Brazil: Social movements reject coup, take to streets
Brazil: Social movements reject coup, take to streets
Saturday, April 23, 2016
In response to a recent vote in the lower house of Brazil's parliament in favour of impeaching Workers' Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's two main coalitions of social movements issued the statement below on April 17.
Rousseff is under attack over a series of corruption scandals, but the forces allied against her — the political, media and corporate elite — have themselves been implicated in corruption. Many in Brazil, including left opponents of Rousseff's government, see the impeachment as an institutional coup by the right wing.
In response to a recent vote in the lower house of Brazil's parliament in favour of impeaching Workers' Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's two main coalitions of social movements issued the statement below on April 17. Rousseff is under attack over a series of corruption scandals, but the forces allied against her — the political, media and corporate elite — have themselves been implicated in corruption. Many in Brazil, including left opponents of Rousseff's government, see the impeachment as an institutional coup by the right wing.
. . .
This April 17, a date in which we remember the massacre of Eldorado dos Carajas (when 19 landless peasants were killed by police in 1996), will once again enter into the history of the Brazilian nation as a day of shame. This is because a circumstantial majority of a Chamber of Deputies stained by corruption, dared to authorise the fraudulent impeachment of a president of the republic who has not been accused of committing any crime of responsibility.
Conservative and reactionary economic and political forces that have promoted this farce hope to wipe out the labour and social rights of the Brazilian people. They include corporate entities, politicians such as [president of the Chamber of Deputies] Eduardo Cunha, who are facing charges of corruption in the Supreme Court, parties that have been defeated at the ballot box such as the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, and forces from outside Brazil who are interested in pillaging our resources, privatising state companies such as (oil company) Petrobras.
They do so with the help of a coup-plotting media, in which Rede Globo plays a central role in the dissemination of coup-plotting ideological propaganda, and through their coverage of a judicial-police operation that is aimed at attacking certain parties and leaders, but not others.
More:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/61613
