Impeaching Dilma Rousseff: the double life of corruption allegations on Brazil’s political right

Abstract

This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, for alleged budgetary misconduct, as well as the related right-wing, 'anti-corruption' demonstrations calling for her ouster. I argue that Rousseff's impeachment was facilitated by a conflation of two models of 'corruption' operating in Brazil, one legal-behavioural and the other religious-ontological. What happened in 2016 was a tacit conflation of these two models, along with their associated regimes for construing evidence of guilt. More specifically, congressional deliberations on Rousseff's guilt allowed jurisprudential standards of evidence to be influenced by the evidential regime of the right-wing Fora Dilma ('Out Dilma') demonstrators. The demonstrators evinced Rousseff's corruption through a semiotic process I term 'cross-domain homology', a process that I claim is intrinsically dangerous for democracy because it invites a state of exception to the norms girding representative institutions. The concept of corruption leads a double life, both a secular, jurisprudential existence and a religious existence. In both realms, its life is abstract, but only in its legal sense can corruption, defined as the 'abuse of entrusted power for private gain', be operationalised as discrete misdeeds. 1 Such jurisprudential accusations of corruption lead to fact-finding procedures for assessing actions in violation of specific statutes. Alternatively, accusations of corruption that assume a quasi-religious (a non-denominational though vaguely Christian) valence, cannot be proven or disproven by facts concerning behaviour. This quasi-religious form of corruption inheres in what people are, rather than what they do, and so one is accused not so much of violating a law but rather of being a fallen person, one whose soul is in a reprehensible state. What I hope to show is that these two models of corruption, and their associated evidential regimes, can get mixed up in practice as the de jure legal model of corruption becomes a de facto 'secular avatar' of the religious model of corruption guiding institutional action (Anders and Nuitjen

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