Brazil hosts Olympics: Is Dilma Rousseff a victim of a political coup?

As everyone around me this past weekend was talking about the African-American swimmer named Simone Manuel of Canada winning the gold medal at the Olympics, I was wondering what the suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is doing. Has she been watching the Olympics at all? Her predecessor, Lula da Silva had fought very hard to bring the Olympics into Brazil and won the bidding in 2009. Dilma's government has spent about $11.1 billion to host the games and infrastructure development at a time when Brazil cut cost on health care and education. Currently, in Brazil, the economy is spiralling out of control with a 10.2 per cent unemployment rate. For months, police officers and others haven't been paid and 20 per cent of its population lives in the favelas (slums) within urban areas. Therefore, hosting the Olympics, an extravagant event, was hugely criticised by the suffering people. The government had to drastically cut back from its initial budget of $20 billion in the face of adversity and to tackle the sudden Zika virus outbreak.
In the midst of everything, the game had to go on for many reasons. At the opening ceremony, Brazil's interim president, Michel Temer refused to share the VIP balcony with Dilma. She had declined to participate in the flame lighting ceremony from the sidelines in a "secondary position" and later to watch from the stand below Temer.
Brazil hosting the Olympic Games with pomp and symbolism is least of Dilma's worries now. On Wednesday (August 10), the Brazil Senate with a 52/22 vote has decided to go ahead with the impeachment trial against 68-year-old Dilma Rousseff at the end of August. As millions across the world are glued to their television sets watching the Olympics, Dilma Rousseff's political fate hangs in the balance as she prepares for her defence. Al Jazeera reported that Rousseff calls the ongoing impeachment proceedings a "coup."
On May 12, Dilma was suspended from official duties for up to 180 days for illegal account practices. She has been accused of manipulating the government budget before her reelection in 2014. Rousseff "went against the Constitution" by intentionally delaying payments to private banks and authorising additional credits without seeking approval from the Congress. According to the impeachment committee's report, it was an attempt to hide the growing budget deficit.
She will have to submit her answers in writing to the Supreme Court within ten days before the final judgement. A total of 54 votes (out of Senate's  81 members)  are needed in the Senate to impeach Rousseff and to remove her permanently from office.
In the most likely scenario of her removal from office will end the 13-year-old rule of Workers Party in Brazil. Dilma's term was scheduled to end in 2018.
When Dilma's opponents and stern critics do acknowledge her reputation as an honest politician, how did it get so bad for her in such a short time? She herself is not facing any corruption charges, but will have to be the fall guy/girl and take the blame for many in her Workers Party as she was on the driver's seat. Her allies in the party have pointed out that an overwhelming number of members of the lower house and senate members who are voting to have her removed, also need to be examined as they face serious corruption charges.
The Dilma presidency is plagued by scandals of the Petrobras, the giant state oil company. Some investigations go as far back to the time when Dilma was the energy and mining minister under Lula. Ordinary Brazilians have lost faith in her ability to restore the economy. So the right-wingers are pushing hard to remove her.
Ironically, Dilma Rousseff had an 80 per cent approval rate only three years ago. During her re-election, in 2014, she defeated the centre-right party in a close margin by convincing the voters that she can still improve the country's economy. Today, Brazil's economy is suffering the worst recession since the 1930s, and people are disgusted with the political elites and their empty words.
Dilma Rousseff's political story is remarkable. On October 31 in 2010, Rousseff, 62, a former Marxist guerrilla turned civil servant, became Brazil's first female President to win a resounding victory. A member of Brazil's Workers Party, Rousseff won in the north and northeast part of the country - in the poorest and least educated regions of Brazil. In a country of 200 million, she took 56 per cent of the vote in the first election against her opponent Jose Serra.
Like millions of women around the world, I was thrilled when Dilma Rousseff became president. Brazil has been a country of immense interest since my teen years. From the mid-70s on, two of my elder brothers, early in their careers, had lived and worked in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. That was way before the internet and direct dialing. All the letters in airmail envelopes stamped with exotic stamps were the only source of communication. I still remember spending many hours at the British Council in Dhaka, poring over encyclopedias and trying to learn all about the places in Brazil that my brothers wrote about.
A POLITICAL CASE STUDY IN THE MAKING: Dilma was an enigma, a political case study in the making. She represented hope to the millions of working class and poor people in Brazil. A daughter of a Bulgarian Communist activist, and a Brazilian mother, a teacher, Dilma did live a bourgeois life as her father later became a believer in capitalism. Growing up, Dilma lived in big houses in the prosperous city of Belo Horizonte and studied at private schools. She had the privilege of growing up in an upper-middle class household, replete with piano and French lessons. Her father introduced her to Zola and Dostoevsky's works.  At school, the nuns often took her class to the city's poorest areas to show the difference between the rich and the poor. Dilma was troubled by the gap between Brazil's middle-class minority, and the vast majority of the poor.
