“With You I Learned to Do Politics”: Lula Remembers Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
This article by Blanche Petrich originally appeared in the October 31, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
It was 1979. At a university in Houston, Texas, the young Brazilian union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was beginning to stand out in politics and to promote internationally the foundations of the PT (then in its infancy), was speaking before a packed auditorium. But the interpreter did not speak Portuguese well, nor did Lula speak English. The talk was about to founder when a tall, brown-skinned man stood up from the audience. “I’ll translate,” he offered. “It was none other than compañero Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas,” Lula recalled.
From that encounter, more than 40 years ago, a strong friendship was born between the two politicians. In May 2024, on the occasion of the 90th birthday of engineer Cárdenas Solórzano, the UNAM organized a tribute celebration in which a video message from President Lula was broadcast, in which he shared that small story that would mark a strong, lifelong relationship.
“I feel very proud to have chosen you as a compañero, Cárdenas, because with you I learned to do politics, I learned solidarity, I learned respect,” the veteran Brazilian leader said, visibly moved.
According to Lula, his great Mexican friend still had to last 10 more years, since the Brazilian leader, who was 78 years old at the time, hoped that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas would live to 102 so he could return the gesture and also send him a 90th birthday greeting. “Because you know,” he reminded him, “that I want to live to 120.”
The brief video message is a tribute to friendship:
We cannot choose our brothers, we are simply children of a father and a mother. But a friend, we choose. And I have had the joy of living this relationship of friendship with the engineer for many years. Rarely have I known a man so coherent, so serious, so decent and honest in his commitments to democracy and to humanity’s quality of life.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
On that occasion he also recalled with sorrow the theft of Cárdenas’s electoral victory in the 1988 presidential election. “Who knows if the history of Mexico could have been much better.” He also recalled that Cárdenas was one of the very few politicians in the world who left his country to travel to Brazil and visit him in the prison in Curitiba, Paraná, where he was incarcerated between 2018 and 2019.
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