Brazilian President-Elect Invites Cellmates to Inauguration

Dilma Rousseff in her 1970 police mugshot, when she led a revolutionary group. Photo by The Independent

President-elect Dilma Rousseff has invited to her inauguration 11 women with whom she shared a prison cell in the early 1970s during Brazil's military regime.

"All eleven have accepted the invitation for the January 1 inauguration," Rousseff spokeswoman Adelina Lapa announced.

She described the invitees as "militants, who fought the dictatorship, just like Rousseff".

"In prison, Dilma already had a strong presence, she was already a leader and she showed great solidarity," journalist Rose Nogueira, one of the 11 women who between 1970 and 1972 were imprisoned with Rousseff, said in an interview published by the daily O Globo.

Sociologist Lenira Machado, another of the women who was at the women's detention center, known during the period as the "Tower of the Maidens," told O Globo that besides the participation of each one of them in the guerrilla movement, both she and Rousseff agreed that the dictatorship had to be fought with arms.

"We defended the armed struggle, based on the formation of plots and not as a simple adventure," Machado said.

Rousseff, a Bulgarian descendant, joined the anti-dictatorship Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard at the age of 19. For three years she helped lead the organization, instructed comrades on Marxist theory and wrote for an underground newspaper.

After three years underground, Rousseff was captured in 1970, when she was 23, and tossed into Sao Paulo's Tiradentes prison, where she was tortured.

She was released in 1973.

Rousseff has said that she never actually picked up a weapon or participated in any of the actions undertaken by those cells.

The army intelligence units, according to documents made public last month by the Defense Ministry, never were able to prove that Rousseff participated in armed actions, but she "advised" the guerrillas on how to prepare bank robberies and organize strikes.

According to the documents - she was called by the dictatorship "the Joan of Arc of the subversion."

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