Brazil’s Rousseff calls her impeachment a power grab
Suspended president defends her record, decries corruption
Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff charged Monday that her impeachment trial is nothing more than an illegitimate power grab by her political opponents.
After four days of intense debate over the charges facing Brazil’s first female president, she got her turn to defend herself.
“This impeachment process isn’t legitimate,” Rousseff told the room full of senators and spectators, including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “I didn’t do anything illegal.”
Rousseff used her 45-minute speech to outline her personal and political history, showing how she rose from the victim of torture under Brazil’s dictatorship in the 1960s to a woman who twice won presidential elections. She reminded the senators of the successes Brazil saw under the 13 years that her Workers’ Party was in power, culminated by successfully hosting the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio.
She also pointed out that Latin America’s long, ugly history of revolutions and illegal seizures of power is reminiscent of the proceedings she is facing. Rousseff said her opponents have been trying to remove her from power through any means necessary, even though she was re-elected in 2014 with 54 million votes.
“They said that the elections were fraudulent, they asked for an audit of ballots, they impugned my electoral gains, and after I took office, they took excessive steps to find whatever facts they could to ... justify impeachment proceedings,” she said. “They wanted power at whatever price. We are one step away from consummating a grave institutional rupture. We are one step away from making a coup d’etat a
“We are one step away from consummating a grave institutional rupture. We are one step away from making a coup d’etat a reality.” Suspended President Dilma Rousseff
reality.”
Rousseff, 68, is accused of using illegal maneuvers to fill federal budget gaps to hide the true extent of the country’s financial woes. Her opponents say she did so to maintain support ahead of her successful 2014 re-election bid, which resulted in Brazil plunging further into recession.
After Rousseff ’s speech, senators questioned her. Sen. Simone Tebet from Brazil’s PMDB political party, told Rousseff that her illegal accounting practices destroyed the trust that Brazil had built in global financial markets.
“You sold an unreal Brazil to Brazilians,” Tebet said. “Those numbers led to a loss of confidence in the government, a slowdown of investments, investors stepped on the brakes. That’s why we’re in the worst economic crisis of our history.”
Sen. Cássio Cunha Lima, leader of the PSDB party, the main opposition to Rousseff ’s Workers’ Party, said he was shocked that Rousseff delivered a glowing biography rather than countering charges against her.
“She missed a real opportunity to defend herself against the grave crimes she is accused of,” Lima said. “You forget, your excellency Dilma, that this impeachment wasn’t born in the Congress. It was born on the streets of Brazil.”
Lima also responded to Rousseff ’s characterization of her trial as an attempted “coup d’etat.”
“A coup is winning an election by lying to a country. A coup is running a company like Petrobras,” Lima, referring to the staterun oil company at the heart of a national corruption investigation.