The Senate on Wednesday ousted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, ending an impeachment process that polarized Latin America’s biggest nation amid a massive corruption scandal and brutal economic crisis.
Senators voted 61 to 20 to convict the nation’s first female president for illegally using money from state banks to bankroll public spending, marking the end of 13 years of leftist Workers Party rule.
Rousseff’s opponents hailed her removal as paving the way for a change of fortunes for Brazil. Her conservative successor, Michel Temer, the former vice president who has run Brazil since her suspension in May, inherits a bitterly divided nation with voters in no mood for the austerity measures needed.
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In his first televised address to the nation after being sworn in as president through 2018, Temer called on Brazilians to unite behind him in working to rescue the economy from a fiscal crisis and more than 11 percent unemployment.
“This moment is one of hope and recovery of confidence in Brazil. Uncertainty has ended,” Temer said in the speech broadcast after his departure for a G20 summit in China.
Defiant to the end, Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla who was tortured and jailed under a military dictatorship in 1970, vowed to fight on in defense of Brazil’s workers.
Standing outside the presidential residence flanked by supporters, she insisted on her innocence and said her removal was a “parliamentary coup” backed by the economic elite that would roll back social programs that lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty over the past decade.
“They think they have beaten us, but they are mistaken,” Rousseff said, adding that she would appeal the decision using every legal means. “At this time, I will not say goodbye to you. I am certain I can say: ‘See you soon.’”
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