Newly sworn-in Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff

Refuses to play the part of the victim … Dilma Rousseff. Photo: AP

RIO DE JANEIRO: Her nom de guerre was Estela. Part of a shadowy urban guerilla group at the time of her capture in 1970, she spent three years behind bars, where interrogators tortured her.

That former guerilla is now Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff. As a truth commission begins examining the military's crackdown on the population during a dictatorship that lasted two decades, Brazilians are riveted by chilling details emerging about the painful pasts of both their country and their President.

The schisms of that era, which stretched from 1964 to 1985, live on. Retired military officials, including Mauricio Lopes Lima, 76, a former lieutenant-colonel accused of torturing Ms Rousseff, have questioned the evidence linking the military to abuses. Rights groups, meanwhile, are hounding Colonel Lopes Lima and others