In the shadow of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, a singular event was unfolding: a coup d'état against the democratically elected president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. A crime against democracy and the law that has been committed with the complacency of the international community. Thus, three Latin American countries are completed under coup d'état: Zelaya's Honduras, Lugo's Paraguay and Rousseff's Brazil, while trying to destabilize other governments of a progressive nature, such as those of Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador and Bolivia.
In 2014, the president of Brazil obtained more than 54 million votes from her compatriots for her re-election; the senators, on the other hand, barely 61 votes to remove her. The farce was so great that they did not have the courage to take away her political rights.
It all began on April 17 of this year when 367 deputies gave rise to a political trial that was not legal, to the president of Brazil, until 61 senators gave the final blow on August 31 in exchange for a handful of favors for their particular interests and the promise of judicial immunity: Let us remember that 41 of the 81 senators and almost a third of the deputies are accused of acts of corruption. Thus consummating what is called a parliamentary coup, that is, the armed forces are not needed to undertake them. What is needed, among other things, is media pressure, business sabotage, political conspiracy and a twisted use of the constitution.
There was not a single concrete piece of evidence to justify the parliamentary coup. But probably for reasons of "bad conscience" the disqualification to hold any public office for a period of eight years was rejected.
Dilma Rousseff has not been removed for any of the multiple cases of corruption - as highlighted by numerous media - that plague Brazilian politics. What the president has been accused of is signing three budget decrees in which she would have masked the accounts in order to obtain new bank loans without having finished paying the previous ones, that is, what she is accused of is her poor economic management. Taking Brazil to an alleged disaster that, in any case, would have to be judged by the citizens at the polls.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, stated during an interview with the American newspaper Democracy Now: "The formal accusation against Dilma that they are using to justify her removal is called in Portuguese 'pedaladas', which means pedaling. It refers to a political maneuver by which the government borrows money from a state bank and then delays in returning it so that it appears that the government has more money in its possession. So, basically, they accuse her of resorting to budgetary tricks to make the government's budgetary situation look better in order to win re-election. Something that, when talking to Europeans or Americans, generates perplexity because it is not understood that something like this can justify the removal from office of a democratically elected president, given that it is extremely common for political leaders around the world to do so, and, in fact, other presidents of Brazil have used that method in the past".
Now the coup leader Michel Temer, will govern without having been elected by the citizens with the goal of covering up corrupt and execute his neoliberal plan. Now will come forcefully the turn of the dismantling of the advances in labor, health, education and the sovereignty of natural resources.
Temer made it clear as soon as he assumed the presidency by announcing the closure of Ministries such as Culture, Women, Human Rights and Racial Equality.
With this sad episode of attack on democracy, not only is the new neoliberal offensive that Latin America is suffering consolidated, but it seems that constitutions and institutions remain a piece of paper, with which from time to time economic power groups and media oligopolies tend to use them according to their conveniences and circumstances.
It is worth remembering that capitalism and colonialism are never interested in democracy, one of its main theorists, the Nobel Prize in economics Friedrich Hayek, said: democracy is a simple "convenience", admissible to the extent that it did not interfere with the "free market", which is the non-negotiable of the system.
Manuel Plasencia, Member of the Insular Coordinator of Citizen Alternative May 25.
