Lula!: The Man, The Myth and a Dream of Latin America - biography by Richard Lapper

 Luiz Inazio Lula de Silva is not just another President of Brazil. He is the first one to rise from abject  poverty, breaking a long tradition of leadership dominated by political and economic elites.

The oligarchic business families could not imagine the country being ruled by a leftist trade unionist from a poor family without college education. Their reaction is brought out poignantly in this story. During his first election campaign, Lula was passing by the side of an elite school in a rich neighborhood. One of the students shouted “vote for Lula”. Taken by surprise, Lula thanked the boy but asked him why was a boy from a rich family support a leftist candidate. The boy replied, “Señor Lula. My father is a wealthy businessman. He says that if you get elected, you will ruin the business and the country with your leftist policies. He has promised to shift the family to Miami, if you were elected as president. I Love Miami”.

Lula has become president for the third time, overcoming the initial apprehensions of the businessmen. In fact, he has become a darling of the business community by promoting their interests both within and outside the country by including large delegations in his state visits. There were over 300 businessmen who had accompanied President Lula during his latest visit to India in February this year.

Richard Lapper, the author of the book, brings out vividly the long and incredible journey of Lula from a dirt poor family in the backward, arid and remote north east part of the country to the presidential palace in Brasilia. Lula’s journey starts in an old beaten up truck through 2500 kms of rough roads from his native village Caetés in the impoverished region of Pernambuco to São Paulo. Lula was seven years old during this 1952 journey along with his six siblings and mother as well as other emigrating neighbors.  Desperate to escape the poverty that had been exacerbated by two years of drought, his mother Dona Lindu was eager to rejoin her husband Aristides Inácio da Silva, who had made the same trip seven years earlier and got a job in Santos port near São Paulo . She sold the family’s plot of land, the primitive shack, the cow and the donkey to make the trip and join her husband. The difficult back-breaking journey, mainly over dirt roads, was an epic of endurance that would take 13 days. 

On arriving at Santos, Dona Lindu found that her husband was living with a new wife. He was angry with the surprise arrival of his family. While he gave some financial support, he became abusive and started beating up the first wife and her children. So she moved away from the husband and started a new life with her children who started working. Lula, joined one of his brothers in selling peanuts, oranges, and a coconut sweet called cocada on the streets in Santos. After a few years of schooling, he found a part-time position as an office boy in a small company.

Lula became a lathe operator after training in a public apprentice scheme and gradually got involved in a growing labour movement during the late 1960s, persuaded by his older brother Frei Chico who was a Communist Party member. After founding and then leading the trade union-based Workers’ Party (PT), Lula stated his political career. He stood in the election for membership of the São Paulo state legislature in 1982 and lost. In 1986, he got elected to the Federal Congress. He ran for president three times in 1989, 1994 and 1998 unsuccessfully. After this, many had written off Lula, dismissing him as an old-style labour unionist, out of touch with the new, more liberal and market-friendly public mood. But Lula surprised his critics. He moderated his goals, dropped the rabble-rousing tone that had marked his first forays into politics, and then surged to success. After winning the presidency twice successively in the 2002 and 2006, Lula left office in January 2011 with his popularity sky-high and as something of an international star. His success in maintaining economic stability, reducing poverty, and improving living standards was applauded by the Brazilians. He had evolved his own governance and development model called as Lulaism or Brasilia Consensus which was a balanced, pragmatic and mature mix of pro-poor and business friendly policies. He believes that the country needs a vibrant private sector to create wealth and employment to supplement the government’s efforts. He stood out as a role model for Latin America, polarized by the confrontation between left and right. 

Since the Brazilian constitution does not allow more than two consecutive presidential terms, Lula had got Dilma Rouseff elected to succeed him in 2010 and 2014. But she let him down by her naive and arrogant political style and mismanagement. She was impeached by the right-wing members of the Congress on a an insignificant budget management error. Lula was put in jail on some trumped up charges by the judges and prosecutors with a political agenda to discredit Lula and PT.  This created an opportunity for Bolsonaro, the extreme rightist, to come to power as president in the 2018 elections.  Bolsonaro went on to deepen political polarization and tarnish the country’s image, with his Trump-like combative, coarse and divisive policies..After spending 580 days in jail, Lula got exonerated and returned to politics . He won the presidency again in the October 2022 elections and has announced his intention to contest in the October 2026 election. 

But Lula is now a fading star and his political party PT has lost lot of voters. While Lula won in 

the last election, the PT suffered losses even in their strongholds. There have been some corruption cases in recent years recalling the public memory of the notorious Car Wash scandal. But Lula’s image got a boost after his successful stand against Trump’s tariffs and bullying.

The country has changed drastically with the rise of the Bible, Beef and Bullet constituencies which control the Congress and move the political agenda of the country. The poor who voted earlier for Lula have been hijacked by the new Evangelical churches, who have increased their sway over nearly one third of the population. The powerful unions of the manufacturing industries have been overshadowed by the service workers of the digital economy. Lula’s rhetoric does not appeal to the young population as it did to their parents. On the contrary, the new generation has gone right consumed by the false narratives and fake news in the social media dominated by extremist rightists and influencers.

So it would be challenging for the 80 year-old Lula to win in the coming election in October this year. But he might defy the odds, as he had done many times in his life.

Lapper has also give a detailed account of the rise of Marina Silva who has a similar story like Lula. Born in a poor rubber tapper family in Amazon, she rose to become the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change for the first five and a half years of Lula’s presidency. She even contested the presidential elections on her own in 2010, 2014 and 2018 but was unsuccessful.

Lapper has narrated the journey of Lula in the larger context of the history of Brazil, starting from the colonial period to the current situation in 2026. 

He has given a fairly objective and balanced portrait of Lula in this book. I found his earlier book Bible, Beef and Bullets: Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro”(published in 2021) also as informative and non-partisan. My review of the book in https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2021/06/bolsonaro-bible-beef-and-bullets.html

Lapper’s perspectives are refreshingly free from the typical western prejudices. This is because of Lapper’s own long journey. As a British student he was fascinated by Marxism and the sociopolitical situation in Latin America. He took to academia, and left-wing activism before becoming a journalist. He had learned Spanish and worked as a correspondent for nearly two years in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, attracted by the excitement of the revolutions sweeping through those countries. He was the Latin America editor of Financial Times for 10 years and had lived in Brazil between 2003 and 2011. Most importantly, he is married to a Brazilian. He had gained first hand knowledge of the Brazilians through interaction with the extended family and friends on his wife’s side. Since leaving the FT, he has continued to visit Brazil regularly, spending up to a quarter of the year there. 

Lapper’s book, which has just been published in February 2026, is a valuable additional source for those following Lula, Brazil and Latin America.