Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, Impeached

Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff has been thrown out of office by the country’s corruption-tainted senate after a gruelling impeachment trial that ends 13 years of Workers’ party rule.

Brazil’s Senate voted 61-20 Wednesday, August 31, 2016 to remove President Dilma Rousseff from office, finding her guilty of breaking budgetary laws in an impeachment trial, CNN reports.

 

The impeachment process which has finally ended today, has dragged on for months. In May 2016, Rousseff was suspended in May.  At the time, Rousseff called the impeachment proceedings an attempt at a “power grab by her rivals“. She alleged political sabotage of her administration by her rivals.

 

“When Brazil or when a president is impeached for a crime that they have not committed, the name we have for this in democracy — it’s not an impeachment, it is a coup,” she said after the Senate voted to launch the proceedings.

 

With her ouster, Michel Temer, 75, Rousseff’s one-time vice president who’s been serving as interim president since her suspension, will assume the office of president and serve out the remainder of her second term.

 

Rousseff, 68, Brazil’s first-ever female head of state and a former Marxist guerrilla, insisted earlier this week that she had committed no crime and said she was proud that she’d been “faithful to my commitment to the nation.”

 

The heir-apparent to former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rousseff was re-elected by a narrow margin in 2014, but a recession and a cross-party corruption scandal put an end to any political goodwill she might have earned, eventually leading to her ouster/the protracted battle.