Brazil Senate braces for Rousseff impeachment vote

Brazil’s Senate was to vote Wednesday on stripping
Dilma Rousseff of the presidency in a traumatic
impeachment trial set to end 13 years of leftist rule
over Latin America’s biggest country.
Senators loyal to Brazil’s first female president
debated into the night Tuesday in a final attempt to
halt the apparently unstoppable momentum toward
her dismissal.
Despite the impassioned speeches, which followed
14 hours of testimony by 68-year-old Rousseff
herself on Monday, her fate was apparently sealed.
Rousseff, from the leftist Workers’ Party, is accused
of taking illegal state loans to patch budget holes in
2014, masking the country’s problems as it slid into
its deepest recession in decades.
She told the Senate that she is innocent, saying the
impeachment trial amounts to a right-wing coup
d’etat.
However, huge street demonstrations over the last
year have reflected nationwide anger at her
management of a country suffering double-digit
unemployment and inflation.
Two thirds of the Senate — 54 of 81 senators —
must vote in favor of impeachment to convict her.
“The chances of impeachment not passing and the
president being made to step down are virtually
nil,” political analyst Adriano Codato of Parana
University said.
If Rousseff is forced from office, her former vice
president turned bitter foe Michel Temer will be
immediately sworn in as president until the next
scheduled elections in late 2018.
The seventy-five-year-old took over in an interim
role after Rousseff’s initial suspension in May and
at once named a new government with an agenda
of shifting Brazil to the right.
– Tears and shouts –
Lawyers presenting closing arguments on Tuesday
could not hold back their emotions as the clock
wound down on a crisis that has paralyzed
Brazilian politics for months, helping deepen
national gloom over recession and runaway
corruption.
A lead lawyer for the case against Rousseff, Senator
Janaina Paschoal, wept as she asked forgiveness for
causing the president “suffering,” but insisted it was
the right thing to do.
“Impeachment is a constitutional remedy that we
need to resort to when the situation gets particularly
serious, and that is what has happened,” she said,
rejecting Rousseff’s coup claim.
“The Brazilian people must be aware that nothing
illegal and illegitimate is being done here.”
Rousseff’s counsel, veteran lawyer Jose Eduardo
Cardozo, retorted that the charges were trumped up
to punish the president’s support for a huge
corruption investigation that has snared many of
Brazil’s elite.
“This is a farce,” he said in a speech during which
his voice alternated between shouts and near
whispers.
“We should ask her forgiveness if she is convicted,”
he added. “History will treat her fairly. History will
absolve Dilma Rousseff if you convict her.”
– Unpopular leaders –
Recalling how she was tortured under Brazil’s
military dictatorship in the 1970s, Rousseff had
urged senators during her testimony on Monday to
“vote against impeachment, vote for democracy…
Do not accept a coup.”
However, the public reaction to her impeachment
trial has been characterized by widespread
indifference.
The Workers’ Party under Rousseff and her
predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is credited
with raising around 29 million Brazilians out of
poverty.
But many now blame the party and Rousseff in
particular for the country’s multiple ills.
Temer, of the center-right PMDB party, has earned
plaudits from investors since taking the interim
post. However, it remains uncertain whether he will
have voters’ support to push through the painful
austerity reforms he promises.
Rousseff has barely double-digit approval ratings.
But Temer is hardly more popular in opinion polls.