“This Is How Coups Start!”: Brazil President Defiant As Impeachment Vote Set For April
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
03/18/2016
“Brazil is being governed by a joke,” political commentator Josias de Souza says. “It’s turned into an aspiring banana republic.”
What was already an unimaginably bad situation took a decisive turn for the worst this week in Brazil when embattled President Dilma Rousseff, fearing that her mentor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was about to be arrested on corruption charges, appointed the former President to a ministerial position.
The opposition was already at their wit’s end with Rousseff, whose opponents say doctored the fiscal books in 2014 and who has presided over a catastrophic decline in the country’s economy. Thus far, Rousseff has managed to dodge an impeachment bid spearheaded by House Speaker Eduardo Cunha but after Senator Delcídio do Amaral gave damaging testimony in a plea deal and after Lula was detained earlier this month, it became clear that sooner or later, the two-year-old car wash probe would eventually dead end at the presidential palace doors.
Rather than risk that, Rousseff decided instead to effectively eliminate the possibility that Lula would ever be prosecuted by giving him a position in her cabinet. That affords him special privileges under the law and makes it all but impossible for anyone to prosecute him except for the high court.
It was an absurdly transparent move and everyone would have seen through it anyway, but judge Sérgio Moro – who is conducting the car wash probe – decided to make sure that there would be no doubt in the public’s mind about what was really going on and so, he tapped Rousseff’s phone and released some 50 recordings, at least one of which found Rousseff promising to send Lula his ministerial papers immediately “in case of necessity.” That was almost surely a reference to the fact that Lula could use the papers as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card if anyone tried to arrest him before he could be sworn in. And make no mistake, Moro was probably going to arrest him.
The Rest…HERE
