Rousseff: Brazil on edge of a coup
President Dilma Rousseff said yesterday that her country was ‘‘one step away from a coup d’etat’’ as the senate prepared to vote on whether to force her from office on charges of breaking budget rules.
‘‘The future of Brazil is at stake,’’ said Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla, in an impassioned defence of her six years as its first female president.
‘‘I did not commit the crimes for which I have been accused unjustly and arbitrarily,’’ she told a packed assembly, which had been warned by the head of the supreme court that anyone applauding, booing or interrupting the proceedings would be removed.
Rousseff appeared resigned to the fact that the senate was expected to find her guilty and end 13 years of Workers’ Party rule.
‘‘I know I will be judged, but my conscience is clear. I did not commit a crime,’’ said Rousseff, 68, who was tortured by Brazil’s farright fascist dictatorship, which ended in 1985.
She recalled those days as well as her battle with cancer while in office. ‘‘Twice I have seen the face of death close up: when I was tortured for days on end, subjected to abuses that make us doubt humanity and the meaning of life itself, and when a serious and extremely painful illness could have cut short my life,’’ she said. ‘‘Today I only fear for the death of democracy, for which many of us here in this chamber fought.’’
She reminded the chamber that she had been elected by 54 million voters in 2014, although her victory was still a narrow one. ‘‘What we are about to witness is a serious violation of the constitution and a real coup d’etat,’’ she said, adding that the ‘‘ultraconservative’’ administration that had replaced her would cut spending on social programmes and instead work for the benefit of a small, wealthy elite.
‘‘I can’t help but taste the bitterness of injustice,’’ she told a crowd that included Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her predecessor and mentor who is known affectionately as Lula.
He was once an icon of the left but is now facing charges of money laundering and obstructing justice in the corruption scandal at the state oil company Petrobras.
It was that scandal and the slide into recession that followed a decade of rapid growth that finally sunk Rousseff, rather than the charges of illicitly shuffling state funds around before her reelection in 2014. She has shown that such financial manoeuvres were carried out by previous governments with no repercussions.
Her support among the working class has been undermined by the economic crash that plunged millions back into poverty and unemployment after years of social gains under her Workers’ Party and by the corruption investigation that has cut though the ranks of Brazil’s political and business elite.
Although Rousseff has not been named in the Petrobras scandal, in which politicians conspired with business leaders to inflate construction contracts and skim off US$2 billion for themselves, many of her close associates have been accused, including Lula.
She was also taped seeming to offer him a cabinet post that would have shielded him from prosecution as investigators closed in.
Rousseff has accused her former rivals in the PMDB party, which is led by her former vice president Michel Temer, who stands to finish her term if she is convicted, of forcing her out because even more of them are implicated in the scandal. She says that the main aim of the coup is to curb the investigation and save the PMDB’s skins, after she vowed not to hinder the inquiry.