Graças Foster as the Transportadora Brasileira do Gasoduto Bolivia-Brasil. In 1998, Foster was working for a Petrobras unit that was involved importing natural gas from Bolivia. During this time, she met Dilma Rousseff, who in October 2010, would be elected to serve as the first female President of Brazil. In 1998, Rousseff was a relatively unknown energy official, serving in Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. Foster and Rousseff developed a lifelong professional relationship, based in their mutual support of the leftist Workers Party, which rose to power in 2002, resulting in the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as
Dilma Rousseff persuaded him not to take office. She would have said that she could "not control these crazy people" and that she was leaving "before it taints my biography." While Collares remembers Rousseff as an example of competence and public transparency, Braga disagrees, stating that "she did not even leave us a single report, and the Treasury Secretary was a chaos." Araújo's defeat jettisoned the PDT of the local executive branch. In 1989, however, Rousseff was appointed director-general of the City Council, but was dismissed by councilman Valdir Fraga, president of the local legislature, after arriving late for work. As Fraga