Resistance Forming in Brazil, on Eve of Impeachment Coup

On the eve of her Senate impeachment trial, which begins on Thursday, President Dilma Rousseff delivered the message to a “Meeting in Defense of Rights and Against the Coup” in Sao Paulo Tuesday and a similar rally in Brasilia Wednesday, that she will defend herself personally before the Senate, because the impeachment trial is a “parliamentary coup” which threatens democracy. It is also being used, she said, to impose vicious economic measures which the electorate would never support: freezing expenditures on education and health for 20 years, in violation of the Constitution; ripping up labor laws; cutting pensions and the minimum wage; and “the great privatizaton of the Nation’s wealth.”

The mood in patriotic layers of the country was expressed starkly at a “Public Act of Constitutional Resistance” held at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul on August 18, where leading legal scholars and others identified the so-called “Lava Jato” anti-corruption operation as “judicial fascism” premised on the precepts of the Nazi crown jurist, Carl Schmitt, whose purpose is to impose a colonial looting economic system upon the country, for which the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff is only the first step.

Former president of the Brazilian Lawyers Association (OAB) Marcelo Lavenere, told the overflow crowd at the Economics School auditorium, to be prepared to form a resistance movement like that which formed after the 1964 military coup, if the President is impeached. The media-driven “Lava Jato” operation, led by “pop-star” judges like Sergio Moro, is “the worst attack that Brazilian democracy has suffered in the last 100 years. It is worse than the ’64 coup,” Lavenere charged. Then we faced an enemy well-defined as an enemy, “and the military, at least, were not such sell-outs as [acting President] Michel Temer [and others] … who want to hand over all our resources to the international elites.”

Pedro Estevam Serrano, Constitutional Law Professor at Sao Paulo’s Catholic University, identified the media as the means by which the rich are being mobilized as “the rabble” who provide the social basis for “judicial facism” imposed through “Lava Jato.” Serrano, who has written a new book, “Coups and Authoritarianism in Latin America—a Brief Essay on the Judiciary as The Instrument of Exception,” cited Nazi Carl Schmitt’s theory that “the true sovereign is he who has the authority to establish the exception.” Serrano added: “who has that power today in Brazil is the judiciary.”