Adding to suspicions of a US role in the ouster of independent-minded Brazilian
president Dilma Rousseff is a revelation making the rounds today that Michel
Temer, the opposition leader who will step in as interim president, had met
with US embassy officials in Sau Paulo to provide his assessment and spin on
the domestic political situation in Brazil. Thanks to Wikileaks, we have the
US
embassy cable that resulted from the incoming president’s visit to US political
officers.
Acting president Temer will hold office for up to six months while impeached
president Rousseff stands trial in the Brazilian senate. If her impeachment
is finalized by a two-thirds vote, Temer will remain in office until elections
in 2018.
Rousseff’s ouster has been curious all along. She claims it is a coup against
the will of the Brazilian voter and indeed she has not been accused of corruption
or serious crime. Instead, she has been impeached for accusations that she used
some tricky bookkeeping maneuvers to hide the extent of Brazil’s budget deficit
in advance of her successful 2014 re-election bid. Observers would note that
if fiddling with economic statistics to make a country’s balance sheet look
better were grounds for impeachment in the United States, there would have been
successive impeachments for decades or perhaps longer.
There are more curiosities surrounding the US role in Brazil’s “regime change”
this week. Just weeks ago, as Brazil’s lower house of parliament began the process
by voting 367 to 137 for impeachment, one very powerful opposition senator made
his way to Washington to make his case in the Beltway corridors of power.
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald wrote
at the time:
Today – the day after the impeachment vote – Sen. Aloysio Nunes
of the (opposition) PSDB will be in Washington to undertake three days of meetings
with various U.S. officials as well as with lobbyists and assorted influence-peddlers
close to Clinton and other leading political figures.
Sen. Nunes is meeting with the chairman and ranking member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Ben Cardin, D-Md.; Undersecretary
of State and former Ambassador to Brazil Thomas
Shannon; and attending a luncheon on Tuesday hosted by the Washington lobbying
firm Albright Stonebridge Group, headed by former Clinton Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and former Bush 43 Commerce Secretary and Kellogg Company
CEO Carlos Gutierrez.
The US has long been opposed to Rousseff, seeing her independent-mindedness
and participation in the BRICS trade grouping as a threat to US influence in
the region. Leftist governments in both Brazil and Venezuela have long been
targets
of US destabilization efforts. When Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had
been tapping her phones, Rousseff delivered a…