Brazil’s Rousseff Defends Herself at Senate Impeachment Trial
Brazil’s suspended president, Dilma Rousseff, defended herself against
accusations of wrongdoing in her testimony during her Senate impeachment
trial, and said her accusers are trying to turn back the social
progress achieved during her and her predecessor’s terms in office.
Brazil’s Suspended President Dilma Rousseff Defends Herself at Senate Impeachment Trial
Beleaguered president continues to liken the process to a coup d’état
ENLARGE
Two-thirds, or 54, of
the Brazilian Senate’s 81 lawmakers need to vote against suspended
President Dilma Rousseff for her to be ousted.
Photo:
evaristo sa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
In a sometimes-emotional 45-minute speech, Ms. Rousseff told the packed Senate chamber that the charges against her are an excuse to permit a constitutional coup d’état and that her enemies want to reverse the outcome of her 2014 re-election.
“What’s at risk now are the conquests of the past 13 years” under Ms. Rousseff and her mentor and predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, she said, speaking of advances made by the country’s poorest citizens and its middle class. “What’s at risk is the future of the country, of the opportunity and the hope of advancing even more.”
Ms. Rousseff is accused of violating budget laws by delaying government payments to a state-controlled bank, in effect forcing the lender to provide her administration with allegedly illegal short-term loans that made the country’s budget situation appear better than it was. Ms. Rousseff has denied wrongdoing.
Two-thirds, or 54, of the Senate’s 81 lawmakers need to vote against her for her to be ousted. Otherwise, she can immediately return to office. A question-and-answer session between Ms. Rousseff and senators followed the speech, and the final vote is expected to take place Tuesday or Wednesday.
In her speech, Ms. Rousseff depicted the impeachment process as an act of revenge by the former head of the lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, and other politicians for her allowing the blockbuster Operation Car Wash anticorruption investigation to go forward.
As head of the lower house, Mr. Cunha accepted a petition last December to begin the impeachment process the day after members of Ms. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party in the chamber’s ethics committee allowed an investigation against him to move forward. Mr. Cunha has been accused of accepting bribes as part of the bid-rigging and bribery scandal at state-controlled oil company Petróleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, which is at the center of the Car Wash probe. He has denied any wrongdoing, but was forced to step down as president of the lower house in July.
While addressing senators, Ms. Rousseff referenced earlier Brazilian leaders whose terms were cut short, including President João Goulart, who was toppled by a military coup in 1964, and placed herself among them in Brazil’s history as a victim of injustice.
Ms. Rousseff described herself repeatedly as a fighter for progress and equality, and spoke with emotion in her voice about being tortured by the country’s military dictatorship and about her struggle to survive cancer before she was elected. There were hushed gasps in the Senate as Ms. Rousseff began to choke on her words while speaking about the two near-death experiences.
“I resisted the storm of terror,” she said, and four decades after suffering at the hands of soldiers, “there’s no torture.” She praised the country’s democratic progress, but added “today I fear the death of democracy.”
Spectators were crammed into the wings of the already-full Senate chamber during the speech, amid near total silence that was punctuated by brief rounds of applause by her supporters -- despite warnings to remain quiet from Supreme Court Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, who is presiding over the trial.
Ms. Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, headed a group of her supporters in the Senate’s upper galleries that included prominent singer and composer Chico Buarque, a critic of the dictatorship whose music was sometimes censored by the military government in the 1970s.
The beleaguered president was suspended from office in mid-May, when the Senate voted to hold the trial that is now in its final stage. Her vice president, Michel Temer, has been acting president since then, and will finish out the two years and four months remaining in her term if she is convicted.
The decision is widely expected to go against the president. In a procedural vote earlier this month that would have ended the process had it gone in favor of Mr. Rousseff, 59 senators voted to approve a report calling for her removal and 21 voted against it.
Ms. Rousseff gave a good speech, telling her supporters what they wanted to hear and placing her situation in Brazil’s historical context, but it is too late to change Senators’ minds, said Pedro Fassoni Arruda, a political scientist and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo.
“She spoke clearly, and well,” he said, “but at this point opinions have already been formed.”
—Benjamin Parkin, Luciana Magalhaes and Rogerio Jelmayer contributed to this article.
Write to Paulo Trevisani at paulo.trevisani@wsj.com and Jeffrey T. Lewis at jeffrey.lewis@wsj.com 
