Tom Jobim, the songwriter who wrote "The Girl from Ipanema," once observed, "Brazil is not for beginners." It is an insight that was shared with me this weekend by a wise friend in Brasilia.
He was not writing about the woman who decisively won Brazil's presidential election on Sunday, Dilma Rousseff. Despite the assertions of her critics, the woman already known to Brazilians simply as Dilma is no beginner. Those critics and some of her soundly defeated opponents are fond of saying that because she had never run before for elected office she might not have the political skills to manage Brazil's fractious Congress or even her ten party coalitions. But this overlooks the long and remarkable road that brought her from being a guerilla combating Brazil's military regimes of the 1960s to jail and torture, to getting her degree in economics to a path of local government leading to Lula's cabinet to his invaluable chief of staff.
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