Lula, Poor Man's Burden
By BARRY BEARAK
ula, his speech over, waded into the embrace of the masses. It was the opposite of most crowd scenes. Here the president was pushing through the ropes to get at the people. He was tired and sweaty, his face infused with crimson. But the swarm of bodies, pressing his way, energized him. He seemed propelled by the heat of their need.
Most of the throng -- like most of Brazil -- was throttled by poverty. These thousands in the city of Sobral were dressed in threadbare clothes and mud-covered sandals. Some stood on tiptoes, hoisting small children who squirmed in their arms. Others held tightly to the bicycles they had ridden across the rain-drenched roads. ''Lula, Lula!'' they shouted, relentlessly pushing forward, those closest grasping for the president's sleeve. A small bear of a man, Lula is bearded and round-shouldered with a wide neck and a thick middle. He moved from one person to the next, hugging some and pausing to hear what they had to say, patting the palm of his hand against the side of their faces. ''O-lé, o-la, Lu-la, Lu-la!'' the crowd began to sing, as if roused to a chant at a soccer game. ''You are a saint!'' cried one barefoot old woman. Her eyes were desperate and bloodshot. She was clutching Lula and wouldn't let go. ''You will help us,'' she said, and as the president bent closer to hear, she bestowed the accolade of the people: ''You are one of us.''
What she, like the others, wanted was a little attention, a little empathy, a little money. Brazil is a rich nation full of poor people, its distribution of income nearly the most unequal in the world. The next night, in another city, a young girl mistook me and my translator for members of Lula's staff. She handed us a note, begging us to pass it on. Many words were misspelled; there was a name but no address. It said: ''Lula, I have six brothers and sisters and my mother doesn't work and we don't have a father to help us. Please, my mother cries because we don't have anything to eat. My name is Adriene.''
Lula, of all people, would understand, the little girl must have thought.
And this would have been right. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 58, is the genuine article, a walking fable, democracy's classic story, the poor boy who grew up to be president. He, too, had a mother who cried and no father to raise him. He, too, had nothing to eat. He, too, suffered all the indignities of privation. But from destitution Lula would become a metalworker and then a union leader and then the nation's most celebrated firebrand, the man who took tens of thousands out on strike in defiance of a military government, opening the body politic to some of the first cross-breezes of democracy. He then led the creation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers' Party, an amalgam of the Brazilian left, including trade unionists, radical intellectuals and progressive Catholics. He won Brazil's presidency on his fourth try, in October 2002, getting an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote.
''In a country where the elite have always held a stranglehold, it was never written anywhere that someone like me could become president,'' Lula told me as we sat aboard the Brazilian equivalent of Air Force One. There was a dining table between us. He stabbed at a piece of meat with his fork and nodded at a handful of eavesdropping cronies who savored his words. ''With me being president, the history of Brazil begins to change because someone from the humble people, the lowest classes, has risen to the top.''
Lula allowed me to join his entourage in mid-March during a three-day swing of meetings, speeches and ribbon-cuttings. Adoring crowds greeted him at every stop, but there were also notable gaps in the adulation. He had been in office for 15 months, and the expectation was that this very different president would somehow bring about a very different Brazil. But the masses, born poor, have remained poor, with no end in sight to their reiterating misery. ''Lula, give us jobs!'' were words one man had written on a placard. ''We are still hungry,'' read another. The federal police had gone on strike, and some police officers occasionally heckled as the president spoke, shouting out their union's demand for an 83 percent raise. Instead of instigating labor protests, Lula was now their target, recast as the villainous gatekeeper of the status quo. There are many numbers between 1 and 83, he reminded the unruly strikers.
On the airplane, his exasperation showed. He had also expected social change to move with more velocity. ''Creating jobs and distributing money to the poor is not easy,'' he said as if sharing the nugget of some great revelation. This pronouncement, however obvious to others, struck him as profound enough to merit repetition. He leaned forward. He raised his right index finger. ''If creating jobs and distributing money were easy, someone else would have done it, and I wouldn't have gotten to the presidency.''
or many Brazilians, Lula's election seemed like deliverance. Here was someone pitched forth from poverty's maelstrom, who had forfeited a finger to a factory accident and now spoke eloquently of class struggle. He was no populist held aloft by charisma and a cult following. Rather, he had spent two decades building a disciplined political movement that fielded candidates and won elections. The noted sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, one of the earliest members of the Workers' Party, likened Lula's victory to Brazil's greatest historic milestones, calling it as important as the abolition of slavery.
Other people, while agreeing on the event's momentousness, disagreed on the nature of its tidings. To them, Lula was a dangerous lout who spoke too breezily about the redistribution of income and land. His competence seemed as questionable as his politics. He had only a few years of formal schooling. His speech lacked syntax; he cut off the S's on his plurals like a peasant. Except for one term in the federal congress -- about which he professed boredom -- Lula had never held a government post. Traders in the international financial markets nervously followed his career. Many considered him anti-American and, worse, anticapitalist. What would such a man do when placed at the head of one of the world's 10 largest economies? Each time Lula's political star went into ascent, so did Brazil's ''risk factor'' on the bond market. Weeks before the election, the nation's bonds were trading at a pitiful 48 cents on the dollar.
But Lula has proved a curious surprise to most everyone, taking only small, measured steps toward domestic reform and staying well within the accepted covenants of global capitalism. For an idealist, perhaps the ideal is to be in the opposition. Lula, finally in power, now has to contend with the many forbidding obstacles in the sightline of a genuinely egalitarian vision. Brazil, doubled over with debt, is beholden to lenders. The Workers' Party, with only a minority in both houses of Congress, is not a complete master of the public agenda. The apparatus of government, besotted with inefficiency and corruption, resists change. ''I don't have the power of God to do miracles,'' Lula says these days with unmasked frustration. He has become the lead character in another common fable: the dreamer who runs headlong into the cul-de-sacs of reality.
This is not an unfamiliar problem for leftist leaders throughout the world. Lula views Fidel Castro as an iconic presence; he dined with him in Brasilia on Inauguration Day. But in Latin America, exhortations to a people's revolution today seem as out of fashion as the red-and-black flag of the Sandinistas. Leftists in developing nations find themselves working within the margins of the global financial schematic. Their urge for reform is most often constrained by a dependence on international creditors. Default would be a debacle. Investor confidence would plummet, capital would flee, the poor would take an abrupt beating. The left may criticize the so-called Washington consensus, an economic model that largely leaves the fight against poverty to the efficiency of free markets, but it is hard pressed to veer off the trodden course without facing uncontrollable consequences. Extremism is out; pragmatism is in.
While Lula continues to talk passionately of feeding Brazil's poor and filling their pockets, his overall strategy has been one of hidebound austerity, cutting back on spending. ''We can't take steps too big for our legs,'' he has said repeatedly. He blames the cursed inheritance of a vulnerable economy and insists he must at last lay the foundation for long-term prosperity. His storied zeal has now been redirected toward this newfound restraint. In the past, Brazil had borrowed its way out of one crisis after another. Not long before Lula was elected, the government negotiated a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund, agreeing to maintain a budget surplus of 3.75 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Lula cinched the belt tighter yet, increasing the target to 4.25 percent, in effect making a decision to spend more on servicing the debt and less on directly assisting the people. This was done to calm the markets and yank back the reins on galloping inflation, he said.
But whatever the long-term benefits may be, Lula's austere approach was accompanied by the penetrating gloom of a recession. In 2003, the president's first year in office, the economy slipped backward, with negative growth of 0.2 percent, the worst performance in a decade. Wages dipped. Jobs were lost.
Under the Workers' Party, the workers took a punch in the gut.
And yet while Lula the politician has chosen to be cautious at home, Lula the statesman has moved quite boldly abroad, challenging international trade regimens that favor rich countries over poor ones. On the global stage, he is still able to situate himself as the outsider, agitating to transform reality rather than merely succumbing to it. Lula -- restless with administrative tasks in the modern, whitewashed buildings of the capital -- has traveled abroad at a pace of more than one trip per month, including jaunts to Luanda, Tripoli and Shanghai. On these excursions, he often finds himself greeted as a heroic new voice for the downtrodden. One of his main efforts has been to try to cobble together trading blocs of emerging nations, attempting to find strength in numbers. He has also crusaded against the extravagant agricultural subsidies given to farmers in wealthy countries. In this battle, he has successfully played by the international rule book. Two months ago, Brazil won a preliminary judgment against the United States at the World Trade Organization in a case involving subsidies to American cotton growers; another pending claim, against the European Union, concerns sugar. These proceedings, seemingly arcane, are vital to agriculture in poor countries. If price-distorting subsidies were wiped away, farmers would suddenly have a fair shot at being competitive in lucrative foreign markets. Tens of millions could be lifted out of poverty.
This independent streak concerning global commerce has of course irked many of the powerful in Washington, as did Lula's opposition to what he once called President Bush's ''private war with Saddam Hussein.'' Still, as men of the people go, Brazil's leader has struck most of the world's establishment as a praiseworthy fellow, certainly no apostle of class warfare like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Last summer, Lula was warmly received in the White House, where President Bush praised his counterpart's social vision and ''tremendous heart.'' Several times, James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, has gushingly commended Lula as ''an extraordinary figure'' who has emerged as ''one of the great world leaders.'' Lula was selected to be the keynote speaker at last week's United Nations summit meeting on corporate responsibility.
