The trio facing off for president in Brazil
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Version 0 of 1. DILMA ROUSSEFF Rousseff, Brazil’s current president, was arrested and tortured by the country’s military dictatorship as a member of an armed left-wing guerrilla group in the early 1970s. But even as former President Lula da Silva’s chief of staff, she was not widely known in Brazil until his patronage helped her win the top office in 2010. She has a reputation as a tough manager and a technocrat, but she has failed to weed out corruption, and economic growth has stumbled under her administration. But Rousseff, the Workers’ Party candidate, is a formidable campaigner who makes up for a lack of political charisma with strength and willpower. She is the favorite. MARINA SILVA The election’s wild card, Silva grew up in poverty in the Brazilian Amazon and only learned to read at age 16, when she left the forest to become a nun. After being deeply influenced by liberation theology and the environmental activist Chico Mendes, Silva was elected Brazil’s youngest ever senator in 1994. As environment minister from 2003 to 2008, she oversaw a plan that led to significant reductions in Amazon deforestation. Silva ran for president as a Green Party candidate in 2010; she entered this campaign as Brazilian Socialist Party candidate Eduardo Campos’s running mate, then took over the ticket after he was killed in a plane crash in August. AÉCIO NEVES The center-right Party for Brazilian Social Democracy’s candidate is the grandson of Tancredo Neves, who was elected Brazil’s first post-dictatorship president in 1984 but fell ill and died before assuming office. Aécio Neves was twice elected governor of Minas Gerais state and left the post — with sky-high approval ratings — to become a senator. Labeled a fun-loving playboy by critics, he has toughened his image as campaigning has gone on, stealing support from Silva and attacking Rousseff over an unfolding corruption scandal involving politicians from her party and coalition and the state-run oil firm Petrobras. |