Impeaching Dilma Rousseff: the double life of corruption allegations on Brazil’s political right

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, for alleged budgetary misconduct, as well as the related right-wing, ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations calling for her ouster. I argue that Rousseff’s impeachment was facilitated by a conflation of two models of ‘corruption’ operating in Brazil, one legal-behavioural and the other religious-ontological. What happened in 2016 was a tacit conflation of these two models, along with their associated regimes for construing evidence of guilt. More specifically, congressional deliberations on Rousseff’s guilt allowed jurisprudential standards of evidence to be influenced by the evidential regime of the right-wing Fora Dilma (‘Out Dilma’) demonstrators. The demonstrators evinced Rousseff’s corruption through a semiotic process I term ‘cross-domain homology’, a process that I claim is intrinsically dangerous for democracy because it invites a state of exception to the norms girding representative institutions.

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Donna Goldstein and Kristen Drybread for organising and editing this important special issue and for their close critical readings of several early drafts of this essay. I am also indebted to my anonymous reviewers for their careful remarks on these drafts. Finally, my thanks to the editorial team at Culture, Theory and Critique (and Christopher Barnes in particular) for their support and labour bringing this special issue to fruition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by author.

Notes on contributor

Aaron Ansell is an Associate Professor of Religion and Culture in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He is a cultural anthropologist whose fieldwork is situated in northeast Brazil and whose topics of study include democracy, patronage, anti-poverty policy.

Notes

1 Transparency International operationalises ‘corruption’ into six misdeeds: (1) ‘active bribery’ – bribery of public servants; (2) ‘passive bribery’ – solicitation of acceptance of gifts by a public servant; (3) abuse of public position for personal gain; (4) possession by a public servant of unexplained wealth; (5) secret commissions made to or by an employee or agent (covering private sector corruption); and (6) bribes and gifts to voters (Carson and Prado 2014: 9).

2 While a summary of Leirner’s argument is beyond the scope of this essay, suffice it to note that his thesis helps to explain why right-wing rhetoric episodically positioned the PT as a hierarchical ‘gang' pitted against an individual hero (e.g., Sérgio Moro), while at other moments, Rousseff was figured as an individual scapegoat opposing the nation’s proper (hierarchical) families.

3 One poll of the Fora Dilma protestors showed that (at least) 22 per cent of the sampled protestors earned less than R$4591/month, the maximum earning of the so-called ‘new middle class’ (or Classe C). The majority earned considerably more (Ortellado et al. 2016).

4 According to Ortellado et al. (2016), approximately 77 per cent of the sampled protestors identified as ‘white’ (branco).

5 This is a reference to the fringe or ‘alt right’ Breitbart News Network that became an important media actor supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign in the US.

6 The ‘coxinhas’ labelled the counter-protesters, ‘petralhas’, a term combining ‘PT’ with ‘Metralha’ (the translated surname of Disney’s crooked ‘Beagle Boys’).

7 The reader will recall that early in 2015, demonstrators around the world had used the phrase ‘Je suis Charlie Hebdo’ to express solidarity for the slain cartoonists of the French magazine, killed for disrespecting the Prophet Mohammed. Sympathy with Europe’s liberal intelligentsia was also prominent among Brazil’s Left, but these ‘coxinha’ messages laid claim to this affiliation to the implied exclusion of the Left.

8 Moro later sentenced Lula to nearly 10 years in prison, effectively barring his 2018 presidential candidacy (Boadle and Brooks 2017).

9 These shirts were available through private venders who sold them on the site Produto Mercado Livre (https://produto.mercadolivre.com.br/MLB-754037637-camiseta-juiz-sergio-moro-livrai-nos-do-mal-_JM).