Brazil’s Rousseff to address impeachment in UN trip

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff flew to New York on Thursday to sign a global

climate change pact but she will use the international stage to denounce efforts to impeach her.
The opposition criticized Rousseff’s plans to address the issue at the United Nations, just four days after the lower house of Congress sent impeachment proceedings to the Senate, which is expected to vote on opening a trial by mid-May.
Rousseff is going to the UN to sign the climate deal on Friday, but a government official told AFP that her speech would include “one sentence” about the political crisis back home.
The official did not give more details, but cabinet chief Jacques Wagner told reporters late Wednesday that Rousseff would have to “express her indignation about the coup that is developing in Brazil” during her trip.
Rousseff says charges that she used illegal accounting tricks to mask budget deficits in an election year back in 2014 have no legal foundation.
Rousseff will likely describe the impeachment process as “artificial and false, because Dilma is an honest woman who did not commit any crime,” Wagner said, without specifying at what point during the visit she would make such remarks.
Rousseff already has a sympathetic ear among other left-wing governments in Latin America.
Cuba’s communist leader Raul Castro called the impeachment process this week a “parliamentary coup” while Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said her ouster would be a “threat to the people of the Americas.”