Lula arrived at the party late that night, gliding into the chilled auditorium, rumpled, tired and glossy with sweat.
Most of the guests were somewhat drunk on champagne. The President was giddy with exhaustion. When he tossed aside a prepared script before taking the stage, his aides grew nervous. This particular party was to honour Brazil's most admired companies, which meant the crowd was obscenely rich and fancily dressed.
Attending was Jose Sergio Gabrielli, the smooth-talking president of Petrobras, the world's second-largest oil company, with a market value of $200-billion. So was Fabio Barbosa, the cherub-faced president of Banco Santander, which raised more than $8-billion through the world's biggest initial public offering this year. And Roger Agnelli, chief executive of Vale, the mining giant that had just announced it would boost its Brazilian investment by 30 per cent to $12.9-billion next year.
The sheer wealth represented in the room was staggering, proof of Brazil's galloping economy, which, fuelled by the recent commodity boom and the emergence of a new consumer class, now ranks among the world's top 10 economies. A recent World Bank report suggested it could become the fifth largest by 2016 - stunning, for a country not long ago considered a basket case.
The country's burgeoning economy, in turn, is testament to a phenomenon even more remarkable: Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a barrel-chested bullfrog of a man who was born dirt poor and, against all odds, fought his way out of destitution to become Brazil's most celebrated president.
Within his own country, Mr. da Silva's story - a rags-to-riches fairy tale that mirrors Brazil's economic transformation - resonates from the favelas of Rio to the Presidential Palace in Brasilia. (His popularity even has a name in Brazil: Lulismo.) Globally, a cult of Lula has also emerged: Economists and foreign politicians have lauded Brazil as a model of balanced development, noting the social transformation that has occurred under his tenure. U.S. President Barack Obama dubbed Mr. da Silva the "most popular politician on Earth" at April's G20 Summit in London.
The highly public tribute underscored the inherent irony of Lula: Considered an eccentric socialist by many of the G20 members when he was first elected, the man once dismissed merely as a hero to the poor has become a rising global leader. Call him the other Obama. But unlike his American counterpart, he is leading a surging economy. And he has done it by turning 21st-century economics on its head. Before, prevailing wisdom dictated that developing countries had to boost their economies before redistributing wealth to the poor. But the Brazilian President has sought to achieve both goals at the same time, and says the country's growth has been fuelled by enriching the poor.
A once-overlooked Latin American nation, Brazil now commands big clout on the international stage, and not just because the charismatic and charmingly emotional President has managed to bag the 2016 Olympics.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - who earlier this year asked Mr. da Silva to help negotiate an end to Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip - visited Brasilia this week. Israel's Foreign Minister asked the Brazilian President to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program. Instead, Mr. da Silva backed the country's right to develop a peaceful nuclear initiative. But moments like these convince Brazilians that their country has finally arrived as a global player.
Onstage that night in Sao Paolo, Mr. da Silva, who sold peanuts on the street as a child, peered down over a landscape of designer gowns and plastic surgery. His tone was triumphant and a little bit smug: "There has never been another moment in the history of this country where we accumulated the wealth that we have now," he said, his voice the texture of sandpaper.
"We have managed to get where we wanted. We managed to get there and we can now say that there is no way that we will step down. We can step up, but not step down."
Others aren't so sure. As Mr. da Silva approaches the end of his presidency - his second, and final, term is up in October, 2010 - many worry about the future of the country. Economists are increasingly warning that its breakneck recovery from the economic downturn - fuelled by rising commodity prices and a flood of liquidity - could fizzle.
Critics worry that the President is asserting state control over the private sector, squandering cash by inflating government payrolls and generally making a mess of the books on his way out the door.
And some are questioning the nature of Brazil's global ambitions. When he was first elected, Mr. da Silva claimed his priority would be to end poverty in his country. Now, he believes Brazil's mission is to change the world - elbowing in on Middle East peace and taking aim at the United States and China on the subject of climate change.
The silent question hovering over the country now is whether he propelled the country's economic ascendancy, or merely happened to preside over it. The answer will prove crucial for Brazil in the coming years - and for the rest of the world, it will dictate to what degree the country will actually matter after Mr. da Silva leaves.
THE MAKING OF A LEADER
His speech to Brazil's leading businessmen finished, Mr. da Silva left the stage to catch a midnight helicopter to Brasilia.
In the auditorium, there was applause. At the bar, there was something else. "Lula is just surfing the wave. The only thing he doesn't take credit for is discovering the country," one of Brazil's corporate big shots, dressed in Hermès, told me that night.
