Dilma Rousseff: Information from Answers.com

40th Chief of Staff of Brazil
Her Excellency Dilma Rousseff

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 illegal activities against the violent military dictatorship, which led her to clandestinity. Her level of activity in such organizations is highly controversial, including plannig of thefts, some of which resulted in deaths. After finally being captured, she spent almost three years in jail, between 1970 and 1972, where she was "brutally tortured."^[1]

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 Alceu 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 government's energy 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, Dilma became the center of several controversies, at the same time Lula made her his favorite candidate to succeed him as President.

1 Biography
2 Political career
3 Personal life
4 References
5 External links

Biography

Childhood and youth

Dilma Rousseff.

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)^[2]^[3] and housewife Dilma Jane Silva.^[4] Her father was related to the Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagriana and, as an active member of the Bulgarian Communist Party in the 1920s^[5], 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 on 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 succeed 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)^[5].

Rousseff 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 Rousseff 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. Peter Roussef died in 1962, bequeathed around 15 properties^[5].

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 made a great stir aginst the government established after the recent 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."^[5]

During that period, Dilma met Cláudio Galeno Linhares, five years older, who also supported the armed struggle. Galeano 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^[5].

Guerrilla activity

Lula and Dilma Rousseff.

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, once she was known for her public activities as a Marxism teacher to labour union members and editor of the newspaper The Piquet (Portuguese: O Piquete). Nevertheless, she learned how to handle weapons and confront the police^[5].

In early 1969, the COLINA in Minas Gerais was limited to a few dozen militants, with little money and few weapons. Its activities had boiled down to four bank robberies, some stolen cars and two bombings, no casualties. On January 14, however, after the arrest of some militants after a bank robbery, the others gathered to debate how they would 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^[5].

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 second year at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais School of Economics^[5].

The amount of people from Minas Gerais on the Rio de Janeiro faction of COLINA was wide (including former Belo Horizonte mayor Fernando Pimentel, which was 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."^[5]

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. After the release of AI-5, in 1968, he joined the armed struggle. On early 1969, he started to 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 classes, in opposition to VPR's military-based sense of revolution^[5].

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."^[5]

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), alleged, 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.^[6] Dilma ridicules such comparison, stating that she does not even remember about much of the actions attributed to her.^[7] She was also dubbed as "the she-pope of subversion", "political criminal", and "female figure of sadly notable aspect."^[5]

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^[8]. It became the most spectacular and profitable action of the armed struggle^[5]. Carlos Minc, which knew Dilma from VAR Palmares and 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 Dilma was the leader of the organization is rather exaggerated, since she was merely a member with no distinction. On at least three different occasions Dilma herself also denied participating in the event^[9]^[10]. 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 to the group, and buying a Volkswagen Beetle. Dilma only remembers of the purchase of the car, and doubts that she was the one responsible for managing the money.

Dilma was captured by the Brazilian Army and found guilty in a military trial, without the right to an attorney as she was considered as an "enemy fighter", and sent to jail, where she was allegedly repeatedly tortured from 1970 to 1973. In December 2006, the Special Commission for Reparation of the Human Rights Office for the State of Rio de Janeiro approved Rousseff's request for indemnification.

In the late 1970s, Rousseff married political militant Carlos Araújo and settled in Rio Grande do Sul, where they had a daughter.

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.^[11]

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.^[12] She is considered a possible presidential candidate for the Worker's Party in the 2010 general elections^[13]. 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.^[14]

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.^[15]