Brazils Rousseff poised to take presidency

[October 31 2010]

The hand-picked candidate of Brazils hugely popular president was poised to replace him as leader of Latin Americas biggest nation as voters began casting ballots Sunday in a runoff election. Dilma Rousseff, a 62-year-old former Marxist guerrilla and career bureaucrat who long ago left behind her rebel ways, held a comfortable lead in opinion polls and was bolstered by the support of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her political mentor, in the contest with centrist Jose Serra.

The winner will lead a nation that will host the 2014 World Cup and is expected to be the globes fifth-largest economy by the time it hosts the 2016 Summer Olympics. Just hours before polls were to open, Rousseff paid tribute to Silva and assured Brazilians that while he would not have an official role in her government, he would always be near.

"President Lula, obviously, wont be a presence within my Cabinet. But I will always talk with the president and I will have a very close and strong relationship with him," Rousseff said at a final campaign stop in her hometown of Belo Horizonte. "Nobody in this country will separate me from President Lula."