People read the day's headlines focused on the congressional impeachment process of President Dilma Rousseff, in Brasilia, Brazil, Monday, April 18, 2016.AP Photo/Felipe Dana
The crisis Brazil is going through is baffling to both friends and strangers. Until recently, the country seemed poised to finally discredit Charles de Gaulle’s irony that Brazil is the country of the future, but that it will always be that way. In the last decade, Brazil became one of the ten top economies in the world, its corporations went global, it developed into an organizer for BRICS, a speaker for the region with the United States, an established candidate for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, a capitalist development model with social inclusion. And almost all the credit went to its ruling party, especially to its leader, Lula, who emerged as the referent for a modern, pragmatic Left that finally seemed capable of ruling the beast.
Next scene: we see a divided country, with hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets, the economy mired in the worst economic crisis in its history, and Dilma Rousseff blamed for leading an inept and, above all, corrupt machine.
