Dilma Rousseff

At 76 years old, Dilma Rousseff has this physical status:

When the mandatory two-party system ended in the early 1980s, Rousseff participated, along with Carlos Araújo, in Leonel Brizola's efforts to restructure the Brazilian Labor Party (of social-democratic President João Goulart, overthrown by the 1964 coup). After the Supreme Electoral Court gave the name registry to the group linked to Ivete Vargas (Getúlio Vargas' niece), Rousseff and the group linked to Brizola founded the Democratic Labour Party (Portuguese: Partido Democrático Trabalhista—PDT). Araújo was elected state deputy three times for this party, in 1982, 1986, and 1990. He was also the party's candidate for Porto Alegre mayor twice, losing to Workers' Party members Olívio Dutra in 1988, and Tarso Genro in 1992. Rousseff got her second job in the mid-1980s as an adviser for the PDT members of the Rio Grande do Sul Legislative Assembly.

Rousseff and Araújo devoted themselves to Alceu Collares' campaign for mayor of Porto Alegre in 1985. Much of his campaign platform and government plan was prepared at their home. After elected, Collares appointed Rousseff as the municipal Secretary of Treasury; this was her first job in the executive branch. According to Collares, Araújo influenced him on Rousseff's appointment, but her competence also contributed on his choice.

In the gubernatorial campaign of fellow PDT member Aldo Pinto in 1986, Rousseff had an advising role. Pinto's running mate was Nelson Marchezan, one of the most prominent civilians during the Brazilian military government. They would be defeated by the PMDB candidate Pedro Simon. Twenty years later, in an interview, Rousseff attempted to justify the controversial alliance: "Marchezan was a leader of the dictatorship, but he was never an enragé (enraged). The Marchezan wing was the wing of the radicalized small (rural) owners. And he was an ethical guy."

Rousseff remained as Treasury Secretary until 1988, when she stepped out to dedicate herself in Araújo's campaign for mayor of Porto Alegre. She was replaced by Políbio Braga, which says that Rousseff persuaded him not to take office. She would have said that she could "not control these crazy people" and that she was leaving "before it taints my biography." While Collares remembers Rousseff as an example of competence and public transparency, Braga disagrees, stating that "she did not even leave us a single report, and the Treasury Secretary was a chaos."

Araújo's defeat jettisoned the PDT of the local executive branch. In 1989, however, Rousseff was appointed director-general of the city council, but was dismissed by councilman Valdir Fraga, president of the local legislature, after arriving late for work. As Fraga later said, "I dismissed her because she had a problem with the time clock."

In 1990, Alceu Collares was elected governor, appointing Rousseff as president of the FEE, where she had been an intern in the 1970s. She remained in office until the end of 1993, when she was appointed Secretary of Energy and Communication through the influence of Carlos Araújo and his group. She remained in office until the end of 1994, the same time when her relationship with Araújo had ended, shaken by the discovery that another woman was pregnant with his child, Rodrigo (born in 1995). They later reconciled and remained together until 2000, when Rousseff moved alone to a rented apartment.

In 1995, after the end of Collares' term, Rousseff departed from her political office and returned to the FEE, where she was the editor of the magazine Economic Indicators (Portuguese: Indicadores Econômicos). It was during this break from public offices that she officially enrolled in the Campinas State University PhD program, in 1998. That same year, the Workers' Party won the Rio Grande do Sul gubernatorial election with the support of PDT in the second round. Once again she was appointed Secretary of Energy, this time by Governor Olívio Dutra. As he later recalled, "I already knew and respected her. I also appointed her because she was in a more left-leaning stance inside the PDT, less populist."

During the first year of the Dutra administration, the PDT had gained some high-ranking offices, but Brizola felt that his party had very little space in the government, responsible for a tiny portion of the budget. Unable to get more space inside the administration, PDT members of the government were pressured by the party leadership to step down. The formation of the political alliance for the 2000 Porto Alegre mayoral election was also a cause of friction among the two parties. They ended up launching each own a different candidate; PDT's was Collares and PT's was Tarso Genro. Rousseff defended the maintenance of the alliance which had elected Dutra, supporting Genro's candidacy, and claiming she would not accept "neoliberal alliances with the right-wing". Her critics said that she was being hypocritical, once she defended an alliance with Marchezan in the 1986 election. Genro defeated Collares in the second round and Rousseff, among other fellow PDT members, joined the Workers' Party. Brizola accused them of being traitors.

