Airplane with president on board forced to land in Mexico due to malfunction

A passenger airplane with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on board circled in the sky for several hours and landed in Mexico due to a malfunction, The Daily Mail reports.

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Adrian Pingstone Arpingstone, PDM

The plane arrived in Mexico City on Tuesday, October 1. Da Silva arrived in the country to attend the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum. However, after taking off from the Mexican capital, pilots reported a technical issue.

It is expected that the Brazilian leader will transfer to another plane to return home.

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Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (born 24 June 1962) is a Mexican politician, scientist, and academic who has been serving as the 66th president of Mexico since October 2024. She is the first female president of Mexico and the first president from a predominantly Jewish background. She is a member of the left-wing National Regeneration Movement (Morena). From 2000 to 2006, Sheinbaum served as secretary of the environment under future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his tenure as head of government of Mexico City. She was mayor of the Tlalpan borough from 2015 to 2017 and was elected head of government of Mexico City in the 2018 election, where she ran a campaign that emphasized curbing crime and enforcing zoning laws.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also known as Lula da Silva or simply Lula, is a Brazilian politician who is the 39th and current president of Brazil since 2023. A member of the Workers' Party, Lula was also the 35th president from 2003 to 2011. He has also held the presidency of the G20 since 2023. Lula quit school after second grade to work, and did not learn to read until he was ten years old. As a teenager, he worked as a metalworker and became a trade unionist. Between 1978 and 1980, he led workers' strikes during Brazil's military dictatorship, and in 1980, he helped start the Workers' Party during Brazil's political opening. Lula was one of the leaders of the 1984 Diretas Já movement, which demanded direct elections. In 1986, he was elected a federal deputy in the state of São Paulo. He ran for president in 1989, but lost in the second round. He went on to also lose two other presidential elections, both in 1994, and then in 1998. He finally became president in 2002, in a runoff. In 2006, he was successfully re-elected in the second round.