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Dilma Rousseff

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff: From Guerrilla Fighter to “the Most Powerful Woman in the World”

 

Brazil has made history with the swearing-in of its first female president. On Saturday, Dilma Rousseff received the presidential sash from outgoing President Lula da Silva at a ceremony in the capital Brasília. In the 1960’s, Rousseff was a guerrilla resisting Brazil’s military dictatorship. She was imprisoned and tortured for three years. Democracy Now! interviewed Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University, and author of “Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.” His most recent book, “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. For the video/audio podcast, transcript, to sign up for the daily news digest, and for today’s entire show, visit www.democracynow.org. Please consider supporting independent media by making a donation to Democracy Now! today, visit: http://www.democracynow.org/donate/YT

Dilma Vana Rousseff (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈd(ʒ)iwmɐ ˈvɐ̃nɐ ʁuˈsɛfⁱ] born 14 December 1947) is the 36th and current President of Brazil, in office since January 2011. She is the first woman to hold the office. Previously she was Chief of Staff under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2005 to 2010.

The daughter of a Bulgarian entrepreneur, Rousseff was raised in an upper middle class household in Belo Horizonte.   She became a socialist during her youth, and following the 1964 coup d’état joined various left-wing and Marxist urban guerrilla groups that fought against the military dictatorship. Rousseff was captured and jailed between 1970 and 1972 and reportedly tortured.

After her release, Rousseff rebuilt her life in Porto Alegre with Carlos Araújo, who would be her partner for 30 years.   Both helped found the Democratic Labour Party (PDT) in Rio Grande do Sul, participating in several of the party’s electoral campaigns. She became the Secretary of the Treasury of the city of Porto Alegre in the Alceu Collares administration, and later the Secretary of Energy of the State of Rio Grande do Sul under both Collares and Olívio Dutra administrations.  In 2000, after an internal dispute in the Dutra cabinet, she left PDT and joined the Workers’ Party (PT).

In 2002, Rousseff joined the committee responsible for the energy policy of presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who after winning the election invited her to become Minister of Energy.   In 2005, a political crisis triggered by a corruption scandal led to the resignation of Chief of Staff José Dirceu. Rousseff took over the post, remaining in office until 31 March 2010, when she left in order to run for President.   She was elected in a run-off on 31 October 2010. She is the first female elected President of Brazil.

Early life – Childhood and youth

Dilma Vana Rousseff was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, on 14 December 1947, to Bulgarian lawyer and entrepreneur Pedro Rousseff (born Pétar RússеvBulgarian: Петър Русев, 1900–1962) and schoolteacher Dilma Jane da Silva.   Her father was born in GabrovoPrincipality of Bulgaria and was a friend of the Nobel Prize-nominated Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagriana.   An active member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1920s, Petar Rusev fled political persecution in Bulgaria in 1929, settling in France. He arrived in Brazil in the 1930s, already widowed (he left behind his son Lyuben, who died in 2007), but soon moved to Buenos Aires. He returned to Brazil several years later, settling in São Paulo, where he succeeded in business. Pétar Rúsev adapted his first name to Portuguese and the last to French. During a trip toUberaba, he met Dilma Jane da Silva, a young schoolteacher born in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro, and raised in Minas Gerais, where her parents were ranchers. The two married and settled in Belo Horizonte, where they had three children: Igor, Dilma Vana, and Zana Lúcia (who died in 1977). Igor Rousseff, Dilma’s elder brother, is a lawyer.

Pedro Rousseff was a contractor for Mannesmann steel, in addition to building and selling real estate. The family lived in a large house, had three servants, and maintained European habits. The children had a classical education, and both piano and French lessons. After Pedro defeated the initial resistance of the local community to accept foreigners, the family began to attend traditional clubs and schools.

Education and early political awareness

Dilma Rousseff (center) with her parents and siblings.

Rousseff was enrolled in preschool at the Colégio Izabela Hendrix and later received primary education at Colégio Nossa Senhora de Sion, a boarding school for girls run by nuns, where the students primarily spoke French with their teachers. Encouraged by her father, Rousseff acquired an early taste for reading. Pedro died in 1962, leaving behind around 15 properties.

