Brazil’s Senate Prepares For Final Vote On Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment

Brazil’s Senate is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to permanently remove President Dilma Rousseff from power, in the final act of an impeachment process that has divided the country.

The decision marks the culmination of a year-long impeachment battle that paralaysed Latin America’s most powerful economy and laid bare deep rifts among the population on everything from race relations to social spending.

While the vote to oust her from office was decisive, a motion to bar her from holding any public office for the next eight years failed. The trial was resumed on Wednesday morning for the final vote on removing her.

Nonsense, Rousseff countered time and again, proclaiming her innocence up to the end.

Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski is overseeing the proceedings. He’s scheduled to present a summary of the six-day trial before voting begins.

The petition to separate the two issues was tacit recognition that Rousseff’s chances of surviving in office were slim.

“They think they have beaten us but they are mistaken”, Rousseff said, adding that she would appeal the decision using every legal means. She was accused of breaking fiscal laws in her management of the federal budget. “Our motto is to spend only the money we make”, he said. “The fraud was documented”.

Paschoal then broke into tears as she asked for Rousseff’s forgiveness for making the president suffer.

The presentations came in the final phase of a political fight that has polarized Brazil since the impeachment measure was introduced in the lower Chamber of Deputies late previous year.

The suspended president has said that, if and when she’s removed from office, she’ll retire to her home in the city of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, Lulu reports. Local news media have reported that at least 54 senators have said they will vote against the president.

Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff speaks at her own impeachment trial, in Brasilia, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 29, 2016.

In her first remarks after being ousted as Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff is vowing to form a strong opposition front against the new government. “I did not commit a crime”, Rousseff told senators in a 30-minute address.

If found guilty, Rousseff will be removed from office definitively while her former Vice President Michel Temer will be confirmed as the new leader for the rest of Rousseff’s four-year term through 2018.

She called him a “usurper” who in May named a Cabinet of all white men in a country that is more than 50 percent non-white. It joined Temer’s interim government in May.

Sen. Lindbergh Farias of the Workers’ Party made an impassioned plea against Rousseff’s impeachment.

Rousseff said it was “an irony of history” she would be judged for crimes she did not commit, by people accused of serious crimes.