An Interview with Dilma Rousseff

From the Washington Post:

Four weeks ago, Brazilians elected their first female president - Dilma Rousseff, the chosen candidate of Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, Brazil's popular outgoing president. Rousseff comes to power with an unusual background: She fought in the 1960s underground against the military regime that then ruled Brazil, and she was imprisoned and tortured between 1970 and 1972. She then started in local politics and joined Lula's government in 2002 as minister of mines and energy, eventually becoming his chief of staff. On Dec. 2, in her first lengthy interview since the vote, Rousseff spoke about her plans for the next four years.

Brazil: Dilma Rousseff President

From Forbes:

Brazil made history yesterday, when the country elected former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff as its President, making her the highest ranking woman and first female head of state there. She was handpicked as the candidate for the Workers’ Party by popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and beat out opponent Jose Serra in Sunday’s runoff election.

In her victory speech, she cited goals of eradicating poverty and improving gender equality. Rousseff has already made tremendous progress. In her posts as Minister of Energy and Chief of Staff, she helped 31 million Brazilians move into the middle class and saw 24 million escape poverty. Moreover, her presence at the top serves as an example for girls around the world. She joins Cristina Fernandez, the first elected female president in Argentina, and Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla as another strong female leader in Latin America. She was named this year to our list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

Brasil's Dilma Rousseff

From the Telegraph:

Locked up and tortured by the dictatorship which ran Brazil during the 1970s, she was once branded by a prosecutor as the "Joan of Arc of subversion".

Yet in less than a month's time Dilma Rousseff is on course to become Brazil's first woman president, entrusted with running the largest and fastest-growing economy in Latin America.

Her first election campaign has gathered the apparently unstoppable force of a steamroller and Ms Rousseff is likely to win the first round of voting outright.

If she pulls it off, it would seem like a miracle for a 62-year-old apparatchik who has never before been elected to any political post and who was unknown to most of Brazil's 192 million people a few months ago - until you look to see who is behind the wheel of the steamroller.