In 1964 Rousseff left the conservative Colégio Sion and joined the Central State High School, a co-ed public school where the students would usually make a great stir against the dictatorship established after the military coup. According to Rousseff, it was in this school that she became aware of the political situation of her country, getting “very subversive” and realizing that “the world was not a place for débutantes.” In 1967 she joined the Worker’s Politics (PortuguesePolítica Operária—POLOP), an organization founded in 1961 as a faction of the Brazilian Socialist Party. Its members soon found themselves divided over the method to be used for the implementation of socialism; while some supported the struggle for the election of a constituent assembly, others preferred the armed struggle.   Rousseff joined the second group, which originated the Command of National Liberation (PortugueseComando de Libertação Nacional—COLINA). According to Apolo Heringer, who was the leader of Colina in 1968 and taught Marxism to Rousseff in high school, she chose the armed struggle after reading Revolution inside the Revolution by Régis Debray, a French intellectual who had moved to Cuba and became a friend of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Heringer says that “the book inflamed everybody, including Dilma.”

During that period, Rousseff met Cláudio Galeno Linhares, a brother in arms five years older than her. Galeno, who had joined POLOP 1n 1962, had served in the Army, participating in the uprising of sailors against the military coup, for which he had been arrested in Ilha das Cobras. They married in 1968 in a civil ceremony, after dating for one year.

Guerrilla activity – Colina

Dilma Rousseff during an interview.

Rousseff participated in the militant activities of the Comando de Libertação Nacional—COLINA (English: National Liberation Command) and advocated Marxist politics among labour union members and as editor of the newspaper The Piquet. According to the magazine Piauí, she handled weapons.   Most of the Brazilian media report that she was engaged only in “organization tasks.”

In early 1969, the Minas Gerais branch of Colina was limited to a dozen militants, with little money and few weapons. Its activities had boiled down to four bank robberies, some stolen cars and two bombings, with no casualties. On 14 January, however, after the arrest of some militants during a bank robbery, the rest of them gathered to debate what they would do in order to release them from jail. At dawn, the police invaded the group’s house and the militants responded by using a machine gun, which killed two policemen and wounded another.

Rousseff and Galeno then began to sleep each night in a different location, since their apartment was visited by one of the leaders of the organization that had been arrested. They had to go back to their home secretly in order to destroy the organization’s documents. On March 1969, the apartment was invaded by the police, but no documents were found. They stayed in Belo Horizonte for a few more weeks trying to reorganize what was left of Colina, but had to avoid their parents’ houses, aware that they were being watched by the military (Rousseff’s family had no knowledge of her participation in underground activities). In addition to that, Galeno had to undergo facial plastic surgery or a similar procedure (although he denies this) after a sketch of him was released for participating in a bank robbery. Unable to remain in the city, the organization ordered them to move to Rio de Janeiro. Rousseff was 21 and had just finished her fourth semester at the Minas Gerais Federal University School of Economics.

There were a large number of people from Minas Gerais in the Rio de Janeiro faction of Colina (including former Belo Horizonte mayor Fernando Pimentel, 18 years old at the time), with the organization having no infrastructure to shelter all of them. Rousseff and Galeno stayed for a brief period in the home of one of Rousseff’s aunts, who thought that they were in Rio on vacation. Later they moved to a small hotel and then to an apartment, until Galeno was sent by the organization to Porto Alegre. Rousseff remained in Rio, where she helped the organization, attending meetings and transporting weapons and money, according to the magazine Piauí. At one of these meetings, she met the Rio Grande do Sul-born lawyer Carlos Franklin Paixão de Araújo, who was then 31 years old; they developed a sudden attraction to one another. Araújo was head of a dissident group of the Brazilian Communist Party(PortuguesePartido Comunista Brasileiro—PCB) and sheltered Galeno in Porto Alegre. The breakup with Galeno was peaceful. As Galeno said, “in that difficult situation, we had no prospect of being a regular couple.”

Araújo was the son of a prominent labor defense lawyer and had joined the PCB early. He had traveled through Latin America (having met Castro and Che Guevara) and had been imprisoned for several months in 1964. He joined the armed struggle after the issue of AI-5 by the dictatorship in 1968. On early 1969, he began to discuss the merger of his group with Colina and Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (PortugueseVanguarda Popular Revolucionária—VPR), led by Carlos Lamarca. Rousseff attended some meetings about the merger, which was formalized in two conferences in Mongaguá, leading to the creation of Revolutionary Armed Vanguard Palmares (PortugueseVanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares—VAR Palmares). Rousseff and Araújo attended these conferences, as well as Lamarca, who thought that Rousseff was a “stuck-up intellectual.” His perception was based on her defense of a revolution through the political engagement of the working class, in opposition to VPR’s military-based sense of revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilma_Rousseff

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