But back home, the patience of the people has dwindled, however much faith they retain in their president's good intentions. Fifteen months ago, a reliable poll showed that 80 percent of the nation had confidence in Lula's government. Steadily, that number has fallen. It is now at 53 percent.
São Paulo, the largest city in South America, has a concentration of skyscrapers to rival Manhattan's. Its enormous wealth is reflected in neighborhoods with walled mansions and long promenades of designer boutiques. But the looping tentacles of the city's superhighways also lead to some of the continent's more abysmal slums. The unemployment rate in São Paulo recently rose above 20 percent. ''We put a lot of faith in Lula, but he has done nothing for us yet,'' Cristiana Arruda, a 21-year-old woman, told me. She and her two sisters work as unlicensed street vendors, illegally selling discounted goods from the impromptu display case of a cardboard box. As we talked, someone nearby shouted ''ice,'' the code word for the police. Dozens of peddlers snatched up their merchandise and ran off. ''Is this any way to live?'' Cristiana asked. ''But there are no jobs.''
One Sunday, I wandered around the A.B.C. Region, the huge industrial cities near São Paulo where Lula transformed himself from a lathe operator to a labor leader. These days, most of the work in the mammoth auto factories -- Ford, Fiat, Volkswagen and the rest -- is done by computer-guided robots. Decent-paying jobs, like the one Lula had three decades ago, are hard to find. ''For sure, Lula is trying to do a good job,'' a poor man named Jo-o Sousa da Silva told me, ''but he's trying to please everybody, and not even Jesus could do that.'' He was standing in a bar beside a pool table, its surface temporarily covered with empty cups, chicken bones and a jar of peppers. Conversation had to vie with samba music pulsing from a radio. ''The house was already in shambles before Lula walked through the door,'' said another man, defending the president. ''Everybody points their finger at Lula. It's not fair.''
The press has certainly relished Lula's distress. During the five weeks I spent in Brazil, he took a daily flogging in the headlines. Lula's own allies were among those who applied the lash. The Workers' Party issued a written critique of the government. Lula's own vice president mocked the economic policies. Perhaps worst of all, a close associate of Lula's chief of staff was tied to a kickback scandal; the president chose to use hardball politics to ward off the nosiness of a Senate inquest. Before coming to national power, the Workers' Party overindulged in sanctimony; suddenly, it was looking as corruptible and unethical as the rest.
In reaction, Lula often apologizes or broods or simply loses his cool. Last month, he revoked the visa of a New York Times correspondent who wrote that the president's consumption of alcohol had become a national concern, a story broadly disputed in Brazil. Only later did Lula change course, apparently realizing the offending newspaper article was not as damaging to his reputation as his display of pique afterward. He is alternately defiant and remorseful, wistfully explaining that he has been busy bringing a distressed economy out of intensive care. ''When the conservative right governed the nation for 10, 15, 20 or 30 years, no one demanded results. But when it's us who have won, people want us to do in one year what they haven't done in 50.''
The harshest rebukes come from what might be called the utopian left. They may not have anticipated a miracle, but they did expect tempestuous shifts in the political winds. Some speak as if the hopes of a lifetime have been swept to sea. De Oliveira, the sociologist who so hailed the significance of Lula's election, now dismissively concludes, ''The country is apparently more complicated than the Workers' Party thought, and if you don't know what to do, you repeat what others have done.''
Some wonder: Has Lula left the left?
One evening, I watched the president wade into yet another rapturous crowd. This time, it was at the grand opening of a soup kitchen subsidized by the Coca-Cola Company in Belo Horizonte. Lula stepped to the podium. His distinctive deep voice emotes with both a rasp and lisp. It is something an animator might give to a bullfrog. His hands cut angular patches of air while he talks. As usual, he meandered from the prepared text.
''When I was younger, being anti-American meant you didn't drink Coca-Cola,'' he reflected. ''But now that I am more mature, I've discovered that there's nothing better than drinking an ice-cold Coke when you wake up early in the morning.''
In his office, Lula was getting his caffeine from strong coffee rather than from Coke, one demitasse after another, in the Brazilian fashion. He was also smoking cigarillos, a habit he forgoes in public. I asked about his childhood. ''In primary school, I only had one pair of pants and one suspender, not even a second suspender, only one,'' he said. ''I wore those pants all week and then I would wash them on Saturday and begin to use them again.'' He finished his smoke and went to work on a granola bar. ''Once, I was very much ashamed because my sister had pneumonia and the doctor came to the house. My sister was lying on the bed and the doctor asked for a chair. But we had no chair.''
These stories from his destitute youth had the aspect of a happy ending, since we were at ease on fine leather furniture in a huge room with a wonderful view of Brasilia, the capital. I was seated to the president's left, his personal translator to his right. Behind Lula was a beautiful 16th-century carving of a crucified Jesus, a gift he had had restored. In another part of the room were a hand-carved desk and tables recovered from the grandeur of a palace in Rio.
Brazil, so goes a common gibe, is the country of the future -- and always will be. With 175 million people, it is the world's fifth most populous nation, and its territory is slightly larger than the continental United States. In the 16th century, Portugal claimed this immensity as a colony, and the crown soon divided 2,500 miles of coastline into a dozen captaincies, some of them larger than the mother country itself. Sugarcane was introduced, and Brazil today still lives with the legacy of a plantation culture that consumed four million African slaves and left land ownership hideously askew. An elite 1.7 percent of the landowners continue to own nearly half the arable land; the top 10 percent of the nation earns half the income.
In Rio de Janeiro, the poor have ended up with the breathtaking vistas of the ocean, having clustered their hovels onto the unstable terrain of the cliffsides. The value of swanky apartments down below often depends on whether a window faces these elevated slums, exposing the occupants to stray gunfire from warring drug gangs. Crime is rampant in Brazil's cities. During my stay, an out-of-work pauper in Brasilia climbed onto the ledge of the Senate's balcony, threatening a suicidal leap to punctuate his misery. After security guards wrestled the man down, tenderhearted legislators gave him some spare cash and wished him godspeed. He was robbed on the way home.
''The Brazilian elite never had a vision for the whole society; they never wanted to share even a little bit of the money,'' Lula told me, answering a question about how he might redress the disparities in wealth. ''Remember, Brazil is a country that had slavery until almost the end of the 19th century. Even then, the end of slavery was only a law written on a piece of paper. The mind-set continued for many years. Income concentration is a disease, and it's much stronger in South America and the third world.''
But he knew of no swift cures, he said. Brazil has a history of major economic schemes that woefully failed. ''What is new here about what we are doing?'' he asked rhetorically. ''The novelty is that we do not want to -- and we will not -- introduce a Lula Plan. Brazil cannot have another president who invents a new plan, achieves a certain amount of success for the first year and then leaves us paying the bill for 10 years after.'' The bankruptcy of neighboring Argentina served as a warning about defaulting on debt, he said. ''What we want is to do things in a sustainable fashion. Each day, even if we advance a centimeter, we are going forward -- without any miracles, without breaking away from our international commitments, simply doing what needs to be done.''
Brazil allocates a reasonable share of its revenues to social spending, but more than half the disbursements go toward public pensions, which are spread widely among income groups, with very little reaching the poorest of the poor. Lula managed to push a reform of the pension system through Congress, but the payments still favor people in the higher income brackets. At his inauguration, he declared a national war on hunger, and he has since consolidated some existing welfare programs, increasing the average monthly stipends to about $25 per family, according to government figures. This amount, seemingly tiny, is no small thing for the desperate. And Lula says he hopes to extend the program -- known as bolsa familia -- to 50 million people by the end of his term in 2006.
But an enhanced dole is far from the income redistribution that some had breathlessly anticipated. Lula's main antipoverty plan is actually a conservative standby: economic growth and jobs, the rising tide that lifts all boats. Contrary to expectations, he has fought hard to restrain increases in the minimum wage, concerned about the effect of enhanced salaries on the public coffers.
''I was expecting a much more dramatic set of social programs,'' said Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was Lula's far more conservative predecessor. The former president claimed to be hesitant about criticizing ''a man of good will.'' Instead he dispensed halfhearted praise, commending Lula's wisdom in imitating Cardoso's own policies, even if the new government's neophyte ministries struck him as beset by ''a lack of coordination.''
I had the chance to meet most of Lula's closest advisers, a collection heavy on onetime communists and ex-union leaders. They had been ruefully discovering the limitations of high office. ''We've gotten the government, but we don't have the power,'' lamented Frei Betto, a Dominican friar who has been close to Lula for 24 years. ''Our Legislature has a conservative profile. So has the judiciary. And we're mired in external debt.''
