Mensalão scandal funneled through an advertising agency owned by Marcos Valério. The investigation has since uncovered members of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, DEM, Brazilian Democratic Movement Party and seven other political parties also involved. Many key advisers to Lula resigned, and several deputies were faced with the choice of resignation or expulsion from congress, though the president himself went on to be re-elected in 2006, and in 2010 Brazil elected his chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, as president. Much of PT's leadership was affected in some way, with many resigning or failing to win re-election. Brazil's economy was widely perceived as
Dilma Rousseff the merger, formalized in two conferences in Mongaguá, thus leading to the creation of Revolutionary Armed Vanguard Palmares (). Rousseff and Araújo attended these conferences. So did Lamarca, who thought that Rousseff was a "stuck-up intellectual" because she defended revolution through political engagement of the working class, as opposed to VPR's military-based sense of revolution. Carlos Araújo was chosen as one of the six leaders of VAR Palmares, a "political-military organization of Marxist-Leninist partisan orientation which aims to fulfill the tasks of the revolutionary war and the establishment of the working class party, in order to seize power and build