Dilma Vana Rousseff (Brazilian Portuguese: [ˈdʒiwmɐ ˈvɐ̃nɐ ʁuˈsɛf]; born 14 December 1947), known mononymously as Dilma, is a Brazilian economist and politician who served as the 36th president of Brazil from 2011 until her impeachment and removal from office on 31 August 2016. She is the only woman to have held the Brazilian presidency to date. Since March 2023, she has been the chair of the New Development Bank. She also served in the cabinet of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during his first presidency—first as Minister of Mines and Energy, from 2003 to 2005, then as Chief of Staff from 2005 to 2010.
Rousseff was raised in an upper middle class household in Belo Horizonte. She became a socialist in her youth. After the 1964 coup d'état she joined left-wing and Marxist urban guerrilla groups that fought against the military dictatorship. Rousseff was captured, tortured, and jailed from 1970 to 1972.
After her release, Rousseff rebuilt her life in Porto Alegre with her husband Carlos Araújo. They both helped to found the Democratic Labour Party (PDT) in Rio Grande do Sul, and participated in several of the party's electoral campaigns. She became the treasury secretary of Porto Alegre under Alceu Collares, and later Secretary of Energy of Rio Grande do Sul under both Collares and Olívio Dutra. In 2001, after an internal dispute in the Dutra cabinet, she left the PDT and joined the Workers' Party (PT).
In 2002, Rousseff became an energy policy advisor to presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who on winning the election invited her to become his minister of energy. After Chief of Staff José Dirceu resigned in 2005 in a political crisis triggered by the Mensalão corruption scandal, Rousseff became chief of staff and remained in that post until 31 March 2010, when she stepped down to run for president. She was elected in a run-off in 2010, beating Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) candidate José Serra. In 2014 she won a narrow second-round victory over Aécio Neves, also of the PSDB, to serve her second term as president.
Impeachment proceedings against Rousseff began in the Chamber of Deputies on 3 December 2015. On 12 May 2016, the Federal Senate suspended President Rousseff's powers and duties for up to six months or until the Senate decided whether to remove her from office or to acquit her. Vice President Michel Temer assumed her powers and duties as acting president of Brazil during her suspension. On 31 August 2016, the Senate voted 61–20 to convict, finding Rousseff guilty of breaking budgetary laws, and removed her from office.
On 5 August 2018, the PT officially launched Rousseff's candidacy for a seat in the Senate from the state of Minas Gerais. Rousseff finished fourth in the final vote and was defeated for her Senate run.
Dilma Vana Rousseff was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, on 14 December 1947, to Bulgarian lawyer and entrepreneur Pedro Rousseff (born Petar Rusеv; Bulgarian: Петър Русев; 1900–1962) and schoolteacher Dilma Jane da Silva (26 June 1924 – 13 July 2019). Her father was born in Gabrovo, in the Principality of Bulgaria, and was a friend of the Nobel Prize-nominated Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagryana. As an active member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, banned in 1924, Petar Rusev fled Bulgaria in 1929 to escape political persecution. He initially settled in France before arriving in Brazil in the 1930s, already widowed (he left behind his son Lyuben-Kamen, who died in 2007), but soon moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He returned to Brazil several years later, settling in São Paulo, where he succeeded in business. Petar Rusev adapted his first name to Portuguese (Pedro) and the last to French (Rousseff). During a trip to Uberaba, 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.
Education and early political awareness
Rousseff was enrolled in preschool at the Colégio Izabela Hendrix and primary school at Colégio Nossa Senhora de Sion, a girls' boarding school run by nuns, who primarily taught in French. Her father died in 1962, leaving behind about fifteen properties.
In 1964, Rousseff left the conservative Colégio Sion and joined the Central State High School, a co-ed public school where the students often protested against the dictatorship that had been established after the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état. In 1967 she joined Worker's Politics (Portuguese: Política Operária—POLOP), an organization founded in 1961 as a spinoff of the Brazilian Socialist Party. Its members found themselves divided over methods; some wanted to advocate for the election of a constituent assembly, but others advocated an armed struggle. Rousseff joined the second group, which became the National Liberation Command (Portuguese: Comando de Libertação Nacional—COLINA). According to Apolo Heringer Lisboa, leader of Colina in 1968 who taught Marxism to Rousseff in high school, she chose armed struggle after reading Revolution inside the Revolution by Régis Debray, a French intellectual who had moved to Cuba and become 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 her senior. Galeno, who had joined POLOP in 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.
Rousseff participated in COLINA and advocated Marxist politics among labour union members and as editor of the newspaper The Piquet. According to the magazine Piauí, she handled weapons. Gilberto Vasconcelos, a former fellow militant, has stated that she "has never … practiced an act of violence".
In early 1969 the Minas Gerais branch of Colina had only a dozen militants, little money, and few weapons. Its activities boiled down to four bank robberies, some stolen cars and two bombings, with no casualties. On 14 January, after some arrests during a bank robbery, they gathered to debate what to do to release them from jail. At dawn, the police invaded the group's house and they responded by using a machine gun, which killed two policemen and wounded another.
Rousseff and Galeno then began sleeping each night in a different location, since their apartment had been visited by one of those arrested. They returned home secretly to destroy documents so when in March 1969, the police searched the apartment, no documents were found. They stayed in Belo Horizonte a few more weeks trying to reorganize Colina, but had to avoid their parents' houses, since these were watched by the military. (Rousseff's family had no knowledge of her participation in underground activities). In addition, 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. The organization ordered them to move to Rio de Janeiro since it was unsafe to remain. Rousseff was 21 and had just finished her fourth semester at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais School of Economics.
There were many people from Minas Gerais in the Rio de Janeiro cell of Colina (including now-former Belo Horizonte mayor Fernando Pimentel, then 18 years old), but the organization had no shelter for them. Rousseff and Galeno stayed briefly with Rousseff's aunt, who thought that they were on vacation. They moved to a small hotel, then to an apartment, until Galeno was sent by the organization to Porto Alegre. Rousseff remained in Rio and helped the organization, attending meetings and transported weapons and money, according to piauí. She met Rio Grande do Sul-born lawyer Carlos Franklin Paixão de Araújo, then 31 years old, at a meeting; the two developed an attraction to one another. Araújo headed a dissident group of the Brazilian Communist Party (Portuguese: Partido Comunista Brasileiro—PCB) and sheltered Galeno in Porto Alegre. Rousseff's breakup with Galeno was friendly. As Galeno said, "in that difficult situation, we had no prospect of being a regular couple".