The "soft coup" in Brazil goes after Lula de Silva

Eric Nepomuceno looks at development in the ongoing "soft coup" in Brazil. (Lula es el verdadero blanco del golpe Página/12 29.08.2016)

The headline is a word play on "golpe blanco" (soft coup), also called golpe en blanco. Blanco also means "target." So the headline reads, Lula is the real blanco of the coup.

Elected President Dilma Rousseff (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores) of the Workers Party was removed from office in impeachment proceedings driven by the opposition on trumped-up corruption charges. The credibility of the whole proceeding isn't enhanced by the fact that the interim President Michel Temer is currently restricted banned from running for any public office in Brazil as part of a legal penalty related to corruption charges.

Nepomuceno reports on a new development in which the Policía Federal, the Brazilian version of the FBI, has made a report implicating former President Lula de Silva in what sounds like another very shaky corruption charge having to do with an apartment he and his wife had bought while it was being constructed. According to Nepomuceno's report, Lula had pulled out of the arrangement and his attorneys had asked the construction company to recover the money. Since apparently Lula and his wife stood to lose money on the deal, it's kind of hard on the face of it to see how this functions as some kind of a bribe for him. In this way, it's reminiscent of the Whitewater pseudoscandal in the 1990s in the United States.

The successive governments of Lula and Dilma were part of what has been called the "pink tide" of left governments in Latin America which challenged the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" in various ways. Lula was President 2003-2011, succeeded by Dilma until she was removed from office in this year's "soft coup."

Corruption is a part of life in business and in government, but that's certainly no reason to be complacent about it, much less accepting.

Corruption accusations are also part of politics. And accusations of corruption are not the same as real corruption. The long history of pseudoscandals is an excellent reminder of that.

But politics is also involved in even legitimate investigations of corruption, particularly when it involves the head of government. The impeachment of Bill Clinton is a great example of that, too. The charges against him were essentially trivial in the end. And the partisan motivations were painfully obvious. Which is why a solid majority of the public supported him in his fight against impeachment.

The other Presidential impeachment in the US, that of Andrew Johnson, was also intensely political and partisan. The underlying political issue there was a substantial one. Johnson's opponents were seeking to have a democratic Reconstruction in the occupied South that would protect the right of black citizens instead of the planter-friendly "Presidential Reconstruction" Johnson had implemented. The formal charge against him is still debated. But, at best, it involved a big judgment call on the part of those Senators voting unsuccessfully for his removal from office related to the Tenure-of-Office law which Johnson was impeached for allegedly violating.

John Kennedy in his 1957 Profiles in Courage, written before he had his touch encounters as President with the intransigence of Southern segregationist Governors like Ross Barnett and George Wallace, selected Kansas Republican Sen. Edmund Ross (1826–1907) for one of his profiles based on his voting against convicting Johnson in the Senate. It was a decisive vote, since conviction failed by only one vote.

In the Brazilian case, there are real problems with corruption, many of them stemming from the state oil company Petrobras. Brazil isn't as exclusively a petrostate as Venezuela. But it is a petrostate. And corruption is one of their chronic problems.

Still, the superficial and strained nature of the corruption charges against both Lula and Dilma is an indication of how insubstantial the actual evidence against them is. The conservative parties in South America share a common program of opposing left governments and defending the neoliberal political and ideological project.

And "soft coups" have become a common approach to unseating left governments. (See my post The art of the "soft coup" 04/12/2016 for more details.) Paraguay served as a kind of test case for a golpe blanco in 2012. Outside of Latin America, Ukraine in 2014 also experienced a "soft coup" with a destructive upshot in the conflict with Russia. That is one of the options being attempted by the opposition in Venezuela.

What the exact American role was in those coups, we probably won't know for years. But in Paraguay and Ukraine, and apparently now in Brazil, the Obama Administration has been sympathetic to the soft coups. And presumably would be sympathetic to one in Venezuela, as well.

