AFP, Brasilia :Suspended Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff told senators in emotional, combative testimony at her trial Monday that voting for her impeachment would amount to a “coup d’etat.”Declaring her innocence and recalling how she was tortured under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, Rousseff warned that Latin America’s biggest country was on the verge of losing its democracy.”Vote against impeachment, vote for democracy…. Do not accept a coup,” the 68-year-old leftist leader said as she defended herself before senators who are widely expected to remove her from office.Brazil’s first woman president is accused of having taken illegal state loans to patch budget holes in 2014, to mask the country’s problems as it slid into its deepest recession in decades.Momentum to push her out of office is also fueled by deep anger at months of political paralysis and a vast corruption scandal centered on state oil giant Petrobras.All indications point to the Senate convicting Rousseff when voting starts Tuesday, ending 13 years of rule by the leftist Workers’ Party. During questioning that followed Rousseff’s 45-minute speech, pro-impeachment Senator Simone Tebet said that as president, Rousseff had criminally mismanaged Brazil’s accounts by taking the unauthorized loans.”An unreal Brazil was sold. The unreal numbers led to a loss of confidence among Brazilians and we are facing the worst financial crisis in the history of the country,” Tebet said.But Rousseff, arguing that the loans were a commonly used fiscal stopgap, said she’d been accused “unjustly and arbitrarily.””I’ve come to look your excellencies in the eye to say that I did not commit a crime,” she said in a calm, firm voice from the Senate chamber podium in the capital Brasilia.There appeared to be little Rousseff could say however to save her presidency.Voting was expected Tuesday, possibly extending into Wednesday, and pro-impeachment senators say they will easily reach the needed two-thirds majority — 54 of 81 senators-to remove her from office.In that case, Rousseff’s former vice president turned political enemy, Michel Temer, will be confirmed as president until elections in 2018.Temer, from the center-right PMDB party, has already been acting president since May, using his brief period in power to steer the government rightward.Keeping to his residence while the Senate drama unfolded, Temer greeted members of the Brazilian Olympic team and said he was following proceedings “with complete calm,” Globo news site reported.