"The problem is, he plays to those who are abroad. He puts on an act, but inside this country a lot of people are not happy," said another partygoer.
Mr. da Silva's administration tends to publicly dismiss any backlash as empty, classist nonsense, masking middle-class insecurity. The rich, so the argument goes, have worried since the President was elected in 2002 that they would become politically irrelevant, eclipsed by his primary supporters - the poor - who vastly outnumber them.
Privately, however, Mr. da Silva is unnerved. The uneasy feeling that everything could unravel echoes all the way up to the Palace. "From the President's point of view, he feels that much of what he's accomplished, to some extent, can be undone," one of his closest advisers in the Foreign Ministry told me.
"I think the most important aspect of President Lula is not what he is, but what he represents - a fundamental shift in Brazilian society, representing the emerging class," he explained.
"In many ways, he is the classical 'arriviste' in the good sense of the word."
Mr. da Silva was born in 1945 in a dusty, dead-end farming town in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, the youngest of nine children. Meals consisted of beans and manioc. Water was scooped from a ditch.
His father, Aristides, "forbade his children from playing, from having simple pleasures like ice cream and even from studying," said Denise Parana, Mr. da Silva's former aide, who wrote the most significant biography on him. "Lula felt in the flesh the meaning of the words 'exclusion' and 'injustice.'"
His life was punctuated by tragedy. He lost a little finger in a factory accident. In 1969, he married, but when his wife was seven months pregnant, she developed hepatitis and died along with their child.
Mr. da Silva channelled his grief into his work, transforming himself after a series of odd jobs into first a lathe operator, then a firebrand union leader. In the late 1970s, he led tens of thousands in a series of debilitating strikes to fight for better working conditions and raises.
In the process, Lula became a household name, famous for his ability to inspire followers and negotiate with his opponents "He was not suggesting we had to face the military regime, but he was suggesting we should do something to achieve better labour conditions and salaries," recalled Luiz Marinho, who, at the time, painted cars on Volkswagen's assembly line. "He didn't want to provoke an ideological debate. That wasn't what it was about."
Today, Mr. Marinho's chauffeur drives him around in a Volkswagen, adorned with the licence plate "Number One." The mayor of Sao Bernardo do Campo presides over the sputtering industrial centre of Sao Paolo where Mr. da Silva still keeps a flat on a bustling street of pool halls and car dealerships.
"We were paving the patch for democracy, but back then we didn't think about it that way. He certainly never thought it would lead him to become the president of the country," Mr. Marinho said.
In 1980, Mr. da Silva founded the Workers' Party (PT), a coalition of leftists, trade unionists and progressive Catholics. He won Brazil's presidency on his fourth try, in October, 2002, with an overwhelming 61 per cent of the vote.
"It's difficult to overstate the significance of that moment," said Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, the former editor of Folha, Brazil's most influential newspaper. "For the poor people of this country, it was deliverance."
Western leaders and lenders were nervous. They feared that the new president of one of the world's most powerful economies was anti-capitalist, and too cozy with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Foreign capital had begun to flee.
Mr. da Silva urged calm, writing a "letter to the Brazilian people." He vowed to honour contracts, pay down debts and play by the prevailing rules of the neo-liberal market.
He proved fiscally conservative, taking calculated moves toward domestic reforms, negotiating a bailout with the International Monetary Fund and hiring unabashed capitalists such as Henrique Meirelles, former chief executive officer of BankBoston, to run Brazil's central bank.
"He has actually been quite conservative," said Eduardo Lins da Silva, the journalist. "He did not follow all of the PT policies, and managed to maintain their support. He kept talking like a leftist leader, but he didn't act like one."
The changes in his country are undeniable: More than 19 million Brazilians have been lifted out of poverty during Mr. da Silva's two terms, according to the private Getulio Vargas Foundation economic think tank. He boosted the minimum wage, and put cash in the pockets of the poor with a family allowance that provides a family of four with roughly $100 a month. About 40 million low-income Brazilians (out of a population of 190 million) are suddenly shopping at supermarkets, buying vacuum cleaners with cash and television sets on credit.
Inflation has been tamed. Interest rates have come down to earth. Capital markets are fuelling new investment. While Western countries foundered and their banks went broke, Brazil expects 5-per-cent growth over the next year.
New consumer demand, coupled with new trade ties to the Middle East and Africa, have fuelled the country's economic growth and insulated it from the worst effects of the global economic downturn.
But many of Brazil's poverty-stricken say the President still hasn't done enough. In Santos, the port city where Mr. da Silva's family first settled, the poor remain grindingly poor. The cobblestone streets are coated with filth, bisected by train tracks. Some of his relatives still live in tumbledown shacks near the water.
