[Placing women in such commanding positions is a priority of
President Dilma
Rousseff, the first woman to lead Brazil. Ms. Rousseff, who visited
the United States this week, is a former energy minister who headed Petrobras’s
board for seven years during the administration of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva. ]
By Simon Romero
 |
Gilvan Barreto for The New York
Times
Maria das
Graças Foster, Petrobras chief, with a portrait of Dilma Rousseff,
Brazil’s president, nearby |
RIO DE JANEIRO THE global oil industry
has long been a male-dominated bastion, represented in the popular imagination
by real gulf sheiks and fictional swaggerers like J. R. Ewing in “Dallas.”
But an exception to this rule has emerged in Brazil, Latin America’s rising oil
power, where women now occupy the most powerful positions in the nation’s booming
energy industry.
In a matter of weeks this year, Maria das Graças Foster, a
longtime chemical engineer, rose to the top job at Petrobras, Brazil’s
state-controlled oil company, and Magda Chambriard was nominated to lead the
National Petroleum Agency, which regulates Brazil’s oil sector.
Placing women in such commanding positions is a priority of
President Dilma
Rousseff, the first woman to lead Brazil. Ms. Rousseff, who visited
the United States this week, is a former energy minister who headed Petrobras’s
board for seven years during the administration of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva.
“She knows the industry very well, and can be extremely
demanding,” Ms. Foster said in an interview here of Ms. Rousseff, an economist
about whom tales of browbeating of subordinates are legend, giving Brazilian
comedians ample
material for skits. “When she calls, I need to have the answer
on the tip of my tongue,” Ms. Foster said.
There aren’t many examples of women rising high in the
energy industry. Within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Diezani
Alison-Madueke, the oil minister of Nigeria, is a woman. In the
United States, Lynn Elsenhans was Sunoco’s chief executive for four years
before stepping down this year. The chief executive of Pertamina, Malaysia’s
oil company, and the head of Schlumberger Asia, a branch of the oil-field
services company, are also women.
But running Petrobras, charged with exploiting vast new oil
discoveries deep offshore, is another matter. The company, created 58 years ago
and led in its early years by Walter Link, an American oilman, is investing by
some estimates more in inflation-adjusted terms than NASA did in the 1960s to
put a man on the moon, to produce oil from reserves found under miles of water,
rock, sand and salt.
“The program that Petrobras is launching is both critical
for Brazil and the global market,” said Daniel Yergin, author of “The Quest,” a
new book about the international energy industry. “She sees the big picture
and, at the same time, pays close attention to the details,” he said of its new
head. “She will quickly become known as one of the most important people in the
world oil industry, and certainly the most important and influential woman in
the business worldwide.”
If Petrobras is able to meet its own ambitious production
goals by the 2020s, Brazil could catapult past Latin America’s oil powerhouses,
Mexico and Venezuela, into the top ranks of global producers. Ventures with
Petrobras are already making Rio’s economy sizzle, with droves of foreign
oilmen driving up rents in exclusive seaside districts like Ipanema and Leblon.
Ms. Foster, on the other hand, still lives in an apartment
in Copacabana, a less lustrous area hemmed in by big apartment blocks and
hillside favelas, or slums. She stands out as an anomaly in the oil patch, not
just as the mother of two adult children but because she chooses not even to
own a car. Taxi drivers in Copacabana often call out to her with a cheer, “the
lady with the fuel,” trying to get her business.
She was born 58 years ago, about the time Petrobras was
conceived to reduce Brazil’s dependence on foreign oil. In the 1950s, her
parents moved from the interior of the neighboring state of Minas Gerais to
Rio, where they lived in Morro do Adeus, a poor hillside area that now is part
of Complexo do Alemão, a collection of favelas occupied by Brazilian security
forces.
As an 8-year-old, she contributed to her family’s meager
income by working as a trash recycler, collecting discarded cans and paper. She
said she had also earned money by writing and reading letters for her
neighbors, a family of immigrants from Portugal.
After attending public schools here, she became an intern at
Petrobras while studying chemical engineering at the Federal Fluminense
University. Then she was lured away into postgraduate studies in nuclear
engineering, at a time when Brazil was developing its nuclear
energy capacity. But she balked at the prospect of spending five
years in Germany to delve further into the field, so she returned to Petrobras.
Once back at the company, she never left, rising through a series of management
posts and obtaining an M.B.A. at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, an elite Brazilian
university.
In 1998, while working for a Petrobras unit involved in a
pipeline to import natural gas from Bolivia, she met Ms. Rousseff, then an
obscure energy official in Rio Grande do Sul, a southern Brazilian state. Ms.
Foster, a supporter of the leftist Workers Party, which has been in power in
Brazil since 2002, saw eye-to-eye ideologically with Ms. Rousseff, a Marxist
guerrilla in her youth; they both are now committed to welcoming foreign
investment in Brazil’s oil industry and exposing Petrobras to market forces.
When the former president, Mr. da Silva, appointed Ms.
Rousseff to his cabinet as Brazil’s energy minister, she named Ms. Foster as
one of her top aides in Brasília, the capital. After serving in that position
for two years, she chose to return to more hands-on responsibilities at
Petrobras. “My business,” she said, “is oil and gas.”
Shares in Petrobras jumped nearly 4 percent on the day in
January she was named as chief executive, replacing the economist José Sergio
Gabrielli. But important challenges await her.
Already, she is facing the scrutiny of Brazil’s media,
arguably Latin America’s most aggressive in questioning the power structures at
large companies like Petrobras. The newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported in
2010 that a company controlled by Ms. Foster’s husband, Colin Foster, a Briton
who has long lived in Brazil, had won numerous contracts since 2007 worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars to supply Petrobras with electronic equipment.
