Brazil's Senate removed
President Dilma Rousseff from office on Wednesday for breaking budgetary laws,
ending an impeachment process that has polarized the scandal-plagued country
and paralyzed its politics for nine months.
Senators voted 61-20 to
convict Rousseff for illegally using money from state banks to boost public
spending, putting an end to 13 years of leftist Workers Party rule in Latin
America's largest economy.
Conservative Michel Temer, the
former vice president who has run Brazil since Rousseff's suspension in May,
will be sworn in on Wednesday to serve out the remainder of the presidential
term through 2018.
A separate Senate vote will be
held on whether Rousseff will be barred from public office for eight years.
Brazil's first female
president has denied any wrongdoing and said the impeachment process was aimed
at protecting the interests of the country's economic elite and rolling back
social programs that lifted millions of Brazilians from poverty during the last
decade.
Her opponents, however, have
hailed the chance to turn the page on a drawn-out political crisis, the
country's worst recession in generations and a sweeping corruption scandal at
state oil company Petrobras.
Motorists honked car horns in
the Brazilian capital in a blaring tribute to the removal of a president whose
popularity had dwindled to single figures since winning re-election in 2014.
In Brazil's largest city, Sao
Paulo, fireworks exploded in celebration after the vote.
Temer has vowed to boost an
economy that has shrunk for six consecutive quarters and implement austerity
measures to plug a record budget deficit, which cost Brazil its
investment-grade credit rating last year.
However, he is likely to face
bitter political opposition from the Workers Party, which has vowed to take to
the streets in protest.
(Additional reporting by Maria
Carolina Marcello, Alonso Soto and Anthony Boadle in Brasilia, Brad Haynes and
Guillermo Parra-Bernal in São Paulo; Writing by Daniel Flynn and Brad Haynes;
Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe and Tom Brown)
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