BRAZIL’S HUGELY popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been diagnosed with throat cancer and will start a course of chemotherapy treatment today.
Doctors found a malignant tumour on the larynx of the former union boss who rose to become his country’s first left-wing president during tests at the Sírio-Libanês hospital in São Paulo on Saturday.
The three centimetre tumour is “not very big” and the former president’s chances of a cure “are excellent” the hospital’s oncologist, Artur Katz, was quoted as saying in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
After visiting the hospital, Brazil’s finance minister Guido Mantega told waiting reporters that Lula and his wife were “tranquil” because doctors told him there was a cure. “It was caught at the beginning so the perspectives are good,” he said.
The news has shocked Brazil though doctors pointed to Lula’s history as a former smoker. Until recently he was occasionally pictured puffing on small cigars. The diagnosis came just two days after he celebrated his 66th birthday.
He left office at the start of the year after overseeing eight years of strong economic growth and implementing social programmes that raised tens of millions out of poverty. This combined with a personal history of a boy who grew up in poverty who went on to be a president who used folksy expressions and football metaphors to explain policy made him his country’s most popular ever leader.
As president, Lula ignored calls to alter the constitution and run for a third term, instead helping elect his little-known chief-of-staff Dilma Rousseff as his successor.
In 2009 she was cured of lymphatic cancer in the same hospital where he will be treated and in an e-mail statement on Saturday said she “was certain the same will happen with President Lula”.
Home to Brazil’s leading cancer centre, the hospital also recently treated Paraguay’s president Fernando Lugo for lymphoma and the Brazilian government offered its services to Hugo Chávez when the Venezuelan leader was diagnosed with a malignant tumour in June. He chose to have treatment in Cuba instead.
As well as a personal shock for millions of Brazilians, Lula’s illness will be a cause of political uncertainty for the government.
“He was still centrally involved in helping the government put together the intricate alliances necessary for mid-term elections next year and was still being discussed as a possible successor to President Dilma,” says André Pereira César, a political consultant in Brasília. “Now we will have to wait and see. But one thing is for sure – without Lula the country’s political scene would change radically.”