Her Excellency  Dilma Rousseff
40th Chief of Staff of Brazil
Incumbent
Assumed office  June 21, 2005
President	Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Preceded by	José Dirceu
21st Minister of Mines and Energy of Brazil
In office January 1, 2003 – June 21, 2005
President	Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
Preceded by	Francisco Luiz Sibut Gomide
Succeeded by	Silas Rondeau
Born	December 14, 1947 (1947-12-14) (age 61) Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais
Birth name	Dilma Vana Rousseff
Nationality	Brazilian
Political party	Workers' Party
Spouse(s)	Cláudio Magalhães Carlos Araújo
Children	Paula Rousseff Araújo
Residence	Brasília, Brazil
Alma mater	Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Profession	Economist
Religion	Roman Catholic
Website	Casa Civil

Dilma Vana Rousseff (born December 14, 1947) is a Brazilian economist and politician. She is a member of the Worker's Party and was appointed as Chief of Staff by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005, becoming the first female to assume the position.

Born in an upper middle class household in Belo Horizonte, Dilma became interested in socialism during her youth, following the 1964 coup d'état. She soon became part of organizations that performed underground activities against the military dictatorship. Her level of activity in such organizations is highly controversial. After finally being captured, she spent almost three years in jail, between 1970 and 1972, where she claims she was "brutally tortured."

After her release from jail, Dilma rebuilt her life in Rio Grande do Sul with Carlos Araújo, who would be her partner for 30 years. Both helped in the foundation of the Democratic Labour Party on the state, participating actively in several electoral campaigns. She was the Secretary of Finance of Porto Alegre during the Alceu Collares administration, and later the Secretary of Energy of Rio Grande do Sul on both Collares and Olívio Dutra administrations. In 2000, after an internal dispute, she left the Democratic Labour Party and joined the Worker's Party.

In 2002, Dilma joined the team responsible for building the energetic government plan for then candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. After her highlighted performance on that group, Lula invited her to become Minister of Energy. Once again recognized for her technical and managerial merits, she was appointed Chief of Staff by Lula after the political crisis which led to the resignation of José Dirceu. Known for her temper, she became the center of several controversies, at the same time Lula chose her as his favorite candidate to succeed him.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Childhood and youth

Dilma Rousseff was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais on December 14, 1947 to Bulgarian Brazilian lawyer and entrepreneur Pedro Rousseff (born Pétar Russév, Bulgarian: Петър Русев)^[1][2] and housewife Dilma Jane Silva.^[3] Her father was related to the Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagriana and, as an active member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1920s^[4], had to flee from Bulgaria in 1929 due to political persecution, settling in France, where he lived until the end of World War II. He arrived in Brazil in the 1930s, already widowed (he left behind his son Luben, who died on 2007), but moved to Buenos Aires, returning to Brazil several years later, settling in São Paulo, where he succeeded in his business. Pétar Russév, a tall blonde blue-eyed man, adapted his first name to Portuguese and the last to French. During a trip to Uberaba, he met Dilma Jane Silva, a young schoolteacher born in Nova Friburgo and raised in Minas Gerais, where her parents acted as ranchers. The two got married and settled in Belo Horizonte, where they had three children: Igor, Dilma Vana, and Zana Lúcia (which died in 1977)^[4].

Dilma Rousseff at a press conference in 2009.

Pedro Roussef was a contractor for Mannesmann steel, in addition to building and selling real estate. The family lived in a large house, served by three employees, maintaining European habits. The children had 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 the traditional clubs and schools (Dilma was enrolled in Colégio Sion, a boarding school for girls where the students spoke primarily in French with their teachers). Encouraged by her father, Dilma acquired an early taste for reading. Pedro died in 1962, bequeathed around 15 properties^[4].

Rousseff in 2009.

On 1965, at age 15, Dilma 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 aginst the government established after the military coup. According to Dilma, it was on 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." On 1967 she joined the Worker's Politics (Portuguese: Política 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. Dilma joined the the second group, which originated the Command of National Liberation (Portuguese: Comando de Libertação Nacional - COLINA). According to Apolo Heringer, which was the leader of COLINA in 1968 and taught Marxism to Dilma on high school, she chose the armed struggle after she read Revolution inside the Revolution by Régis Debray, a Frenchman which had moved to Cuba and became a personal friend of Fidel Castro. Heringer says that "the book inflamed everybody, including Dilma."^[4]

During that period, Dilma met Cláudio Galeno Linhares, five years older than her, who also supported the armed struggle. Galeano, which had joined POLOP on 1962, had served in the Army, participated in the uprising of the sailors during the military coup and was arrested in Ilha das Cobras. They married in 1968 in a civil ceremony, after just one year of dating^[4].

