Brazil’s
Democracy To Suffer Grievous Blow As Unelectable,
Corrupt Neoliberal is Installed
By Glenn
Greenwald
(Para ler a versão desse artigo em Português, clique
aqui.)
May
12, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept " -
In
2002, Brazil’s left-of-center Workers Party
(PT) ascended to the presidency when Lula da
Silva
won in a landslide over the candidate of
the center-right party PSDB (throughout
2002,
“markets” were indignant at the mere
prospect of PT’s victory). The PT remained
in power when Lula, in 2006, was re-elected in
another landslide against a different
PSDB candidate. PT’s enemies thought they
had their chance to get rid of PT in 2010,
when Lula was barred by term limits from
running again, but their hopes were crushed
when Lula’s handpicked successor, the
previously unknown Dilma Rousseff,
won by 12 points over the same PSDB
candidate who lost to Lula in 2002. In
2014, PT’s enemies poured huge amounts of
money and resources into defeating her,
believing she was vulnerable and that they
had finally found a star PSDB candidate,
but they lost again, this time narrowly,
as Dilma was re-elected with 54 million
votes.
In
sum, PT has won four straight national
elections – the last one occurring just 18
months ago. Its opponents have vigorously
tried – and failed – to defeat them at the
ballot box, largely due to PT’s support
among Brazil’s poor and working classes.
So
if you’re a plutocrat with ownership of the
nation’s largest and most influential media
outlets, what do you do? You dispense with
democracy altogether – after all, it keeps
empowering candidates and policies you
dislike – by exploiting your media outlets
to incite unrest and then install a
candidate who could never get elected on his
own, yet will faithfully serve your
political agenda and ideology.
That’s exactly what Brazil is going to do
today. The Brazilian Senate will vote later
today to agree to a trial on the lower
House’s impeachment charges, which will
automatically result in Dilma’s suspension
from the presidency pending the end of the
trial.
Her
successor will be Vice President Michel
Temer of the PMDB party (pictured, above).
So unlike impeachment in most other
countries with a presidential system,
impeachment here will empower a person from
a different party than that of the elected
President. In this particular case, the
person to be installed is awash in
corruption: accused by informants of
involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing
scheme, he was just found guilty of, and
fined for, election spending violations and
faces an 8-year-ban on running for any
office. He’s deeply unpopular:
only 2% would support him for President
and
almost 60% want him impeached (the same
number that favors Dilma’s impeachment). But
he will faithfully serve the interests of
Brazil’s richest: he’s planning to
appoint Goldman, Sachs and IMF officials
to run the economy and otherwise install a
totally unrepresentative, neoliberal team
(composed in part of the same party – PSDB –
that has lost 4 straight elections to the
PT).
None of this is a defense of PT. That
party – as even
Lula acknowledged to me in my interview
of him – is filled with serious corruption.
Dilma, in many critical ways, has been a
failed president, and is deeply unpopular.
They have often aligned with and served the
country’s elite
at the expense of their base of poor
supporters. The country is suffering
economically and in almost every other way.
But
the solution to that is to defeat them at
the ballot box, not simply remove them and
replace them with someone more suitable to
the nation’s richest. Whatever damage PT is
doing to Brazil, the plutocrats and their
journalist-propagandists and the band of
thieves in Brasilia engineering this
travesty are far more dangerous. They are
literally dismantling – crushing – democracy
in the world’s fifth-largest country. Even The
Economist – which is hostile to even
the most moderate left-wing parties, hates
PT and wants Dilma to resign – has
denounced impeachment as “a pretext for
ousting an unpopular president” and
just two weeks ago warned that “what is
alarming is that those who are working for
her removal are in many ways worse.” Before
he became an active plotter in his own
empowerment,
Temer himself said last year that
“impeachment is unthinkable, would create an
institutional crisis. There is no judicial
or political basis for it.”
The
biggest scam of all is that Brazilian media
elites are justifying all of this in the
name of “corruption” and “democracy.” How
can anyone who is minimally rational believe
this is about “corruption” when they’re
about to install as President someone far
more implicated in corruption than the
person they’re removing, and when the
factions to be empowered are corrupt beyond
what can be described? And if they were
really concerned with “democracy,” why
wouldn’t they also impeach Temer and hold
new elections,
letting voters decide who should replace
Dilma? The answer is obvious: new
elections would almost certainly result in a
victory
for Lula or other candidates they dislike,
so what they fear most is letting the
Brazilian population decide who will govern
them. That is the very definition
of the destruction of democracy.
Beyond its obvious global significance, the
reason I’ve spent so much time and energy
writing about these events is because it’s
been astonishing – and unnerving – to watch
it all unfold, particularly given how the
country’s dominant media, owned by a tiny
handful of rich families, allows almost no
plurality of opinion. Instead, as Reporters
Without Borders
put it earlier this month: “In a barely
veiled manner, the leading national media
have urged the public to help bring down
President Dilma Rousseff. The journalists
working for these media groups are clearly
subject to the influence of private and
partisan interests, and these permanent
conflicts of interests are clearly very
detrimental to the quality of their
reporting.”
As
someone who has lived in Brazil for 11
years, it’s been inspiring and invigorating
to watch a country of 200 million people
throw off the shackles of a 21-year-old
right-wing (US/UK supported) military
dictatorship and mature into a young,
vibrant democracy and then thrive under it.
To see how quickly and easily that can be
reversed – abolished in all but name only
– is both sad and frightening to watch. It’s
also an important lesson for anyone, in
countries all over the world, who blithely
assume that things will continue as is or
that they’re guaranteed stability and
ongoing progress.
Last week, I spoke to Democracy Now
for about 10 minutes on why I think these
developments in Brazil are so significant:
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