Background
He left home with other migrants in the back of a truck, arriving in the port city of Santos in 1952. In 1957 he moved to SãoSao Paulo, where he took a job in a screw factory and where a decade later he became active in the Metal Workers' Union. He was elected president of the union in 1975 and gained national prominence in 1978 and 1979 when, under his leadership, the union confronted the automobile industry and the military government in a series of wildcat strikes.
In 1980 Lula helped to organize the Workers' Party (PT), which during the decade grew to become the largest and best organized left-of-center party in Brazil. Lula and the PT came to expand its political base to include much of the country's artistic and intellectual community, the very large radicalized wing of Brazil's Catholic Church, peasants in the northeast and the unemployed in urban shantytowns, and the Amazonian rubber-tappers, whose leader Chico Mendes (assassinated in 1988) was a PT deputy in Brazil's parliament.
Lula was defeated in his first candidacy for public office, a run for the governorship of SãoSao Paulo in 1982, but he was elected to Brazil's parliament in 1986. In the presidential election of November 1989, the first direct election of a Brazilian chief executive since 1960, Lula competed in a field of some 20 candidates. The initial round of voting narrowed the field to Lula and Fernando Collor de Mello, the aristocratic and flamboyant former governor of Alagoas. The runoff election in December polarized the political community, setting Collor's conservative following against Lula's leftist coalition. In the final vote count, Collor emerged with 35 million votes to 31 million for Lula.
Collor was forced to resign amid a corruption scandal in 1992, and Brazil's 1994 presidential race began with Lula holding a commanding lead over Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a onetime foreign minister and finance minister. Although Lula toned down his anticapitalist message and sought to build ties with Brazil's business community, he lost ground steadily during the campaign, finishing a distant second to Cardoso in the October election.