Profile: Lula, metalworker and president

GENEVA: I had the opportunity to meet Lula on different occasions - more often when he was not yet Lula but simply Luiz Inácio da Silva, a charismatic union leader in the industrial suburbs of Sao Paulo. I only saw him once after he became a politically important figure, the candidate of the Left for the presidency. Certainly, he doesn't remember me. How many faces and how many speeches there have been since the founding of the Workers' Party and his three electoral campaigns! But I remember him quite well, in particular in one very special situation. It was in March 1979, and the military dictatorship was coming to an end after three decades of authoritarian power. A strike was blocking the factories in the ABC industrial zone of Sao Paulo and 80,000 workers crowded the stadium of Sao Bernardo. Inácio da Silva, who had been elected president of the metalworkers' union in 1975, spoke to the mass. There were no loudspeakers and the words of the future Lula were transmitted like a wave by the people. It was incredible! The workers in the front row repeated the sentences of the union leader to the second row, then the second to the third... and so on to the back of the stadium. Wages, working hours, labour rights and democracy. Two days later the strike was declared illegal, the governor sent in the army and the workers' leadership met in the church of La Matriz in Sao Bernardo. The bishop declared: "We have to open the door to the people. They are hungry for justice." Inácio was born in the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil, the seventh in a family of eight children. When he was six months old, his father, looking for a job, migrated to the south, to Santos, the harbor of Sao Paulo. Seven years later, Inácio made the same trip with his mother and the rest of the family - 3,000 km in 13 days to join the father in Sao Paulo, in one room at the back of a bar. Lula has spoken many times of the humiliation of seeing his father with another woman, of being thrown out of a cinema because he had no jacket, the despair of his mother to find a way to feed her children. "Brazilians have the right to eat twice a day" was one of the main slogans of his presidential campaign. Populism? No, just remembering. Like the great majority of poor Brazilians, Inácio started work at a very early age, in the streets polishing shoes, selling lemons. At 12, he worked in a textile shop, at 15 in a bolt plant. He lost a finger of his left hand in a work accident. When years later during one of his union campaign travels to his northeast and the Amazon he saw many people without arms or legs, he said: "I was lucky to have lost only a little finger." The rest of the story is known: president of the union, founding of the Workers' Party (PT), the political adventure. Many years after the big strikes of the 1980s, I saw Lula at a Congress of the National Confederation of Metalworkers (CNM). The union had become important, the PT a well-established party and Inácio known as Lula the world over, but I did not perceive any change in his simplicity and deep commitment to the people. The reason? He never forgot that trip from the north and never failed to remember his own story. In his speech, he invited the union leaders of Brazil's industrialised south not to forget that "there are people who still suffer from hunger..." Now that the dream is a reality, I like to imagine Inácio da Silva as a man who will never forget having been poor. Someone has said that he's wearing a tie now, which makes me remember the sentence of a poor peasant who, when I met him, said: "To honour you, I have put on the only tie I have." And Lula, too, in honouring the people he comes from, the workers and poor of Brazil. Good luck, Inácio.