Brazil elects first female president

 SAO PAULO: A former Marxist guerrilla who was tortured and imprisoned during Brazil's long dictatorship was elected Sunday as president of Latin America's biggest nation, a country on an economic and political rise.

A statement from the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees elections, said governing party candidate Dilma Rousseff won the election. When she takes office Jan. 1, she will be Brazil's first female leader.

With nearly 95 percent of the ballots counted, Rousseff had 55.6 percent compared to 44.4 percent for her centrist rival, Jose Serra, the
electoral court said.

Rousseff, the hand-chosen candidate of wildly popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, won by cementing her image to Silva's, whose policies she promised to continue.

She will lead a nation on the rise, a country that will host the 2014 World Cup and that is expected to be the globe's fifth-largest economy by the time it hosts the 2016 Summer Olympics. It has also recently discovered huge oil reserves off its coast.

Rousseff was already speaking like a president-elect when she cast her vote Sunday morning.

''Starting tomorrow we begin a new stage of democracy,'' Rousseff, 62, said in the southern city of Porto Alegre, where she cast her vote. ''I will rule for everyone, speak with all Brazilians, without exception.''

Silva used his 80 percent approval ratings to campaign incessantly for Rousseff, his former chief of staff and political protege. She never has held elected office and lacks the charisma that transformed Silva from a one-time shoeshine boy into one of the globe's most popular leaders.

Silva was barred by the constitution from running for a third consecutive four-year term. He has batted down chatter in Brazil's press that he is setting himself up for a new run at the presidency in 2014, which would be legal.

Despite Rousseff's win, many voters don't want ''Lula,'' as he is popularly known, to go away.

''If Lula ran for president 10 times, I would vote for him 10 times,'' said Marisa Santos, a 43-year-old selling her homemade jewelry on a Sao Paulo street. ''I'm voting for Dilma, of course, but the truth is it will still be Lula who will lead us.''