Brazil’s ousted President Dilma Rousseff appealed to the Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn the Senate’s decision to remove her from office for breaking budgetary rules.
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(AP Photo/Andre Penner). Police officers stand next to a large inflatable doll in the likeness of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff wearing a presidential sash with the words in Portuguese “Goodbye dear” during a rally to celebrate her impeachment in S.
A statement from Caracas calls Rousseff’s impeachment and removal a “parliamentary coup” and says the withdrawal of its ambassador is “definitive”. Her running mate was Michel Temer, from the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party.
President Dilma Rousseff and Vice President Michel Temer once had a political marriage of convenience.
Previous presidents used similar accounting techniques, she noted, saying the push to remove her was a bloodless coup d’etat by elites fuming over the populist polices of her Workers’ Party the last 13 years.
In a second Senate vote about 30 minutes later, Rousseff won a minor victory as a measure to ban her from public office for eight years failed.
Pleading her innocence during a marathon 14-hour session on Monday, she said that abuse of the impeachment process put at risk Brazil’s democracy, restored in 1985 after a two-decades-long military dictatorship. “We will be back to continue our course towards a Brazil in which the people are sovereign”, Rousseff vowed.
“Today is the day that 61 men, many of them charged and corrupt, threw 54 million Brazilian votes in the garbage”, Rousseff tweeted minutes after the decision.
Michel Temer has been sworn in as Brazil’s new leader following the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff.
“Putschist is you”, he said, referring to Rousseff’s accusation that he had led the charge to oust her.
In her words, “They think that they beat us, but they are wrong”.
She was elected president in the run-off on October 31, 2010, with 56.09 percent of votes against 43.9 percent for her opponent Jose Serra, from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). The two-year probe has led to the jailing of dozens of top businessmen and politicians from across the political spectrum, and threatens numerous same lawmakers who voted to remove Rousseff.
Rousseff’s removal marked the latest setback for Latin America’s left, which had been on the ascendancy just a few years ago in Argentina, Venezuela and other countries but has increasingly struggled amid a continent-wide economic slowdown and a series of corruption scandals. He did not make any statements, and expected to address the nation later Wednesday.
He appeared tone-deaf with his first move in May: appointing an entirely white, male Cabinet to oversee a nation of 200 million people where more than 50 percent identify as black or mixed-race.
As chief of staff for the president, Rousseff was responsible for the major executive actions in Lula da Silva’s second term as president. Three of his ministers were forced to resign within weeks of taking their jobs because of corruption allegations, which also follow Temer and threaten his hold on power.
New elections would first require that Temer resign, which he has no intention of doing. “It’s you who is breaking the constitution”.
She told followers at the presidential residence on Wednesday she’s form “the strongest, most tireless and most active opposition that a coup government could suffer”.
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“We are protesting against the coup and fighting for democracy”, said 61-year-old farmer Orlando Ribeiro.
