Why did Brazilians impeach their president?
Impeaching Dilma Rousseff is a referendum on the country’s past
By Asher Kohn
Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is losing her grip. After two years of ruling over one of the world’s most powerful economies, she was impeached Wednesday.
The impeachment is centered around accusations that Rousseff illegally funded social programs by taking money out of state-owned banks. Opponents say that this sort of corruption is endemic to leftist politicians who make promises that they literally cannot cash. There are thousands of disenchanted protesters who have taken the streets demanding that she resign or face trial.
At least one historian viewed these demands skeptically. Lincoln Secco, a professor of history at the University of São Paulo, told The New York Times that “this will set a very dangerous precedent…because from now on, any moment that we have a highly unpopular president, there will be pressure to start an impeachment process.” Secco said that the impeachment movement is “putting a very large bullet in Brazilian democracy.”
Those are fighting words in Brazil, which has seen military intervention and politicized ousters within living memory. The dueling narratives at play argue that the president is either a feckless overspender or a white knight of the Brazilian people. Both rely on a selective reading of history to stake their claims, and neither are particularly accurate.
In some ways, Rousseff herself is a living artifact Brazil’s violent past. The daughter of a communist émigré, she was a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist in her youth. She was arrested and tortured by her country’s military government at age 22, suspended naked and upside down by interrogators in a torture maneuver called the pau de arara, or “parrot’s perch.”
Today, the Brazilian military is far less brutal than it was back then, and Rousseff has moved away from her radical roots. The turning point (or at least one of many turning points) was Fernando Collor de Mello’s presidency. Brazil’s first democratically elected president since since 1959, Collor barely squeaked by the left-wing candidate in 1988 and inherited a country rife with economic instability.
Collor’s government was wildly corrupt, but that didn’t stop him from painting those protesting his presidency as a sort of fifth column trying to bring back to military rule. In 1992, Collor was forced to resign after he was found guilty of influence peddling. He was impeached and eventually disqualified from holding office until 2000. But all in all, he left office without a fight.
Rousseff held on for as long as she could. For one, accusations of military meddling are far more grave when they come from someone who has been tortured by that military, not the patrician son of a governor. Also, Collor himself is a major figure in the corruption scandal. It’s easy for her supporters to imagine her as an innocent — the “subversive Joan of Arc” she was as a guerilla — up against an old boys’ network of crooks and cronies. Not necessarily accurate, but politically useful.
Either way, looks like Rousseff couldn’t wield history the way she wanted.
