NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dilma Rousseff's suspension is temporary, but some are saying that it seems all but certain that she'll be permanently removed from office. Is that correct?
ANDREW FISHMAN: Yeah. It would take some sort of miracle or massive change in the political landscape for her not to be -- for the vote to not go through. You need a two-thirds vote in the Senate for her to be impeached after the trial. They already had that number, and then a few more, voting for the -- this initial vote the other day. So, I mean, unless something massive were to change, it seems quite clear.
And the -- I mean, the only people that could really intervene right now would be the Supreme Court. They've shown that they also prefer the Temer presidency. They want this. They think that Temer is the quickest path to resolve the political crisis and to move forward from the chaos that's currently going on. And they've said -- they said so quite explicitly in some statements that they've given to the press, which, as an American coming from the U.S. context, where at least the Supreme Court in the United States tries to maintain the appearance of impartiality in maintaining pure judicial decisions, in this case they've made statements that show that they're making very political calculations in their decisions, as has the prosecutor general.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Andrew, about an article by Greg Grandin about who's profiting from this coup, as Dilma Rousseff has called it. Grandin wrote in The Nation, a piece that was headlined, "A Slavers' Coup in Brazil?: Among the many groups pushing for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, one is seldom discussed: companies that profit from slavery." In the article, Grandin notes Rousseff's Workers' Party creates a -- created a "dirty list" of "hundreds of companies and individual employers who were investigated by labor prosecutors and found to be using slaves."
Grandin goes on to write that one of the members of the opposition that's pushed for Rousseff's impeachment directly profits from slave labor. According to Grandin, Congressman Beto Mansur is, quote, "charged with keeping 46 workers at his soybean farms in Goias State in conditions so deplorable that investigators say the laborers were treated like modern-day slaves." Andrew Fishman, what business interests have aligned themselves against Dilma Rousseff? And what about this congressman?
ANDREW FISHMAN: Yeah, and going one step further even, I mean, Greg's article was about a week ago, and just yesterday, President Temer installed his Cabinet, his ministers. The agricultural minister is a massive soybean farmer who has huge tracts of land, they've -- responsible for massive deforestation, and he's been personally linked to slavery. His time in Congress, he actually introduced a bill to try and limit the definition of what slavery actually is, to try and help himself and his partners and his business interests.
Slavery is a massive problem in Brazil. Brazil has plenty of social problems. This, slavery, is obviously one that should not exist in the modern world; however, it clearly does here and around the world. If you go out into the interior of the country, which is massive tracts of wilderness, it's basically wild, wild West out there. There's very little law. Journalists, activists, anyone who tries to push back against these massive corporate interests, who have benefited greatly under the PT government time in the last 10, 12 years, they are all -- they're all able to use this sort of slavery, because they have no -- there's basically no rule of law to stop them from doing so.
So, yeah, the massive agribusiness has aligned themselves against Dilma and have actually said that they want -- wanted her to be impeached, as has big industrialist groups and as has the media, which is also a huge industry here, obviously. But all these groups benefited greatly under President Rousseff and President Lula da Silva. Just last year, they've had hundreds of millions of reais, you know, over the time -- hundreds and billions of dollars in subsidies that have gone to these groups and these industries, and they've gotten really rich off of it, much more money than has gone to the social distribution programs, which President Temer has now indicated that he probably will be cutting or reducing. So, it's an interesting moment. I think that they never really were entirely aligned with the PT, but it was a pact of political convenience: They saw a way to get a deal, a way to get their interests met. Now that the economy has gone down slightly and her popularity has gone down dramatically, it seemed like a good opportunity for them to push back with their more conventional allies, which are the PSDB and the PMDB.
AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Fishman, thanks for joining us, researcher, reporter for The Intercept, has covered Brazil extensively, along with Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda, speaking to us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at Syria. Stay with us.
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