Crisis in Brazil
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- Published on Tuesday, 19 April 2016 23:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1249 .... April 20, 2016
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Crisis in Brazil
Since the 1980s, Brazil's Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) has been one of the largest political parties of the left in Latin America. It has held power at the federal level in Brazil, in coalition with other parties, since January 2003, and figured prominently as one of the central representatives of the ‘pink tide’ running against neoliberalism in Latin America. But just as the pink tide has been fracturing, from internal challenges in some cases and electoral reaction in others, a deep institutional crisis is consuming the PT government of Dilma Rousseff and, indeed, exposing political rot across the state institutions. The opposition forces leading the parliamentary effort of impeachment of Rousseff are also implicated in a range of corruption scandals. The... forces of the right, including the far right, have been marshalling street demonstrations of considerable size. Where the political crisis will head next is anything but clear. We present three recent articles about the political crisis in Brazil and the proceedings to impeach president Dilma Rousseff.
After Vote to Remove Brazil’s President, Key Opposition Figure Holds Meetings in Washington
Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman, David Miranda
Brazil's lower House of Congress on Sunday voted to impeach the country's president, Dilma Rousseff, sending the removal process to the Senate. In an act of unintended though rich symbolism, the House member who pushed impeachment over the 342-vote threshold was Dep. Bruno Araújo, himself implicated by a document indicating he may have received illegal funds from the construction giant at the heart of the nation's corruption scandal. Even more significantly, Araújo belongs to the center-right party PSDB, whose nominees have lost four straight national elections to Rousseff's moderate-left PT party, with the last ballot-box defeat delivered just 18 months ago, when 54 million Brazilians voted to re-elect Dilma as president.
Those two facts about Araújo underscore the unprecedentedly surreal nature of yesterday's proceedings in Brasília, capital of the world's fifth-largest country. Politicians and parties that have spent two decades trying, and failing, to defeat PT in democratic elections triumphantly marched forward to effectively overturn the 2014 vote by removing Dilma on grounds that, as today's New York Times report makes clear, are, at best, dubious in the extreme. Even The Economist, which has long despised the PT and its anti-poverty programs and wants Dilma to resign, has argued that "in the absence of proof of criminality, impeachment is unwarranted" and "looks like a pretext for ousting an unpopular president."