No one who coexists daily with Lula is startled any more by the unaffectedness with which he faces the monstrous and absurd persecutions that afflict him. It is as if he must live with persecution, injustice, the daily struggle to overcome these obstacles.

When he mentions his origins, when he recalls what he had to do to survive, one becomes aware of how Lula was born already condemned and how his life is a permanent struggle against the destiny that others have always attempted to impose on him and against which he was able to react and move ahead.

Lula was born condemned to die as a child, a destiny that millions of children like him were condemned to, in the poorest parts of Brazil. A destiny that three of his 11 brothers did not manage to escape. He himself says that, coming from where he came from, if he managed to stay alive to the age of five, he now has no fear of anything.

Having overcome this obstacle, travelling on an open truck with his surviving brothers and his mother to seek a better life in São Paulo, 13 days on the road, they were condemned to be, at best, civil construction workers, when São Paulo proclaimed itself “the city that grows fastest in the world, where four houses were built each hour”. Those who built them were the nordestinos (North-Easteners), discriminated, objects of scorn, who lived on the construction site until it was finished, and then moved on to the next one.

Lula worked as messenger boy, shoe-shiner, and all kinds of work of a poor youth, condemned to eternal poverty. He was condemned once more, but was capable, again, of escaping the destiny assigned to him. He undertook technical training, became a mechanical technician and thus made a professional leap forwards, to become a qualified metallurgical worker. He would no longer have to build houses in São Paulo, but automobiles.

Condemned to be a worker, Lula came to lead metallurgical workers in the resistance against the policy of wage freezes and intervention in unions of the dictatorship. Suddenly, Lula made another leap, he became the greatest union leader in Brazil, breaking the wage policies of the dictatorship and instigating the crisis of the collapse of the regime.

From a union leader, Lula decided to become a political leader, moving from union work to that of the Workers Party. He underwent a first great electoral defeat, as the candidate for governor of the province of São Paulo, coming in fourth place, when he had hopes of winning.

Overcoming the limits, Lula was the first union leader to become a candidate for the presidency of Brazil. He was defeated three times, until he won and became the first union leader to become President of Brazil.

When the leftist economists told him that Brazil was condemned, because of the immense crisis that the Cardoso government had inflicted on the country, Lula decided to recuperate the economy, with distribution of income. Not only did he achieve this, but he became the most successful president of Brazil and the Latin American leader with the greatest global impact in this century.

Lula also overcame the condemnation that he would not be able to elect a successor, and much less a woman who had never been a candidate for anything, and had Dilma Rousseff elected the first woman president of Brazil.

Thus, he ended his second mandate, with 87% of support among Brazilians, and then Lula had to face another challenge, another possible condemnation: throat cancer. He faced this with tenacity, with suffering, until he overcame this condemnation too.

As if it were not enough to have overcome all these challenges, he now faces a juridical-political-media siege that would have driven any other leader to defeat and discouragement. Everyone is surprised at the strength, the tranquility and the confidence with which Lula faces this new challenge. It is because he is someone who was born condemned, who had to overcome gigantic obstacles to come to this point, that the big obstacles of today do not appear to him to be insurmountable at all.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)