Americas
Pall Hangs Over Brazil’s Presidential Palace as Dilma Rousseff Prepares for Trial
BRASÍLIA — The first time the lights went out in her presidential palace, Dilma Rousseff
grimaced. The next time, she rolled her eyes. The third time, she
jumped out of her chair, demanding that subordinates find out what was
going on.
“This was my area,” she fumed during an interview, pointing out that she had made Brazil’s electricity grid a top priority before she was suspended last month as president. “I don’t know why this is happening.”
With
Ms. Rousseff stripped of her authority, a sense of powerlessness and
indignation pervades the Palácio da Alvorada, the cavernous residence
where she is allowed to stay while the fight to oust her once and for all grinds on in the Senate.
It was not supposed to be like this. Brazil was hoping to celebrate its triumphs in the run-up to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, not play host to a jaw-dropping spectacle of political dysfunction.
Ms.
Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was supposed to be preparing
to greet world leaders, not enduring the humiliation of an impeachment
battle that has her hanging by a thread.
“These parasites,” is what she called her rivals trying to impeach her, many of whom are facing their own scandals.
For now, she is still surrounded by the trappings of luxury in the palace
designed by Oscar Niemeyer: the battalion of servants serving tiny cups
of coffee, the heated pool in a well-manicured garden, the modernist
masterpieces by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and Alfredo Volpi hanging on the
walls.
But
the futuristic palace feels less like a lavish manor these days than a
bunker. Stewing as she tries to make sense of her predicament and
prepares for her impeachment trial, Ms. Rousseff compared her rivals to
the strangler figs that envelop trees in the jungle, slowly choking them
to death.
And yet, she has relished a few unexpected glimmers of hope.
The interim government led by Michel Temer, the vice president who took over the nation last month after breaking with Ms. Rousseff, has suffered a series of embarrassing blunders since legislators suspended her.
First,
one of Mr. Temer’s top allies stepped down as planning minister after a
secret recording emerged late last month. On it, an aide laid out how
their party — the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or P.M.D.B. — had pursued Ms. Rousseff’s ouster in order to thwart the investigation into the colossal graft scheme surrounding Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras.
Then, the new transparency minister — essentially Mr. Temer’s anticorruption czar — resigned after another recording seemed to show that he had also tried to stymie the Petrobras inquiry.
Beyond that, Mr. Temer, 75, a lawyer who speaks an archaic Portuguese that flummoxes his countrymen, decided not to name any women or Afro-Brazilians to his cabinet.
His choices opened him to withering criticism in a country where more
than half of the people define themselves as black or mixed race, and
where women feature prominently in the halls of Congress, the Supreme
Court and the executive suites of large corporations.
“It’s
a provisional government of rich white men,” Ms. Rousseff, a
self-described leftist who was an operative in an urban guerrilla group
in her youth, said about the administration of her adversary. “I never
thought that I would see in Brazil a government as conservative as this
one.”
Ms.
Rousseff and her allies hope that the recent blows to Mr. Temer’s
legitimacy can tilt the impeachment vote to her favor. She pointed out
that all she needs is a handful of senators to change their votes for
her to be reinstated as president.
Still,
for every misstep by her adversaries, Ms. Rousseff and her own top
confidants have also found themselves caught off-guard by new
revelations in federal graft inquiries, reflecting the challenges that
her Workers’ Party faces in its ambition to win her impeachment trial.
Ms.
Rousseff remains rare among major political figures in that she has not
been accused of stealing for personal gain. Instead, she faces charges
of manipulating the budget in order to hide the depths of Brazil’s
economic woes.
But
a former Petrobras executive has also testified that Ms. Rousseff lied
about her knowledge of a bribery-fueled refinery deal when she was the
chairwoman of the company’s board. She denies the claim.
Potentially
even more damaging, the Brazilian magazine Isto É reported in recent
days that a construction magnate testified that Ms. Rousseff negotiated
an illegal $3.5 million donation for her 2014 re-election campaign.
Ms. Rousseff rejected
the account, calling it a “slanderous” part of a news media campaign
attacking her “personal honor.” But together with other developments —
her campaign strategist and the former treasurer of the Workers’ Party
are among Ms. Rousseff’s allies already in jail on graft charges — the
reports have further eroded her credibility.
Josias
de Souza, a prominent political columnist, described the latest
revelations tarnishing the camps of both Ms. Rousseff and Mr. Temer as
“a classic power struggle between criminal factions” taking place before
a recession-weary society.
Despite
such grim assessments, Ms. Rousseff is avidly preparing her defense.
She consults with aides, bounces strategies off lawyers. Sometimes, her
legal team convenes in the quiet chapel on the grounds of the palace.
“They’ve
always wanted me to resign, but I won’t,” she said, arguing that her
rivals were carrying out a coup, albeit one with the Supreme Court’s
stamp of approval. “I really disturb the parasites, and I’ll keep on
disturbing them.”
Senate
leaders said on Monday that the impeachment trial was expected to
conclude sometime in early August, potentially producing embarrassing
street protests as the Olympic Games get underway, regardless of how the
Senate rules.
In
the meantime, Ms. Rousseff expresses irritability, if not resignation,
over the toll that the political upheaval has had on the young democracy
established in 1985 in Brazil after a long military dictatorship.
“This is a turning point,” she said about the rupture producing Mr. Temer’s ascension. “A pact that existed has broken.”
Glossing
over criticism that her policies laid the groundwork for Brazil’s
economic crisis, she argued that the economy would already be on the
mend if congressional leaders had not thwarted measures aimed at
restoring confidence.
Otherwise,
Ms. Rousseff said that she hewed to routines each day, riding her
bicycle in the morning and reading at night, devouring each digital
edition of The New York Review of Books. Lately, she has been reading “SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome,” by the English classical scholar Mary Beard.
Ms.
Rousseff said that she found some bemusement in investigators comparing
Eduardo Cunha, who led the impeachment campaign as the speaker of the
lower house before he was suspended to face corruption charges, to Catiline, the senator who conspired to overthrow the Roman Republic in the first century B.C.
Cicero,
the orator and constitutionalist, denounced Catiline in a series of
speeches before the Senate, and Ms. Rousseff, smiling as she recalled
her schoolgirl Latin, said: “Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus eludet?”
The
sentence was from one of the speeches, which questioned how much longer
Catiline would continue abusing the republic’s patience. In the
question repeated by Ms. Rousseff, Cicero asked, “How long is that
madness of yours still to mock us?”
copy http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06
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