Thousands rally in Brazil in support of investigations

RIO DE JANEIRO: Demonstrators marched in major cities across Brazil on Sunday, protesting government corruption and a recent vote in Congress that was widely perceived as an effort to intimidate judges and prosecutors currently leading graft probes.

Dressed mostly in the national colours of yellow and green, thousands of residents of Rio de Janeiro gathered along the city’s Copacabana waterfront waving banners with messages like “We are all Sergio Moro,” the judge who has overseen a historic corruption investigation that has jailed dozens of political and corporate chieftains.

The demonstrations, also underway in cities like São Paulo and Brasília, are smaller than some of the massive marches that erupted across Brazil in recent years as an economic boom soured into recession and citizens grew frustrated with corruption and once-successful leftist policies that exhausted public finances.

Those problems this year helped topple former President Dilma Rousseff, formally impeached for breaking budget rules, and now plague the nascent administration of President Michel Temer, her conservative successor and a politician who many Brazilians already complain inspires little hope for change. “The struggle has to continue,” says Iara Soares, a 56-year-old schoolteacher at Rio’s beachside march, wearing a cape-like Brazilian flag over her shoulders.

“We need a real renovation of the political class.”