Brazil’s Senate impeaches Rousseff

Brasilia, August 31

Brazil's  Senate today voted to remove President Dilma Rousseff from office, the culmination of a yearlong fight that paralysed Latin America’s largest nation and exposed deep rifts on everything from race relations to social spending.

Rousseff, however, branded the vote to remove her from office a “parliamentary coup” and vowed a comeback by her Workers’ Party. “They decided to interrupt the mandate of a president who had committed no crime. They have convicted an innocent person and carried out a parliamentary coup,” she said.

Rousseff was Brazil's first female President, with a storied career that includes a stint as a Marxist guerrilla jailed and tortured in the 1970s during the country's dictatorship. She was accused of breaking fiscal laws in her management of the federal budget.

“The Senate has found that the President of the federal republic of Brazil, Dilma Vana Rousseff, committed crimes in breaking fiscal laws,” said Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, who presided over the trial.

Opposition lawmakers, who made clear early on the only solution was getting her out of office, argued that the maneuvers masked yawning deficits from high spending and ultimately exacerbated the recession in a nation that had long enjoyed darling status among emerging economies.

Nonsense, Rousseff countered time and again, proclaiming her innocence up to the end. Previous presidents used similar accounting techniques, she noted, saying the push to remove her was a bloodless coup d'état by elites fuming over the populist polices of her Workers' Party the last 13 years.

The opposition needed 54 of the 81 senators to vote in favor for her to be removed. They got many more, winning in a landslide of sorts, 61-20.

"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. — Agencies