A Very Brazilian Coup

[Judi Lynn]

June 3, 2016
A Very Brazilian Coup

by Conn Hallinan

On one level, the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff seems like vintage commedia dell’arte.

For instance, the lower house speaker who brought the charges, Eduardo Cunha, had to step down because he has $16 million stashed in secret Swiss and U.S. bank accounts. The man who replaced Cunha, Waldir Maranhao, is implicated in the corruption scandal around the huge state-owned oil company, Petrobras.

The former vice-president and now interim president, Michel Temer, has been convicted of election fraud, and has also been caught up in the Petrobras investigation. So is Senate president Renan Calheiros, who’s also dodging tax evasion charges.

In fact, over half the legislature is currently under investigation for corruption of some kind.

But there’s nothing comedic about what the fall of Rousseff and her left-leaning Workers Party will mean for the 35 million Brazilians who’ve been lifted out of poverty over the past decade, or for the 40 million newly minted members of the middle class — that’s one-fifth of Brazil’s 200 million people.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/a-very-brazilian-coup/

[Lodestar]

1. A lurch to the right

When the Workers Party was elected in 2002, it was unwilling to dilute its programs by bringing ideological opponents into a cabinet — yet the party still needed partners. The solution was cash payouts to legislators, a scheme titled mensalao (“monthly payoffs”) that was uncovered in 2005. Once the payoffs were revealed, the party had little choice but to fall back on the old system of handing out ministries in exchange for votes. That’s how Temer and the PMBD entered the scene.

With the reputation of the popular former president Lula da Silva and his Workers Party dented by the payoff scheme, the right saw an opportunity to rid themselves of the left. But Silva’s resilient popularity and the success of his anti-poverty programs made the party pretty much unassailable at the ballot box. Silva won another landslide election in 2006, and his successor Rousseff was elected twice in 2010 and 2014.

A Very Brazilian Coup

In short, the elites could not win elections. But they could still pull off a very Brazilian coup.

First, they hammered at the fact that some Workers Party leaders had been involved in corruption and others implicated in the Petrobras bribery scheme. Rousseff herself headed up Petrobras before being elected president. While she’s never been personally linked to any of the corruption, it did happen on her watch.

Petrobras is the fourth largest company in the world. It’s building tankers, offshore platforms, and refineries. That expansion has opened huge opportunities for graft, and the level of bribery involved could exceed $3 billion. Nine construction companies are implicated in the scandal, as well as more than 50 politicians, legislators, and state governors, from the PMDB as well as the Workers Party.

Rousseff’s biggest mistake was to run on an anti-austerity platform in 2014 and then reverse course after she was elected, putting the brakes on spending. The economy was already troubled and austerity made it worse. The 2005 bribery scheme lost the Workers Party some of the middle class, and the 2014 austerity alienated some of the party’s working class supporters.

But it was most likely Rousseff’s decision to green light the Petrobras corruption investigation that spurred her enemies to strike before the probe could pull down scores of political leaders and wealthy construction owners. Temer’s own anti-corruption minister was recently caught on tape plotting to use the impeachment to derail the investigation, an event that led to his resignation.

[MisterP]

2. looks a bit Honduran to me!