Brazil's Supreme Court removed the speaker of the lower house of Congress on Thursday on charges of obstructing a corruption investigation, days before an impeachment process that he engineered was expected to oust President Dilma Rousseff.
Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff vowed on Monday to fight impeachment to the very end in the Senate after a Sunday heavy defeat in the lower house of Congress raised the likelihood of an end to her administration and 13 years of populist rule in Latin America's largest economy.
The Brazilian government is considering reviving a financial transaction tax known as CPMF in a bid to shore up its finances in 2016, but the initiative apparently does not have sufficient support in Congress and President Dilma Rousseff's main coalition ally, PMDB, is not willing to make the presentation.
Uruguay's foreign minister said on Friday that nobody supports the proposal from the Brazilian Senate president Renan Calheiros to put an end to the Mercosur customs union. However he did point out that he proposal exposed that the block effectively is 'not working' and needs to have its foundations reviewed.
Renan Calheiros, president of the Brazilian Senate, and the man who could help President Dilma Rousseff avoid impeachment in Congress, has proposed a package of measures to rescue Brazil from its current stagflation, but among his demands is “an end to the customs union of Mercosur”.
President Dilma Rousseff and leading Brazilian senators are preparing a joint set of major reforms that seek to introduce an agenda of market-friendly proposals, in a move one senior official says is an effort to counter a revolt by lawmakers in the Lower House.
Brazil's top prosecutor, who has put dozens of politicians under investigation for allegedly taking bribes in the Petrobras corruption scandal, has won the backing of his peers to stay on the job for two more years.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, (and her political mentor Lula da Silva), raced on Wednesday to defuse a rebellion by legislators upset about her budget austerity plans and her handling of a corruption scandal at state-run oil company Petrobras, which now threatens political stability.
Brazil's Congress elected a conservative as speaker of the Chamber of Deputies on Sunday in a setback for the ruling Workers' Party that split President Dilma Rousseff's coalition and will complicate her legislative agenda.
The president of the Brazilian Senate, Renan Calheiros had decided to return the equivalent of public funds he used to fly on a Brazilian Air Force (FAB) aircraft from Brasilia to Recife, where he underwent a hair implant.