The petistas, as Workers' Party members are known, proudly cite the government's accomplishments, things like food distributions, loans to small farmers and a network of dental clinics. And yet even they seem stunned by the brittleness of what had once seemed bedrock ideals. More than a year into a petista government, the pace of land transfers to peasants has been slack. Amazon rain forest continues to disappear at breakneck speed. Genetically modified soybean seeds have been loosed in the soil. ''It's difficult to find the right path,'' said Gilberto Carvalho, the ex-seminarian who directs the president's scheduling. ''You have to make concessions, yes, but you can't let them betray your principles. It's a daily battle.''
The government's top positions are meted out to an ecumenical mix, some appointments based on ability, others on the settlement of political obligations. Most have arrived from the left. Chief of Staff Jose Dirceu once went into exile in Cuba, where he underwent both guerrilla training and the facial camouflage of plastic surgery; he has hung a photo of Fidel and himself behind his desk. Marina Silva, the environment minister, grew up in a family of Amazon rubber tappers; her nearest neighbors were a two-hour walk away, and she saw her first electric light at age 5 during a trip downriver for medical care. But on the economic side, Lula's choices have been decidedly more conservative. Henrique Meirelles, president of the central bank, used to be the head of global banking at FleetBoston Financial. Luiz Furlan, the minister of development, industry and commerce, was a millionaire poultry exporter. Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, while a petista and an ex-Trotskyite, is a dedicated convert to fiscal orthodoxy.
Lula himself disdains political labels and has always resisted being pinned to a point along the ideological gamut. The political isms and wasms of other countries seemed irrelevant to him. He preferred his own intuition and common sense. While still a young union leader, he was frequently asked to define himself as a communist, a socialist or a social democrat. ''I am a lathe operator,'' he would reply.
But this was not some dodge. Lula was left, but it was a labor-movement left. He didn't care if it was called socialism or Christianity or simply ethics. To him, class struggle was about democratic elections and bigger salaries. He wanted workers to own houses and refrigerators, not the means of production. In a 1978 television appearance, a reporter chided him for showing up in a three-piece suit rather than dungarees. He answered, ''I pray to God that in the near future all workers can not only have three-piece suits but everything else they produce, even cars.'' In 1979, he was asked which historical figures he most admired. Gandhi, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong were names he gave at first. When asked for more examples, he added Hitler, Castro and Ayatollah Khomeini. ''I admire in a man the fire to want to do something and then his going out to try to do it,'' he explained.
Twenty-five years later, Gandhi, Che and Castro would surely still make the list. As the president and I sat together, there seemed clear enough lines between the Lula of the 70's and the Lula of today. On one hand, he remained the pragmatic union negotiator, going after what he thought the best obtainable deal. So far, that's what his government had been about, political give-and-take within the parameters of the possible. On the other hand, he still dreamed of unlikely twists of fate. For this, he had only to look in the mirror.
Stymied by the economic realities of a debt-ridden nation, Lula has diverted some of his dreaming to humanity in general. Since last year, he has been proposing a global tax to feed the world's hungry. The mechanics of the idea remain extremely vague, but he seems determined to mention it at every conceivable forum. ''Maybe we can tax the arms trade, for example,'' he told me. ''Or maybe we could tax the tax havens. Or we could tax world trade. Something has to be done so we get beyond just making speeches.''
Lula began thinking about this at the meeting of the G-8 last June in Evian, France, he said. ''I discovered a very interesting thing. I was there with the major world leaders, people I never imagined I'd be anywhere near. Suddenly, I started to think: These men are very important in their countries, very important in the world. But none of them understand the poor -- especially the issue of hunger -- in quite the way I do. Why? It's not because they are insensitive. It's because they never experienced it.''
But he had.
ula was the seventh child born to Euridice Ferreira de Mello. A month before the birth, his father, Aristides Inacio da Silva, left the family and their sandy patch of farmland in the state of Pernambuco. His departure, however untimely, was not so unusual. For years, the sky had been miserly with rain. The dry soil, never very obliging, was rendering pitifully little corn, beans and manioc. Men from all over Brazil's northeast were hoping to find work in the factories of São Paulo. The women they left behind were known as widows of the drought.
Aristides's departure was not entirely noble. Unknown to his wife, her husband was accompanied south by another woman -- her younger cousin, actually -- with whom he started a second family. Euridice would learn of this only when Aristides came back for a visit five years later. He had three new children in tow when he finally met his young son Luiz, affectionately known as Lula.
Much of what is known of Lula's childhood comes from an oral history done in the early 90's by Denise Parana, who was then his aide. She interviewed not only her boss but also most of his siblings. Their lives in Pernambuco, as they recalled them, were ones of lingering want. Their house was tiny. Meals were often no more than manioc flour and beans. Water was frequently scooped from a ditch and drunk after the dirt had settled.
Aristides fared somewhat better in Santos, the port near São Paulo where he found work unloading cargo. After his return visit to Pernambuco, Aristides brought Lula's older brother Jaime back with him to Santos. But the boy became lonely, and after two years away, the 15-year-old sent his mother a letter supposedly dictated by his illiterate father, beckoning her and the rest of the family to join them. Euridice, eager to escape the wretchedness of the northeastern bush, sold her watch, a donkey and her portraits of the saints to buy space on a pau de arara, a rickety open-ended truck with boards for seating. The trip took 13 days. Passengers slept along the dirt roads and huddled beneath the vehicle when it rained.
Unexpectedly saddled with both families, Aristides settled them in separate homes and laid his head each night wherever his mood suggested. His parenting habits were stern: everyone worked, no one went to school. ''My father used to beat us with something like a rubber hose,'' Jose, one of Lula's brothers, told me. Then, one fateful day, Jose said, ''my father, ignorant as always, threatened to hit my mother, and that was it.''
Euridice left for good. Over the years, she and the children lived in some awful places, including space behind a São Paulo bar where they shared a toilet with the hard-drinking patrons. Her daughters were hired out as maids; Lula, her youngest son, shined shoes and delivered laundry. Then, at age 15, he had the good luck to find work at a factory that made screws. Through this job he managed to enter a program in a public trade school and became a skilled machinist.
In 1969, Lula married a slender, dark-haired woman named Lourdes, the younger sister of his best friend, Lambari. For years, Lula had been too shy to date her, but now they were living the full measure of small dreams, able to buy a house near a bakery and a bus stop. Lourdes became pregnant, but in her seventh month she developed hepatitis, something her doctors at first failed to diagnose. The baby died inside her, and when Lula came to the hospital with clothes for the child's burial, he was told his wife was dead as well.
Lambari was with his friend when he received the crushing news. ''Lula began walking in a spin,'' he told me and then demonstrated what he meant by whirling against a wall, careening shoulder to shoulder. The two men were later taken to the hospital morgue where the covered bodies -- one long, one tiny -- were laid out with tags strung to their toes. The words ''Born Dead'' were written on the baby's tag instead of a name.
In his grief, Lula went through ''three years of craziness,'' as he once described it, wanting ''to be with a woman Monday through Sunday.'' For companionship, he also began to spend more time at the union. There, he found not only a calling but a second wife, Marisa Leticia Casa dos Santos, who was newly widowed. Her husband had been murdered in a robbery. She had come to the union hall to ask about survivors' benefits.
During the mid- and late 70's, Lula would gradually transmute into a labor militant. This was a particularly strange turn. The metalworkers union of São Bernardo do Campo, like most unions at the time, was controlled by conservatives who worked hand-in-glove with the companies and government. Lula was welcomed into the hierarchy because he was deemed easy to control. The bosses backed his candidacy for president in 1975.
But Lula proved anything but pliant. Brazil was astir with wafts of rebellion, and soon he was riding the storm of an unprecedented labor struggle. One morning in 1978, workers from Lula's union sat down in front of their machines at the Saab-Scania truck factory. The strike was unlawful, but within days the tactic spread to other automotive plants. Some 80,000 workers refused to move the vehicles up the production line. The companies, forced to negotiate, yielded to union wage demands, and a landmark victory was won.
Lula found himself becoming famous: a blunt man in bell-bottom pants with a recognizable crown of curly black hair. In 1979, the union called a general strike. The only place large enough for a rally was the soccer stadium, but when the meeting began, the sound system failed. There was Lula on the platform, a single voice shouting to an encompassing horde of distant faces. For four hours, even as rain dampened their clothes, 90,000 metalworkers passed his words in a relay back through the crowd.
Marxist intellectuals had always thought to send their educated cadres to toil in the factories, insinuating the seeds of class struggle on the shop floor. In Brazil, the workers themselves led the way, with the intelligentsia traipsing behind. By 1980, the labor unrest had already reached far beyond São Paulo and the metalworkers, spreading to bank workers, teachers, miners and others. But to fully challenge the repressive regime, many, including Lula, thought the labor movement needed a political component, and the Workers' Party was begun.
The party began fielding candidates in 1982, the first time since 1964 that the military permitted relatively free local and state elections. Lula ran for the governorship of São Paulo. His slogan was ''A Brazilian Like You.'' He finished fourth with a dismal 10 percent in that race, but slowly the Workers' Party came into its own, initially electing mayors and congressmen, then governors and senators. In 1989, the first time in nearly three decades that Brazilians were allowed to directly elect a president, Lula advanced into a runoff before finally losing. He would lose twice more before deciding a fourth attempt was futile unless the party agreed to changes making him more electable. Though it was certain to offend purists, he wanted to choose someone from outside the party as his running mate, even someone from the right. And he wanted Brazil's top political hired gun as his strategist. Duda Mendonca, a devilish svengali to some petistas, described his own politics as leftist, but he also saw himself as a ''technician'' who ran campaigns for high pay without letting ideology interfere with his choices.