[edit] Guerrilla activity

Yeda Crusius, Lula, Dilma Rousseff, and Jaime Ardila, president of General Motors of Brazil.

[edit] COLINA

Like her fellow militant men, Dilma had great leadership skills, managing to impose herself among men accustomed to give orders. She did not participated actively on any of the armed efforts of COLINA, as she was known for her public activities as a Marxism teacher to labour union members and editor of the newspaper The Piquet. Nevertheless, she learned how to handle weapons and confront the police^[4].

In early 1969, COLINA in Minas Gerais 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 January 14, 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^[4].

Dilma and Galeno then began to sleep each night on a different location, since their apartment was visited by one of the leaders of the organization that had been arrested. They had to went back to their home hidden in order to destroy the organization's documents. On March 1969, the apartment was invaded, but no document was found. They continued in Belo Horizonte for a few weeks trying to reoganize what was left of COLINA, but had to avoid their parents' houses, aware that were being watched by the military (Dilma's family had no knowledge of her participation on underground activities). In addition to that, Galeno had to undergo a physical change after a sketch of him was released for participating on a bank robbery (which he denies). Unable to remain on the city, the organization ordered them to move to Rio de Janeiro. Dilma was 21 and had just finished her fourth semester at the Minas Gerais Federal University Economics School^[4].

The amount of people from Minas Gerais on the Rio de Janeiro faction of COLINA was wide (including former Belo Horizonte mayor Fernando Pimentel, 18 years old at the time), with the organization having no infrastructure to shelter all of them. Dilma and Galeno stayed for a brief period in the house of an aunt of Dilma, which thought that the couple was 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. Dilma remained in Rio, where she helped the organization, attending meetings and transporting weapons and money. At one of these meetings, she met the Rio Grande do Sul-born lawyer Charles Franklin Paixão de Araujo, who was then 31 years old; they developed a sudden crush for each other. Araújo was head of a dissent group of the Brazilian Communist Party (Portuguese: Partido Comunista Brasileiro - PCB) and sheltered Galeano in Porto Alegre. The break up with Galeno was peaceful. As Galeano said, "in that difficult situation, we had no perspective of forming a regular couple."^[4]

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 (Portuguese: Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária - VPR), led by Carlos Lamarca. Dilma attended some meetings about the merger, which was formalized in two conferences in Mongaguá, leading to the creation of Revolutionary Armed Vanguard Palmares (Portuguese: Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares - VAR Palmares). Dilma and Araújo attended these conferences, as well as Lamarca, which thought that Dilma 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^[4].

[edit] VAR Palmares

Carlos Araújo was chosen as one of the six leaders of VAR Palmares, which claimed to be a "political-military organization of Marxist-Leninist partisan orientation which aims to fulfill the tasks of the revolutionary war and the establishment of the working class party, in order to seize power and build socialism."^[4]

As Maurício Lopes Lima, a former member of the Operação Bandeirantes (OBAN) search force (a structure which included the intelligence and torture services of the Armed Forces), declared, Dilma was the main leader of VAR Palmares. According to him, he received reports defining her as "one of the brains" of the revolutionary schemes. Police commissioner Newton Fernandes, which investigated the clandestine organization in São Paulo and drawed the profile of dozens of their members, said that Dilma was one of the head masters of the revolutionary schemes. The attorney which prosecuted the organization called her "Joan of Arc of subversion", saying that she led strikes and advised bank robberies.^[5] Dilma ridicules such comparison, stating that she does not even remember about much of the actions attributed to her.^[6] She was also dubbed as "the she-pope of subversion", "political criminal", and "female figure of sadly notable aspect."^[4]

Carlos Minc, which was also a VAR Palmares militant, denied Dilma's role as head of the clandestine organization.