Maria Elena claims she is related to Lula by marriage - her brother married his sister. When her brother died last year, she said, Mr. da Silva did not bother to attend the funeral. She feels abandoned: Power has corrupted him, bringing him too close to the ruling class, she said. "They say he travels a lot for fun instead of work. For me, the price of bread is going up," said Ms. Elena, tottering on legs painfully swollen with phlebitis.
Some economists have also criticized Mr. da Silva's initiatives. They say giving cash to the poor is a cheap trick that will fail to have any lasting effect and the credit extended to low-income people will never be paid back.
And even those who voted for him agree that he inherited favourable cards from his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who first took on Brazil's runaway inflation, regulated the banking sector and created an earlier, more limited, family-allowance program.
As for the country's upper class, the President is still trying to persuade them of the merits of his revolution. "I just want you to get a grip on what is happening in this country," he told the assembly of businessmen who'd gathered to hear him in Sao Paolo.
"These are people who buy products from Natura, people who eat chocolate from Nestlé, people who are buying gas from Petrobras, and these people who are buying everything that you produce.
"Maybe you think what you are producing is consumed by the more privileged people of this country," he said. "You are wrong."
While Mr. da Silva's message to the poor is "patience," he tells the rich not to step aside but to step up: "People who live on the floor below you, they are climbing a few steps. Still very slowly, but one day they will reach the top of the ladder and when they get there, probably the ones that are already at the top, they will build an additional floor."
It was a clumsy metaphor, but one that underscored the potential for Brazil's new wealth to create a new social order.
Yet some question Mr. da Silva's commitment to private enterprise. Plans for a state-owned company to control the development of vast new oil fields discovered off the coast of Rio in 2007 have raised fears that he is backtracking on his previous commitment to privatization. Brazil's elite is also furious at the President for pressuring Vale, the mining giant, to do more for the nation's economy - last month, the company announced a more aggressive Brazilian investment strategy under duress from the Palace.
Luis Furlan, who once served as Mr. da Silva's minister of industry, development and foreign trade, is nervous. "I would hope President Lula is bright enough to understand that his approval has to do with his abilities to privatize. If he changes course, he will lose that," he said.
Across the country, there is now growing speculation about what Mr. da Silva will do after leaving office. "I think what he would like to do is have something like a Clinton-type of foundation, or become something like a Mandela," one of his aides said.
With the election slated for October, Mr. da Silva has become reflective and preoccupied with his legacy. When he turned 64 last month, he celebrated his birthday at the Palace, watching a recently completed $10-million epic film: Lula, Son of Brazil , celebrating the President's unlikely rise from nothing.
"I wasn't there," said Fabio Baretta, the film's director, "but I heard he cried."
Sonia Verma is a writer for The Globe and Mail.
THE ROAD TO THE 2016 OLYMPICS
Two weeks after it was announced that Rio de Janeiro would host the 2016 Olympics, there was a dramatic flare in the city's gang wars. Rival factions battling over control of the drug trade in Morro dos Macacos (Monkey Hill) triggered a police raid. In the fighting that ensued, gangsters shot down a police helicopter with an anti-aircraft gun.
At least 21 people were killed, and the violence spilled over into the city. Gangsters torched cars and city buses to avenge the police invasion of their turf. A massive public funeral for the police officers was followed by more raids on the favelas, as security forces sought to calm fears that the International Olympic Committee's decision was a mistake.
Asked by a reporter at a press conference what he would do about the violence, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva replied in vague terms: "I am taking all the measures necessary to fix this problem, but it will take time to solve these problems of violence," he said. "We want to clean the city because it is unacceptable. It really sends a negative image of our country abroad.
"Every day, we have a feeling this is a lost cause, but we should not give up. I think we have to be more forceful and severe."
Mr. da Silva's advisers have indicated that Brazilian security forces will step up operations in the slums in the coming months, in an attempt to rid them of violence before his term ends.
But privately they admit that solving the deeper problems in the slums is a greater challenge: "It's going to take us at least 10 years to get the situation under control - I mean, to really have the state come in and begin to deal with the fundamental issues," one official said.
Those issues - a lack of education and health care - will take at least a generation to address. Plans involve building roads into the favelas, extending public transportation, building schools and community police patrols.
Meanwhile, the Lula administration hopes to move some slum dwellers into government housing. Others will be assigned property rights to the shacks they live in, one of the President's advisers said. "We need to help people become proprietors so the land they use can then be used as leverage for loans, to open businesses, whatever."