Speaking to a group of U.S. business and foreign policy elites, the country's installed president, Michel Temer, admitted that what triggered the impeachment process was not any supposed "budgetary crimes," but rather Dilma's opposition to the neoliberal platform of social program cuts and privatization demanded by Temer's party and the big-business interests that fund it.
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THE INTERCEPT BRASIL'S Inacio Vieira yesterday reported one of the most significant pieces of evidence yet about the real reason for the impeachment of Brazil's elected president, Dilma Rousseff.
Speaking to a group of U.S. business and foreign policy elites, the country's installed president, Michel Temer, admitted that what triggered the impeachment process was not any supposed "budgetary crimes," but rather Dilma's opposition to the neoliberal platform of social program cuts and privatization demanded by Temer's party and the big-business interests that fund it.
But what's as revealing as Temer's casual acknowledgement of coup-type motives is how Brazil's large media -- which is united in favor of impeachment -- has completely ignored his comments. Literally not one of Globo's countless media properties, nor the nation's largest newspaper, Folha, nor any of the nation's large political magazines have even mentioned these stunning and incriminating remarks from the country's president. They've imposed a total blackout. While numerous independent journalists and websites have reported Temer's admission, none of Brazil's major media outlets have uttered a word about it.
The only exception to this wall of silence was a columnist from the right-wing newspaper Estadao, Lucia Guimaraes, who spent several hours on Twitter yesterday completely humiliating herself in a spirited attempt to deny that Temer actually said this. She began by insinuating that The Intercept Brasil made a suspicious "cut" in the video that altered reality -- basically accusing Vieira of committing fraud without the slightest evidence, all to protect Temer.
Go to The Intercept to read the rest of this article.
Authors Bio:
[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning.
For his 2013 NSA reporting, working with his source Edward Snowden, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was also awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A film about the work Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras did with Snowden to report the NSA archive, "CitizenFour," directed by Poitras, was awarded the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
In 2019, he received the Special Prize from the Vladimir Herzog Institute for his reporting on the Bolsonaro government and pervasive corruption inside the prosecutorial task force that led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva. The award is named after the Jewish immigrant journalist who was murdered during an interrogation by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1977. Several months after the reporting began, Lula was ordered released by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the former President credited the expose's for his liberty. In early 2020, Brazilian prosecutors sought to prosecute Greenwald in connection with the reporting, but the charges were dismissed due to a Supreme Court ruling, based on the Constitutional right of a free press, that barred the Bolsonaro government from making good on its threats to retaliate against Greenwald.
After working as a journalist at Salon and The Guardian, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept in 2013 along with Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill, and co-founded The Intercept Brasil in 2016. He resigned fromThe Intercept in October, 2020, to return to independent journalism.
Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with his husband, Congressman David Miranda, their two children, and 26 rescue dogs. In 2017, Greenwald and Miranda created an animal shelter in Brazil supported in part through public donations designed to employ and help exit the streets homeless people who live on the streets with their pets.
