Dilma Rousseff: The story of impeachment – 05/20/2023 – Samuel Pessôa

Fernando Limongi, full professor of political science at USP’s FFLCH and professor at FGV’s São Paulo School of Economics, launched on Friday (19), by Editora Hoje, “Operação Impeachment: Dilma Rousseff and Brazil’s Lava Jato” , with the narrative of the historical facts that led to the impeachment of Dilma, voted in the House on April 17, 2016 and in the Senate on August 31.

Limongi, almost obsessively, provides us with a public service: through a fluent and lean narrative in 168 pages, we follow the detailed sequence of events at a thriller pace. All references to press reports of the time documenting Limongi’s meticulous historical reconstruction are in 649 notes in the 100 pages dedicated to them in small print at the end of the book.

The careful edition contains bibliographical references and a remissive index, which greatly facilitates the reader’s life in recovering facts and characters.

The main thesis of the book, suggested by the reconstitution of the facts, is that Dilma’s impeachment was totally different from that of Collor. If in this quartet the economic crisis, people on the street, lack of political articulation and the occurrence of all these facts at the beginning of the mandate explains the impeachment, it is not the same case for Dilma.

Dilma managed to recentralize her government at least twice. In September 2015, after the MBL dismissed the services of Ives Granda Martins and “knocked on the door of Hélio Bicudo” —who, assisted by fellow jurist Janaina Paschoal, prepared a new request—, Dilma promoted a ministerial reform. The PMDB received two additional folders—Health, for Piauí deputy Marcelo Castro, and Science and Technology, for Rio de Janeiro deputy Celso Pansera.

As Limongi wrote, “the ministerial reform, therefore, marked the rapprochement between Dilma and Lula, directly responsible for the successful rapprochement with Jorge Picciani’s group”.

In the second moment, in early 2016, after the Supreme Court, in December 2015, overturned the rite established by the then mayor, Eduardo Cunha, leaving the process suspended until February 2016, the main political leaders were removed of impeachment. As Limongi wrote, “the political climate was different. Impeachment had left the agenda. Everything indicated that the electoral calendar would be followed”.

At that moment, the economic agenda returned. The government, through minister Nelson Barbosa, attempted a pension reform and a spending cap.

In this moment of distension, Lava Jato counterattacks. First with Operation Acarajé, on February 22, with 51 warrants, including the arrest of Dilma’s marketer, João Santana. And then, on March 4, with Operation Aletheia, with Lula’s coercive conduct warrant.

These Justice movements made it clear to politicians that Operation Lava Jato would not be restricted to company executives or only to PT politicians. It would reach them all. In a desperate rescue action, impeachment was the way out that politicians found to try to “stop the bleeding” promoted by Curitiba and the Attorney General’s Office in the person of attorney Rodrigo Janot.

If I understand correctly, this is Limongi’s narrative. And it is in this sense that Dilma’s impeachment would be intrinsically different from Collor’s: with mistakes and successes, Dilma made politics. What she failed to deliver was the silencing of Lava Jato, by the way, a product that Temer also failed to deliver.

Additionally, the fact that, after seven years of Rousseff’s impeachment, politicians did not move to change the 1950 impeachment law, a simple ordinary law, signals that the political class likes to have this “bitter medicine” at hand solution of acute political crises.

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