Catherwood LibraryILR School

This Sunday saw history made in Brazil, as this largest country in South America voted in its first left-wing president in forty years and the first working-class president in the nation's history, by the largest landslide in the nation's history. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva---known as Lula---is a former factory worker, union president, and ran, as he did in his past three attempts at the presidency, as a man of the people and the candidate of the Workers' Party he helped found. Staunchly opposed to U.S. President Bush's Free Trade of the Americas plan bacause of the harm it could do to Brazil's workers, Lula's overwhelming victory crossed geographic and class boundaries giving him a clear mandate to reform the rightist economic policies that led his country into crushing debt under the previous government.