I was going to start this column with a tale about how Lula and I spent a day and evening together in the early 1980s in São Bernardo do Campo, a Brazilian industrial city just south of Sao Pãolo. He had been elected leader of the 100,000-strong metalworkers union, but he still came across as a horny-handed son of toil.

I could speak Portuguese in those days, and we had an interesting time. However, Luiz Inácio da Silva (as nobody but his mother ever called him), went........

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