Ex-Guerrilla to Be Brazil's First Female President

Written by Laurie Bajo Friday, 05 November 2010 07:32

On Oct. 31, 2010 a former Marxist guerrilla who was tortured and imprisoned during Brazil's long dictatorship was elected Sunday as the first female president of Latin America's biggest nation, a country in the midst of a rapid economic and political rise.

A statement from the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees elections, said governing party candidate Dilma Rousseff won the election.

With nearly all ballots counted, Rousseff had 56 percent of the vote compared to just under 44 percent for her centrist rival, Jose Serra, the electoral court said.

On Rousseff’s first 25 minute speech she said her first promise was to, “honor the women” and she hoped that her win would allow, “fathers and mothers to look their daughters in the eyes and say, ‘Yes, a woman can.’”

Beginning Jan. 1, she will lead a nation on the rise, a country that will host the 2014 World Cup and that is expected to be the globe's fifth-largest economy by the time it hosts the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Despite Rousseff's win, many voters don't want "Lula," as he is popularly known, to go away. "If Lula ran for president 10 times, I would vote for him 10 times," said Marisa Santos, a 43-year-old selling her homemade jewelry on a Sao Paulo street. "I'm voting for Dilma, of course, but the truth is it will still be Lula who will lead us."

"We've been waiting for this dream for so long," said Sandra Martins, a 40-year-old school teacher who was dressed in Worker Party red and waving a large Rousseff campaign flag. "It's going to be the third term for Lula - except this time represented by a woman."

"I voted for Dilma because she is a fighter," said Estevam Sanches, a 43-year-old pizza parlor owner in Sao Paulo. "What we need is a fighter in the presidency to continue, as she says she will, with Lula's efforts to eradicate poverty and strengthen the economy."

Dilma is the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant father, a lawyer who died when she was 14, and a Brazilian mother who was a schoolteacher. Her past points to an early political awakening.In 1967, as a 19-year-old economics student, she joined a militant political group opposing the dictatorship. For three years she helped lead guerrilla organizations, instructed comrades on Marxist theory and wrote for an underground newspaper.

After being released, she moved to southern Brazil in 1973, where she reunited with her now ex-husband, Carlos Araujo, who was also an imprisoned militant. She gave birth to a daughter and finished an economics degree. As Brazil's dictatorship began to loosen its grip, Rousseff became more politically involved and campaigned to get her husband elected to the state congress in 1982.

"We fought and participated in a dream to build a better Brazil," she said in an interview published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo in 2005, one of the rare times she has spoken in detail about her militancy and torture endured."