"Soft coup" in Brazil and Thursday

The "institutional coup," aka, "soft coup" in Brazil took place on Thursday. It's a really bad sign for democracy in Brazil and more broadly in Latin America.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks gives a rundown on the story in Brazillian [sic] Impeachment Is Actually A Corporate Coup 05/12/2016:





His description of the new President, Michel Temer, is pretty amazing. He's legally banned for running for any public office in Brazil as part of a legal penalty for corruption charges. But the Brazilian oligarchy just installed him as the President of one of the largest and most populous countries in the world. This is not a good thing.

Formally, the Brazilian Senate has voted to conduct and impeachment trial of elected President Dilma Rousseff. But under the Brazilian Constitution, that means she's temporarily removed from power, in this case for up to six months. (Jonathan Watts, Dilma Rousseff suspended as senate votes to impeach Brazilian president The Guardian 05/12/2016)

Rousseff called the action a "modern coup" carried out by the "traitor" Temer. (Democracia suspendida Página/12 12.05.2016)

The new President isn't wasting a moment in implementing standard neoliberal (Herbert Hoover/Angela Merkel/Mauricio Macri) economic policies. Jonathan Watts reports in Michel Temer takes reins as Brazil's president with pledge to rebuild country The Guardian 05/12/2016:

Although he promised to maintain welfare programmes such as bolsa familia poverty relief, he has touted balancing the budget and getting inflation back under 10% as his priority.

In a sign of his commitment to austerity, Temer has slashed the number of cabinet posts from 31 to 22. But he may find it hard to cut other costs ahead of municipal elections and with unemployment already in double digits.

Whether this tough task can be achieved will depend largely on new finance minister Henrique Meirelles, who gained considerable kudos as central bank president under the first two Workers’ party governments. He will be charged with reining in expenses and encouraging other ministers to push ahead with privatisation, outsourcing and weakening stringent labour and pension laws.

Oh, and of course he is inviting the Confidence Fairy to come in and boost the economy. (Brazil's Temer calls for unity, confidence for Brazil recovery) The phrase "con man" is short for "confidence man." I'm just sayin'. (Lisandra Paraguassu and Alonso Soto, Brazil's Temer calls for unity, confidence for Brazil recovery Reuters 05/12/2016)

Brazilian resident Glenn Greenwald reports on the "soft coup" in Brazil’s Democracy to Suffer Grievous Blow as Unelectable, Corrupt Neoliberal is Installed The Intercept 05/11/2016, on which Cenk relies in the video report above. He calls attention to the malign role the major media in Brazil have played in this:

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.”

This Reuters story provides some background, though it doesn't explain how transparently phony the impeachment charges are, Trials and errors: how Rousseff lost Brazil Buenos Aires Herald 05/12/2016.

I'm sure it's pure coincidence. But Liliana Ayalde, the current US Ambassador to Brazil, served as US Ambassador to Paraguay from 2008-2011. A very similar "institutional coup" took place in Paraguay in 2012. (Benjamin Dangl, Behind Paraguay's coup Aljazeera 07/26/2012)

See also:

BBC News, Brazil impeachment: New leader Temer calls for trust 05/13/2016

Darío Pignotti, La noche que la democracia entra en suspenso Página/12 12.05.2016

Darío Pignotti, Dilma luchará contra los usurpadores del Planalto Página/12 13.05.2016

Kleber Tomaz, Temer é ficha-suja e fica inelegível por 8 anos, diz promotora eleitoral 05.05.2016 Globo.com

"Soft coup" in Brazil

The impeachment vote on Sunday against left-leaning Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff could be an important turning point in Latin America.

Whether it's a good one or not is not only a matter of perspective. It's also a matter of what happens going forward.

Dilma's supporters, and the democratic left in Latin America more generally, are calling this a coup. The press talks a lot about "corruption" in Brazil, corruption being both a real thing and a sneer word applied to nations whom the speaker doesn't favor. (Blanket, reflexive accusations of corruption have been a common attack on Greece by their EU "partners" in northern Europe.)

