Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff Impeached By Senate In Crushing Defeat

By Jonathan Watts for The Guardian – Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff has been thrown out of office by the country’s corruption-tainted senate after a gruelling impeachment trial that ends 13 years of Workers’ party rule. Following a crushing 61 to 20 defeat in the upper house, she will be replaced for the remaining two years and four months of her term by Michel Temer, a centre-right patrician who was among the leaders of the campaign against his former running mate.

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Brazil President Dilma Rousseff Comes Out Fighting In Impeachment Trial

By Jonathan Watts and Donna Bowater for The Guardian – Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, put up a fight in keeping with her Marxist guerrilla background on Monday with a powerful denunciation of the politicians who are poised to eject her from power within days. Testifying in her own defence before a predominantly opposition senate, the Workers’ party leader said she had withstood torture in her fight for democracy and would not back down even though she is widely expected to lose a final impeachment vote likely to occur within the next two days.

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Impeachment Effort May Fail In Brazilian Senate

By Mark Weisbrot for CEPR – Some press reports on the crisis in Brazil seem to imply that the removal of President Dilma Rousseff, re-elected in 2014 for a four-year term, is a done deal. Of course the interim government is acting as though they are the product of some huge electoral victory, even though the elected president is merely suspended pending her upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate. Beginning with a cabinet of all rich, white males, in a country where more than half identify as Afro-Brazilian or mixed race descent…

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Major New Brazil Events Expose Fraud Of Dilma’s Impeachment

By Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept – FROM THE START of the campaign to impeach Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff, the primary justification was that she used a budget trickknown as pedaladas (“peddling”: illegal delay of re-payments to state banks) to mask public debt. But this week, as the Senate conducts her impeachment trial, that accusation was obliterated: The Senate’s own expert report concluded there was “no indication of direct or indirect action by Dilma” in any such budgetary maneuvers.

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Protests Erupt Over Coup Impeachment In Brazil

By Staff of Tele Sur – Attorney General Eduardo Cardozo, the government’s top lawyer, asked the Supreme Court to annul impeachment proceedings, his office said. Speaker Eduardo Maranhao on Monday had annulled a vote by the lower house due to “procedural flaws” in the April 17 vote that left the decision in the Senate’s hands. In a statement to the Senate, Maranhao did not cite any reason for backtracking the lower house’s decision.

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Brazil: Impeachment Of Dilma Opens Up New Period Of Class Struggle

By Fred Weston for In Defense of Marxism – Such were the passions on both sides that the authorities had to build a temporary two metre-high, one kilometer-long metal fence to keep apart the thousands of pro- and anti-impeachment demonstrators outside the Congress building in Brasilia. Parliament voted by a big majority, 367 for impeachment and 137 against, more than the two-thirds required to start proceedings against Dilma. She is accused of manipulating government accounts.

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Politicians Seeking To Impeach Dilma, Accused Of Greater Corruption

By Vincent Bevins for The Los Angeles Times – Efforts to impeach Brazil’s president accelerated this month as the country fell into full-blown crisis. But the congressional commission that will help decide Dilma Rousseff’s fate has its own legal problems. Of 65 members on the impeachment commission, 37 face charges of corruption or other serious crimes, according to data prepared for the Los Angeles Times by the local organization Transparencia Brasil. The commission does not represent just the congressional faction that wants Rousseff impeached, but contains members of both the ruling coalition and the opposition.

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Impeachment Likelihood In Brazil Grows As Dilma Coalition Falls Apart

By Anthony Boadle for Reuters – Brazil’s largest party announced on Tuesday it was leaving President Dilma Rousseff’s governing coalition and pulling its members from her government, a departure that sharply raises the odds she could be impeached in a matter of months. The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) took just a few minutes to decide unanimously in a packed leadership meeting that its six ministers in Rousseff’s Cabinet and all other party members with government appointments must resign immediately.

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