Dilma Rousseff Net Worth

What is Dilma Rousseff's Net Worth?

Dilma Rousseff is a Brazilian economist and politician who has a net worth of $1 million. Dilma Rousseff served as the first female president of Brazil from 2011 to 2016, and prior to that served as the chief of staff in the cabinet of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In 2016, Rousseff was impeached for allegedly breaking budgetary laws, and at the end of August she was convicted by the Senate and controversially removed from office.

Early Life and Education

Dilma Rousseff was born on December 14, 1947 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil to schoolteacher Dilma Jane da Silva and Bulgarian lawyer and entrepreneur Pedro Rousseff. She has a brother named Igor and had another sibling, Zana, who passed away in 1977. Raised in a large house with three servants, Rousseff enjoyed an upper middle-class childhood. She went to preschool at the Colégio Izabela Hendrix and primary school at the girls' boarding school Colégio Nossa Senhora de Sion. Rousseff left the latter in 1964 to go to a co-ed public high school. In 1967, she joined the Worker's Politics organization that spun off from the Brazilian Socialist Party. For her higher education, Rousseff first studied economics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, but was expelled due to her guerrilla activity. She later graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and began a graduate program, but never completed it, at the State University of Campinas.

Guerrilla Activity and Activism

After becoming a socialist, Rousseff joined the National Liberation Command, which promoted armed revolution against the Brazilian dictatorship. She promulgated Marxist politics among members of labor unions and through the newspaper The Piquet, which she edited. Rousseff's brother-in-arms was Cláudio Galeno Linhares, to whom she was briefly married. During her guerrilla years, she smuggled weapons and money and allegedly orchestrated heists. She also led VAR Palmares, a Marxist-Leninist political and paramilitary group. In early 1970, Rousseff was arrested by police in a bar in São Paulo, and was allegedly tortured for over three weeks afterward. She was then sentenced to prison, where she remained until the end of 1972. Following a period of recovery and the completion of her economics degree, Rousseff joined the Institute of Social and Political Studies, where she organized debates.

Government Career, 1985-2010

In the early 1980s, Rousseff aligned herself with the newly formed Democratic Labour Party. Her first major position in government was as treasury secretary of Porto Alegre under Alceu Collares, a position she held from 1985 to 1988. In 1990, after Collares was elected governor of Rio Grande do Sul, he named Rousseff as president of the Foundation of Economics and Statistics. She went on to become the state secretary of energy in 1993, serving in that role for a year. Following the end of Collares's term, Rousseff returned to the Foundation of Economics and Statistics, where she edited the magazine Economic Indicators.

Rousseff served a second term as the state secretary of energy from 1998 to 2002, this time under governor Olívio Dutra. In 2002, she became an energy policy advisor to presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. After he was elected president, he appointed Rousseff as his minister of energy. She served in that position from 2003 to 2005, and then became Lula's chief of staff upon the resignation of José Dirceu in 2005. Rousseff was the chief of staff until March of 2010, when she stepped down to launch her presidential campaign.

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President of Brazil

As the official presidential candidate for the Workers' Party, Rousseff ran for president of Brazil in 2010. The general election ended up going to a run-off, which Rousseff won over Brazilian Social Democratic Party candidate José Serra. She was reelected in 2014 with a narrow second-round victory over the PSDB's Alécio Neves. Rousseff was the first woman to serve as the president of Brazil. She had a fairly high approval rating during her first term due to such measures as reducing federal taxes and lowering the overnight rate of the Central Bank of Brazil.

Rousseff's popularity started falling in early 2015. She was involved in a number of controversies during her presidency, including the Petrobras scandal and projects to build hydroelectric dams in the Amazon Basin. In late 2015, Chamber of Deputies president Eduardo Cunha accepted a petition for Rousseff's impeachment, and the petition was advanced to the Senate the next year. The impeachment trial commenced in May of 2016, and at the end of August Rousseff was convicted by a vote of 61-20 for breaking budgetary laws. She was consequently removed from office, with vice president Michel Temer taking her place.

Post-presidency

In 2018, Rousseff returned to politics as the Workers' Party candidate for a seat in the Senate representing Minas Gerais. Ultimately, she finished fourth in the election. In 2019, Rousseff was a subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary film "The Edge of Democracy," to which she contributed an interview. Later, in 2023, she was elected president of the New Development Bank.

Personal Life

In the late 1960s, Rousseff was married to Cláudio Galeno Linhares, a journalist and fellow revolutionary. After they split, she married Carlos Paixão de Araújo, a lawyer and communist dissident. Together, they had a daughter named Paula in 1976. Rousseff and Araújo divorced in 2000.

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