New Brazil leader adds to LatAm ’woman’s touch’

AFP - Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff, who takes up the helm on January 1, will lead a small but powerful group of women taking on the political challenges facing Latin America.

When she is inaugurated as the head of the region’s biggest economy, Dilma Rousseff will be the most visible face of the inroads women are making into a paternalist tradition that has so long sidelined them into secondary roles.

It will be a tricky test for Rousseff, who takes over from her charismatic mentor Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, whose gruff, bearded manner proved persuasive in a variety of situations—not least in getting her elected.

She joins a select club of Latina female leaders that already includes Argentine President Cristina Kirchner and Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

“In Brazil, there is an attempt to undermine Dilma’s legitimacy because she was chosen by Lula, as if she was incapable of making her own decisions just because she’s a woman”, said Professor Rosemary Segurado, a social sciences professor at Sao Paulo University.

Rousseff, Lula’s former cabinet chief; Kirchner, first lady before taking over the presidency; and Chinchilla, a former vicepresident of Costa Rica, are finding themselves forced to prove “they are not in anyone’s shadow”, she said. “Latin American politics is seen as an area for men, and society has trouble accepting they have their own opinions, ideas and initiatives”, she added.

In Rousseff’s case, the fact she had never run in an election before winning the presidency was taken as evidence that she was simply a prolongation of Lula’s government—something which diminished her own accomplishments, Segurado said.

 Chinchilla, likewise, faced criticism that she was propelled to the top by her predecessor, Oscar Aria. And Kirchner was previously credited with being more infl uential when she was the senator wife of president Nestor Kirchner. When she became president with her husband’s backing, “it was as if she had no political past” for much of the electorate, Segurado said. In contrast, Chile’s former female president Michelle Bachelet served as defense minister before becoming head of state, Segurado noted. She had successfully negotiated military matters that still felt the tug of ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet.

“Bachelet is a case of a woman who had her own path, who managed to show she was not only a creation of ex-president Ricardo Lagos but a public fi gure in her own right”, she said.

Latin America also had several other female figures who, though not in the spotlight of international politics, were regarded as infl uential within their own countries. They included Maraa Estela Martinez de Peron in Argentina, Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro and Panama’s Mireya Moscoso. In Haiti, former fi rst lady Mirlande Manigat took 31 percent of the vote in November’s fi rst round of presidential elections and will stand in next month’s run-off vote.

Even after running their country’s affairs, some female leaders have remained at the forefront of global politics.

 Bachelet, for instance, was chosen by UN chief Ban Ki-moon this year to run UN Women, a gender equality entity. Women “manage to always take decisions, and all decisions, not only the easy ones”, Bachelet recently told the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo. She also said Rousseff’s election gave greater visibility to female leaders worldwide. “This contributes to changing the belief that women are secondclass citizens”, she said.

Source: T/ AFP P/ Agencies

Brazil Elects Dilma Rousseff, First Female President
Amy Goodman interviews Michael Fox
Democracy Now!
November 1, 2010