page_title: Dilma Rousseff
section_title: Colina
hierarchical_section_title: Dilma Rousseff / Early life / Guerrilla activity, 1968–69 / Colina
caption_attribution_description: 28/06/2010. São Paulo - SP. Entrevista ao Programa Roda Viva. Foto: Roberto Stuckert Filho.
context_page_description: Dilma Vana Rousseff is a Brazilian economist and politician who served as the 36th president of Brazil, holding the position from 2011 until her impeachment and removal from office on 31 August 2016. She was the first woman to hold the Brazilian presidency and had previously served as Chief of Staff to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from 2005 to 2010.
  The daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant, Rousseff was raised in an upper middle class household in Belo Horizonte. She became a socialist in her youth and after the 1964 coup d'état joined left-wing and Marxist urban guerrilla groups that fought against the military dictatorship. Rousseff was captured, tortured, and jailed from 1970 to 1972.
  After her release, Rousseff rebuilt her life in Porto Alegre with Carlos Araújo, who was her husband for 30 years. They both helped to found the Democratic Labour Party in Rio Grande do Sul, and participated in several of the party's electoral campaigns. She became the treasury secretary of Porto Alegre under Alceu Collares, and later Secretary of Energy of Rio Grande do Sul under both Collares and Olívio Dutra.
context_section_description: Rousseff participated in COLINA and advocated Marxist politics among labour union members and as editor of the newspaper The Piquet. According to the magazine Piauí, she handled weapons. Gilberto Vasconcelos, a former fellow militant, has stated that she "has never … practiced an act of violence".
  In early 1969 the Minas Gerais branch of Colina had only a dozen militants, little money, and few weapons. Its activities boiled down to four bank robberies, some stolen cars and two bombings, with no casualties. On 14 January, after some arrests during a bank robbery, they gathered to debate what to do to release them from jail. At dawn, the police invaded the group's house and they responded by using a machine gun, which killed two policemen and wounded another.
  Rousseff and Galeno then began sleeping each night in a different location, since their apartment had been visited by one of those arrested. They returned home secretly to destroy documents so when in March 1969, the police searched the apartment, no documents were found. They stayed in Belo Horizonte a few more weeks trying to reorganize Colina, but had to avoid their parents' houses, since these were watched by the military. (Rousseff's family had no knowledge of her participation in underground activities). In addition, Galeno had to undergo facial plastic surgery or a similar procedure (although he denies this) after a sketch of him was released for participating in a bank robbery. The organization ordered them to move to Rio de Janeiro since it was unsafe to remain. Rousseff was 21 and had just finished her fourth semester at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais School of Economics.
  There were many people from Minas Gerais in the Rio de Janeiro cell of Colina (including now-former Belo Horizonte mayor Fernando Pimentel, then 18 years old), but the organization had no shelter for them. Rousseff and Galeno stayed briefly with Rousseff's aunt, who thought that they were on vacation. They moved to a small hotel, then to an apartment, until Galeno was sent by the organization to Porto Alegre. Rousseff remained in Rio and helped the organization, attending meetings and transported weapons and money, according to piauí. She met Rio Grande do Sul-born lawyer Carlos Franklin Paixão de Araújo, then 31 years old, at a meeting; the two developed an attraction to one another. Araújo headed a dissident group of the Brazilian Communist Party (Portuguese: Partido Comunista Brasileiro—PCB) and sheltered Galeno in Porto Alegre. Rousseff's breakup with Galeno was friendly. As Galeno said, "in that difficult situation, we had no prospect of being a regular couple".
  Araújo, son of a prominent labor defense lawyer, had joined the PCB early. He had traveled through Latin America, met Castro and Che Guevara, and been imprisoned for several months in 1964. He joined the armed struggle after the issue of AI-5 by the dictatorship in 1968. In early 1969, he began to discuss the merger of his group with Colina and Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (Portuguese: Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária—VPR), led by Carlos Lamarca. Rousseff attended meetings about the merger, formalized in two conferences in Mongaguá, thus leading to the creation of Revolutionary Armed Vanguard Palmares (Portuguese: Vanguarda Armada Revolucionária Palmares—VAR Palmares). Rousseff and Araújo attended these conferences. So did Lamarca, who thought that Rousseff was a "stuck-up intellectual" because she defended revolution through political engagement of the working class, as opposed to VPR's military-based sense of revolution.
caption: Dilma Rousseff during an interview in São Paulo.
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