Early Life
Paulo Salim Maluf, the son of Lebanese Christian immigrants Salim Farah Maluf and Maria Stephan Maluf, was born in São Paulo, and graduated 1954 in engineering at the University of São Paulo (USP), where coincidentally he was a colleague of the late Mário Covas, another important Brazilian politician who would later become one of his biggest political rivals.
At the time a self-acknowledged playboy with a taste for fast-racing sportscars, Maluf entered professional politics thanks to his family's friendship with the then military president Artur da Costa e Silva, with whom he shared a common interest in Horse racing bets. Banking on this friendship, he was to be appointed mayor of São Paulo in 1969, replacing the very popular Faria Lima. In a manner very similar to New York’s Robert Moses, he suspended the construction of the São Paulo Metro and built one of the most controversial constructions of Brazil: Costa e Silva elevated expressway, also known as Minhocão (“Big Earthworm” in Portuguese). This expressway is seen as responsible for the degradation of a great area of São Paulo´s downtown by placing a high-traffic elevated road in the middle of a residential area and is considered as the hallmark of the military dictatorship's – and Maluf's – authoritarian, road enhancement and private-car-friendly urban policies in São Paulo – its building being made possible only by the impossibility of a public reaction to it on the surrounding community's side.
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