Dilma Rousseff

Biography

Dilma Vana Rousseff was born in Belo Horizonte in 1947 and raised in an upper-middle-class household. As a student after the 1964 military coup she joined the socialist group POLOP and then the armed underground organisations COLINA and VAR Palmares, which opposed the dictatorship. She was arrested in São Paulo in January 1970, tortured, and held until the end of 1972.

After her release she settled in Porto Alegre, finished an economics degree at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in 1977, and helped found the local Democratic Labour Party (PDT). She was the city's finance secretary from 1986 to 1988 and Rio Grande do Sul's secretary for energy in 1993-1994 and again from 1999 to 2002. In 2001 she moved to the Workers' Party (PT).

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made her minister of mines and energy in 2003 and, after the Mensalão scandal forced out José Dirceu in 2005, his chief of staff. Chosen as Lula's successor, she won the 2010 election against José Serra, becoming Brazil's first woman president, and narrowly won re-election over Aécio Neves in 2014.

Her second term was overshadowed by recession and the Petrobras corruption investigations. Impeachment proceedings began in December 2015, the Senate suspended her in May 2016, and on 31 August 2016 it removed her from office for breaking budget laws. She lost a 2018 Senate race in Minas Gerais and in 2023 became president of the BRICS New Development Bank.