But this impeachment move didn't bother to put much of a fig leaf on what they were doing, charging the President with mismanaging the budget. Not as in stealing money, but as in they didn't like her budget. So it's legitimate to call it a coup. Terms I've seen used for it recently include soft coup (golpe blando), institutional coup, and parliamentary coup.

Dilma is in her second term as the elected President of Brazil. First elected in 2011, she became Brazil's first female President, and was reelected in 2014 as the candidate of the Workers' Party, Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT).

With the new economic slump in much of the world and with the drop in oil prices in particular, Brazil has been hit hard economically in the last year. A significant part of Brazil's strong growth in prior years has been business with China. And now China's economy is slowing down.

The impeachment process there has some similarities to those in the US Constitution but there are important differences. The vote on Sunday was an impeachment, which is a kind of indictment. And it required a 2/3 vote in the lower house of Congress. Next it goes to the Brazilian Senate, the upper house, for trial and a decision on the charges. If she is convicted on the impeachment charges, she would be permanently removed as President.

However, the Senate must first vote by a majority on whether to conduct a trial or not, a vote that comes May 11. If a Senate majority decides to conduct the trial, Rousseff will be suspended as President for 180 days and Vice President Michel Temer, who is opposed to Rousseff's economic policies and in favor of the IMF/Washington Consensus approach favored by the Brazilian oligarchs (cutting government services, selling off state property, deregulation of local and international corporate activity, lower wages, the usual prescription). If there is anything in economics that has been empirically demonstrated on a grand scale since 2008, it's that such Herbert Hoover policies of governmental austerity and retrenchment in a recession is a pro-cyclical policy, i.e., it makes the recession longer and deeper.

Eric Nepomuceno in the article cited below reports that it's very likely that the Senate will vote yes to the trial, effectively removing Dilma from power in three weeks or so from now. "En pocas palabras: Dilma Rousseff está liquidada" ("In short: Dilma Rousseff is liquidated.") Dilma, who was arrested and tortured as a young woman because she was part of the opposition to the military dictatorship, certainly appreciates the difference between being "liquidated" politically and "liquidated" physically.

Dilma was arrested in 1970 when she was part of the Comando de Libertação Nacional (COLINA), which Ian Epstein in the article linked below describes as "a left-wing guerrilla group that fought the right-wing military dictatorship that ruled Brazil until 1985." The Reuters article linked below describes her as "a 68-year-old former Communist guerrilla." Actually, FWIW, the main guerrila group during that period that identified itself as Communist was called FOGUERA.

This piece from Heather Arnet from just after her reelection gives a glimpse of what the political differences are in Brazil that resulted in the impeachment:

Ronald Reagan famously coined the phrase, “Are you better off now then you were four years ago?” For millions of Brazilians the answer is a resounding yes. But from the coverage of the Brazilian presidential race in the U.S. and European media you could easily have had the impression that Brazil was teetering on the edge of economic collapse. How could an economy, which resulted in lifting 40 million people out of poverty and into the middle class, and with historically low unemployment figures,be considered a troubled economy? It all depends on whose economic interests define your perspective. ...

As other nations fell into recession and declared strict austerity measures, cutting social services, education, healthcare, and government jobs, Brazil invested in all of these. In addition to expanding Brazil’s economic subsidy program, Rousseff also led efforts to successfully pass legislation mandating that income from national oil and energy reserves be reinvested in expanding education and healthcare opportunities for the poor.

But investing in the people of Brazil meant that there were less profits for international investors. The one percent in Brazil and the one percent internationally were still making profits on their Brazilian holdings, because the Brazilian economy was still growing. But they were not making enough profits, as the rate of growth had slowed as Brazil invested in the welfare of its own people. And so the elites demanded that it was time for change.

