Dilma Rousseff, an impeachment based on misogyny.
On October 31, 2010, the Brazilians elected the successor of the very popular President Lula Da Silva. Dilma Rousseff, after several senior positions in the government, is brought to power and will have to deal with the legacy of her predecessor.
Active at a very young age in movements against the military dictatorship, such as the Marxist Revolutionary Organization for Workers Politics, an organization founded within the Brazilian Socialist Party and the National Liberation Command that opted for armed struggle as the method to be used for the implantation of socialism. The young woman political opinions were shaped at that time by books like Revolution in the Revolution, by Régis Debray, French philosopher and intellectual who at the time had moved to Cuba and became friends with Fidel Castro. Dilma will have ingenuity and great leadership skills.
She did not participate directly in the armed actions, as she was known for her public performances, her contacts with the unions. Rousseff would soon be imprisoned and tortured for three years.
Rape, among other forms of sexual torture, was one of the dictatorship’s choice weapons against women prisoners as well as paddles, punches, macaw sticks and electric shocks. Among her injuries, a uterine hemorrhage, knocked out teeth, and a ruined jaw. According to declassified archives, the soldiers who detained her during her incarceration qualified her as a remarkably intelligent Jeanne d’Arc of subversion.
When she joined the Workers’ Party founded by Lula, he was seduced by her profile of activist transformed into a pragmatic technocrat. “There is something about Dilma that reminds me of Nelson Mandela”, Lula once said. She then became an advisor in the legislative assembly of the Rio Grande do Sul State, then State Minister in charge of Energy. Her ability to dilute a marked left-wing political agenda to forge practical capitalist alliances is one of the reasons Lula made her Federal Minister of Energy. Rousseff is then named Lula’s chief of staff, giving her access to the second highest position in the executive branch. Without any experience in Brasilia, she owes this promotion to her hard work rather than to a mastery of the political game. Those who know her describe a tenacious, thorough person.
The election of Dilma Rousseff as President of Brazil is presented by foreign media as a strong symbol for female emancipation. In an election where of the three main candidates in the first round, two were women, and won alone 66% of the vote (the Green Party being represented by Marina Silva). This election would, of course, be celebrated around the world as an example to follow, because after having elected a president from the proletariat, the Brazilians would innovate again by placing, for the first time (in their young democracy), a woman at their head. This result suggests that Brazilian society would have finally ceased to be macho. And yet!
Continuity does not carry Lula’s spectacular results in terms of economy, the plunge of the Brazilian currency, the slide in the price of oil and raw materials pushes Dilma towards unpopular measures. Controversies involving her quickly pile up.
On the surface: There is the famous Lava Jato scandal that touched the whole political class, plus accusations towards her of having disguised the public accounts during her re-election campaign to hide from Brazilians the scale of the deficits. Elections that permitted her re-election but also resulted in the most conservative Lower House of Congress since the end of the dictatorship.
In depth: Being the first woman to hold a presidential post in Brazil, she had to face an explosion of sexism. The persecution directed towards President Rousseff may have started from political divergences, but it quickly unraveled as pure, violent, misogyny.
To counter her democratic project, her political detractors used malicious defamation and personal attacks that would have never been directed to a man, even her mentor and predecessor totally despised by the oligarchs has not been subjected to this kind of public humiliation, a humiliation based on a well established mechanism of prejudice against women that exists in societies like Brazil.
As an example, extremely shocking images have circulated on the Internet, showing montages of Dilma Rousseff’s head on a female body with her legs open. The Brazilians were encouraged to stick this photo to the entrance of their car’s gas tank, and when being filled at gas stations, it was as if the gas pump was sexually penetrating the president. The rape threat in this sticker resonated undeniably with the country’s violent patriarchal, militaristic history. It stemmed from a deep need to humiliate any woman who has the audacity to rise above what has been determined as her place in patriarchal society, that of enslavement.
On April 17/2016, within the solemn precincts of Congress and despite the great agitation that reigned that evening. The majority, made up of heterosexual Christian white men in suits with conservative discourse that didn’t have neither the moral nor the technical knowledge to do so, voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff. There is no doubt, they decided to destroy a free thinker single mother, a woman who did not shut up by staying behind her stove. They couldn’t stand her, her very existence disturbed these men. Their decision was purely political, lacking reason and justice.
For Brazilian who, during Rousseff’s government, overcame poverty, started getting medical care, who went to university and simply stopped being invisible to the eyes of the nation, earning rights that had long been denied. It was a shock that the greatest effort against corruption in Brazilian history further developed in breaking the government that had made it possible and helped a group of corrupt politicians to power. The national, progressive, inclusive and democratic project which Dilma Rousseff represented had been interrupted by a powerful conservative, reactionary force, with the support of a partisan and venal press.
As for Brazilian women especially, the disbelief and the sadness of seeing backwardness, a conservative agenda and the elimination of rights back to power, have been exacerbated by The announcement of interim President Michel Temer’s cabinet and its 23 white men.
It was the first time in nearly four decades that they had a male-only cabinet. The last time was during the military dictatorship.
This is what you would expect from a president whose wife is ‘beautiful, demure and at home’, as she declared on a controversial profile as Brazil’s new first lady in the country’s most influential magazine. “She is a lucky woman,” was the opening line.
Luck for Temer’s wife apparently came when she met her future husband. She was only 18 and he was over 60 when her uncle introduced them at a party conference. Needless to point that Temer is nearly the opposite of Rousseff in terms of his political views and personal experience.
Another controversy about gender emerged weeks earlier, when Dilma Rousseff was portrayed on the cover of a magazine as a woman with a nervous breakdown. Using an archive photo that looked like she was screaming, the president was described as having kicked things, abused staff and being too “emotionally unstable” to run the country. Being a woman, Rousseff is of course emotional, irrational, incapable of thinking and acting coolly. As a woman in a leadership position, she is bossy, overly dominating and aggressive.
A typical way to undermine women and a surprising contrast to how Rousseff, a former guerrilla who endured torture, insisted she would fight until the end. It is very hard to argue that there is no sexism in the attacks against her. Describing what was happening to her as a patriarchal coup. Dilma said:
“I leave the Presidency as I came: without having made any illicit act, without having betrayed any of my commitments, with dignity, and carrying in my heart the same love and admiration I always had for Brazilians, and the same urge to keep fighting for Brazil. I lived my truth. I gave my best. I didn’t run away from my responsibilities. I was moved emotionally by human suffering. I was touched by the fight against poverty and hunger. And I fought against social inequalities.”
The day after her indictment, in a pitiful move, a couple of news agencies owned by oligarchs, described her as demoralized, after leaking photos of the Presidential Palace where bouquets of flowers were absent for once. Hundreds of women gathered on the lawn along the presidential palace bringing her roses.
For women, the fierce feminist, cancer survivor, daughter of a a Brazilian teacher and a Bulgarian communist lawyer, had wanted to leave a legacy of a successful presidency, not an impeachment. In any case, she will leave as a legacy to women, a trajectory of a Woman who did not bend under adversity.
Riham Mokrani
