Brazil on edge of a coup, says Rousseff
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.
Pointing to Eduardo Cunha, the former PMDB speaker of congress who was instrumental in her impeachment before being suspended for perjury and corruption, Rousseff said that she had been the victim of ‘‘explicit blackmail’’ for not protecting corrupt political allies.
She was in combative form as she took questions from senators after her speech. ‘‘Don’t expect from me the obliging silence of cowards,’’ she said.
Nevertheless, she was not expected to survive the vote in the senate that is expected to take place overnight. Backers of impeachment need two thirds of the 81 senators – 54 votes – to push through her dismissal.
After preliminary hearings this month, 59 senators voted for the trial to go ahead.
‘‘We need 54 votes, and we expect to get at least 60,’’ Temer’s press spokesman, Marcio de Freitas, said.
That will mean that Temer, 75, who has been standing in since Ms Rousseff was suspended by Congress in May, will see out the rest of her second term, which ends in December 2018.
A survey published in O Globo on Monday showed 53 senators would vote against Rousseff and only 18 would back her, 10 short of the 28 she needs to avoid being ousted. Ten senators have not stated a position or were not polled.
Temer’s ratings are as bad as hers and he too may face impeachment on the same charges, although his party is likely to use its control of key congressional posts to delay the proceedings.
He was booed when he opened the Olympics, and organisers had to turn up the music to hide the jeers as he made a swift exit. He was absent from the closing ceremony as a result. Three of his new interim ministers were forced to quit almost as soon as they had been appointed because of corruption allegations; one of them was the minister in charge of fighting corruption. In a sign of how disillusioned Brazilians have become with their tarnished leaders only a few hundred supporters of the Workers’ Party showed up outside the senate in Brasilia yesterday. Police had gone prepared for at least 10,000.
With Rousseff all but dispensed with, some analysts expect the crusading prosecutors behind the Petrobras case to step up their investigations of Temer and Brazil’s new rulers, further shaking up the political establishment and raising questions about Temer’s legitimacy as he struggles to steer the world’s ninth largest economy in the world out of the doldrums. Temer has promised to cut the deficit and is hoping that foreign investors’ confidence is restored by his more businessfriendly government.