paraná, due to corruption charges that were later dropped. Lula and Janja married on 18 May 2022

Early Life

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born on 27 October 1945 (registered with a date of birth of 6 October 1945) in Caetés (then a district of Garanhuns), located 250 km (150 miles) from Recife, capital of Pernambuco, a state in the Northeast of Brazil. He was the seventh of eight children of Aristides Inácio da Silva and Eurídice Ferreira de Melo, a couple of farmers who experienced the famine in one of the poorest parts of the agreste. Two weeks after Lula's birth, his father moved to Santos, São Paulo, with Valdomira Ferreira de Góis, a cousin of Eurídice. He was raised Roman Catholic. Lula's mother was of Portuguese and partial Italian descent.

In December 1952, when Lula was seven years old, his mother moved the family to São Paulo to rejoin her husband. After a journey of 13 days in a pau-de-arara (open truck bed), they arrived in Guarujá and discovered that Aristides had formed a second family with Valdomira. Aristides's two families lived in the same house for some time, but they did not get along very well, and four years later, Eurídice moved with her children to a small room behind a bar in São Paulo. After that, Lula rarely saw his father, who died an alcoholic in 1978.

Lula has had little formal education. He did not learn to read until he was ten years old and quit school after the second grade to work and help his family. His first job at age 8 was still in Guarujá as a street vendor. When he was 12, he worked as shoeshiner and street vendor in São Paulo. In 1960, when he was 14, he got his first formal job in a warehouse.

In 1961, he started working as an apprentice of press operator while studying in a vocational course in a metallurgical industry that produced screws. In this period, Lula had his first contact with strike movements. After the movement failed in the negotiations, Lula left the company for another metallurgical industry. There, age 19, he lost his left pinkie finger in an accident, while working as a press operator in the factory. After the accident, he had to run to several hospitals before he received medical attention. This experience increased his interest in participating in the Workers' Union. Around that time, he became involved in union activities and held several important union posts.                                 

Career

  • President of Brazil - Brazilian politician , president

Recognition

In 2008 he was awarded the UNESCO Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize.

In 2012 he received the Four Freedoms Award.

Reference

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