Rio de Janeiro: A deepening political crisis that has sparked angry street protests laid bare sharp divisions in Brazil Saturday as President Dilma Rousseff risked impeachment and her predecessor faced a criminal lawsuit.
Street rallies have rocked Brazil over recent days, just months before it hosts the Olympics in August, with riot police firing stun grenades and water cannons to disperse demonstrators.
Rousseff's enemies are trying to drive her from power while her supporters accuse them of attempting a "coup" against the elected leftist president.
Government supporters mobilized on Friday as pressure mounted on Rousseff, 68, and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, 70, whom she enlisted to try to save her leadership from a crisis aggravated by a deep recession.
"We won't accept a coup in this country," said the gray-bearded Lula, addressing a crowd of supporters from the back of a truck in Sao Paulo.
Rousseff had named Lula, a hero of the Latin American left, as her new chief of staff. But on Friday a high court judge barred him from taking up the post, despite government appeals.
Rousseff and Lula are accused of conniving to put him in the cabinet post, which would make him immune from criminal prosecution over corruption allegations.
Friday also saw the first session of a new congressional committee charged with drawing up a motion on whether to impeach Rousseff over a separate corruption case.
- Impeachment committee -
Police said 270,000 people joined street rallies Friday evening in support of Rousseff, while organizers put the turnout at 1.2 million.
On Friday morning, riot police fired stun grenades and water cannons to disperse some 150 anti-government protesters in Sao Paulo ahead of the counter-rally.
That was far fewer than the three million that police estimated at anti-government rallies last Sunday.
Recent polls showed that Rousseff's approval rating is about 10 percent and that 60 percent of Brazilians would support impeachment.
Rousseff is accused of manipulating government accounts to boost public spending during her 2014 re-election campaign, and again in 2015 to mask a deep recession.
The newly installed congressional impeachment committee said it expected to reach a decision within a month on whether to recommend removing the president.
Lula is charged with accepting a luxury apartment and a country home as bribes from executives implicated in a multibillion-dollar corruption scam at state oil company Petrobras.
- Anger at corruption -
The high court decision against Lula sends the case back to the desk of Sergio Moro, an anti-corruption judge in the southern city of Curitiba who is leading the Petrobras investigation.
Prosecutors have demanded that Lula be remanded in custody -- a potentially dramatic development in a tense political climate.
Moro "can order his detention, but he would have to be able to show that there is evidence to justify it," said law expert Carlos Goncalves of Sao Paulo Catholic Pontifical University.
"It could be justified for example on the grounds that Lula could try to influence the obtaining of evidence in the case," Goncalves told AFP.
In Sao Paulo about 50 people protesting against the government were gathered Saturday in the major Paulista avenue.
"The first thing we want is for Dilma to resign and Lula to go to prison along with all corrupt politicians," said one protester, Bruno Balestrero, a 27-year-old actor.
He said they would stay camped there until Rousseff quits.
At Lula's rally on Friday government supporters defended his record of popular social policies during the economic boom of his 2003-2011 presidency.
"It's absurd what they're doing to Lula, an attack on a person who has done so much for this country and its neediest people," said 53-year-old housewife Maria do Carmo Zafonatto.
"This is a coup by the right. That's why I'm here, to defend democracy."
Financial markets appeared to be betting on Rousseff's government falling. The Sao Paulo stock exchange surged 6.6 percent on Thursday as her plight worsened.
"The odds of a government change are definitely increasing," said Joao Augusto de Castro Neves, a senior Latin America analyst at the consultancy Eurasia Group.
"This could happen as soon as early May."
AFP