I met Mendonca at his headquarters in São Paulo. He was wearing a well-cut black blazer over a snug-fitting black T-shirt. For the 2002 campaign, he had also smartened up Lula's look. ''It was important to show Lula had evolved,'' he said. ''So we took a little bit better care of him. The beard was trim, the clothes finer. He was groomed. On TV, instead of being sweaty, he was carefully made up.'' A dentist improved his smile, a tailor provided genteel suits. Lula, the lathe operator, now looked presidential. His running mate was the textile magnate Jose Alencar.
The slogan of this campaign was Lulinha, paz e amor -- ''Little Lula, peace and love.'' Not all of this was a publicist's artifice. Lula in fact is a warm, engaging sort whose abounding sentimentality habitually opens the valves of his tear ducts. Still, the overall goal was to bury the earlier portrait of an angry, unkempt union leader. Lula was pictured with the pope and with Nelson Mandela. He stood beside some of Brazil's top intellectuals, who posed as if determined to tap into his wisdom.
''I changed; Brazil changed,'' Lula said in his speeches. This, too, was true. Lula, like much of the party, had moderated his views. Lessons had been absorbed while running city and state governments. Lula had already agreed to honor the bailout deal with the I.M.F.
This time, Lula's rival in the runoff was Jose Serra, a bland academic who had served with distinction as Cardoso's health minister. But Brazil's economy was again in awful straits. People wanted change, and Lula's hour was finally arriving.
In the month before the election, he allowed Jo-o Salles, a documentary filmmaker, to follow him behind usually closed doors. Often, Lula seemed to forget the camera's presence. Salles showed me some of the footage he was editing and translated from the Portuguese.
In one harangue, Lula spoke of the man with whom he is most often compared, the Polish union leader-turned-president, Lech Walesa. Both led a wave of strikes in 1980. ''I had far more members in my rank-and-file than Walesa, but he was wined and dined all over the world because he was fighting against communism,'' Lula complained. But when it was Walesa's turn to run the country, what did he achieve? Lula answered his own question. ''The rest is history, because he didn't do diddly-squat in office.''
Yet he, too, was worried about failure. With the election just days away, he fretted that the ''machinery'' of government would define his presidency and not the other way around. He wasn't sure what he'd be able to do for Brazil's poor, but he did understand the expectations. ''I don't know how I'll react. But I do know that this coming Monday people will start demanding me to deliver everything I've said for the past 20 years.''
I told Lula that I would be traveling to Pernambuco to better understand his early years. ''You must eat buchada, which are dried goat intestines,'' he insisted, grasping my hand. He was emphatic, staring me in the eye. This regional delicacy was too delectable to be missed, he said. ''We'll call my cousin, and he'll kill a goat.''
The centerpiece of the meal was actually the goat's stomach. It was a soft grayish oval about the size of a small baked potato. Stuffed inside was rice that had been steeped in blood and mixed with spices and minced pieces of the animal's heart and liver. On a side plate was a goat hoof partially wrapped with intestines. ''How do you like it?'' asked Lula's amiable cousin Moura. ''It's better than I had expected,'' I replied.
The capital of Pernambuco is the seaside city of Recife, where high-rises hover over the beaches. But much of the state's interior is backward, with tiny farms along sandy and narrow roads; adolescents can remember the arrival of electricity.
I had gone there for more than a peek into Lula's distant past. The Movement of Landless Workers, the M.S.T., was planning to again take up the tactic of ''occupations,'' sending peasants onto unused private farmland so they could claim it as their own. Gunmen working for the latifúndios, the large landowners, sometimes attacked these intruders, so the times and places for these peasant sieges were kept secret until the last minute. I had been given only a contact number in Recife and a range of possible dates.
The M.S.T., along with the Workers' Party and the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores -- a federation of trade unions -- are something of a holy trinity to the Brazilian left. The peasants' group claims to have settled 250,000 families on ''occupied'' land in the past 20 years. During that time, Lula always had been a dependable ally. Even as president, he could be counted on to attend an occasional rally and don a red M.S.T. cap. The peasants' group had largely stopped doing occupations, allowing their companeiro to spearhead land reform.
But by this spring, the M.S.T.'s leaders were fed up with the government's sluggish pace. Lula had promised to settle 530,000 families by 2006 -- only half of what the M.S.T. wanted in the first place. So far, only 49,000 families had been given land by the government. The M.S.T. decided to return to their confrontational tactics.
''Lula is being dominated by the state apparatus,'' said Alexandre Conceição, one of two eager young men assigned to escort me to the occupation at the appropriate time. In their eyes, Lula had fallen into the clutches of the capitalists. ''We could compare him to Queen Elizabeth,'' Conceição continued. ''She is the government but she does not really rule. Who runs things are the agricultural bourgeoisie and the businessmen.''
Lula's withering relationship with the M.S.T. was another product of his collision with ornery realities. The government can legally claim unused arable land, of which Brazil has an overabundance. But the property's owners have to be paid with bonds or cash, and the remuneration adds up. Then there is the matter of whether people can make a go of it on the land they are given. A half million farmers already were in precarious shape because they badly needed roads and electricity and technical help, none of which the financially depleted government could easily afford, Miguel Rossetto, the minister of agrarian development, told me. He spoke of the necessity of taking ''a strategic view.'' Why buy land for peasants who will just have to sell it?
One Sunday, soon after dawn, I was taken to São Lourenco da Mata, where families were arriving to cast their fate with the M.S.T. The gathering point in the town was a small cement building. Inside hung posters of Lula, Che Guevara and Conan the Barbarian. Outside stood more than 100 anxious men, women and children, carrying both the tools of agriculture (hoes and shovels) and the requirements of camping (food, water and blankets). Music blared from a parked sound truck. It was intended to steel the participants' courage with sambas. The lyrics yearned for a people's revolution.
During the march up the highway to the targeted land, I for a time walked with a 61-year-old farm laborer named Neiapo Feliciano. His story was a common one. He had always worked for others, but now he was thought old and dispensable. Divested of prospects, he was ripe for recruitment by the M.S.T. ''Every man has a right to live on his own land,'' he told me firmly. ''To survive, we have to take back what is naturally ours.''
The entrance to the land was protected by a strand of barbed wire, which succumbed easily to four whacks from a machete. People then charged purposefully into the hilly green expanse. Some went right to work gathering branches to be used as tent posts. Neiapo began scraping at a patch of ground with his hoe. ''I know this red clay,'' he said, fingering the soil like gold dust. ''This is good for potatoes.''
These occupations -- or at least the ones that don't end in violence -- usually follow a pattern. The property's owner goes to court; the M.S.T. then insists the land is unused. While a federal agency conducts an investigation, the peasants relocate their tents to the roadside. They wait months -- or years -- for an official decision.
''We're going to construct a new socialist society!'' Conceic-o, my escort, shouted into a microphone as the peasants worked. ''Viva the Brazilian people!''
I would meet several other peasants while in Pernambuco; most were Lula's aunts, uncles and cousins. Their weather-beaten faces gave me some idea of what his future would have been like had his mother not loaded him onto that rickety pau de arara in 1952. Instead he ended up in the midst of democracy's great folk dance and somehow emerged as a vessel for the hopes of the country.
This was inspiring -- and yet also worrying. I thought of Fitzgerald's line: ''Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.'' Lula has sincerity and natural intelligence going for him, and Brazil's economy has lately shown some promising signs of a rebound. But it remains too hard to calculate his chances at success, especially with the public's impatience with their president overtaking their affection. His life will inevitably serve as a wonderful fable; it's just too soon to know the instructive moral.
The windowless one-room home where Lula was born no longer exists. Another family lives on the property now. Their house is a bit larger, though most everything else is the same. Corn and manioc still struggle to thrive in the dry ground.
The property is slightly elevated, and from the front door the view is pleasant, the houses and the cacti and the palm trees unfolding as a tapestry of greens and browns.
The lady of the house is Anilda Suarez dos Santos. She stood in the doorway in the late afternoon, a tired-looking woman in a denim skirt. Like Lula's mother, she has eight children. Like Lula's family, they are paupers. They transport their water across the distance in jugs. They plant, they tend, they harvest. Sometimes they go hungry.
Lula's bolsa familia program has reached their district. That $25 a month would be a great help to a family like this, but a local official found a way to swindle the poor out of the cash. No money from the government had come their way in months.
I asked Anilda if she had voted for Lula. Her answer was so forceful a ''yes'' that I wondered if the question had been impertinent, like asking her if she believed in God.
I was satisfied with her simple, emphatic response, but as I turned to leave, she felt compelled to add something else a foreigner needed to understand.
''Of course,'' she informed me, ''nothing has changed.''
