THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: She is a former Marxist guerrilla whose organisation once stole $2.5 million from the safe of the governor of São Paulo.
Locked up and tortured by the dictatorship which ran Brazil during the 1970s, she was once branded by a prosecutor as the "Joan of Arc of subversion".
Yet Dilma Rousseff has become Brazil's first woman president, entrusted with running the largest and fastest-growing economy in Latin America.
Her first election campaign had gathered the apparently unstoppable force of a steamroller and Ms Rousseff was never in any real doubt of victory.
It would seem like a miracle for a 62-year-old apparatchik who has never before been elected to any political post and who was unknown to most of Brazil's 192 million people a few months ago - until you look to see who is behind the wheel of the steamroller.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the most popular president in Brazilian history, is ineligible to run for a third four-year term, and has given Ms Rousseff, his former political adviser, his unflinching support. >>> Harriet Alexander, Foreign Affairs Correspondent | Tuesday, January 11, 2011
