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Brazil’s Rousseff Bows Out Defiantly After Historic Senate Vote To Try Her

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff bowed out defiantly on Thursday, suspended from office after the Senate voted to put her on trial for breaking budget laws … Continue reading Brazil’s Rousseff Bows Out Defiantly After Historic Senate Vote To Try Her


Rouseff_BrazilBrazilian President Dilma Rousseff bowed out defiantly on Thursday, suspended from office after the Senate voted to put her on trial for breaking budget laws in a historic decision brought on by a deep recession and a corruption scandal.

Rousseff, in office since 2011, will be replaced by Vice President Michel Temer, for the duration of a Senate trial that could take up to six months.

Rousseff, speaking shortly before she left Brasilia’s Planalto presidential palace, said was notified of her suspension on Thursday morning.

“I may have made mistakes but I did not commit any crime,” Rousseff said in an angry address, calling the impeachment “fraudulent” and “a coup.” The leftist leader, 68, was flanked by dozens of ministers who were leaving with her administration.

“I never imagined that it would be necessary to fight once again against a coup in this country,” Rousseff said, in a reference to her youth fighting Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Her suspension came hours after the Senate voted 55-22 to put her on trial, a decision that ended more than 13 years of rule by the left-wing Workers Party.

The party rose from Brazil’s labor movement and helped pull millions of people out of poverty before seeing many of its leaders tainted by corruption investigations.

Rousseff, an economist and former member of a Marxist guerrilla group who was the country’s first woman president, is unlikely to be acquitted in her trial.

The size of the vote to try her showed the opposition already has the support it will need to reach a two-thirds majority required to convict Rousseff and remove her definitively from office.

“It is a bitter though necessary medicine,” opposition Senator Jose Serra, tipped to become foreign minister under Temer, said during the marathon debate. “Having the Rousseff government continue would be a bigger tragedy.”

With Brazil’s economy mired in its deepest recession in decades, the incoming Temer administration sought to show it would act rapidly.

Temer aides said the incoming government would announce a series of austerity measures to help reduce a massive budget deficit. An immediate effort would seek to reform Brazil’s costly pension system, possibly setting a minimum age for retirement, said one advisor.

Temer also plans to appoint Henrique Mereilles, a former central bank president and banking executive who is popular with foreign investors, as finance minister, another aide said.