Brazil’s first female president, Rousseffimpeached

Brazil former President Dilma Rousseff
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was
suspended Thursday to face impeachment,

ceding power to her vice-president-turned-
enemy Michel Temer in a political earthquake
ending 13 years of leftist rule over Latin
America's biggest nation.
A nearly 22-hour debate in the Senate closed
with an overwhelming 55-22 vote against
Brazil's first female president. Pro-
impeachment senators broke into applause and
posed for selfies and congratulatory group
photos in the blue-carpeted, circular chamber.

Only a simple majority of the 81-member
Senate had been required to suspend Rousseff
for six months pending judgement on charges
that she broke budget accounting laws. A trial
could now take months, with a two-thirds
majority vote eventually needed to force
Rousseff, 68, from office altogether.
Within hours, Temer, from the center-right
PMDB party, was to take over as interim
president, drawing the curtain on more than a
decade of dominance by Rousseff's leftist
Workers' Party.

He was preparing to announce a new
government shortly and said his priority is to
address Brazil's worst recession in decades
and end the paralysis gripping Congress during
the battle over Rousseff.

A onetime Marxist guerrilla tortured under the
country's military dictatorship in the 1970s,
Rousseff has denounced the impeachment
drive as a coup and vowed to fight on during
her trial.

She was expected to be officially notified of
the vote's result at 10:00 am (1300 GMT)
Thursday and was planning to address the
nation around the same time. A crowd of
supporters was gathering outside the
presidential palace to salute her as she drove
off, a spokesman for the Workers' Party told
AFP.

- Battered by multiple crises -
Due to host the Olympic Games in Rio de
Janeiro in less than three months, Brazil is
struggling to stem economic disarray and
handle the fallout from a corruption scandal
reaching deep into the political and business
elite.

The latest target of a sprawling probe into the
graft was Senator Aecio Neves, who narrowly
lost to Rousseff in the 2014 presidential
elections -- and who was one of the senators
voting to impeach Rousseff. The Supreme
Court authorized a probe into his alleged bribe
taking and money laundering overnight.

The multiple crises have wreaked havoc on the
Workers' Party, whose transformative social
programs have lifted tens of millions of people
from poverty since 2003, but which has been
portrayed as increasingly incapable of
governing.

Senate President Renan Calheiros, who oversaw
the proceedings, told reporters that
impeachment would be "traumatic."
And divisions were plain to see outside
Congress, where police erected a giant metal
fence to keep apart small rival groups of
demonstrators. Riot police pepper sprayed a
group of Rousseff supporters late Wednesday
and pro- and anti-impeachment protesters also
scuffled briefly in Rio.

Even though the impeachment vote came in
the middle of the night, residents in central
Sao Paulo -- Brazil's financial center and an
opposition stronghold -- set off fire crackers,
banged pots and yelled "Dilma out!" from their
windows.

- 'Stain' or 'new day?' -
Senators made their cases in 15-minute
blocks, alternately describing Rousseff as the
cause of Brazil's humiliating economic decline
or defending her as victim of a coup in a
deeply corrupt political system.
Jose Eduardo Cardozo, Rousseff's attorney
general, delivered a passionate closing
statement, telling senators that they were
"condemning an honest, innocent woman"
whose supposed crimes amounted to nothing
more than a long accepted accounting
practice.

"If this is carried out, it will break constitutional
order. If it goes through, it will be a coup that
leaves a stain on our history," he said.

But Neves -- who is just one of dozens of
senators facing or who have faced criminal
cases -- said "Brazil can now start to turn a
new page."
"I have no doubt that Brazil will have a new
opportunity and we need to unite," he said.

Even some of those opposing Rousseff doubt
that a change of power will resolve the
country's underlying problems of corruption
and mismanagement.
Pro-impeachment protester Sulineide
Rodrigues said that even if she wanted
Rousseff out, she had few hopes for Temer
improving things.

"We don't think Temer will be any better," said
Rodrigues, 59.
"But you know what we'll do? We'll keep
coming back and keep having impeachments
until there's someone there who listens to us
Brazilians."