Da: "Nello Margiotta" A: Oggetto: Fw: NYTimes.com article about Lula Data: mercoledì 9 ottobre 2002 20.15 Workingman President, Maybe October 8, 2002 By LARRY ROHTER RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct. 7 - As a child, he labored as a farmhand at his mother's side; as a teenager, forced to drop out of school by poverty, he worked 12-hour shifts in factories. But now, at 56, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stands just a step away from becoming the first workingman to be elected president of Brazil. More than 38 million people voted for Mr. da Silva, candidate of the leftist Workers Party, in Sunday's balloting, twice as many as supported his closest rival, José Serra, of the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party. The two men will face each other in a runoff on Oct. 27, but Mr. da Silva is now the odds-on favorite, and not only because that day happens to be his birthday. "Patience! On the 27th we'll finish the task of convincing voters who rejected the economic model," Mr. da Silva said at a news conference today, brushing off suggestions that he was disappointed that he had not won it all in the first round, as polls suggested might occur. "Our mood is even better than that of the national soccer team," he added, referring to the team that won the World Cup three months ago. Mr. da Silva seems to be a lightning rod for the discontent of Brazil's 175 million people. The economy has stalled, unemployment is up, the value of the currency is way down, and he argues that his background and outlook will help him succeed where all the expert managers, technocrats and administrators have failed. "Lula has been profoundly marked by the experience of having gone hungry, lived in destitution and been part of the socially excluded himself," said Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo, a Roman Catholic friar who is one of Mr. da Silva's oldest friends and his biographer. "He likes to say the revolution he wants is to guarantee each Brazilian one plate of food a day." Luiz Inácio da Silva was born near Garanhuns, a peasant town in Pernambuco State, on Oct. 27, 1945, the next to last of seven children. Both his parents were farmworkers, but a few months after his birth, his father migrated to São Paulo State and a job as a stevedore. Seven years later, Mr. da Silva, his mother and siblings also moved south, only to find that his father had formed another family. To help his mother make ends meet, Mr. da Silva worked as a shoeshine boy and street vendor, selling peanuts and candy. At 12, after completing fifth grade, he began to work full time, finally being hired at a screw-manufacturing plant, where he remained for four years. During his free hours, he studied at a technical school and was certified as a lathe operator. Transferring to a sheet-metal plant, he often worked overtime and lost part of the little finger of his left hand in a job accident. When he was laid off during a recession, he spent six months going door to door until he was again able to find work in another factory. Though he now wears tailored suits - in a concession to campaign managers - those hardscrabble beginnings remain the source both of Mr. da Silva's demands for a more just Brazil and his mass appeal. While still in his 20's, he also suffered the loss of his first wife in childbirth because the couple could not afford adequate medical care. "A guy like Serra could never understand what we ordinary people have to put up with in Brazil," said Aderaldo Nascimento da Silva, 25, a delivery man who voted for the Workers Party on Sunday, in the first time he has ever cast a ballot. "But Lula, he's lived through a lot of hard times himself and feels the same things we do." Mr. da Silva began his union career at 22, urged on by an older brother, who was a member of the Brazilian Communist Party. In 1975, the year the brother was arrested and tortured by the military dictatorship, Mr. da Silva was elected president of the metalworkers' union in a São Paulo suburb, São Bernardo do Campo. By 1980, after leading a series of combative (and mostly successful) strikes, he had become a national figure. But when his union organized another walkout that year, he was arrested, stripped of his post and convicted of violating the dictatorship's draconian National Security Law, a verdict that was overturned on appeal. From that point, he and a small group of labor leaders broadened their focus and began organizing the Workers Party as a political entity more flexible than left-wing parties found elsewhere in Latin America. He likens his party to a tree whose trunk is resolutely socialist but has branches that accommodate social democrats and Trotskyites, advocates of liberation theology and gays, intellectuals and environmentalists. "There is no left-wing party in the world today that has the characteristics of the Workers Party," he said recently, where "dogmas do not win out and people with the most diverse political leanings can participate." The party first competed in elections in 1982, with Mr. da Silva as its candidate for governor of São Paulo, running on the slogan, "Workers vote for Workers." He lost badly, but clung proudly to his origins: when asked if he was a Communist, he would routinely reply, "No, I'm a lathe operator." He has been his party's candidate in each of Brazil's four presidential elections since the end of military rule in 1985. His share of the vote has risen with each election, but until this year most political experts argued that his party had an "electoral ceiling" of 35 to 40 percent that would prevent him from ever becoming president. In recent years, though, "both Lula and the Workers Party have changed, because Brazil and the world have changed," said José Dirceu, president of the party and one of Mr. da Silva's closest political associates. Today, Mr. da Silva seems to regard himself as a mainstream democrat, closer in temperament and ideology to France's Socialist Party than to Fidel Castro, an earlier idol. "Every now and then someone will say to me that my discourse in 1980 is not like the speeches I make today," he said earlier this year. "What a good thing that is!"