The song of a bygone struggle against dictatorship echoed through Brazil’s cities last week as trade unionists, social activists and musicians rallied against what they see as a coup against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
Geraldo Vandre’s 1968 melody Pra nao dizer que nao falei das Flores (“So they can’t say I didn’t sing about the flowers”) harks back to an era of flower power and brutal military rule, but it has been revived in a very modern battle for the political soul of the country.
More than 100,000 demonstrators joined protests in dozens of cities on Thursday last week, a date chosen to mark the 52nd anniversary of the coup that deposed a democratically elected president and ushered in two decades of military rule.
Illustration: Mountain People
In Rio de Janeiro, tens of thousands of people packed the Largo da Carioca square in a carnival-esque atmosphere that mixed music and caipirinhas with defiant political rhetoric.
On a stage, a variety of speakers returned again and again to the refrain “Nao vai ter golpe” (“There’s not going to be a coup”), occasionally adding the line: “There’s going to be fight.”
It was the most significant show of strength to date for the embattled Rousseff and indicates that regardless of the momentum currently propelling the impeachment movement, neither her supporters nor their allies on the left would accept her removal quietly.
As well as a protest in its own right, the show of people power was also a rehearsal for what is expected to be a bigger turnout on Sunday next week, when the Brazilian congress is due to began a plenary debate on whether to impeach.
It is not easy to defend an unpopular, impotent leader who has overseen the biggest economic decline in a century, political paralysis and a massive corruption scandal that has implicated many of her allies. Rousseff’s approval rating was just 10 percent in the latest poll. Far larger anti-government rallies have called for her removal.
However, many of those who took to the streets on Thursday last week said they were defending democracy rather than the president. Regardless of Rousseff’s faults, they believe she was chosen by the electorate to serve a four-year term that is now threatened by a legally dubious impeachment threat.
Unlike many of the demonstrators, Kimie Shimabukuro, a 32-year-old biologist from Sao Paulo, did not wear red — the color of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) — partly because she was afraid of violence and partly because she is unconvinced that Rousseff and her party are worth supporting.
She turned out because of her principles.
“I’m against the coup. I think the impeachment will worsen the corruption situation in Brazil,” she said.
Her friend, Ushi Arakaki, another Japanese-Brazilian, went further.
“I hoped for more from the Workers’ Party. But even so, I am opposed to the opportunism of the opposition, which wants to get rid of a president who was elected by popular vote without a legal basis for impeachment. That’s why I consider this a coup,” Arakaki said.
“This is a critical moment,” said Marcela Abrantes, a 43-year-old teacher. “There is no proof that Dilma did anything to deserve impeachment. These are just maneuvers being carried out by congress and the judiciary.”
Technically, Rousseff faces impeachment for breaking Brazil’s law of fiscal responsibility by using funds from state-backed banks to temporarily mask the government’s budget deficit ahead of the 2014 election. Although this practice was used by previous administrations, the president’s critics, led by Brazilian lower house Speaker Eduardo Cunha, said the window-dressing of government accounts is grounds for impeachment.
This has infuriated many voters, not least because Cunha is himself accused of the greater crime of taking US$5 million from a kickback scheme at the state-run oil company Petrobras.
However, in the absence of a no-confidence vote, many politicians see impeachment — which is within the scope of the Brazilian constitution — as the only way to end a political logjam.
The battle over this issue in congress could easily form the plot of an episode of House of Cards. In the latest twist last week, the possibility of Rousseff failing to complete her term moved much closer with the defection from her ruling coalition of the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (PMDB).
Her fall is by no means a certainty. Although the Brazilian Workers’ Party has abandoned hope of killing impeachment in committee on Monday next week, it is desperately trying to secure the 172 seats needed to stifle the process when it comes to a debate and vote in the 513-member lower chamber, which is expected to run from Friday next week through Sunday or April 18th. Before then, the pro and anti-impeachment camps are said to be offering increasingly lucrative incentives to win over about 90 deputies of smaller parties who are likely to decide the outcome. Globo TV network political commentator Ricardo Noblat said the government is currently offering 1 million Brazilian real (US$271,805) of public works contracts for each vote against impeachment and 400,000 Brazilian real for each abstention. Whatever the two sides are offering, it is likely to increase the closer the vote comes.
While the impeachment battle and corruption investigation suck up all the political oxygen, the economy continues to choke. Brazil’s GDP — by far the largest of any nation in Latin America — is suffering its biggest contraction in a century. In the past six months, all three of the world’s most influential financial ratings agencies have downgraded Brazil’s sovereign debt to junk status.
The latest piece of grim news was that industrial production fell 11.8 percent in the first two months of the year. Everybody agrees the current situation is untenable, but how to restore stability is the subject of furious debate. While the opposition put their hopes in impeachment, others want elections, or for Rousseff to soldier on.
The Brazilian Workers’ Party says that removing the president would only make matters worse.
“I think it’s a mistake to think that the coup would happen without a reaction. Many sectors of society will not accept this and it will bring the country into a process of conflicts,” Brazilian Workers’ Party deputy Paulo Pimenta said.
The peculiarity of the situation has created some unlikely bedfellows. On the issue of impeachment, the Landless Workers’ Movement is on the same side as its arch-enemy, Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply Katia Abreu — one of several PMDB Cabinet members who have defied their party’s orders to leave the ruling coalition.
“Impeachment exists in the Constitution and by itself is not a coup, but it can become a coup. It is a traumatic process that will scar the nation. We have no right to be imprudent,” Abreu said in an interview.
Back among the red-clad protesters on Thursday last week, Andrea Oliveira, a 30-year old student whose T-shirt was covered in “Dilma” stickers, said: “I am here because I still believe in this government. I am black and I am poor and I have had the opportunity to go to university thanks to the policies of this government.”
However, while many in the crowd were petistas, as government supporters are known, a significant number said that they had no love for the president. Abrantes voted for the first Brazilian Workers’ Party president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but never for Rousseff, said she believed the president would survive the impeachment process.
“If you look at her history, she has survived much worse than this,” she said, referring to the three years Rousseff, then the treasurer of a Marxist guerrilla organization, spent imprisoned during the period of military rule.
Chants of ‘Dilma, Dilma, Dilma” failed to find much of an echo, while cries calling for the resignation of Brazilian Vice President Michel Temer, who has been angling to succeed her, proved much more popular.
Maria Machedo, 55, a university lecturer, said she had always supported the Brazilian Workers’ Party, but was highly critical of the alliances it had made to stay in power. There are over 30 political parties in Brazil’s congress and until the PT’s major ally, the PMDB, quit this week, there were ten in the governing coalition alone.
“Political reform is this country’s most urgent priority,” she said. “After food, and people’s other most basic necessities, we need political reform.”
Later in the evening, Chico Buarque, a writer and singer who is one of Brazil’s most respected artists, took to the stage to a rapturous reception.
“People who voted for the PT, and people who don’t like the PT,’ he said, “it is clear that we are here united in our appreciation of democracy and in our robust defense of democracy.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry