Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
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| Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva | |
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39th President of Brazil
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| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office January 1, 2003 |
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| Vice President(s) | José Alencar |
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| Preceded by | Fernando Henrique Cardoso |
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| Born | October 27, 1945 Caetés, Pernambuco |
| Political party | Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) - PT |
| Spouse | Marisa Letícia Rocco Casa |
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (pron. IPA: [lu'iz i'nasju 'lulɐ da 'siwvɐ]), born Luiz Inácio da Silva on October 27, 1945, popularly known as Lula, is the current President of Brazil. Lula was elected to the post in October 27, 2002 with 61% of the votes (run-off), and took office on January 1, 2003. He was elected in the same ticket as his vice-president, José Alencar. On October 29, 2006, Lula was re-elected with more than 60% of the votes, extending his position as President of Brazil until January 1, 2011.
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[edit] Name
- Silva. Lula's surname is Silva. da is merely a preposition, and the correct form to refer to him is President Silva; not President da Silva (as often seen in many English-language newspapers).Surname[›]
- Luiz Inácio da Silva. This was Lula's full birth name, which he used from 1945 to 1982.
- Lula. Lula was his nickname since childhood — in this case, a hypocoristic for Luiz with consonantal reduplication. Lula became the name by which Mr. Silva was known throughout his career as a metallurgical worker, and as he emerged in the national scene as a union leader, and for all his political life.
- Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula's full legal name since 1982. In 1982, in order to run for governorship of the state of São Paulo, Lula changed his legal name, adding the nickname Lula by which he was nationally known. Under Brazilian electoral laws, one could only use one's legal name to run for public office.
Brazilian newspapers refer to him either (more formally) using his full name Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or (informally or on second reference) only his moniker Lula.
[edit] Early life
Lula was born to a poor, illiterate peasant family in Caetés (then still a district of the municipality of Garanhuns) in the state of Pernambuco. His date of birth was registered as October 6, 1945, although he prefers to use the date which his mother remembers him being born on, being October 27. In Brazil it is not uncommon among rural provinces for there to be birth registration discrepancies.
Soon after Lula's birth, his father moved to the coastal city of Guarujá (in the state of São Paulo). Lula's mother and her 8 children joined his father in 1952, facing a journey of 13 days in a truck's open cargo area. Although their living conditions were better than in Pernambuco, life was still very difficult.
Lula had little formal education, quitting school after the 4th grade. His professional life began at age 12 as a shoeshine boy and street vendor. By age 14 he got his first formal job in a copper processing factory. Lula eventually studied for and received a high school equivalency diploma.
In 1956 his family relocated to the city of São Paulo, which offered greater opportunities. Lula, his mother and 7 siblings lived in a small room in the back area of a bar.
At age 19, he lost a finger in an accident while working as a press operator in an automobile parts factory. Around that time he became involved in union activities and held several important union posts. Brazil's dictatorship strongly curbed trade unions' activities, and as a reaction Lula's views moved further to the political left.
In 1969 he married Maria de Lourdes, who died together with their son while giving birth. In 1974 he re-married to Marisa, with whom he had three sons. He had a daughter out of wedlock this same year, with Miriam Cordeiro.
[edit] Union career
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In 1978 he was elected president of the Steel Workers' Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema, the cities home to virtually all of Brazil's automobile manufacturing facilities (such as Ford, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and others) and among the most industrialized in the country.
Prior to that, however, Lula had already filled various posts in the same union, and it was in that capacity that he traveled to the U.S., during the early 1970s in the middle of the Brazilian military dictatorship, to attend a course in trade unionism sponsored by AFL-CIO and ORIT the regional organization for the ICFTU [1]. In the late 1970s, Lula helped organize major union activities including huge strikes. He was jailed for a month, but was released following protests. The strikes ended with both pro-union and pro-government forces dissatisfied with the outcome[citation needed].
[edit] Political career
On 10 February 1980 a group of academics, union leaders and intellectuals, including Lula, founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers' Party, a left-wing party with progressive ideas created right in the middle of the military dictatorship.
In 1982 he added the nickname Lula to his legal name. In 1983 he helped found the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) union association.
In 1984 PT and Lula joined the popular Diretas Já campaign, demanding a direct popular vote for the next Brazilian presidential election. According to the Brazilian 1967 Constitution, Presidents were then elected by both Congress houses in joint-session, plus representatives of all State Legislatures, but this was widely recognized as a mere sham as, since the military coup, only high-level military personnel (all retired generals) chosen after a closed military caucus had been so "elected". As a direct result of the campaign and after years of popular struggle, the 1989 elections were the first to elect a president by direct popular vote in 29 years.
In 1992 Lula joined the campaign for the impeachment of president Fernando Collor de Mello after a series of scandals involving public funds.
[edit] Elections
Lula first ran for office in 1982, for the government of the state of São Paulo. He lost, but helped his party to gain enough votes to remain in existence.
In the 1986 elections, Lula won a seat in Congress with a medium percentage of the votes. The Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) helped write the country's post-dictatorship constitution, ensuring strong constitutional guarantees for workers' rights, but failing to achieve redistribution of rural agricultural land. Though participating on its development, Lula and his party refused to sign the new constitution when it was finished.
