Brazil & Southern Cone - January 2011 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Dilma – echoes of Piñera?

The ground literally shook under President Sebastián Piñera’s inauguration in Valparaíso on March 11 2010, as central and southern Chile was rocked by strong aftershocks in the aftermath of one of country’s worst ever earthquakes less than fortnight earlier on 27 February. The heavens certainly opened over Dilma Rousseff’s historic inauguration as Brazil’s first female president on 1 January, but that was nothing compared to the torrential rains that deluged parts of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro a few week later. Like Piñera, Dilma was thrown a huge curve ball in the shape of an unprecedented natural disaster in her first weeks in office. As in Chile, Brazil’s disaster preparedness and emergency relief planning was found wanting, prompting citizen anger and criticism from as far away as the United Nations (UN). But like the businessman Piñera, the technocrat Dilma reacted with a cool and calm head, promising to unleash “the great organisational capacity of Brazil’s federal government” to see to it that some 5.0m (mostly low income) Brazilians are moved out of designated ‘at risk’ areas in coming years. Dilma has thus set the bar high for her new administration. She might do well to cast an eye towards Chile, where after a year marked by the trauma of the earthquake and then the glory of the operation to rescue 33 trapped miners, Piñera is now the least popular Chilean president since the return to democracy in 1990.