Dilma Rousseff impeached Dilma Rousseff
Dilma Rousseff

Dilma Rousseff

BRASÍLIA. — After a nine-month impeachment process, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president has been dismissed by the Brazilian senate. The lawmakers convicted her of breaking budget laws. The vote that finalised Rousseff’s dismissal from Brazil’s highest office came yesterday, two days after she delivered an emotional speech to defend herself before legislators.Sixty-one senators of the 81-strong body voted against the now-former president.

Twenty senators voted against the impeachment.

Rousseff is the first Brazilian leader to be dismissed from office since 1992, when Fernando Collor de Mello resigned before a final vote in his impeachment trial for corruption.

Rousseff considers the impeachment motion against her a coup staged by right-wing political forces with the help of the media.

Former Vice-President Michel Temer will now act as Brazil’s president until his term expires in 2018.

He is facing the toughest economic crisis the Latin American country has seen since the 1930s and his government is taking painful austerity measures to address the budget deficit.

Temer’s ability to tackle those problems remains in question, as there are signs of resistance to his proposals in congress.

But the final removal of Rousseff, who was suspended in May to face trial, was much more than a judgment of guilt on any charge. It was a verdict on her leadership and the slipping fortunes of Latin America’s largest country.

The impeachment puts a definitive end to 13 years of governing by the leftist Workers’ Party, an era during which Brazil’s economy boomed, lifting millions into the middle class and raising the country’s profile on the global stage.

Unlike many of the politicians who led the charge to oust her, Rousseff (68), remains a rare breed in Brazil: a prominent leader who has not been accused of illegally enriching herself.

Instead, her trial revolved around a contentious legal question of whether she committed an impeachable offense by employing budgetary tricks to conceal yawning deficits.

Rousseff repeatedly insisted that she did nothing illegal, pointing out that her predecessors also manipulated the federal budget.

But her opponents argued that the scale of her administration’s transfers of funds between giant public banks, to the tune of about $11 billion, seriously eroded Brazil’s economic credibility and helped her get re-elected unfairly in 2014.

Rousseff will not go to jail after her conviction, but she expressed defiance throughout her trial, insisting that Brazil’s economic crisis was largely the result of shifts in the global economy that cut commodities prices.

A bureaucrat who specialised in overseeing giant public companies in Brazil’s energy industry, Rousseff had not held elected office until her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, anointed her as his heir after other leaders in the Workers’ Party were tarnished by a vote-buying scandal.

As a divorced grandmother known as an avid reader of literature, she was an exception in the male-dominated political scene.

In addition to serving as Mr da Silva’s hard-charging chief of staff, she was known for her involvement with the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard, an urban guerrilla group, in her youth. Agents of the military dictatorship captured Ms. Rousseff and tortured her repeatedly in the early 1970s. — RT/NY Times.

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