Petrobras has denied any wrongdoing, contending that none of
the acquisitions was carried out by the unit, gas and energy, under Ms.
Foster’s command.
In addition, a company spokeswoman said in a written reply
to questions about these contracts that Petrobras had made only “small
purchases” from 2005 to 2010 from Mr. Foster’s company.
The company’s shares have slumped more than 30 percent over
the last year as concerns persist about a range of issues, from delays in
procuring ships from Brazilian shipyards for Petrobras’s offshore operations to
the costs associated with selling gasoline domestically at relatively low
prices and importing refined products from abroad.
The most pressing challenge of all at Petrobras, perhaps,
may be in meeting expectations of raising output to an estimated 4.5 million
barrels a day, from 2.3 million. Doing so will require guiding Petrobras, Latin
America’s largest company, past equipment bottlenecks, the development of
complex new drilling technologies and concerns over spills at offshore fields.
“We’re working to get there,” Ms. Foster said about meeting
Petrobras’s output goals.
Naming Ms. Foster to lead Petrobras is just one example of
Ms. Rousseff’s push to place women in the highest levels of government since
taking office last year. Her 38-member cabinet includes 10 women in ministerial
posts, including her chief of staff, Gleisi Hoffmann, and Ideli Salvatti, who
manages the administration’s delicate relations with a Congress of uncertain
loyalties.
While Ms. Rousseff maintains a high approval rating of more
than 70 percent, reactions to her nominations have been mixed. Evangelical
Christian leaders recently lashed out at Eleonora Menicucci, the minister for
women’s affairs, over her support of abortion in cases of rape or in which a
woman’s health is at risk. And in 2011, the defense minister, Nelson Jobim,
questioned Ms. Salvatti, the minister of institutional relations, calling her
“very weak” in published remarks. Ms. Rousseff responded by quickly removing
Mr. Jobim from his post, replacing him with Celso Amorim, a former minister of
foreign affairs.
Ms. Foster said she was well aware of the challenges
awaiting her as a woman leading an oil company with 82,100 employees in a
male-dominated industry. She said she welcomed a certain degree of
confrontation, even if it took place in the executive suite.
“The best people to work with me are those who interrupt me,
even question me,” she said. “If I’m speaking loudly, speak louder. When you
discuss, you have an environment that’s more intense, that’s actually warmer,
where you arrive at the best solutions for the company.”
@ The New York Times
'MIRACLE’ MORGUEBABY IMPROVING IN ARGENTINA
["I moved the coverings aside and saw the tiny hand,
with all five fingers, and I touched her hand and then uncovered her
face," she said in the TeleNoticias interview. "That's where I heard
a tiny little cry. I told myself I was imagining it — it was my imagination.
And then I stepped back and saw her waking up. It was as if she was saying
'Mama, you came for me!']
By The Associated Press
 |
—/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Fabian Veron and his wife, Analia Bouter, at Perrando
Hospital, in Chaco province, Argentina.
|
BUENOS AIRES,
Argentina (AP) — A mother in Argentina says she fell to her knees in shock
after finding her baby alive in a coffin in the morgue nearly 12 hours after
the girl had been declared dead.
Analia Bouter named her newborn Luz Milagros, or
"Miracle Light." The tiny girl, born three months premature, was in
critical but improving condition Wednesday in the same hospital where the staff
pronounced her stillborn on April 3.
The case became public Tuesday when Rafael Sabatinelli,
the deputy health minister in the northern province of Chaco, announced in a
news conference that five medical professionals involved have been suspended
pending an official investigation.
Bouter told the TeleNoticias TV channel in an interview
Tuesday night that doctors gave her the death certificate just 20 minutes after
the baby was born, and that she still hasn't received a birth certificate for
her tiny girl.
Bouter said the baby was quickly put in a coffin and taken
to the morgue's refrigeration room. Twelve hours passed before she and her
husband were able to open the coffin to say their last goodbyes.
She said that's when the baby trembled. She thought it was
her imagination — then she realized the little girl was alive and dropped to
her knees on the morgue floor in shock.
A morgue worker quickly picked up the girl and confirmed
she was alive. Then, Bouter's brother grabbed the baby and ran to the
hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, shouting for the doctors. The baby was
so cold, Bouter said, that "it was like carrying a bottle of ice."
A week later, the baby is improving. Bouter said she still
has many unanswered questions about what happened. She said she had given birth
normally to four other children and doesn't understand why doctors gave her
general anesthesia this time. She said she also doesn't know why she wasn't
allowed to see her baby before it was put into a coffin.
She said she had to insist on going to the morgue's
refrigeration room, where she brought her sister's cellphone to take a picture
of the newborn for the funeral. Her husband struggled to open the lid, and then
stepped aside to let her see inside.
"I moved the coverings aside and saw the tiny hand,
with all five fingers, and I touched her hand and then uncovered her
face," she said in the TeleNoticias interview. "That's where I heard
a tiny little cry. I told myself I was imagining it — it was my imagination.
And then I stepped back and saw her waking up. It was as if she was saying
'Mama, you came for me!'
"That was when I fell to my knees. My husband didn't
know what to do. We were just crying and I laughed and cried, cries and
laughter. We must have seemed crazy."
She says the family plans to sue the staff at Hospital
Perrando in the city of Resistencia for malpractice, and still wants answers.
But they've been focused for now on their little girl, whom she described as
amazingly healthy despite being born after just 26 weeks of gestation. So far,
she hasn't needed oxygen or other support commonly provided to preemies, she
said.
"I'm a believer. All of this was a miracle from
God," she told Telam, Argentina's state news agency.