Dilma would have been the head of the theft of a safe belonging to former governor of São Paulo Ademar de Barros (considered by the guerrilla fighters as a symbol of corruption). The action was carried out on June 18, 1969 in Rio de Janeiro, and resulted in the subtraction of 2.5 million U.S. dollars.^[7] It became the most spectacular and profitable action of the armed struggle.^[4] Carlos Minc, which was among the militants which raided the house of the alleged mistress of the former governor, has denied the participation of Dilma in the event, saying that the widespread version that she was the leader of the organization is rather exaggerated, since she was merely a member of no distinction. On at least three different occasions Dilma herself also denied participating in the event.^[8][9] Testimonials and police reports indicated that Dilma was responsible of managing the money of the robbery, paying the salaries of the militants, finding a shelter for the group, and buying a Volkswagen Beetle. Dilma remembers only of purchasing the car, and doubts that she was the one responsible for managing the money.^[10][11]

In 1969, VAR Palmares would have planned the kidnapping of Antônio Delfim Netto, a symbol of the "Brazilian Miracle" and the most powerful civilian in the federal government at the time. This alleged plan should have been carried out in December, as mentioned in the book Os Carbonários, written by Alfredo Sirkis in 1981. Antonio Roberto Espinosa, former head of both VPR and VAR Palmares, would have said that Dilma was one of the five members of the organization's leadership aware of it. The kidnap did not took place because the members of the organization were captured just weeks before. Dilma emphatically denies that she was aware of the plan and doubts that anyone involved really remembers about it. She also said that Espinosa fantasized about the event.^[10][11] After learning about the quotes that were being attributed to him, Espinosa said that he never stated that Dilma knew about the plan, which was rapid and vague. He said that Dilma never participated or planned any paramilitary actions; she always had only a political militancy.^{[12][13][14][15][16]}

Even with large amounts of money, the organization failed to maintain its unity. At a conference held in Teresópolis between August and September 1969, there was a major dispute among those who supported the armed struggle and who advocated working with the masses. Dilma was in the second group. While the first group split into the paramilitary VPR, led by Lamarca, the second (joined by Dilma) continued as VAR Palmares. There was a dispute over the money and weapons.^[4]

After the split, Dilma was sent to São Paulo, where she was in charge to keep safe the the weapons of her group. Avoiding keeping them in apartments without the necessary safeness, she and a friend (Maria Celeste Martins, which would become her Chief of Staff assistant decades later) moved to a simple boarding house in the eastern zone of the city, with shared bathroom, where they would hide the weapons under their beds.^[4]

[edit] Arrest

José Olavo Leite Ribeiro, who met three times a week with Dilma, was captured by the military. As Ribeiro reported, after a day of torture, he revealed the place where he would meet with another militant, in a bar on Rua Augusta. On January 16, 1970, he was forced to go to the bar accompanied by undercover policemen, where his colleague was captured and, when they were preparing to leave, Dilma unexpectedly arrived. Realizing that something was wrong, Dilma tried to leave the place without being noticed. The officers suspected of Dilma and searched her, discovering that she was armed. "If it was not for the gun, it is possible that she could have escaped", says Ribeiro.^[4]

Dilma was taken to the OBAN headquarters, the same place were Vladimir Herzog would be tortured to death five years later. She was allegedly tortured for 22 days by punching, ferule, and electric shock devices.^[17] As Maria Luisa Belloque, a cellmate, said "Dilma was shock even with car wiring." Some military sees Dilma's account with irony and disbelief, saying that no one could survive to 22 uninterrupted days of torture.^[18] Later, Dilma denounced the torture she suffered in court proceedings, citing even the names of those who tortured her, such as Army Captain Benoni de Arruda Albernaz, mentioned by several other witnesses. Although she revealed the locations of some militants during torture interrogation, Dilma managed to preserve the identities of Carlos Araújo (which would be arrested several months later) and Maria Celeste Martins.^[19] Dilma's name was on a list found at Carlos Lamarca's home, where were listed the prisoners who would get priority in exchange for hostages, but she was never exchanged and served her whole regularly.^[20]

Carlos Araújo was arrested on August 12, 1970. After Dilma was captured, he had an affair with actress and fellow militant Bete Mendes. After his arrest, he met Dilma on some occasions, during displacements regarding the military lawsuits both were being persecuted for. They were even a few months in the same prison in São Paulo, where during conjugal visits they reconciled, planning to resume married life after being released from jail.^[19] Dilma was convicted in first instance to six years in prison. She had already served three years when the Supreme Military Court reduced her sentence to two years and a month. She also had her political rights suspended for eighteen years.^[21]