During Rousseff's management of the Secretariat of Energy in the Dutra administration, the service capacity of the electricity sector rose by 46%. due to an emergency program attended by state and private companies. In January 1999, Rousseff traveled to Brasília in order to alert the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration that if the authorities responsible for the power sector did not invest in generation and transmission of energy, the power cuts that Rio Grande do Sul faced early in her administration would take place in the rest of the country. Therefore, the electricity crisis at the end of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration affected millions of Brazilians, with the exception of those from the three southern states, where no rationing was imposed, as there was no drought. There was a voluntary energy saving, and Rousseff tried to obtain compensation from the federal government, as it was granted to other regions. The federal government did not grant it, and Rousseff had to compromise with the private sector. According to Pedro Parente, chief of staff during the Cardoso administration, "she was pragmatic, objective and showed that she had a fluid dialogue with the business sector."

The issues related to the area of energy on the government plan of candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were discussed in meetings coordinated by physicist and nuclear engineer Luiz Pinguelli Rosa. Another highlighted member of the group was Ildo Sauer. Both of them were completely opposed to the privatization of the sector, which was, in their opinion, responsible for the energy problems that the country was facing. Pinguelli invited Rousseff to join the group meetings in June 2001, where she arrived as a shy participant in a team formed by several professors, but soon stood out with her objectivity and good knowledge of the area. However, it was clear for everyone in the group that Pinguelli would become the Minister of Energy if Lula won the election.

It was a great surprise for everyone that, after elected, Lula chose Rousseff as the incumbent minister. The President elect declared: "Already near 2002, it appears there a comrade with a little computer in her hand. We started debating and I realized she had a differential characteristic from the others who were there, because she came in with the practicality of the assignment of running the Secretary of Energy of Rio Grande do Sul. Then I was like: I think I found my Minister here." Another factor which would have weighed heavily on Lula's choice was the sympathy that Antonio Palocci had for Rousseff, recognizing that she would have a much easier dialogue with the private sector than Pinguelli, in addition to her support of the Carta aos Brasileiros (Letter to the Brazilian People), agreeing with several market friendly changes in the Workers' Party. Dutra said he was consulted by Lula, and praised Rousseff's technical merits while Secretary of Energy during his administration. "I could have weighted the scale in her favor at that time, but from the transition government forward the merit is all hers," he recalled. After her appointment, she became very close to José Dirceu, appointed by Lula as the new chief of staff of Brazil.

Her management of the Ministry was marked by the respect of contracts made by the previous administration, by her efforts to prevent further blackouts and by the implementation of an electric model less concentrated in the hands of the state, differently from what Rosa and Sauer desired. Regarding the free market of energy, Rousseff not only kept it as she expanded it as well. José Luiz Alquéres, president of Light S.A., praised the approach taken by Rousseff, which is, accordind to him, helping the segment as a whole. He criticized, however, the delay in the implementation of the new model, but said that this is the fault of the bureaucratic government machinery. Convinced that urgent investments in power generation were required so that the country would not face a general blackout in 2009, Rousseff entered in a serious clash with then Minister of Environment, Marina Silva, which defended the embargo on several construction sites, concerned with the ecological imbalance that they could cause. Dirceu had to create a team of mediators between the two ministers in order to try to resolve their disputes.

A close friend of Lula, Pinguelli was appointed as president of Eletrobrás, and found himself at odds with Rousseff on several occasions, considering an early resignation once. He was ironic about Rousseff's alleged mood swings, being quoted as saying that "this lady formats her disk every week." Pinguelli eventually left the federal government in 2004. Mauricio Tolmasquim, a member of the transition government which shared a vision of the energy sector similar to Rousseff's, was invited by her to be the executive secretary of the ministry. He stated that once they got to know each other better, Rousseff started shouting with him occasionally. "It's her way. It's not personal. And in five minutes everything is okay," he said. Sauer, who took over the gas and energy department of Petrobras, also clashed with the minister, who repulsed his ideas of a statist model. Sometimes the clashes between them were so serious that Lula's intervention was necessary. Sauer left the state oil company in 2007. Another one which had disagreements with the minister on energy issues was the former Congressman Luciano Zica. For him, "Dilma is the most democratic person in the world, as long as you agree 100% with her." He recently left PT and joined the Green Party along with Marina Silva.

