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Rousseff defends record at impeachment trial
Dilma Rousseff, the embattled president now suspended and on trial for allegedly misrepresenting the federal budget during her 2014 reelection, today told the Brazilian Senate that she had committed no crime and defended her record during public office.
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She said the impeachment process, which has paralyzed Brazilian politics since December and cast a shadow over last month’s Rio Olympics, was little more than a plot to protect the interests of the privileged classes in Latin America’s largest economy. Police fired tear gas late yesterday to disperse demonstrators who lit fires in the street of Sao Paulo to protest the looming impeachment of suspended president Dilma Rousseff.
The Workers’ Party under Rousseff and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is credited with raising millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Her appearance is to be followed by a Senate vote on whether to remove her permanently from the presidency, expected as early as Tuesday, possibly going into Wednesday. Rousseff’s address came on the fourth day of the trial.
If she is sacked, Temer will become the full-fledged president until the next presidential election in December 2018.
“The evidence makes it clear that charges against me are merely pretexts based on fragile judicial rhetoric”, she said.
With the odds stacked against her, Rousseff’s testimony appeared more aimed at making a point for the history books, rather than a bid to sway a handful of wavering senators.
She called him a “usurper”, and argued Brazilians would never have elected a man who named a Cabinet of all white men in a country that is more than 50 percent non-white.
“I can’t help but taste the bitterness of injustice”, Rousseff said of the impeachment effort.
A survey by O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper said 53 senators have already confirmed they will vote against Rousseff, just one vote short of the two-thirds of the 81 seat Senate needed to dismiss her.
Ms Rousseff asserted that impeachment was the price she had paid for refusing to quash a wide-ranging police investigation into the state oil company Petrobras.
Voting on Rousseff’s fate will begin on Tuesday and her conviction would mark the end of the 14-year-rule of the leftist Workers’ Party. Watchdog groups estimate 60 percent of the 594 lawmakers in both chambers are being investigated for wrongdoing, many for corruption related to the Petrobras probe.
Unbowed, Rousseff told senators that history would judge them by their votes and recalled her trial under the military dictatorship in 1970, when officers hid their faces to not be recognized in photographs.
In May, the Senate voted 55-22 to suspend her from office for up to 180 days while a trial was prepared.
Temer, who has been interim president since Congress opened impeachment proceedings in mid-May, has vowed to impose austerity measures to plug a growing fiscal deficit that cost Brazil its investment-grade credit rating past year. Aecio Neves, who narrowly lost the presidential election to Rousseff in 2014.
The drama has consumed Brazil, with the proceedings continuing even during the August 5-21 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
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Before Rousseff spoke, Supreme Court Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, who is presiding over the trial, warned senators and spectators to remain silent. Rousseff has lost her base of support in Congress and can no longer run the country effectively, he said.