We in Guyana, as against citizens in other Caribbean states, will certainly have had a more intense interest in Latin American affairs recently, as the governments in our two neighbours, Brazil and Venezuela, have been facing substantial challenges, deriving largely from declines in their economies.
In Brazil, at the end of August, and two years and four months before her term was scheduled to end, President Dilma Rousseff was impeached and removed by what is accepted there as constitutional, though non-electoral means; and a successor, once a Vice President in her administration but recently hostile to it, is now serving out the remainder of her term.
The major charges made against the former President were related to manipulating the budget during her 2014 campaign for re-election to make the country’s financial position appear better than it really was. In Brazil this is unconstitutional.
Prior to the impeachment it had become increasingly clear that the President was unable to control the various elements in her government, as evidenced by the fact that her formal electoral running mate, Vice President Michel Temer, played a large part in forcing the charges against her, and under the constitution now serves as President of the Republic.
The decisive vote of 61-20 in the upper house of the parliamentary system, indicates the extent to which the President had essentially lost the support with which she initially came to office partly on basis of her presentation to the public by the popular President Lula. But the party arrangements on the basis of which she came to power did not possess the cohesiveness that we tend to associate with electoral processes. And in consequence, as her successor and others have shown over the last few months with a certain alacrity and ambition, former President Rousseff, even with the support of ex-President Lula, himself facing allegations of misuse of funds, was unable to withstand the political onslaughts made against her, emanating from within her own coalition.
It is noticeable that, as the bases of the charges were constructed against her, her main supporter, ex-president Lula, himself came up against charges, which appear to have diminished the political force of his reputation as a major supporter of the election of the government initially approved by the population.
Rousseff’s removal and replacement by Vice-President Michel Temer would appear to have put an end to the political run, largely deemed successful, that Lula’s Workers Party has had in Brazil. Of course, as has been widely pointed out in current commentary, Rousseff, who inherited a reasonably vibrant economy, faced a decline in the country’s rate of economic growth, in part the result of the slump in the price of the country’s oil exports which, as she has tended to point out, is now 50% of what prevailed when she acceded to the presidency in 2011.
The consequence of economic decline has, in recent years, been a diminishing in the foreign policy activism displayed by Lula during his period of office. Clearly, former President Rousseff has not been as active in the ranks of the leading countries as Lula has been. She seemed, to many observers, to be hesitant to play an expanded role in Latin America, and therefore in the hemisphere, which President Obama appeared to be indicating as an objective of American diplomacy during his tenure.
In that connection, neither her visit to the United States in June 2015, nor the previous visit to Brazil of President Obama in March 2011, have seemed to resonate as efforts to enhance the roles which Brazil and other major Latin American states might have played during Obama’s period of office.
