Brazil Impeached Their First Female President

             

Brazilian President Dilma 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 judgement
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.
Within hours, Temer, from the center-right
PMDB party, was to take over as interim
president, drawing the curtain on more than
a decade of dominance by Rousseff's leftist
Workers' Party.
He was preparing to announce a new
government shortly and said his priority is to
address Brazil's worst recession in decades
and end the paralysis gripping Congress
during the battle over Rousseff.
A onetime Marxist guerrilla tortured under
the country's military dictatorship in the
1970s, Rousseff has denounced the
impeachment drive as a coup and vowed to
fight on during her trial.
She was expected to be officially notified of
the vote's result at 10:00 am (1300 GMT)
Thursday and was planning to address the
nation around the same time. A crowd of
supporters was gathering outside the
presidential palace to salute her as she
drove off, a spokesman for the Workers'
Party told AFP.
- Battered by multiple crises -
Due to host the Olympic Games in Rio de
Janeiro in less than three months, Brazil is
struggling to stem economic disarray and
handle the fallout from a corruption scandal
reaching deep into the political and business
elite.
The latest target of a sprawling probe into
the graft was Senator Aecio Neves, who
narrowly lost to Rousseff in the 2014
presidential elections -- and who was one of
the senators voting to impeach Rousseff.
The Supreme Court authorized a probe into
his alleged bribe taking and money
laundering overnight.
The multiple crises have wreaked havoc on
the Workers' Party, whose transformative
social programs have lifted tens of millions
of people from poverty since 2003, but
which has been portrayed as increasingly
incapable of governing.
Senate President Renan Calheiros, who
oversaw the proceedings, told reporters that
impeachment would be "traumatic."
And divisions were plain to see outside
Congress, where police erected a giant
metal fence to keep apart small rival groups
of demonstrators. Riot police pepper
sprayed a group of Rousseff supporters late
Wednesday and pro- and anti-impeachment
protesters also scuffled briefly in Rio.
Even though the impeachment vote came in
the middle of the night, residents in central
Sao Paulo -- Brazil's financial center and an
opposition stronghold -- set off fire crackers,
banged pots and yelled "Dilma out!" from
their windows.
- 'Stain' or 'new day?' -
Senators made their cases in 15-minute
blocks, alternately describing Rousseff as
the cause of Brazil's humiliating economic
decline or defending her as victim of a coup
in a deeply corrupt political system.
Jose Eduardo Cardozo, Rousseff's attorney
general, delivered a passionate closing
statement, telling senators that they were
"condemning an honest, innocent woman"
whose supposed crimes amounted to
nothing more than a long accepted
accounting practice.
"If this is carried out, it will break
constitutional order. If it goes through, it will
be a coup that leaves a stain on our
history," he said.
But Neves -- who is just one of dozens of
senators facing or who have faced criminal
cases -- said "Brazil can now start to turn a
new page."
"I have no doubt that Brazil will have a new
opportunity and we need to unite," he said.
Even some of those opposing Rousseff
doubt that a change of power will resolve
the country's underlying problems of
corruption and mismanagement.
Pro-impeachment protester Sulineide
Rodrigues said that even if she wanted
Rousseff out, she had few hopes for Temer
improving things.
"We don't think Temer will be any better,"
said Rodrigues, 59.
"But you know what we'll do? We'll keep
coming back and keep having impeachments
until there's someone there who listens to
us Brazilians."