The New York Times is worried about a shift to the right in Latin America and put its concern on the front page. Simon Romero reported from Brazil about the suspension from office of leftist president Dilma Rousseff during her impeachment trial.
But instead of focusing on allegations of budgetary flimflamming by her administration, Romero tried to scare readers with the new, more conservative administration taking over, one of whose many sins made it into the sub-headline: “Interim President May Move Brazil to the Right – All-Male Cabinet and Other Shifts Amid on Impeachment.” An all-male cabinet? Horrors!
The new Brazilian president’s first pick for science minister was a creationist. He chose a soybean tycoon who has deforested large tracts of the Amazon rain forest to be his agriculture minister. And he is the first leader in decades to have no women in his cabinet at all.
The government of President Michel Temer -- the 75-year-old lawyer who took the helm of Brazil on Thursday after Dilma Rousseff was suspended by the Senate to face an impeachment trial -- could cause a significant shift to the political right in Latin America’s largest country.
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For more than a decade, Brazil has been an anchor of leftist politics in the region, less strident than the governments in countries like Venezuela and Cuba, but openly supportive of them and committed to its own platform of reducing inequality.
“Strident” ? That’s an odd way for Romero to describe those two dictatorial economic basket cases, which have solved inequality by making their citizens equally impoverished. Then again, in a 2011 story he embraced Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and leftist autocrat and ideological sibling Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, using a euphemism to describe their dictatorial rules as “revolutionary zeal....unrivaled authority.”
Romero strangely focused on counting up the women in the new administration’s cabinet.
To many of Mr. Temer’s critics, the shift is perhaps most evident in the role of women in his and Ms. Rousseff’s administrations.
The contrasts could not be more glaring. Ms. Rousseff, 68, was a former operative in an urban guerrilla group. She was tortured during the military dictatorship and eventually rose to lead the board of the national oil company before becoming Brazil’s first female president.
Then he went personal, suggested Temer’s relationship with his young wife was a liability.
Until recently, relatively few Brazilians had even heard of Mr. Temer. When they did, it often involved references to his wife, Marcela Temer, 32, a former beauty pageant contestant who is 43 years younger than he is. They met when she was just 18.
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The magazine did not mention the tattoo on the nape of Ms. Temer’s neck featuring her husband’s name, but the message was clear: Mr. Temer, a law professor and career politician, embodies a more conservative approach than Ms. Rousseff in the corridors of power and in his own home.
Then there is the issue of race. After a long stretch in which Brazil pressed ahead with affirmative action policies, Mr. Temer’s critics point out the lack of Afro-Brazilians in his cabinet, especially when nearly 51 percent of Brazilians define themselves as black or mixed race, according to the 2010 census.
“It’s embarrassing that most of Temer’s cabinet choices are old, white men,” said Sérgio Praça, a political scientist at Fundação Getulio Vargas, an elite Brazilian university. He drew a contrast with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, who formed a cabinet in which half of the 30 ministers are women.
Romero eventually got around to why Rousseff is in hot water.
In a speech to the nation on Thursday, Mr. Temer said he would seek to soothe tensions in Brazil, a nation polarized by the impeachment trial of Ms. Rousseff. She is accused of manipulating the federal budget to hide yawning deficits, a budgetary sleight of hand that her critics say helped her get re-elected in 2014.
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Like many of Brazil’s political leaders, Mr. Temer has legal problems of his own. He was recently found guilty of violating campaign finance limits, a conviction that could make him ineligible to run for office for eight years, leaving a cloud of scandal that has raised concerns about his capacity to govern with a strong mandate.
“Temer faces the fundamental problem of legitimacy,” said Michael Shifter, the president of Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington. “He did not become president as a result of a popular vote, but rather because of a controversial impeachment process.”
Near the end Romero tried guilt by association:
Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almeida, a political scientist at the University of São Paulo, said that the last time a Brazilian cabinet did not have any women was in the early 1980s, during the military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985.
The paper reliably defended the leftist leader on the editorial page as well. A Friday editorial, “Making Brazil’s Political Crisis Worse,” made the case that Rousseff was no more corrupt than her accusers.
Hours after senators voted overwhelmingly to put her on trial for alleged financial trickery, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil denounced the effort to impeach her as a coup.
“I may have committed errors, but I never committed crimes,” Ms. Rousseff said.
That is debatable, but Ms. Rousseff is right to question the motives and moral authority of the politicians who are seeking to oust her. The Brazilian president, who was re-elected in 2014 for a four-year term, has been a lousy politician and an underwhelming leader. But there is no evidence that she abused her power for personal gain, while many of the politicians orchestrating her ouster have been implicated in a huge kickback scheme and other scandals.
Fiddling with economic figures to stay in power sounds like "personal gain" here.
Hans Bader at Newsbusters cited a Cato Institute scholar, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, who pointed out that the impeachment proceedings have been fair and above board. Hidalgo also pointed out that the press had little to say about the removal and prosecution for corruption of Guatemala’s right-wing leader Otto Perez Molina.
Indeed, the same New York Times editorial page that was so offended by Rousseff’s impeachment greeted Molina's removal with approval in August 2015:
That outcome would send a powerful message to Guatemalans who aspire to be governed by honest leaders. It should also be studied, and possibly emulated, in neighboring countries where justice is still too often administered arbitrarily or not at all.
