Mainstream WeeklyFor a very long time, his only companions were grinding poverty and a constant challenge to see food on the table. He himself may not have known that these early struggles to survive would shape Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to become one of the most respected socialist leaders in the world.
On October 26, Lula, now 81, stunned Brazil and much of the world alike by coming from behind to overcome strong opposition from the Trump-backed Flavio Bolsonaro by taking 51.8 per cent of all the votes in the second round.
It is not without reason that Lula immediately thanked the people of Brazil for the most unexpected victory, a win which halted the US President’s desperate attempt to put a Washington-friendly politician in power in Brasilia.
Today, Lula’s stature is such that Barack Obama once called him “the most popular politician on Earth” – in part because the Brazilian always championed the cause of the downtrodden and called for global action to roll back hunger.
This is because Lula really knew what hunger is – and how much pain it causes to those at the bottom rung of a hugely unequal society.
Lula grew up amid rural and urban poverty, something that ended up shaping his lifelong political worldview.
He was born on October 27, 1945 as the seventh of eight children in a poor and illiterate family in Caetes, an arid and impoverished town in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco.
It was a dry and underdeveloped interior of Brazil, and his family struggled for sheer survival. Hunger deeply affected them.
His father eventually moved to the industrial heartland of Sao Paolo to work in a factory while his mother and siblings remained in Pernambuco, subsisting on a diet of flour and beans. They could afford little else.
Lula was seven when his mother sold her watch and a donkey to afford a 13-day journey in an open-backed truck to Sao Palolo to join the father in the hope of providing a better life to the children.
But deprivation refused to leave them. The family lived in cramped and precarious conditions in a suburb, battling unending financial strain.
To help the family, Lula did odd jobs from a very young age. He would shine shoes on the streets or sell peanuts. He also delivered laundry and worked as an office errand boy. For a while, he was a dry-cleaning assistant.
Pressures of poverty and the need to work prevented him learning how to read until he was 10 years old. At age 14, he gave up school for good to work full-time. There was no other choice.
His first job came in the same age when he found employment in a factory which made screws and auto parts. Over time, he became a skilled machinist.
In 1964 he lost a finger while working a mechanical press in an auto parts factory. The amputation became a physical emblem of his working class background.
Recently, when Bolsonaro tried to make fun of him by calling him “Nine Fingers”, Lula hit back to say the accuser was “some rich guy” who “doesn’t know what hunger is”.
Bolsonaro didn’t realise that his remark was seen as deeply offensive to one who was seen as one of them by most Brazilians.
A military coup in Brazil in 1964 – the same year Lula lost a finger – led to severe labour market changes, pushing workers deeper into poverty.
Lula himself had to change jobs several times before joining a metallurgical company where he came into contact with the trade union movement thanks to his brother, José Ferreira da Silva.
In 1978, the military junta outlawed strikes and dismantled mandatory protection given to workers. A defiant Lula led a protest strike by thousands of metal workers in 1979-80, an industrial action that played a role in returning Brazil to the democratic path.
But personal tragedies did not go away. He lost two wives and an unborn child in tragic circumstances.
Ultimately, however, Lula – shaped by the poverty he had witnessed and suffered first hand – became a socialist icon. He fought elections, losing some and winning some.
A boy who once sold peanuts to tourists finally became the president of one of the largest economies in South America.
It is only a study of his poverty-laced political rise that can help one to understand why Lula is a champion of a politics so different from his rightist political rivals as well as Trump, the political godfather of the Latin American Right – and why Brazil has elected him as president a fourth time.