'Impeachment Without Crime Is a Coup' Goes Viral

As embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff prepares to address a United Nations General Assembly on drugs in New York, on Twitter the impeachment against her is massively trending as people across Brazil and around the world are fiercely condemning media manipulation and the Latin American country's opposition's “coup attempt.”

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With the hashtags #StopCoupInBrazil and #SOSCoupinBrazil, tens of thousands of people have gone onto Twitter to heavily criticized the rich and powerful of Brazil and how through the media they are carrying out a coup, as they explain, “an impeachment without a crime is a coup.”

IN DEPTH:
Impeachment in Brazil

On Thursday, The Guardian published an extensive Op-Ed signed by David Miranda, a Brazilian activist and the creator of the Edward Snowden Treaty, a campaign to protect whistleblowers.

Image: Twitter

In it, Miranda explains how the global perception around Brazil’s political crisis is rapidly shifting from believing what the local Brazilian media and the U.S.-backed, or allied news outlets, have been saying about the Latin American country and how they've been essentially lying regarding the truth.

“The country’s dominant broadcast and print outlets are owned by a tiny handful of Brazil’s richest families, and are steadfastly conservative,” Miranda said. “For decades, those media outlets have been used to agitate for the Brazilian rich, ensuring that severe wealth inequality (and the political inequality that results) remains firmly in place.”

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Miranda goes on to remember how the largest media organizations in Brazil — who have made it a point to seem respectable to outsiders — backed the 1964 military coup that paved the way to two decades of right-wing dictatorship while further enriching the nation's oligarchs.

Brazilian news outlet Globo, which today is doing everything in their power to wrongfully manipulate information as to legitimize a “coup” against Rousseff, in the 1960s praised the coup as a necessary and noble thing to do against who they called a corrupt, but democratically elected government.

Miranda accused Globo and other right-wing media of inciting to the recent protests against Rousseff.

The activist highlighted how Brazil's media has been quick and accurate to cover all the protests but also exposed the fact that they failed to tell their readers they were behind the protests.

He also noted how the protesters were not “remotely representative of Brazil’s population. They were, instead, disproportionately white and wealthy: the very same people who have opposed the PT (Rousseff's Worker's Party) and its anti-poverty programs for two decades.”

People around the world are now forgetting that it was the PT under Rousseff's highly charismatic and popular predecessor President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that the country finally came out of crisis and inserted itself into a booming economy with huge growth.

It was for this reason that the PT has won four straight presidential elections, Miranda reminded.

So today, the plutocrats and elites who have failed to once and again to win at the polls, have decided to leave the rules and rule of law to one side and clinch power by any means.

And they are using lawmakers and politicians who are in fact deeply involved in corruption to try to push a legitimate president out of office.

For the sake of brevity we will only mention one of hundreds of corrupt politicians — who perhaps have been offered amnesty if they succeed in overthrowing Rousseff — and whose name is Eduardo Cunha, the house speaker, who is implicated in corruption scandals while the president is not.

As Miranda recalls, “Cunha was caught last year with millions of dollars in bribes in secret Swiss bank accounts, after having falsely denied to Congress that he had any foreign bank accounts. Cunha also appears in the Panama Papers, working to stash his ill-gotten millions offshore to avoid detection and tax liability.”

He is only one of the many dirty-handed politicians trying to oust Rousseff without evidence or proof of any kind.