Barry Bearak is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. His last article was about Pakistan.
ula, his speech over, waded into the embrace of the masses. It was the opposite of most crowd scenes. Here the president was pushing through the ropes to get at the people. He was tired and sweaty, his face infused with crimson. But the swarm of bodies, pressing his way, energized him. He seemed propelled by the heat of their need.
Most of the throng -- like most of Brazil -- was throttled by poverty. These thousands in the city of Sobral were dressed in threadbare clothes and mud-covered sandals. Some stood on tiptoes, hoisting small children who squirmed in their arms. Others held tightly to the bicycles they had ridden across the rain-drenched roads. ''Lula, Lula!'' they shouted, relentlessly pushing forward, those closest grasping for the president's sleeve. A small bear of a man, Lula is bearded and round-shouldered with a wide neck and a thick middle. He moved from one person to the next, hugging some and pausing to hear what they had to say, patting the palm of his hand against the side of their faces. ''O-lé, o-la, Lu-la, Lu-la!'' the crowd began to sing, as if roused to a chant at a soccer game. ''You are a saint!'' cried one barefoot old woman. Her eyes were desperate and bloodshot. She was clutching Lula and wouldn't let go. ''You will help us,'' she said, and as the president bent closer to hear, she bestowed the accolade of the people: ''You are one of us.''
What she, like the others, wanted was a little attention, a little empathy, a little money. Brazil is a rich nation full of poor people, its distribution of income nearly the most unequal in the world. The next night, in another city, a young girl mistook me and my translator for members of Lula's staff. She handed us a note, begging us to pass it on. Many words were misspelled; there was a name but no address. It said: ''Lula, I have six brothers and sisters and my mother doesn't work and we don't have a father to help us. Please, my mother cries because we don't have anything to eat. My name is Adriene.''
Lula, of all people, would understand, the little girl must have thought.
And this would have been right. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 58, is the genuine article, a walking fable, democracy's classic story, the poor boy who grew up to be president. He, too, had a mother who cried and no father to raise him. He, too, had nothing to eat. He, too, suffered all the indignities of privation. But from destitution Lula would become a metalworker and then a union leader and then the nation's most celebrated firebrand, the man who took tens of thousands out on strike in defiance of a military government, opening the body politic to some of the first cross-breezes of democracy. He then led the creation of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers' Party, an amalgam of the Brazilian left, including trade unionists, radical intellectuals and progressive Catholics. He won Brazil's presidency on his fourth try, in October 2002, getting an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote.
''In a country where the elite have always held a stranglehold, it was never written anywhere that someone like me could become president,'' Lula told me as we sat aboard the Brazilian equivalent of Air Force One. There was a dining table between us. He stabbed at a piece of meat with his fork and nodded at a handful of eavesdropping cronies who savored his words. ''With me being president, the history of Brazil begins to change because someone from the humble people, the lowest classes, has risen to the top.''
Lula allowed me to join his entourage in mid-March during a three-day swing of meetings, speeches and ribbon-cuttings. Adoring crowds greeted him at every stop, but there were also notable gaps in the adulation. He had been in office for 15 months, and the expectation was that this very different president would somehow bring about a very different Brazil. But the masses, born poor, have remained poor, with no end in sight to their reiterating misery. ''Lula, give us jobs!'' were words one man had written on a placard. ''We are still hungry,'' read another. The federal police had gone on strike, and some police officers occasionally heckled as the president spoke, shouting out their union's demand for an 83 percent raise. Instead of instigating labor protests, Lula was now their target, recast as the villainous gatekeeper of the status quo. There are many numbers between 1 and 83, he reminded the unruly strikers.
On the airplane, his exasperation showed. He had also expected social change to move with more velocity. ''Creating jobs and distributing money to the poor is not easy,'' he said as if sharing the nugget of some great revelation. This pronouncement, however obvious to others, struck him as profound enough to merit repetition. He leaned forward. He raised his right index finger. ''If creating jobs and distributing money were easy, someone else would have done it, and I wouldn't have gotten to the presidency.''
or many Brazilians, Lula's election seemed like deliverance. Here was someone pitched forth from poverty's maelstrom, who had forfeited a finger to a factory accident and now spoke eloquently of class struggle. He was no populist held aloft by charisma and a cult following. Rather, he had spent two decades building a disciplined political movement that fielded candidates and won elections. The noted sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, one of the earliest members of the Workers' Party, likened Lula's victory to Brazil's greatest historic milestones, calling it as important as the abolition of slavery.
Other people, while agreeing on the event's momentousness, disagreed on the nature of its tidings. To them, Lula was a dangerous lout who spoke too breezily about the redistribution of income and land. His competence seemed as questionable as his politics. He had only a few years of formal schooling. His speech lacked syntax; he cut off the S's on his plurals like a peasant. Except for one term in the federal congress -- about which he professed boredom -- Lula had never held a government post. Traders in the international financial markets nervously followed his career. Many considered him anti-American and, worse, anticapitalist. What would such a man do when placed at the head of one of the world's 10 largest economies? Each time Lula's political star went into ascent, so did Brazil's ''risk factor'' on the bond market. Weeks before the election, the nation's bonds were trading at a pitiful 48 cents on the dollar.
But Lula has proved a curious surprise to most everyone, taking only small, measured steps toward domestic reform and staying well within the accepted covenants of global capitalism. For an idealist, perhaps the ideal is to be in the opposition. Lula, finally in power, now has to contend with the many forbidding obstacles in the sightline of a genuinely egalitarian vision. Brazil, doubled over with debt, is beholden to lenders. The Workers' Party, with only a minority in both houses of Congress, is not a complete master of the public agenda. The apparatus of government, besotted with inefficiency and corruption, resists change. ''I don't have the power of God to do miracles,'' Lula says these days with unmasked frustration. He has become the lead character in another common fable: the dreamer who runs headlong into the cul-de-sacs of reality.
This is not an unfamiliar problem for leftist leaders throughout the world. Lula views Fidel Castro as an iconic presence; he dined with him in Brasilia on Inauguration Day. But in Latin America, exhortations to a people's revolution today seem as out of fashion as the red-and-black flag of the Sandinistas. Leftists in developing nations find themselves working within the margins of the global financial schematic. Their urge for reform is most often constrained by a dependence on international creditors. Default would be a debacle. Investor confidence would plummet, capital would flee, the poor would take an abrupt beating. The left may criticize the so-called Washington consensus, an economic model that largely leaves the fight against poverty to the efficiency of free markets, but it is hard pressed to veer off the trodden course without facing uncontrollable consequences. Extremism is out; pragmatism is in.
While Lula continues to talk passionately of feeding Brazil's poor and filling their pockets, his overall strategy has been one of hidebound austerity, cutting back on spending. ''We can't take steps too big for our legs,'' he has said repeatedly. He blames the cursed inheritance of a vulnerable economy and insists he must at last lay the foundation for long-term prosperity. His storied zeal has now been redirected toward this newfound restraint. In the past, Brazil had borrowed its way out of one crisis after another. Not long before Lula was elected, the government negotiated a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund, agreeing to maintain a budget surplus of 3.75 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Lula cinched the belt tighter yet, increasing the target to 4.25 percent, in effect making a decision to spend more on servicing the debt and less on directly assisting the people. This was done to calm the markets and yank back the reins on galloping inflation, he said.
But whatever the long-term benefits may be, Lula's austere approach was accompanied by the penetrating gloom of a recession. In 2003, the president's first year in office, the economy slipped backward, with negative growth of 0.2 percent, the worst performance in a decade. Wages dipped. Jobs were lost.
Under the Workers' Party, the workers took a punch in the gut.
And yet while Lula the politician has chosen to be cautious at home, Lula the statesman has moved quite boldly abroad, challenging international trade regimens that favor rich countries over poor ones. On the global stage, he is still able to situate himself as the outsider, agitating to transform reality rather than merely succumbing to it. Lula -- restless with administrative tasks in the modern, whitewashed buildings of the capital -- has traveled abroad at a pace of more than one trip per month, including jaunts to Luanda, Tripoli and Shanghai. On these excursions, he often finds himself greeted as a heroic new voice for the downtrodden. One of his main efforts has been to try to cobble together trading blocs of emerging nations, attempting to find strength in numbers. He has also crusaded against the extravagant agricultural subsidies given to farmers in wealthy countries. In this battle, he has successfully played by the international rule book. Two months ago, Brazil won a preliminary judgment against the United States at the World Trade Organization in a case involving subsidies to American cotton growers; another pending claim, against the European Union, concerns sugar. These proceedings, seemingly arcane, are vital to agriculture in poor countries. If price-distorting subsidies were wiped away, farmers would suddenly have a fair shot at being competitive in lucrative foreign markets. Tens of millions could be lifted out of poverty.
This independent streak concerning global commerce has of course irked many of the powerful in Washington, as did Lula's opposition to what he once called President Bush's ''private war with Saddam Hussein.'' Still, as men of the people go, Brazil's leader has struck most of the world's establishment as a praiseworthy fellow, certainly no apostle of class warfare like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. Last summer, Lula was warmly received in the White House, where President Bush praised his counterpart's social vision and ''tremendous heart.'' Several times, James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, has gushingly commended Lula as ''an extraordinary figure'' who has emerged as ''one of the great world leaders.'' Lula was selected to be the keynote speaker at last week's United Nations summit meeting on corporate responsibility.