In 1989, still as a Congressman, Lula ran as the PT presidential candidate. Although he was popular with a wide spectrum of Brazilian society, he was feared as an opponent by business owners and financial interests, and was submitted to a thorough vilification by the media, as well as to election-rigging on a local level (sudden absence of busing facilities in places — mostly poor neighbourhoods — where Lula was expected to win, etc.) something which contributed significantly to his losing the election. The fact that his party was formed as a loose confederacy of trade unionists, grassroots activists, left Catholics, left-center social democrats and small Trotskyist groupings, although dampening overtly ideological issues, also earned him the distrust of better-off Brazilians precisely because of the ability of the PT to represent itself as the first working class mass movement organized on a grassroots basis. Conversely, Vargas' Brazilian Labor Party was mostly a top-heavy organization built around the top brass of the State-led trade-union bureaucracy.
Lula refused to run for re-election as a congressman in 1990, busying himself with expanding the Workers' Party organizations around the country. He continued to run for President in 1994 and 1998. As the political scene in the 1990s came to be under the sway of the real monetary stabilization plan, which ended decades of rampant inflation, Lula lost in 1994 (in the first round) to the official candidate, former Minister of Finance (and therefore responsible for the real) Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who ran for re-election (after a constitutional amendment ended the long-held rule that a president could not have a second term) in 1998, also having a first-round win.
In the following 2002 campaign, Lula forswore both his informal clothing style and his platform plank of conditioning the payment of Brazil's foreign debt to a prior thorough audit. This last point had worried economists, businessmen and banks, who feared that an even a partial Brazilian default along with the already ongoing Argentine default would have a massive ripple effect through the world economy.
Lula became President after winning the second round of the 2002 election, held on October 27, defeating the centrist candidate José Serra of the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Social Democracy Party, PSDB)
On October 1, 2006, Lula narrowly missed winning another term outright in the first round of elections. He faced a runoff on October 29 which he won by a substantial margin. [1]
[edit] Lula's government
[edit] Political orientation
From the beginning of his political career to the current days, Lula has changed some of his original ideals and moderated his positions. His party moved progressively from more radical views to a modern social democratic[citation needed] political position. Instead of deep social changes as proposed in the past, his government chose a reformist line, passing new retirement, tax, labor and judicial laws, and discussing a university reform. Some wings of the Worker's Party disagreed with these changes in focus and have left the party to form dissidences like the Workers' Cause Party, the United Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialism and Freedom Party.
[edit] Social projects
Lula da Silva put social programs at the top of his agenda during his campaign and since his election. Lula states that one of the main problems in Brazil today is hunger.[citation needed] In order to tackle this issue, the Lula government devised Fome Zero (Zero Hunger). This program unifies a series a programs with the goal to end hunger in Brazil; including programs to create cisterns in Brazil's semi-arid, to fight child-labor, to strengthen family agriculture, to distribute a minimum amount of money to the poor and many other things. The biggest program of Fome Zero is Bolsa Família, it gives financial aid to families with a very-low income (below R$60 per person, or R$120 for families with children up to 15). It requires that the families send their children to school and keep their mandatory personal vaccination-booklets duly updated. Fome Zero has a governmental budget and accepts donations from the public and international community.
According to FAO, Brazil has 15.6 million malnourished people.
[edit] Economy
As Lula gained strength in the run-up to the 2002 elections, the fear of drastic measures (and comparisons with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela) increased internal market speculation. This led to low demand for sovereign bonds, a rise in the inflation rate, speculative attacks on the Real, and a rise in sovereign risk factor of Brazil's bonds by more than 2000 base points.[Confusing — Please clarify][citation needed] After his election, the market anxiously awaited the nominations of his cabinet.
The single most important member of Brazil's economic cabinet is the Minister of Finance (Ministro da Fazenda, in Portuguese), who is largely responsible for all fiscal decisions. Brazil does not have an independent central bank, leaving to the finance minister to decide the degree of autonomy accorded to the bank. This created a finance minister who was responsible for not only fiscal policy, but could influence monetary policy as well.
The minister chosen by Lula was Antônio Palocci, a physician and former trotskyst activist who had recanted his far left views while serving as the mayor of the sugarcane processing industry center of Ribeirão Preto, in the State of São Paulo. Palocci had raised himself as one of the key figures in Lula's team of advisers for his election campaign. Although Palocci had Lula's personal backing, his absence of prior upbringing in Economics and his lack of relief as a national political figure didn't give him enough of the political clout necessary in order to win the confidence of the international finance markets in the soundness of his future policies.
Lula, therefore, also chose Henrique Meirelles, a prominent market-oriented economist, for President of the Brazilian Central Bank, the Brazilian monetary authority. Meirelles was eventually approved by the Brazilian Senate. Well known to the market, both at home and internationally, Meirelles had previously been a CEO at BankBoston. Meirelles had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2002 as a member of the PSDB (opposition to President Lula's party), but had to resign that position before becoming President of the Central Bank.
