International

You are a coup plotter, Brazilian President tells VP

Published

8 years ago

April 13, 2016

You are a coup plotter, Brazilian President tells VP

Brazilian President Dilma Roussef who is fighting tooth and nail to salvage her presidency has branded her vice-president a coup plotter and a traitor using impeachment proceedings to bring down her government.

“If there were any doubts about my denunciation that a coup is under way, there can’t be now. The coup plotters have a leader and a deputy leader,” she said in a blistering attack in the capital Brasilia on Tuesday.

Referring to the leak on Monday of a recording in which her vice president, Michel Temer, practises the speech he would make if Rousseff were impeached, the Brazilian president said: “The mask of the conspirators has fallen.”

“We are living in strange and worrying times, times of a coup and pretending and treachery,” she said.

“Yesterday they used the pretence of a leak to give the order for the conspiracy.”

On Tuesday, the controversial speaker of the lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, was expected to present the formal impeachment document to the chamber. Deputies were then due to start debating on Friday with a vote penciled in for Sunday.

“Yesterday it became clear that there are two leaders of the coup who work together in a premeditated way,” Rousseff said without giving names, although the context clearly referred to Temer and Cunha.

“They are coup plotters, without respect for democracy,” she said. “They are trying to bring down without legal justification a president elected with 54 million votes.”

Brazil’s lower house of Congress committee voted 38-27 to recommend Rousseff’s impeachment as major political crisis deepens in the South American country.

On Sunday, there will be a vote in full at the lower house to determine the Brazilian president’s fate and if two-thirds vote in favour, the impeachment will be sent to the Senate.

If the upper house decides by a simple majority to put Rousseff on trial, she will immediately be suspended for up to six months while the Senate decides her fate, vice president Michel Temer will take office as acting president.

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