Citizen Dilma: Rousseff reflects on life after impeachment

Brazil’s former president, who survived two years of torture in prison in the 1970s, is on a mission to clear her name and tell her side of the story

Reversals of fortune do not come much sharper or more symbolic than that suffered by Dilma Rousseff over the past year.

Last December, she was still in the early stages of her second term as Brazil’s first woman president. Unbeaten in elections, she lived in a palace, commanded Latin America’s biggest bureaucracy, joined summit banquets alongside Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel, and went on her morning bicycle ride in Brasília with the full protection given to a head of state.

Today, however, after being levered from power by her running mate and impeached by Congress, Rousseff lives in her mother’s apartment, buys her own groceries at the local supermarket, has a one-man security detail and rides her bike along the seafront of Rio de Janeiro with the rest of the crowd.

There can be few more striking personifications of the demise of the political left in the past 12 months. But even though it may seem that the world has moved backwards in terms of gender, race and income equality, Rousseff – who has arguably lost more than anyone – says that for her, this is by no means rock bottom.

Every day has been difficult,” she tells the Guardian during an interview near her residence in Rio de Janeiro. “But this is not the worst year I have experienced. Not at all.”

Asked if she regretted winning in 2014 – just as this system started to come crashing down along with the economy – Rousseff shakes her head. “Not for one moment. If I hadn’t won, things would be much worse now. We would already have an austerity and privatisation package like that of [President Mauricio] Macri in Argentina.”

Although she credits her short-lived second administration for delaying and reducing the impact of the neoliberal tide now sweeping Latin America, she is not optimistic about the near-term prospects for progressive politicians in Brazil or elsewhere. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are, she says, a cause for wider concerns.

For most of her life, Rousseff has been fighting these trends. But for now, she plans to step back and study her enemy. Her immediate plan is to research the concept of “states of exception” – the term coined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to justify dictators who bypass national laws in the name of the public good.

With these justifications creeping back – for example with the Patriot Act in the US, the criminalisation of the poor and the treatment of refugees – Rousseff says the memoirs will have to wait.