Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president-elect, gathered information and advised guerrilla groups bank hold-ups in the sixties when the country was ruled by a military dictatorship according to reports published in the Rio daily O Globo.
According to the reports from Military prosecution which has been released after four decades in which they sere considered “secret”, Brazilian military intelligence was never able to link Ms Rousseff directly to the bank robberies or any other “violent actions”.
The release of the documents was requested to military justice archives by Folha de S. Paulo, but it was the competing newspaper O Globo which first published the documents that do not add much to what is already known about the links of then student Dilma Rousseff with the urban guerrilla movements that fought the military dictatorship (1964-1985).
The president-elect was arrested in 1970 when she was 23 and accused of belonging to “subversive groups” and had to remain in jail for almost three years, when according to her statements was the victim of “barbarian tortures.”
According to the military documents from the dictatorship she was described as the “Joan of Arc” of subversion and joined “subversive forces in 1967”.
As a member of the Colina and VAR-Palmares guerrilla groups Dilma Rousseff “commanded strikes”, advised in “bank hold-ups” and was the “organizer and distributor of tasks”, although it was never proved that she effectively was directly involved in any armed action.
The documents also have extracts of her testimony before the military courts following her arrest. Ms Rousseff confesses to being a “Marxist-Leninist” and admitted that the Colina group participated in three bank hold-ups and was involved in two attacks with bombs, which did not cause any victims.
The last time the president-elect spoke publicly about her past was during a congressional hearing in which she confessed “to have lied” in her statements to the military court.