But back home, the patience of the people has dwindled, however much faith they retain in their president's good intentions. Fifteen months ago, a reliable poll showed that 80 percent of the nation had confidence in Lula's government. Steadily, that number has fallen. It is now at 53 percent.
São Paulo, the largest city in South America, has a concentration of skyscrapers to rival Manhattan's. Its enormous wealth is reflected in neighborhoods with walled mansions and long promenades of designer boutiques. But the looping tentacles of the city's superhighways also lead to some of the continent's more abysmal slums. The unemployment rate in São Paulo recently rose above 20 percent. ''We put a lot of faith in Lula, but he has done nothing for us yet,'' Cristiana Arruda, a 21-year-old woman, told me. She and her two sisters work as unlicensed street vendors, illegally selling discounted goods from the impromptu display case of a cardboard box. As we talked, someone nearby shouted ''ice,'' the code word for the police. Dozens of peddlers snatched up their merchandise and ran off. ''Is this any way to live?'' Cristiana asked. ''But there are no jobs.''
One Sunday, I wandered around the A.B.C. Region, the huge industrial cities near São Paulo where Lula transformed himself from a lathe operator to a labor leader. These days, most of the work in the mammoth auto factories -- Ford, Fiat, Volkswagen and the rest -- is done by computer-guided robots. Decent-paying jobs, like the one Lula had three decades ago, are hard to find. ''For sure, Lula is trying to do a good job,'' a poor man named Jo-o Sousa da Silva told me, ''but he's trying to please everybody, and not even Jesus could do that.'' He was standing in a bar beside a pool table, its surface temporarily covered with empty cups, chicken bones and a jar of peppers. Conversation had to vie with samba music pulsing from a radio. ''The house was already in shambles before Lula walked through the door,'' said another man, defending the president. ''Everybody points their finger at Lula. It's not fair.''
The press has certainly relished Lula's distress. During the five weeks I spent in Brazil, he took a daily flogging in the headlines. Lula's own allies were among those who applied the lash. The Workers' Party issued a written critique of the government. Lula's own vice president mocked the economic policies. Perhaps worst of all, a close associate of Lula's chief of staff was tied to a kickback scandal; the president chose to use hardball politics to ward off the nosiness of a Senate inquest. Before coming to national power, the Workers' Party overindulged in sanctimony; suddenly, it was looking as corruptible and unethical as the rest.
In reaction, Lula often apologizes or broods or simply loses his cool. Last month, he revoked the visa of a New York Times correspondent who wrote that the president's consumption of alcohol had become a national concern, a story broadly disputed in Brazil. Only later did Lula change course, apparently realizing the offending newspaper article was not as damaging to his reputation as his display of pique afterward. He is alternately defiant and remorseful, wistfully explaining that he has been busy bringing a distressed economy out of intensive care. ''When the conservative right governed the nation for 10, 15, 20 or 30 years, no one demanded results. But when it's us who have won, people want us to do in one year what they haven't done in 50.''
The harshest rebukes come from what might be called the utopian left. They may not have anticipated a miracle, but they did expect tempestuous shifts in the political winds. Some speak as if the hopes of a lifetime have been swept to sea. De Oliveira, the sociologist who so hailed the significance of Lula's election, now dismissively concludes, ''The country is apparently more complicated than the Workers' Party thought, and if you don't know what to do, you repeat what others have done.''
Some wonder: Has Lula left the left?
One evening, I watched the president wade into yet another rapturous crowd. This time, it was at the grand opening of a soup kitchen subsidized by the Coca-Cola Company in Belo Horizonte. Lula stepped to the podium. His distinctive deep voice emotes with both a rasp and lisp. It is something an animator might give to a bullfrog. His hands cut angular patches of air while he talks. As usual, he meandered from the prepared text.
''When I was younger, being anti-American meant you didn't drink Coca-Cola,'' he reflected. ''But now that I am more mature, I've discovered that there's nothing better than drinking an ice-cold Coke when you wake up early in the morning.''
In his office, Lula was getting his caffeine from strong coffee rather than from Coke, one demitasse after another, in the Brazilian fashion. He was also smoking cigarillos, a habit he forgoes in public. I asked about his childhood. ''In primary school, I only had one pair of pants and one suspender, not even a second suspender, only one,'' he said. ''I wore those pants all week and then I would wash them on Saturday and begin to use them again.'' He finished his smoke and went to work on a granola bar. ''Once, I was very much ashamed because my sister had pneumonia and the doctor came to the house. My sister was lying on the bed and the doctor asked for a chair. But we had no chair.''
These stories from his destitute youth had the aspect of a happy ending, since we were at ease on fine leather furniture in a huge room with a wonderful view of Brasilia, the capital. I was seated to the president's left, his personal translator to his right. Behind Lula was a beautiful 16th-century carving of a crucified Jesus, a gift he had had restored. In another part of the room were a hand-carved desk and tables recovered from the grandeur of a palace in Rio.
Brazil, so goes a common gibe, is the country of the future -- and always will be. With 175 million people, it is the world's fifth most populous nation, and its territory is slightly larger than the continental United States. In the 16th century, Portugal claimed this immensity as a colony, and the crown soon divided 2,500 miles of coastline into a dozen captaincies, some of them larger than the mother country itself. Sugarcane was introduced, and Brazil today still lives with the legacy of a plantation culture that consumed four million African slaves and left land ownership hideously askew. An elite 1.7 percent of the landowners continue to own nearly half the arable land; the top 10 percent of the nation earns half the income.
In Rio de Janeiro, the poor have ended up with the breathtaking vistas of the ocean, having clustered their hovels onto the unstable terrain of the cliffsides. The value of swanky apartments down below often depends on whether a window faces these elevated slums, exposing the occupants to stray gunfire from warring drug gangs. Crime is rampant in Brazil's cities. During my stay, an out-of-work pauper in Brasilia climbed onto the ledge of the Senate's balcony, threatening a suicidal leap to punctuate his misery. After security guards wrestled the man down, tenderhearted legislators gave him some spare cash and wished him godspeed. He was robbed on the way home.
''The Brazilian elite never had a vision for the whole society; they never wanted to share even a little bit of the money,'' Lula told me, answering a question about how he might redress the disparities in wealth. ''Remember, Brazil is a country that had slavery until almost the end of the 19th century. Even then, the end of slavery was only a law written on a piece of paper. The mind-set continued for many years. Income concentration is a disease, and it's much stronger in South America and the third world.''
But he knew of no swift cures, he said. Brazil has a history of major economic schemes that woefully failed. ''What is new here about what we are doing?'' he asked rhetorically. ''The novelty is that we do not want to -- and we will not -- introduce a Lula Plan. Brazil cannot have another president who invents a new plan, achieves a certain amount of success for the first year and then leaves us paying the bill for 10 years after.'' The bankruptcy of neighboring Argentina served as a warning about defaulting on debt, he said. ''What we want is to do things in a sustainable fashion. Each day, even if we advance a centimeter, we are going forward -- without any miracles, without breaking away from our international commitments, simply doing what needs to be done.''
Brazil allocates a reasonable share of its revenues to social spending, but more than half the disbursements go toward public pensions, which are spread widely among income groups, with very little reaching the poorest of the poor. Lula managed to push a reform of the pension system through Congress, but the payments still favor people in the higher income brackets. At his inauguration, he declared a national war on hunger, and he has since consolidated some existing welfare programs, increasing the average monthly stipends to about $25 per family, according to government figures. This amount, seemingly tiny, is no small thing for the desperate. And Lula says he hopes to extend the program -- known as bolsa familia -- to 50 million people by the end of his term in 2006.
But an enhanced dole is far from the income redistribution that some had breathlessly anticipated. Lula's main antipoverty plan is actually a conservative standby: economic growth and jobs, the rising tide that lifts all boats. Contrary to expectations, he has fought hard to restrain increases in the minimum wage, concerned about the effect of enhanced salaries on the public coffers.
''I was expecting a much more dramatic set of social programs,'' said Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was Lula's far more conservative predecessor. The former president claimed to be hesitant about criticizing ''a man of good will.'' Instead he dispensed halfhearted praise, commending Lula's wisdom in imitating Cardoso's own policies, even if the new government's neophyte ministries struck him as beset by ''a lack of coordination.''
I had the chance to meet most of Lula's closest advisers, a collection heavy on onetime communists and ex-union leaders. They had been ruefully discovering the limitations of high office. ''We've gotten the government, but we don't have the power,'' lamented Frei Betto, a Dominican friar who has been close to Lula for 24 years. ''Our Legislature has a conservative profile. So has the judiciary. And we're mired in external debt.''
