The election completed an unlikely journey that took Rousseff from jail and brutal torture by her military captors in the 1970s to become the first woman to lead Latin America’s largest economy.
A 62-year-old economist and former energy minister who leans left but has become more pragmatic over the years, Rousseff had never run for elected office. Yet she received decisive support from Lula, who plucked her from relative obscurity to succeed him.
“I think she will continue Lula’s work,” said Elizabete Gomes da Silva, a factory worker in Sao Paulo. “He governed for the people who needed him most — the poorest.”
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Yay! I’m very happy about this. Also, it seems that the generation that fought its way through the dictatorships during the seventies are the ones coming into office more and more in Latinamerica. It’s really great- no matter how many the right winged genocidal power hungry military men killed, they couldn’t stop them from eventually coming into office.
Yes, we should be so happy we elected a woman not because of her own merits, but because she was the puppet of a male president. A woman who calls abortion “a violence against woman” and will go against women’s rights to get the vote of the religious majority. Yay!
Or not.
Miriam, I am brazilian and would LOVE to write about women’s rights in Brazil and the discussion about abortion and welfare state that marked this elections. Would it be a good idea?