Dilma Rousseff
Dilma Rousseff was tortured by the dictatorship, became Brazil's first woman president, and was removed over a budget technique her predecessors had also used. She joined the armed resistance as a student in the late 1960s, was captured in Sao Paulo in 1970, and spent nearly three years in prison. She was an administrator afterwards rather than a campaigner - energy secretary in Rio Grande do Sul, then Lula's energy minister and chief of staff. She had never run for elected office before running for the presidency, and Lula's endorsement carried her to it in 2010. Her first term was steady and her second was not. Commodity prices fell, the growth of the previous decade stopped, and the recession of 2015 and 2016 was the deepest on record. The Car Wash investigation, which began as a money-laundering case at a petrol station, opened up a contracting cartel at the state oil company and reached most of the political class. In June 2013 protests over a bus fare rise in Sao Paulo became the largest demonstrations since the dictatorship. She won re-election in 2014 by three percentage points. The impeachment case against her concerned fiscal pedalling: delaying transfers to state banks so that the accounts looked better than they were. Her defenders called it an accounting practice used by previous governments and the removal a parliamentary coup. Her opponents called it a crime of responsibility under the budget law. The Chamber voted to proceed in April 2016, in a session where deputies dedicated their votes to God and to family, one of them to a colonel who had run a torture centre. The Senate convicted her that August. It declined to bar her from public office, and she was never charged with personal enrichment.
- Lived: 1947 CE – ?
- Nationality: Brazilian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