The petistas, as Workers' Party members are known, proudly cite the government's accomplishments, things like food distributions, loans to small farmers and a network of dental clinics. And yet even they seem stunned by the brittleness of what had once seemed bedrock ideals. More than a year into a petista government, the pace of land transfers to peasants has been slack. Amazon rain forest continues to disappear at breakneck speed. Genetically modified soybean seeds have been loosed in the soil. ''It's difficult to find the right path,'' said Gilberto Carvalho, the ex-seminarian who directs the president's scheduling. ''You have to make concessions, yes, but you can't let them betray your principles. It's a daily battle.''
The government's top positions are meted out to an ecumenical mix, some appointments based on ability, others on the settlement of political obligations. Most have arrived from the left. Chief of Staff Jose Dirceu once went into exile in Cuba, where he underwent both guerrilla training and the facial camouflage of plastic surgery; he has hung a photo of Fidel and himself behind his desk. Marina Silva, the environment minister, grew up in a family of Amazon rubber tappers; her nearest neighbors were a two-hour walk away, and she saw her first electric light at age 5 during a trip downriver for medical care. But on the economic side, Lula's choices have been decidedly more conservative. Henrique Meirelles, president of the central bank, used to be the head of global banking at FleetBoston Financial. Luiz Furlan, the minister of development, industry and commerce, was a millionaire poultry exporter. Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, while a petista and an ex-Trotskyite, is a dedicated convert to fiscal orthodoxy.
Lula himself disdains political labels and has always resisted being pinned to a point along the ideological gamut. The political isms and wasms of other countries seemed irrelevant to him. He preferred his own intuition and common sense. While still a young union leader, he was frequently asked to define himself as a communist, a socialist or a social democrat. ''I am a lathe operator,'' he would reply.
But this was not some dodge. Lula was left, but it was a labor-movement left. He didn't care if it was called socialism or Christianity or simply ethics. To him, class struggle was about democratic elections and bigger salaries. He wanted workers to own houses and refrigerators, not the means of production. In a 1978 television appearance, a reporter chided him for showing up in a three-piece suit rather than dungarees. He answered, ''I pray to God that in the near future all workers can not only have three-piece suits but everything else they produce, even cars.'' In 1979, he was asked which historical figures he most admired. Gandhi, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong were names he gave at first. When asked for more examples, he added Hitler, Castro and Ayatollah Khomeini. ''I admire in a man the fire to want to do something and then his going out to try to do it,'' he explained.
Twenty-five years later, Gandhi, Che and Castro would surely still make the list. As the president and I sat together, there seemed clear enough lines between the Lula of the 70's and the Lula of today. On one hand, he remained the pragmatic union negotiator, going after what he thought the best obtainable deal. So far, that's what his government had been about, political give-and-take within the parameters of the possible. On the other hand, he still dreamed of unlikely twists of fate. For this, he had only to look in the mirror.
Stymied by the economic realities of a debt-ridden nation, Lula has diverted some of his dreaming to humanity in general. Since last year, he has been proposing a global tax to feed the world's hungry. The mechanics of the idea remain extremely vague, but he seems determined to mention it at every conceivable forum. ''Maybe we can tax the arms trade, for example,'' he told me. ''Or maybe we could tax the tax havens. Or we could tax world trade. Something has to be done so we get beyond just making speeches.''
Lula began thinking about this at the meeting of the G-8 last June in Evian, France, he said. ''I discovered a very interesting thing. I was there with the major world leaders, people I never imagined I'd be anywhere near. Suddenly, I started to think: These men are very important in their countries, very important in the world. But none of them understand the poor -- especially the issue of hunger -- in quite the way I do. Why? It's not because they are insensitive. It's because they never experienced it.''
But he had.
ula was the seventh child born to Euridice Ferreira de Mello. A month before the birth, his father, Aristides Inacio da Silva, left the family and their sandy patch of farmland in the state of Pernambuco. His departure, however untimely, was not so unusual. For years, the sky had been miserly with rain. The dry soil, never very obliging, was rendering pitifully little corn, beans and manioc. Men from all over Brazil's northeast were hoping to find work in the factories of São Paulo. The women they left behind were known as widows of the drought.
Aristides's departure was not entirely noble. Unknown to his wife, her husband was accompanied south by another woman -- her younger cousin, actually -- with whom he started a second family. Euridice would learn of this only when Aristides came back for a visit five years later. He had three new children in tow when he finally met his young son Luiz, affectionately known as Lula.
Much of what is known of Lula's childhood comes from an oral history done in the early 90's by Denise Parana, who was then his aide. She interviewed not only her boss but also most of his siblings. Their lives in Pernambuco, as they recalled them, were ones of lingering want. Their house was tiny. Meals were often no more than manioc flour and beans. Water was frequently scooped from a ditch and drunk after the dirt had settled.
Aristides fared somewhat better in Santos, the port near São Paulo where he found work unloading cargo. After his return visit to Pernambuco, Aristides brought Lula's older brother Jaime back with him to Santos. But the boy became lonely, and after two years away, the 15-year-old sent his mother a letter supposedly dictated by his illiterate father, beckoning her and the rest of the family to join them. Euridice, eager to escape the wretchedness of the northeastern bush, sold her watch, a donkey and her portraits of the saints to buy space on a pau de arara, a rickety open-ended truck with boards for seating. The trip took 13 days. Passengers slept along the dirt roads and huddled beneath the vehicle when it rained.
Unexpectedly saddled with both families, Aristides settled them in separate homes and laid his head each night wherever his mood suggested. His parenting habits were stern: everyone worked, no one went to school. ''My father used to beat us with something like a rubber hose,'' Jose, one of Lula's brothers, told me. Then, one fateful day, Jose said, ''my father, ignorant as always, threatened to hit my mother, and that was it.''
Euridice left for good. Over the years, she and the children lived in some awful places, including space behind a São Paulo bar where they shared a toilet with the hard-drinking patrons. Her daughters were hired out as maids; Lula, her youngest son, shined shoes and delivered laundry. Then, at age 15, he had the good luck to find work at a factory that made screws. Through this job he managed to enter a program in a public trade school and became a skilled machinist.
In 1969, Lula married a slender, dark-haired woman named Lourdes, the younger sister of his best friend, Lambari. For years, Lula had been too shy to date her, but now they were living the full measure of small dreams, able to buy a house near a bakery and a bus stop. Lourdes became pregnant, but in her seventh month she developed hepatitis, something her doctors at first failed to diagnose. The baby died inside her, and when Lula came to the hospital with clothes for the child's burial, he was told his wife was dead as well.
Lambari was with his friend when he received the crushing news. ''Lula began walking in a spin,'' he told me and then demonstrated what he meant by whirling against a wall, careening shoulder to shoulder. The two men were later taken to the hospital morgue where the covered bodies -- one long, one tiny -- were laid out with tags strung to their toes. The words ''Born Dead'' were written on the baby's tag instead of a name.
In his grief, Lula went through ''three years of craziness,'' as he once described it, wanting ''to be with a woman Monday through Sunday.'' For companionship, he also began to spend more time at the union. There, he found not only a calling but a second wife, Marisa Leticia Casa dos Santos, who was newly widowed. Her husband had been murdered in a robbery. She had come to the union hall to ask about survivors' benefits.
During the mid- and late 70's, Lula would gradually transmute into a labor militant. This was a particularly strange turn. The metalworkers union of São Bernardo do Campo, like most unions at the time, was controlled by conservatives who worked hand-in-glove with the companies and government. Lula was welcomed into the hierarchy because he was deemed easy to control. The bosses backed his candidacy for president in 1975.
But Lula proved anything but pliant. Brazil was astir with wafts of rebellion, and soon he was riding the storm of an unprecedented labor struggle. One morning in 1978, workers from Lula's union sat down in front of their machines at the Saab-Scania truck factory. The strike was unlawful, but within days the tactic spread to other automotive plants. Some 80,000 workers refused to move the vehicles up the production line. The companies, forced to negotiate, yielded to union wage demands, and a landmark victory was won.
Lula found himself becoming famous: a blunt man in bell-bottom pants with a recognizable crown of curly black hair. In 1979, the union called a general strike. The only place large enough for a rally was the soccer stadium, but when the meeting began, the sound system failed. There was Lula on the platform, a single voice shouting to an encompassing horde of distant faces. For four hours, even as rain dampened their clothes, 90,000 metalworkers passed his words in a relay back through the crowd.
Marxist intellectuals had always thought to send their educated cadres to toil in the factories, insinuating the seeds of class struggle on the shop floor. In Brazil, the workers themselves led the way, with the intelligentsia traipsing behind. By 1980, the labor unrest had already reached far beyond São Paulo and the metalworkers, spreading to bank workers, teachers, miners and others. But to fully challenge the repressive regime, many, including Lula, thought the labor movement needed a political component, and the Workers' Party was begun.
The party began fielding candidates in 1982, the first time since 1964 that the military permitted relatively free local and state elections. Lula ran for the governorship of São Paulo. His slogan was ''A Brazilian Like You.'' He finished fourth with a dismal 10 percent in that race, but slowly the Workers' Party came into its own, initially electing mayors and congressmen, then governors and senators. In 1989, the first time in nearly three decades that Brazilians were allowed to directly elect a president, Lula advanced into a runoff before finally losing. He would lose twice more before deciding a fourth attempt was futile unless the party agreed to changes making him more electable. Though it was certain to offend purists, he wanted to choose someone from outside the party as his running mate, even someone from the right. And he wanted Brazil's top political hired gun as his strategist. Duda Mendonca, a devilish svengali to some petistas, described his own politics as leftist, but he also saw himself as a ''technician'' who ran campaigns for high pay without letting ideology interfere with his choices.
