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2nd LD: Brazilian Senate impeaches Rousseff, Temer swears in as president

Xinhua, September 1, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Brazilian Senate voted on Wednesday to strip Dilma Rousseff of the presidency by 61 votes in favor to 20 votes against.

This means Rousseff is immediately and permanently removed from her role and Michel Temer, who assumed the interim presidency after Rousseff was suspended in May, will become president until the end of this term in 2018.

Rousseff was found guilty of seeking to hide public budget deficits through fiscal irregularities, such as delaying loan payments to public banks and ordering additional loans without congressional approval.

In a separate vote, however, Rousseff escaped being suspended from public office for eight years. A two-thirds majority was needed to suspend her, but she escaped with 42 votes in favor, 36 against, and three abstentions.

Michel Temer, the interim president of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), was officially sworn in as president at the Senate on Wednesday afternoon. He will serve in the role until the end of the current term in 2018.

He has recorded an address, which will be broadcast live on television across Brazil on Wednesday evening. Immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, Temer will fly to China, where he will participate in a G-20 Summit, to be held in Hangzhou on Sept. 4-5.

Shortly after the vote, reactions quickly began pouring in. Brazil's Central Union of Workers (CUT), a stalwart Rousseff ally behind many of the protests in her favor, was indignant. In a statement, it said Dilma had faced "a coup" and predicted that unions and workers' associations would unite against any attempt to "strip them of their rights."

"This is not a simple change of mandate but the usurpation of Brazil's destiny by a wing of the political class, the judiciary and the press that desire power at any cost," said CUT president, Vagner Freitas.

The government of Ecuador released a statement, in which it condemned "the political events in Brazil...which have deposed from her position the constitutional President Dilma Rousseff."

Quito rejected "the flagrant subversion of the democratic order in Brazil, which can be considered an underhanded coup d'etat."

On Tuesday, Bolivia's President Evo Morales wrote on Twitter that he would recall his country's ambassador to Brazil, if Rousseff was impeached. Endit