In October 1964, Charles de Gaulle visited Brazil. The country was six months into its military dictatorship. In April of that year, there had been a relatively bloodless coup against the sitting president, João Goulart, who one morning found a tank pointing its muzzle at his residence in Rio. The ensuing military regime lasted for two decades,and routinely tortured its dissidents. One of those tortured was a 22-year-old female member of a militant guerrilla group who was arrested in 1970 and subjected to paddle beatings and electric shocks to her ears, feet, breasts and thighs. Today, she is president. This is Brazil’s fairy tale.
Except that Dilma Rousseff is now being unseated in her own coup, after the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house in the National Congress) voted last month to impeach her. An anti-corruption inquiry, Operation Car Wash, has exposed a kickback scheme related to the national oil company Petrobras so diffuse that by the time all the politicians involved in it have been swept up, there may be no one left to run the country.
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