President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
The seventh of Aristides Inácio da Silva and Eurídice Ferreira de Mello's eight children, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was born on 27 October 1945 in the small town of Garanhuns in the state of Pernambuco in north-east Brazil. Aristides had left his family to work as a stevedore in the port of Santos, near São Paulo, and it was only at the age of five that Lula first met his father.
In December 1952 Eurídice and her children left Pernambuco in the hope of finding a better life in south-east Brazil, embarking on a thirteen-day journey in the back of a truck to the state of São Paulo. They settled in a poor district of the coastal town of Guarujá.
Lula attended a local school, but by the age of seven he was also supplementing the family income by selling peanuts, tapioca and oranges on the streets of Guarujá.
In 1956 Eurídice, who had separated from her husband, took her children to live in the city of São Paulo in a single room at the back of a bar in the district of Ipiranga. Outside school hours, Lula worked as a shoe-shine boy and ran deliveries for a dry-cleaner's.
Lula left school at the age of fourteen, working first in a warehouse and then a factory which made screws. While employed at the factory he started a three-year part-time course in order to qualify as a mechanic and lathe-operator.
In January 1966 he started work at Indústrias Villares, one of Brazil's biggest metallurgical companies, located in São Bernardo do Campo in the industrial area of metropolitan São Paulo known as the 'ABC'. It was there, through his brother José, that Lula first got involved in trade union activities.
In 1969 Lula was elected as a substitute member of the executive council the Metalworkers' Trade Union of São Bernardo do Campo and Diadema. He completed his rise through the union's hierarchy in 1975 when he became president, assuming overall responsibility for the representation of around 100,000 workers.
In 1980 the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores - PT) was born in São Paulo, created by Lula and other trade unionists along with leaders of social movements and left-wing academics, intellectuals and religious leaders.
By 1982 the Workers' Party was a political force to be reckoned with: it was represented in almost every part of Brazil and had a huge membership of around 400,000. Lula was at the forefront of the process of establishing an organizational structure for the party, and in 1983 he also helped to found the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), a national federation of trade unions.
Military rule finally came to an end in 1985, and Brazil embarked on a steady process of re-democratization. In the elections of 1986 Lula became federal deputy for the state of São Paulo, receiving more votes than any other individual candidate in Brazil.
In 1989, for the first time in twenty-nine years, Brazilians went to the polls to elect the President of the Republic. Lula received 31 million votes as candidate for the Workers' Party, but was beaten into second place by Fernando Collor. In 1994 and 1998 he lost again, both times to Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Lula's perseverance was rewarded on 6 November 2002 when he and José Alencar were respectively elected President and Vice-President of the Federative Republic of Brazil with 61.27% of the 52.7 million votes cast. The result was certified by the national electoral court on 14 December 2002.