Lula and his cabinet followed in part the ideals of the previous government, by renewing all agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were signed by the time Argentina defaulted on its own deals in 2001. His government achieved a satisfactory primary budget surplus in the first 2 years, as required by the IMF agreement, exceeding the target for the third year. In late 2005, the government paid off its debt to the IMF in full, two years ahead of schedule. [2]
Lula invested in international commerce to jump-start the Brazilian economy. He has signed political and economic treaties with countries like Russia, China and South Africa.
Three years after the election, Palocci had slowly but firmly gained the market's confidence, and sovereign risk indexes fell to around 250 points. The government's choice of inflation targeting kept the economy stable, and was complimented during the World Economic Forum of Davos in 2005. However, since 2003 to that point Brazil had dropped 11 positions on the Forum's Growth Competitiveness Index ranking [3] [4], something which is often attributed to the high interest rates which stemmed from the inflation-targeting system.
The Brazilian economy was generally not affected by the Mensalão scandal. In early 2006, however, Palocci had to resign as finance minister due to his involvement in an abuse of power scandal which stemmed from the Mensalão Scandal. Lula's following (and current) finance minister was Guido Mantega, a member of Lula's party (PT) and an economist by profession. Mantega, a former marxist who had written a Ph. D thesis (in Sociology) on the history of economic ideas in Brazil from a Left viewpoint, is presently known for his criticisms of high interest rates- currently the biggest of the world, enforced by Pallocci's Orthodox, monetarist views on economy-, which satisfied business (specially banking interests) interests, while making the finance market apprehensive, and slowing down the growth of the Brazilian economy, which grew much below the less optimistic expectatives, being the country which grew the less in Latin America during the last four years apart from Haiti. For the current term, Lula has promised more heterodox actions on the economy, aiming for the growth that didn't happen in the previous term.
Not long after the start of his second term, Lula, along his cabinet, announced the "PAC" (short for Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento - Growth Acceleration Program). A vast series of measures created with the intention of solving many of the problems that prevent the Brazilian economy to grow at higher rates. The measures include investment in the creation and recuperation of roads and railways, simplification and reduction of taxations, and modernization on the country's energy production to avoid further shortages among others. The money to be spent in this Program is considered to be around R$ 500 billion (more than 200 billion dollars) in four years. Part of the measures still depend on approval by the congress, some of them have already generated negative reactions from organizations that consider them unfair and governors of some states that claim the share allocated to their regions to be insufficient.
[edit] Foreign policy
According to the periodical The Economist (2 March 2006), Lula has a pragmatic foreign policy, seeing himself as a negotiator, not an ideologue. As a result, he has befriended both Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and U.S. President George Bush. Leading a large and competitive agricultural nation, Lula generally opposes and criticizes farm subsidies, and this position has been seen as one of the reasons for the walkout of developing nations and subsequent collapse of the Cancun World Trade Organization talks in 2003 over G-8 agricultural subsidies. Brazil assumed an important role in international politics and is becoming a regional leader in a fertile dialogue between South America and developed countries, especially the U.S. It played an important role in negotiations in internal conflicts of Venezuela and Colombia, and concentrated efforts on strengthening MERCOSUL/MERCOSUR.
During the Lula administration, Brazilian foreign trade has increased dramatically, changing from deficits to several surpluses since 2003. In 2004 the surplus reached US$ 29 billion due to a substantial increase in global demand for commodities (especially from China). A record surplus is expected in 2005, despite the relatively high value of the real against the US dollar.
Lula's also supports the implementation of the Tobin tax on international financial transactions to aid developing nations. Brazil has also sent troops and leads a peace keeping mission in Haiti to show its resolve as a global player and to help its bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
[edit] Content Notes
[edit] References
- ^ Dicionario Historico e Biográfico Brasileiro
[edit] External links
[edit] Economy
- Guido Mantega, Ministro da Fazenda
- Henrique Meirelles, President of Banco Central do Brasil
- About the autonomy of the Banco Central do Brasil
- "Brazil’s Presidential Election: Background on Economic Issues" from the Center for Economic and Policy Research
[edit] Lula's election and foreign policy
- Lula's Workers' Party publicly calls for Puerto Rico's independence from United States
- "A President's White Hair", by Jorge Majfud
- Profile of President Lula
- Lula's foreign policy of Third World unity, The Nation
- Brazil's 'Lula' Celebrates Election as President, Voice of America News
- Financial markets hold for Lula, BBC News
- Peace, love and power, Radio Netherlands
- Brazil's Lost Leader from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
- IPS Inter Press Service Independent news reports and features about the elections in Latin America
[edit] Interviews
| Preceded by Fernando Henrique Cardoso |
President of Brazil 2003 – Present |
Succeeded by Incumbent |
| Persondata | |
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| NAME | Silva, Luiz da |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula da (full name); Da Silva, Luiz (common incorrect referent); Lula (nickname) |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | President of Brazil |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 27, 1945 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Caetés, Pernambuco, Brazil |
| DATE OF DEATH | living |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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