Article: Brazil
Section: Contemporary era

Question: Who was Brazil's first woman president?

Several brief interim governments succeeded after Vargas's suicide.
Juscelino Kubitschek became president in 1956 and assumed a conciliatory posture towards the political opposition that allowed him to govern without major crises.
The economy and industrial sector grew remarkably, but his greatest achievement was the construction of the new capital city of Brasília, inaugurated in 1960.
His successor was Jânio Quadros, who resigned in 1961 less than a year after taking office.
His vice-president, João Goulart, assumed the presidency, but aroused strong political opposition and was deposed in April 1964 by a coup that resulted in a military regime.
The new regime was intended to be transitory but it gradually closed in on itself and became a full dictatorship with the promulgation of the Fifth Institutional Act in 1968.
The repression was not limited only to those who resorted to guerrilla tactics to fight the regime, but also reached institutional opponents, artists, journalists and other members of civil society, inside and outside the country (through the infamous "Operation Condor").
Despite its brutality, like other totalitarian regimes in history, due to an economic boom, known as an "economic miracle", the regime reached its highest level of popularity in the early 1970s.
Slowly however, the wear and tear of years of dictatorial power that has not slowed the repression, even after the defeat of the leftist guerrillas, plus the inability to deal with the economic crises of the period and popular pressure, made it inevitable an opening policy, which of the regime side was led by Generals Geisel and Golbery.
With the enactment of the Amnesty Law in 1979, Brazil began to slowly return to democracy, which would be completed along the 1980s.
Civilians returned to power in 1985 when José Sarney assumed the presidency, becoming unpopular during his tenure due his failure in control the economic crisis and hyperinflation inherited from the military regime.
Sarney's unsuccessful government allowed the election in 1989 of the almost unknown Fernando Collor, who was subsequently impeached by the National Congress in 1992.
Collor was succeeded by his Vice-President Itamar Franco, who appointed Fernando Henrique Cardoso as Minister of Finance.
In 1994, Cardoso produced a highly successful Plano Real, that after decades of failed economic plans made by previous governments attempting to curb hyperinflation, finally granted stability to the Brazilian economy, leading Cardoso to be elected that year, and again in 1998.
The peaceful transition of power from Fernando Henrique to his main opposition leader, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, who was elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, proved that Brazil had finally succeeded in achieving its long-sought political stability.
Lula was succeeded in 2011 by the current president, Dilma Rousseff, the country's first woman president and as such one of the most powerful women in the world.
In June 2013, following the viral phenomenon of worldwide manifestations (such as the ""Arab Spring"", the ""Occupy Wall Street"" and the ""Spanish Indignados""), numerous protests erupted in Brazil.
For days, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in several cities to protest.
Initially a movement against the increase in public transport fares, it assumed gigantic proportions, sparked by the excessive use of force by the state polices, turning into a series of huge demonstrations by groups and individuals, angry about a range of issues (including new stadium projects for international sports events, demands on quality of public services, anger about corruption, and opposition to a constitutional amendment proposal, PEC 37, which is interpreted by some as an attempt to curb repression of corruption).
Thus it became a movement containing conflicting ideologies, with so far no single political agenda nor recognizable leadership.