In the 1960s, when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship, Dilma joined a rebel movement named National Liberation Command, and became an urban commander. The secretive radical group that she joined saw nothing wrong in taking up arms against the military regime. She openly confessed to having "wanted to change the world." It is alleged that from 1967 to 1969, Dilma was involved with various terrorist activities while serving as an agent for the Worker's Politics Movement.
Later in 1970, she was captured by the security forces and was sent to prison for three years. She was tortured and endured beatings and electric shock while in prison.
After the 2010 election, self-assured and authoritarian Dilma, undoubtedly, had the most difficult task ahead of her. It was evident that she was tough and a fighter; she was going to improve inequalities between classes, and alleviate poverty.
During her election campaign, she had promised to make sure poor children of Brazil will get a decent education in government-funded schools. She was to restructure the health and sanitation departments, so that poor Brazilians will have access to free health clinics. She had vowed to close the gender gap. This alone gave millions of Brazilian women hope that alongside men, they can now take part in policy making. Her own gender was an indication that progress was in the making.  
When Dilma took office, Brazil had the best growing economy in the Americas. There is a saying in Brazil that "Anything grows here, even in a small crack." With its fertile land, rich mineral wealth, including the Amazon basin, Brazil had placed itself in a position to claim global trade talks with the US and other major European countries.
The country was supposed to continue to prosper in the coming years. Dilma seemed very dedicated, and she had inspired the confidence of the people and had established for her the "right to govern." Throughout the presidential campaign, Dilma had articulated clearly and forcefully her vision for Brazil. As the country's first female leader, she was supposed to lead Brazil by keeping the main goal in focus into the 21st century.
But the problem of inequality in Brazil remains. The gap between the rich and the poor was too big to even out. From the beginning of her tenure, Dilma had faced some monumental task that was left behind for her by Lula. She had tried to implement some of his polices too early and fell short on her first election campaign promises to close the wide gap between Brazil's rich and poor, to decrease government spending, improve quality of public school education, lower the taxes, and have a better handle on Amazon's deforestation. Brazil has had the most wasteful bureaucratic history of government spending. Her reassurance to her fellow Brazilians that she is committed to move Brazil away from abysmal poverty level and creating opportunities for all people hasn't quite worked out the way she had envisioned.
Dilma's promise to "reduce her country's debt levels so that interest rates, which are second-highest in the world after inflation, can fall in a sustainable way" also didn't materialise. Her famous words, "We cannot rest while Brazilians go hungry, while families are living on the streets, while poor children are abandoned" sound hollow at this point as she remains isolated within the presidential palace. Since her suspension from office, she was hardly seen in public, and has squabbled with the party members who once were her closest allies. Many of them are now supporting the impeachment, and voted for it.  
To any democratic nation, the Federal Republic of Brazil appears as a "feudal monarchy." The poor Brazilians do enjoy certain rights though the government tells them how to live their private lives. Brazil's Workers Party doesn't honour a person's constitutional rights. They also challenge people's property rights.
Social, economic and political analysts who were sceptical if Dilma would be able to lead Brazil without enough political background, must be feeling good now because their predictions apparently proved correct. However, there were millions who had thought Dilma could do the job because she was different from Lula as she was representing a different moment, and it was a different job. People had put their trust on her to move Brazil forward without changing the essence.
2016 has so far been a tumultuous year for Brazil. Firstly, the country had to deal with the effects of Zika virus as it can be devastating in infected pregnant women including loss of pregnancy or a baby born with abnormal head and brain. Secondly, the Zika outbreak was a major concern of athletes and Brazil feared many will be withdrawing out of fear. The athletes were also worried over pollution factor while sailing on the Guanabara Bay. Thirdly, the Brazilian Congress has forced Dilma Rousseff to sit out while they try to impeach her. Fourthly, the Brazilians are fearful of the country's political situation and its leadership. The interim president is highly unpopular among the Brazilians and the world got a glimpse of that when he was booed during the Olympics opening ceremony.
Up until this point, Dilma has remained defiant who strongly believes that she has been victimised. There is a strong component of sexism in her sudden downfall, as she claimed in a recent CNN interview. Brazil is, after all, a feudal, bureaucratic male-dominated society, albeit one of the strongest in South America. Old habits and practices die hard; it irks the male chauvinists a great deal that a woman is the President of this most important nation in South America, and may introduce policies that will change the way things have always been done in this patriarchal society. This will cut into their secure power base, eventually bringing in new leadership in government, politics, business and all aspects of public life. The sudden downturn in the economy may also have played a huge part. The allegations of corruption were damaging in no small extent, although Dilma herself was not personally implicated.
The question that is important now: Is Dilma going to prove the sceptics right who went to say that people voted for her to honour the legacy of Lula da Silva? From all indications, it appears that Dilma's legacy will not be a positive one because Brazil's once booming economy has taken a nosedive in many decades, and the huge corruption scandal at Petrobras took place under her watch. The upcoming impeachment trial will most likely seal her political fate.
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