I met Mendonca at his headquarters in São Paulo. He was wearing a well-cut black blazer over a snug-fitting black T-shirt. For the 2002 campaign, he had also smartened up Lula's look. ''It was important to show Lula had evolved,'' he said. ''So we took a little bit better care of him. The beard was trim, the clothes finer. He was groomed. On TV, instead of being sweaty, he was carefully made up.'' A dentist improved his smile, a tailor provided genteel suits. Lula, the lathe operator, now looked presidential. His running mate was the textile magnate Jose Alencar.
The slogan of this campaign was Lulinha, paz e amor -- ''Little Lula, peace and love.'' Not all of this was a publicist's artifice. Lula in fact is a warm, engaging sort whose abounding sentimentality habitually opens the valves of his tear ducts. Still, the overall goal was to bury the earlier portrait of an angry, unkempt union leader. Lula was pictured with the pope and with Nelson Mandela. He stood beside some of Brazil's top intellectuals, who posed as if determined to tap into his wisdom.
''I changed; Brazil changed,'' Lula said in his speeches. This, too, was true. Lula, like much of the party, had moderated his views. Lessons had been absorbed while running city and state governments. Lula had already agreed to honor the bailout deal with the I.M.F.
This time, Lula's rival in the runoff was Jose Serra, a bland academic who had served with distinction as Cardoso's health minister. But Brazil's economy was again in awful straits. People wanted change, and Lula's hour was finally arriving.
In the month before the election, he allowed Jo-o Salles, a documentary filmmaker, to follow him behind usually closed doors. Often, Lula seemed to forget the camera's presence. Salles showed me some of the footage he was editing and translated from the Portuguese.
In one harangue, Lula spoke of the man with whom he is most often compared, the Polish union leader-turned-president, Lech Walesa. Both led a wave of strikes in 1980. ''I had far more members in my rank-and-file than Walesa, but he was wined and dined all over the world because he was fighting against communism,'' Lula complained. But when it was Walesa's turn to run the country, what did he achieve? Lula answered his own question. ''The rest is history, because he didn't do diddly-squat in office.''
Yet he, too, was worried about failure. With the election just days away, he fretted that the ''machinery'' of government would define his presidency and not the other way around. He wasn't sure what he'd be able to do for Brazil's poor, but he did understand the expectations. ''I don't know how I'll react. But I do know that this coming Monday people will start demanding me to deliver everything I've said for the past 20 years.''
I told Lula that I would be traveling to Pernambuco to better understand his early years. ''You must eat buchada, which are dried goat intestines,'' he insisted, grasping my hand. He was emphatic, staring me in the eye. This regional delicacy was too delectable to be missed, he said. ''We'll call my cousin, and he'll kill a goat.''
The centerpiece of the meal was actually the goat's stomach. It was a soft grayish oval about the size of a small baked potato. Stuffed inside was rice that had been steeped in blood and mixed with spices and minced pieces of the animal's heart and liver. On a side plate was a goat hoof partially wrapped with intestines. ''How do you like it?'' asked Lula's amiable cousin Moura. ''It's better than I had expected,'' I replied.
The capital of Pernambuco is the seaside city of Recife, where high-rises hover over the beaches. But much of the state's interior is backward, with tiny farms along sandy and narrow roads; adolescents can remember the arrival of electricity.
I had gone there for more than a peek into Lula's distant past. The Movement of Landless Workers, the M.S.T., was planning to again take up the tactic of ''occupations,'' sending peasants onto unused private farmland so they could claim it as their own. Gunmen working for the latifúndios, the large landowners, sometimes attacked these intruders, so the times and places for these peasant sieges were kept secret until the last minute. I had been given only a contact number in Recife and a range of possible dates.
The M.S.T., along with the Workers' Party and the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores -- a federation of trade unions -- are something of a holy trinity to the Brazilian left. The peasants' group claims to have settled 250,000 families on ''occupied'' land in the past 20 years. During that time, Lula always had been a dependable ally. Even as president, he could be counted on to attend an occasional rally and don a red M.S.T. cap. The peasants' group had largely stopped doing occupations, allowing their companeiro to spearhead land reform.
But by this spring, the M.S.T.'s leaders were fed up with the government's sluggish pace. Lula had promised to settle 530,000 families by 2006 -- only half of what the M.S.T. wanted in the first place. So far, only 49,000 families had been given land by the government. The M.S.T. decided to return to their confrontational tactics.
''Lula is being dominated by the state apparatus,'' said Alexandre Conceição, one of two eager young men assigned to escort me to the occupation at the appropriate time. In their eyes, Lula had fallen into the clutches of the capitalists. ''We could compare him to Queen Elizabeth,'' Conceição continued. ''She is the government but she does not really rule. Who runs things are the agricultural bourgeoisie and the businessmen.''
Lula's withering relationship with the M.S.T. was another product of his collision with ornery realities. The government can legally claim unused arable land, of which Brazil has an overabundance. But the property's owners have to be paid with bonds or cash, and the remuneration adds up. Then there is the matter of whether people can make a go of it on the land they are given. A half million farmers already were in precarious shape because they badly needed roads and electricity and technical help, none of which the financially depleted government could easily afford, Miguel Rossetto, the minister of agrarian development, told me. He spoke of the necessity of taking ''a strategic view.'' Why buy land for peasants who will just have to sell it?
One Sunday, soon after dawn, I was taken to São Lourenco da Mata, where families were arriving to cast their fate with the M.S.T. The gathering point in the town was a small cement building. Inside hung posters of Lula, Che Guevara and Conan the Barbarian. Outside stood more than 100 anxious men, women and children, carrying both the tools of agriculture (hoes and shovels) and the requirements of camping (food, water and blankets). Music blared from a parked sound truck. It was intended to steel the participants' courage with sambas. The lyrics yearned for a people's revolution.
During the march up the highway to the targeted land, I for a time walked with a 61-year-old farm laborer named Neiapo Feliciano. His story was a common one. He had always worked for others, but now he was thought old and dispensable. Divested of prospects, he was ripe for recruitment by the M.S.T. ''Every man has a right to live on his own land,'' he told me firmly. ''To survive, we have to take back what is naturally ours.''
The entrance to the land was protected by a strand of barbed wire, which succumbed easily to four whacks from a machete. People then charged purposefully into the hilly green expanse. Some went right to work gathering branches to be used as tent posts. Neiapo began scraping at a patch of ground with his hoe. ''I know this red clay,'' he said, fingering the soil like gold dust. ''This is good for potatoes.''
These occupations -- or at least the ones that don't end in violence -- usually follow a pattern. The property's owner goes to court; the M.S.T. then insists the land is unused. While a federal agency conducts an investigation, the peasants relocate their tents to the roadside. They wait months -- or years -- for an official decision.
''We're going to construct a new socialist society!'' Conceic-o, my escort, shouted into a microphone as the peasants worked. ''Viva the Brazilian people!''
I would meet several other peasants while in Pernambuco; most were Lula's aunts, uncles and cousins. Their weather-beaten faces gave me some idea of what his future would have been like had his mother not loaded him onto that rickety pau de arara in 1952. Instead he ended up in the midst of democracy's great folk dance and somehow emerged as a vessel for the hopes of the country.
This was inspiring -- and yet also worrying. I thought of Fitzgerald's line: ''Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.'' Lula has sincerity and natural intelligence going for him, and Brazil's economy has lately shown some promising signs of a rebound. But it remains too hard to calculate his chances at success, especially with the public's impatience with their president overtaking their affection. His life will inevitably serve as a wonderful fable; it's just too soon to know the instructive moral.
The windowless one-room home where Lula was born no longer exists. Another family lives on the property now. Their house is a bit larger, though most everything else is the same. Corn and manioc still struggle to thrive in the dry ground.
The property is slightly elevated, and from the front door the view is pleasant, the houses and the cacti and the palm trees unfolding as a tapestry of greens and browns.
The lady of the house is Anilda Suarez dos Santos. She stood in the doorway in the late afternoon, a tired-looking woman in a denim skirt. Like Lula's mother, she has eight children. Like Lula's family, they are paupers. They transport their water across the distance in jugs. They plant, they tend, they harvest. Sometimes they go hungry.
Lula's bolsa familia program has reached their district. That $25 a month would be a great help to a family like this, but a local official found a way to swindle the poor out of the cash. No money from the government had come their way in months.
I asked Anilda if she had voted for Lula. Her answer was so forceful a ''yes'' that I wondered if the question had been impertinent, like asking her if she believed in God.
I was satisfied with her simple, emphatic response, but as I turned to leave, she felt compelled to add something else a foreigner needed to understand.
''Of course,'' she informed me, ''nothing has changed.''
Barry Bearak is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. His last article was about Pakistan.
posted by Rui at 12:21 da tarde
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