 Dilma Vana Rousseff was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, on 14 December 1947, to Bulgarian lawyer and entrepreneur Pedro Rousseff (born "Petar Rúsеv", , 1900–1962) and schoolteacher Dilma Jane da Silva (26 June 1924 – 13 July 2019).Her father was born in Gabrovo, in the Principality of Bulgaria, and was a friend of the Nobel Prize-nominated Bulgarian poet Elisaveta Bagryana.As an active member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, banned in 1924, Petar Rusev fled Bulgaria in 1929 to escape political persecution; he settled in France.