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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 6/11/16

Kill List: Smashing the "B" in BRICS

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The stakes could not be higher. Not only the future of the BRICS, but the future of a new multipolar world is in the balance. And it all hinges on what happens in Brazil in the next few months.

Let's start with the Kafkaesque internal turmoil. The coup against President Dilma Rousseff remains an unrivaled media theater/political tragicomedy gift that keeps on giving. It also doubles as a case of information war converted into a strategic tool of political control.

A succession of appalling audio leaks has revealed that key sectors of the Brazilian military as well as selected Supreme Court justices have legitimized the coup against a President that has always protected the two-year-old Car Wash corruption investigation. Even Western mainstream media was forced to admit that Dilma did not steal anything but is being impeached by a bunch of thieves. Their agenda; to stifle the Car Wash investigation, which may eventually throw many of them in jail.

The leaks also unveiled a nasty internecine carnage between Brazilian comprador elites -- peripheral and mainstream. Essentially the peripherals were used as lowly paperboys in Congress for the dirty work. But now they may be about to become road kill -- along the illegitimate, unpopular, interim Michel Temer "government," led by a bunch of corrupt-to-the-core PMDB politicians, the party that is heir to the sole opposition outfit tolerated during the 1960s-1980s military dictatorship.

Meet the vassal chancellor

An insidious character in the current golpeachment scam is the interim Minister of Foreign Relations, senatorJose Serra of the PSDB party, the social democrats turned neoliberal enforcers. In the 2002 presidential election -- which he lost to Lula -- Serra had already tried to get rid of peripheral Brazilian oligarchies.

Yet now he's incarnating another role -- perfectly positioned not only to retrograde Brazilian foreign policy to some point around the 1964 military coup, but mostly as the Beltway's point man inside the coup racket.

Exceptionalistan's key ally in Brazil is the oligarchy in Sao Paulo, the wealthiest state and home to the financial capital of Latin America. This is Brazil's A-list. It's from their ranks that an eventual "national savior" may eventually spring up.

Once the peripherals are history, then no holds would be barred to criminalize -- and imprison -- an array of leftist leaders, Lula included, as well as manufacture a fake election legitimized by a noxious Supreme Court justice, Gilmar Mendes, a PSDB stooge.

It all hinges on what happens in the next two months. The prosecutor general finally asked the Supreme Court to throw three top peripherals in jail; they are all accused of plotting to derail the Car Wash investigation -- an extremely complex juridical-political-police network of myriad concentric/parallel circles.

Meanwhile, the final judgment of Dilma's impeachment at the Senate is bound to happen on August 16 -- 11 days after the start of the Olympic Games. The coup plotters suffered a heavy blow as they were trying hard to accelerate the proceedings. As it stands, the outcome is uncertain; after the leaks, four to five senators are already wavering, as the leaks also implicate Temer personally. The "leader" of a zero-credibility, corruption-crammed scam, he's among the targets of several corruption investigations and has just been banned from running for political office for the next eight years.

The Brazilian mainstream media monopoly (five families) -- popularly referred to as PIG, the Brazilian acronym for Pro-Coup Media Party -- has changed its anti-left tune and is now also going after selected members of the Temer racket.

According to the constitution, if both the Presidency and Vice-Presidency are vacated in the last two years of a given term, it's up to Congress to elect the new President.

This implies two possible scenarios. If Dilma is not impeached, it's increasingly likely she will call for new presidential elections before the end of the year.

If she is impeached, the PIG will tolerate the stooge-crammed Temer interim racket until January 2017 at the most. The next step would be what Serra and about-to-be-jailed Senate leader Renan Calheiros are campaigning for; the end of direct presidential elections and the onset of Brazilian-style parliamentarianism.

The man best positioned to be the national savior in this case is former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso -- also former "Prince of Sociology" and a major star (during the 1960s and early 1970s) of the dependency theory, then metamorphosed into an avid neoliberal. Cardoso is a very close pal of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The Beltway/Wall Street axis loves him. Cardoso would be "elected" mostly by the pack of Congress hyenas who got the Dilma impeachment rolling on April 17.

The hard node of golpeachment goes way beyond peripheral Brazilian elites. It is comprised of a political party (the PSDB); the Globo media empire; the Federal Police (very cozy with the FBI); the Public Ministry; most of the Supreme Court; and sectors of the military. Only the Beltway/Wall Street axis has the means and the necessary pull to regiment all these players -- by hard cash, blackmail or promises of glory.

And that ties in with key unanswered questions regarding the recent audio leaks. Who taped the conversations? Who leaked them? Why now? Who profits from a nation in total political/economic/juridical chaos, with virtually all institutions totally discredited?

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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