José Serra Chirico (; born 19 March 1942) is a Brazilian politician who has served as a Congressman, Senator, Minister of Planning, Minister of Health, Mayor of São Paulo, Governor of São Paulo state, and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil. Early life José Serra was born in the São Paulo neighbourhood of Mooca to Francesco Serra, an Italian immigrant from Corigliano Calabro, Calabria, and Serafina Chirico, a Brazilian born to Italian parents. Serra comes from a lower middle class family. His father was semi-illiterate and worked as a fruit vendor in a market of São Paulo, but he was able to enroll his only child in college. In the early 1960s, he was a prominent member of the socio-political movement Ação Popular which opposed the conservative political system that existed at the time. Serra interrupted his studies in engineering at age 22 and left the country in 1964, after the coup that established the military government in Brazil. Serra came to the attention of the authorities having served as President of the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), (National Student Union) which opposed the existing conservative regime while he was a 4th year engineering student at the Polytechnic School at the University of São Paulo. José Serra was in exile from 1964 to 1978 in Bolivia, France, Chile, and the United States. In Chile, he did his master's degree in Economics and taught economics at the University of Chile (Universidad de Chile). There he also married Monica Allende (1967), then a top ballerina at the National Ballet of Chile. They had two children, Veronica (1969) and Luciano (1973). In the United States José Serra was awarded a Masters and Ph.D. in economics at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) and later spent 2 years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. On returning to Brazil after the political amnesty in 1978, Serra lectured in economics at the University of Campinas, did research for Cebrap, and wrote for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Political career In 1982 he was appointed São Paulo's State Secretary for Economics and Planning under Franco Montoro's governorship, and became an influential secretary of Montoro's government. In 1986 and 1990 he was elected and then reelected to Congress. In 1994 he was elected Senator for the State of São Paulo with more than 6.5 million votes. His first bid for the mayorship of the City of