Impeachment drive accelerates amid expanding political crisis in Brazil

Impeachment drive accelerates amid expanding political crisis in Brazil

By Bill Van Auken
19 March 2016

The leadership of the lower house of the Brazilian Congress has moved to accelerate the impeachment process against the country’s President Dilma Rousseff amid continuing street demonstrations both against and in favor of her ruling Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT).

Friday saw demonstrations in every state of Brazil in defense of Dilma, as the president is universally known, and Lula, ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former metalworkers union leader who was a cofounder of the Workers Party over 35 years ago.

While the CUT trade union federation, one of the main organizers of the demonstration, claimed that 250,000 people rallied in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil’s financial and industrial capital, and another 50,000 reportedly took to the streets in Recife to the north, the demonstrations, dominated by the PT officialdom, the CUT, government-affiliated “social movements” and student federations, were far smaller than the protests held across the country last Sunday demanding the ouster of Rousseff and the PT.

Those demonstrations, like similar ones held a year ago, were dominated by better-off sections of the middle class who have been mobilized on an extremely right-wing basis. Participants included those calling for a reprise of the 1964 military coup that led to over two decades of military dictatorship. The crowd also included an openly fascist youth group as well as people calling for the fascistic American billionaire businessman Donald Trump, the leading candidate in the current Republican presidential primary, to rescue Brazil.

More:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/19/braz-m19.html