Impeachment petitioner: Rousseff hid Brazil's “looming bankruptcy”

At the opening of the floor debate in the Chamber of Deputies that precedes the lower house's final vote on whether the impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff should move forward to the Senate, law scholar Miguel Reale Junior, one of the lawyers who filed the impeachment petition, began his arguments by rebutting Rousseff supporters' calls of “there will be no coup.”

“The real coup was when [the government] hid that the country was headed for bankruptcy, covered up the true fiscal situation of the country, indulged in spending and even borrowed from national state [banking] institutions,” Reale said in a reference to the fiscal maneuvers that make the core of the allegations in the impeachment case against Rousseff.

In his statements, the lawyer extolled the Chamber of Deputies as the country's “liberators” and called on them to press ahead with Rousseff's impeachment. “The country is going through times of severe agony, we are longing to free ourselves from this turmoil of lies and corruption,” he urged.

Impeachable offenses

Miguel Reale maintained his point that Rousseff's has committed impeachable offenses. “The Treasury was running out of money, but instead of taking fiscal austerity measures and cutting down spending, [the government] simply indulged.”

According to him, the fiscal maneuvers are more than an accounting issue and the burden is falling on the population. “Coming to this House to impeach the president on such serious charges of dragging the country into this quagmire—is that what you call a coup? Do you call it a crime? A coup was the huge money [spent] for so long to cover up the truth. Would you say this is not ground for impeachment?”

Reale went on to mention allegations covered in the impeachment petition that the government passed decrees without congressional authorization to amend the budget. “[Rousseff's government] has trampled on the authority of this House, this House was disregarded by the President of the Republic when she passed unjustifiable decrees despite the deficit, and then issued a bill to change the fiscal target. These are extremely serious facts,” he said.

Translated by Mayra Borges