In December 2006, the Special Commission for Reparation of the Human Rights Office for the State of Rio de Janeiro approved a request for indemnification by Dilma and eighteen other prisoners in law enforcement agencies of the São Paulo state government in the 1970s.^[22] In her request, a pivotal witness was Vânia Abrantes, who was in the same police car that transferred her from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro (Vânia was Araújo's girlfriend when he and Dilma began to date).^[19] Dilma also requested compensation in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, since she was arrested in São Paulo but taken to inquiry in Juiz de Fora and Rio de Janeiro. She also seeks indemnification from the federal government. The total compensation figure can get to 72,000 reais. As her advisors has declared, however, the indemnification has a symbolic character to her, and Dilma demanded the requests to be tried only after her departure from public office.^[21]

On April 5, 2009, Folha de S. Paulo published, on its front page, an alleged criminal record of Dilma containing notes about various crimes allegedly committed by her. The document would have been part of the file of the Department of Political and Social Order (Portuguese: Departamento de Ordem Política e Social - DOPS), the military regime's political police. Dilma questioned the veracity of the file, claiming that it was a forged document, which led the newspaper to declare that it did not obtained the document from DOPS' file, but rather via an e-mail and, thus, can not guarantee its veracity.^{[23][24][25][26]}

[edit] Political career

Rousseff and Lula meeting Barack Obama in the White House on March 14, 2009.

In 1977, she graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul with a degree in economics. Her academic credentials have been the subject of controversy as her official biography listed master and doctoral degrees she had never earned. She was, however, twice enrolled in the graduate program in economics at the State University of Campinas, without ever fulfilling all requirements for those degrees.^[27]

In the early 1980s, Rousseff took part in the restructuring movement of the Brazilian Labour Party (of social-democratic President João Goulart, overthrown by the 1964 coup d'état), linked to the group of Leonel Brizola. After the Supreme Electoral Court gave the name registry to the group linked to Ivete Vargas (Getúlio Vargas' niece), Dilma and the group linked to Brizola founded the Democratic Labour Party.

The party won the 1990 gubernatorial election in Rio Grande do Sul and Rousseff was appointed Secretary of Energy by Governor Alceu Collares. She remained on the office until Collares' term ended in 1995. In 1998, Olívio Dutra, gubernatorial candidate from the Worker's Party, won the state election with the support of the Democratic Labour Party and Rousseff was once again appointed head of the Energy Bureau. The following year, the head of the Democratic Labour Party left the state government and demanded the same from its members. Rousseff left the party and joined the Worker's Party to remain serving as the Secretary of Energy.

In January 2003, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appointed Rousseff as the Energy Minister. In June 21, 2005, she became the Chief of Staff, replacing José Dirceu, who left the position over media pressure and accusations of corruption. As a former Energy Minister, Rousseff is also the chairwoman of the board of directors of oil company Petrobras.^[28] She is considered a possible presidential candidate for the Worker's Party in the 2010 general elections^[29]. According to a recent poll by Sensus Institute, Dilma has the preference of over 23,5% of Brazilian voters against 40,4% of São Paulo governor José Serra. She is tied with Serra on the spontaneous poll, in which a list featuring the names of the likely candidates is not shown to voters.^[30]

[edit] Personal life

Rousseff has been married two times. Her first husband was journalist Cláudio Galeno de Magalhães Linhares, who introduced 20-year-old Dilma to the resistance movement. In the late 1970s, Dilma married Carlos Franklin Paixão de Araújo, with whom she had her only child, Paula Rousseff de Araújo. The couple is now divorced.

At a press conference on April 15, 2009, Rousseff announced that she had had an axillar lymph node removed. This was detected by a routine mammographic exam and was diagnosed as a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. She was submitted to adjuvant chemotherapy treatment for four months.^[31]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dilma Rousseff

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dilma Rousseff

• Biographical Data of Minister Dilma Vana Rousseff from the website of the Presidency of Brazil
• BARRIONUEVO, Alexei. "The Health of a Likely Presidential Candidate Comes Under Brazil's Microscope", The New York Times, May 23, 2009.
• DUFFY, Gary. "Brazil local vote to have national impact", BBC News, October 4, 2008.