Coup in Brazil: The Farce Is Consummated, Now the Struggle Continues

Statement from Alba Movimientos on the Coup in Brazil

August 31, 2016 will be written in the dark pages of Latin American and Caribbean history as day in which a corrupt and delegitimized Parliament bypassed the vote of more than 54 million Brazilian men and women. The aim: putting Brazil under the geopolitical control of the United States and applying a brutal adjustment against the people, at the service of large corporations.

In the name of democracy and an alleged fight against corruption, with a little help from the private mass media, the most corrupt and anti-democratic politicians have managed to overthrow legitimately-elected President Dilma Rousseff, even without being able to prove the corruption accusations that weigh on her. However, during the process, we have seen the brutality that the most conservative sectors are capable of in order to take over power once again.

With the voting in the Senate the coup against the Brazilian democracy was materialized. They destroyed the electoral result, condemning an innocent woman and crowning the greatest political setback since the military coup in 1964.

This rupture of the constitutional order expresses the unpatriotic and unpopular aims of the economic elites, engaged in privatizing Pre-salt fields, state companies, and public Banks, apart from selling the lands to foreign capital, putting at risk the national production of food and water control. Coupist leaders want, among other things, to reduce the investments in health, education and housing, eliminating labour rights, ending with the relation between basic pensions to minimum wage, burying the agrarian reform and emptying social programs.

This goes hand in hand with the reactivation of the process towards the creation of the Pacific Alliance, that is to say, towards Free Trade Agreements at the service of transnationals and military cooperation with the United States.

As we have warned in the past, this was a very important step due to its geopolitical weight in the offensive against the development of the integration between the countries of Our America. This process of integration has dawned with the beginning of the XXI century, promoting the struggles of the peoples all over the continent, fighting against imperialism in every country and coordinating efforts to create stronger bonds between nations and peoples.

“Our struggle against the coup and their plan to strip us from our conquests will be ruthless (…) Today, the resistance is merely beginning. On the streets and inside institutions. In education centers, workplaces and households. Sooner than the usurpers think, the Brazilian people will be able to reject their plans and retake the road of great changes,” pointed out the communiqué of Brazil’s Popular Front, a space for coordination that is made up of several organizations that are also part of ALBA Movimientos in Brazil.

From the Continental Articulation of Movements Towards ALBA, we echo these words, we reject the Coup and commit to continue building, in every country, more unity, organization and mobilization, with the aim of retaking the historical process of a Great Homeland, a Patria Grande, which is free, just and sovereign for the people of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Continental Articulation of Movements Towards the ALBA

Source: ALBA Movimientos / August 31, 2016