It was striking to see that nearly all media coverage of this year’s Brazilian presidential election focused on how the “markets” and “investors” were strongly behind Rousseff’s fiscal conservative competitor Aecio Neves. And how investor confidence would fall drastically each time Rousseff rose in the polls. These same articles would cite in the sixth or seventh paragraph that while it was true that tens of millions of families were lifted out of poverty by Rousseff and her party’s economic policies, broad national growth and inflation had suffered under Rousseff. What the articles failed to mention was that it is only the extremely rich who were not benefiting from these policies. [my emphasis]

Yes, Virginia, there is an oligarchy. In Brazil and elsewhere.

The TeleSUR article below reports suspicions that the US is involved in the current golpe blando in Brazil. Which is easy to believe. Hard not to believe, actually. But it will probably take Wikileaks or a new Edward Snowden to provide details.

At the very least, the Brazilian oligarchs' parties would not likely have tried such a blatant "soft coup" if they hadn't assumed that the Obama Administration would at least be passively sympathetic. The initial State Department reaction to yesterday's news was to express confidence in the durability of Brazilian institutions.

It's definitely clearly relevant in this context that the Obama Administration during Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State supported both the military coup in Honduras in 2009 and the "soft coup" in Paraguay in 2012. The Paraguay coup is definitely a very similar event to what's happening now in Brazil.

Given the United States' policy of keeping itself as the dominant world power and in doing so to ward off the development of any "peer competitor" nation or alliance, the Obama Administration would no doubt be happy to reverse some trends of the last 15 years or so in Latin America. Like the increase in business and closer diplomatic relations between China and several Latin American countries, including purchase of Chinese weaponry. And Brazil is the "B" of the BRICS group which has been challenging the "Washington Consensus" of neoliberal development policies.

But this is very serious stuff. The oligarchy in Brazil is barely pretending there's any kind of legal reason or democratic procedure for removing Dilma from the Presidency. They want her and her policies gone, and they're abusing the existing institutions to nullify the results of the 2014 Presidential election in which she was elected with 54 million votes. This is not something parties and leaders genuinely interested in strengthening democratic institutions would do.

Sources:

Heather Arnet, What Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff Can Teach Hillary Clinton Daily Beast 10/29/2014

Henrique Gomes Batista, Governo dos Estados Unidos afirma confiança nas instituições brasileiras O Globo 18.04.2016

R. Evan Ellis, La aparición de China en las Américas Military Review Enero-Febrero 2015

Ian Epstein, Brazil's Next Outlaw President Daily Beast 10/02/2010

Janína Figueiredo e Aline Macedo, Aliados latino-americanos manifestam solidariedade a Dilma: Argentina, Chile, Paraguai, Colômbia e Peru optam pela discrição O Globo 18.04.2016

Foreign Military Studies Office: Alvaro de Souza Pinheiro and William Mendel Guerrilla in The Brazilian Amazon July 1995

Martín Granovsky, El golpe de los esclavócratas Página/12 18.04.2016

Joe Leahy and Samantha Pearson, Brazil’s crisis takes on carnival atmosphere Financial Times 04/18/2016

Mercedes López San Miguel, Por presidenta y por mujer Página/12 18.04.2016

Eric Nepomuceno, Un golpe que se vio en vivo y en directo Página/12 18.04.2016

Darío Pignotti, Dos Brasilias separadas por un muro Página/12 18.04.2016

Michael Ray and Jeff Wallenfeldt, Dilma Rousseff Encyclopædia Britannica (article updated 04/18/2016)

Maria Carolina Marcello and Alonso Soto, Brazil's Rousseff to fight on after heavy impeachment defeat Reuters 04/18/2016

Open Society Archive: Radio Free Europe, Brazil's Urban Guerrilla in Theory and Practice 06/16/1970

TeleSUR: Juicio a Dilma es una operación mundial dirigida por EE.UU. 18.04.2016