After becoming a Minister, Rousseff defended a new industrial policy from the government, ensuring that Petrobras' platforms had a minimum domestic content, what could generate 30 thousand new jobs in the country. She argued that it was unthinkable that a billion dollar building was not being made in Brazil. The bids for the P-51 and P-52 platforms were then the first in the country to require a minimum domestic content. The requirement was heavily criticized, on the grounds that it would increase the costs of Petrobras, but Rousseff defended the country's ability to produce ships and platforms, stating that the nationalization rates of the platforms, which varied between 15% and 18% rose to more than 60% after the requirement. Lula acknowledged that, from the perspective of the company, the costs did in fact go higher, but that Petrobras should not only target the immediate costs, but also the strengthening of national science and technologies. In 2008, the shipbuilding industry as a whole employed 40 thousand people, compared to 500 people in the mid-90s, in part because of the nationalization requirement. Brazil now has the sixth largest shipping industry in the world.

Rousseff proposed to accelerate the goals of universalizing the access to electricity, which had a deadline of 2015, suggesting that 1.4 million rural households would get electricity access by 2006. She argued that it was a social inclusion goal that should be a part of Fome Zero, (Zero Hunger) and that it was not possible to assume that such a program would provide a financial return. During the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, a similar program, called Luz no Campo (Rural Electrification), was created to encourage agribusiness providing the funding by the recipient. The goal of the program was to provide electricity to over a million households, but as of early 2003 only half of them had been electrified. According to Rousseff, the results of this program were higher in states where local governments subsidized it for the population. She defended, then, a program heavily subsidized by the federal government, which should not only subsidize, but cover the costs for the universalization of electricity. The subsidy, however, should be for the consumer, and not for the electric companies.

The program was launched in November 2003, under the name Luz para Todos (Electricity for All), focused in regions with a low Human Development Index and toward families with total incomes equaling, up to, three times the minimum wage. The goal of the program was to provide electricity for 2.5 million rural households (approximately 12 million people) by the end of 2008. In October 2008, Rousseff acknowledged that the government would not be able to fulfill its goal in time, leaving 100,000 households behind. In April 2008, the government extended the program until 2010, in order to benefit another 1.17 million families. 49% of the program's connections are concentrated in the Northeastern region of Brazil, which represented, from January 2005 to May 2008, 37.8% of all new wiring in the region, making the Northeast surpass the Southern region in power consumption for the first time. Despite being initially advertised as being funded by the Federal Government, 90% of its cost is actually paid for by electricity consumers, through several tariffs on energy prices.

As Minister of Energy, Rousseff had the support of two key ministers of the Lula administration: Antonio Palocci and José Dirceu. After Dirceu resigned as Chief of the Presidential Staff due to his involvement in the so-called "Mensalão" scandal, instead of being weakened, Rousseff was chosen by Lula to be the new chief of staff. She took office on 21 June 2005, becoming the first female to assume the position. As a former Energy Minister, she also holds a seat on the board of directors of Petrobras.

According to Gilberto Carvalho, the President's private secretary, Rousseff, caught the attention of Lula for her courage to face difficult situations and for her technical skills. Franklin Martins, another guerrilla fighter-turned-minister, said Lula was very impressed with Rousseff's management of the Ministry of Energy, where she prevented another blackout. "Lula realized that she kept things moving," he said. By choosing Rousseff, Lula also prevented the political dispute between Palocci and Dirceu to succeed him, while Rousseff did not have such ambition for being a new member of the Workers' Party, and not belonging to any party faction, she moved about well in all of them. Rousseff said to Carvalho that being appointed as chief of staff was a much bigger surprise for her than being appointed as Minister of Energy. In the opinion of Rio Grande do Sul senator and former governor Pedro Simon, since Rousseff took office, "seriousness is being imposed" in the Presidential Staff.

After Rousseff took office, the U.S. Consulate General in São Paulo sent a long profile of her to the U.S. Department of State. It detailed several aspects of her life, talking about her past activity in guerrilla organizations, her tastes and habits, and professional characteristics, being described as a prestigious and detailed technician, with the reputation of a workaholic and a great ability to listen, but lacking political tact, turning directly to technicians rather than her superiors.

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