Brazil’s Political Crisis: Rousseff Suspended to Face Impeachment Trial

Local Editor

As the tension escalates on the Brazilian political arena, the Senate held a marathon debate Wednesday on suspending and impeaching President Dilma Rousseff.

Rousseff was suspended Thursday to face impeachment, ceding power to her vice-president-turned-enemy Michel Temer in a political earthquake ending 13 years of leftist rule over Latin America's biggest nation.

A nearly 22-hour debate in the Senate closed with an overwhelming 55-22 vote against Brazil's first female president. Pro-impeachment senators broke into applause and posed for selfies and congratulatory group photos in the blue-carpeted, circular chamber.

Only a simple majority of the 81-member Senate had been required to suspend Rousseff for six months pending judgment on charges that she broke budget accounting laws. A trial could now take months, with a two-thirds majority vote eventually needed to force Rousseff, 68, from office altogether.

Rousseff is accused of illegal accounting maneuvers, but says the charges are trumped up and amount to a "coup" by her right-wing opponents.

Senate President Renan Calheiros, who was overseeing the proceedings, told reporters that impeachment would be "traumatic" for Brazil.

Rousseff had argued that the architect of the impeachment drive, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha manipulated the process to avoid facing trial himself for allegedly taking millions in bribes in a huge corruption scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras.

Cunha was himself suspended by the Supreme Court last week for abuse of office.

But Justice Teori Zavascki ruled the government's case lacked "legal plausibility."

That cleared what looked to be the last potential barrier ahead of a vote that the Senate leader said he expected to hold Wednesday night.

He said Rousseff would be formally notified of her suspension on Thursday and he would discuss with her the details of how she would hand over power to her vice president-turned-enemy, Michel Temer.

Due to host the Olympic Games in less than three months, Brazil is struggling with its worst recession in decades and a corruption scandal reaching deep into the political and business elite.

The political crisis has left the sprawling South American country deeply divided between those outraged at Rousseff for presiding over an economic collapse and colossal graft, on the one hand, and on the other those loyal to her Workers' Party for transformative social programs that lifted tens of millions of people from poverty.

The divisions were plain to see outside Congress, where police erected a giant metal wall to keep apart the rival groups of demonstrators expected later in the day.

As the Senate session got under way, the main square outside was shut off by police and eerily deserted.

Senator Paulo Paim, a Rousseff ally, told journalists there would not be any "miracle," and that his side would have to fight to win more than one-third of the votes at the end of the impeachment trial.

He said the impeachment drive was "a symbol of Brazilian politicians' incompetence, to accept a tainted process against a president they know is honest."

But Magno Malta, a senator of the opposition PR party, said impeachment was needed to heal a sick country.

"As soon as we vote for impeachment, the dollar will fall [strengthening Brazil's currency], our stock market will rise and the patient will breathe again," he said.

Rousseff is accused of breaking budgetary laws by taking loans to boost public spending and mask the sinking state of the economy during her 2014 re-election campaign.

She says the accounting maneuvers were standard practice in the past, and vowed Tuesday to use "all means" to fight her ouster.

Workers' Party faithful on Tuesday burned tires and blocked roads in Brasilia and other cities in a potential taste of more street trouble to come.

Protesters again put up roadblocks Wednesday morning in the economic capital, Sao Paulo, before they were dispersed.

Seeking to hamstring the center-right leader, Rousseff's allies have asked the top electoral court to bar Temer from appointing his own ministers.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team