Surprise Candidate Marina Silva Rattles Brazil's Presidential Race

Until Aug. 13, Marina Silva was the vice presidential candidate in a long-shot campaign to win the Brazilian national election. Then tragedy intervened: Her running mate, the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, Eduardo Campos, died in a plane crash. Silva succeeded him and, in the weeks since, has seen her poll numbers rival those of President Dilma Rousseff, who had been favored to win the Oct. 5 vote being contested by three major candidates and several minor ones. The two women are now expected to face each other in a runoff, and Silva stands a solid chance of beating the incumbent.

Silva, 56, rose from a poverty- and disease-stricken childhood, not learning to read and write until she was 16. She went on to organize native communities to confront logging interests in the Amazon, eventually becoming a senator and then environment minister in the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She resigned from that post and Lula’s Workers’ Party in 2008 after butting heads with the party elite, including Rousseff, whom Lula picked as his successor.