Mediocre incompetent opportunist, corrupt coward traitor, and certified political usurper, interim President Michel Temer, refused to go to the closing ceremony, afraid of being booed out of a packed Maracana stadium. According to the latest polls, 79% of Brazilians want Temer The Usurper out. Now.

Thus Temer The Usurper was not able, according to protocol, to pass the baton (for Tokyo in 2020) to visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Team Temer offered a meeting later on in the capital, Brasilia. Japanese diplomats flatly refused; who wants your Prime Minister to meet a coward in hiding?

Former President Lula lobbied hard to bring the Olympics to Rio, and preparations went on under President Dilma Rousseff. Coupled with Temer The Usurper’s primal fear of being booed just as in the Olympics opening ceremony, which led to his subsequent diplomatic humiliation, a noxious, pathetic political propaganda campaign was deployed right to the end of the games, trying to diminish or even extinguish Lula’s and Dilma’s role. Quite a few Brazilian athletes with great performances at the games benefited from government-supported sport programs.

Now the Scoundrel Games are back in Brazil – with a parliamentary junta disputing gold medals with an institutional racket involving big banks, big business, corporate media and sectors of the Judiciary and the Federal Police. The farce is being sold as a trial in the Senate of President Rousseff, accused – without proof – of financially embellishing the state budget.

Unlike the cowardly usurper, Rousseff is going to the Senate to stare all 81 members in the face; these are the people who by the end of this month will for all practical purposes save or bury Brazilian democracy for good. Rousseff, in case of – miraculously – not being impeached, proposes a referendum leading to new elections.

As it stands, it does not look good. The late, great Jean Baudrillard – a great lover of Brazil – would characterize Rousseff’s impeachment drive as a simulacrum, obliterating the real crime; the parliamentary/institutional coup orchestrated by a notorious bunch of scoundrels, Temer included.

The multi-layered coup, with modified Hybrid War elements, comes with a prearranged finale. It does not matter that even Brazilian Public Ministry experts have repeatedly admitted there’s no juridical basis for Rousseff’s impeachment. Even the federal prosecutor on the case concluded a few weeks ago that she did not commit a crime – «responsibility» or otherwise.

The prosecutorial gang includes two of every three members of the Brazilian Congress who are facing an array of scandals. The overall institutional farce points to the Legislative, the Judiciary and the Public Ministry dragging their feet on indicting the legislative scoundrels while accelerating the procedure against Rousseff. That’s the definition of organized crime.

The endgame, from the point of view of the coup plotter galaxy, is to criminalize and finish off with the Workers’ Party for good – from Lula and Rousseff downwards – under an upcoming barrage of hazy «obstruction of Justice» allegations.

And the Obama administration loves it

The president of construction company giant Odebrecht, incarcerated for months now, accused Temer The Usurper of pleading for – and receiving – undeclared «electoral help», in cash, for his party, the PMDB. Temer has already been convicted for violating election finance laws and banned from running for office for eight years.

Interim Foreign Minister Jose Serra also received «electoral help» for his presidential campaign in 2010; part of the loot was paid overseas, something that properly investigated could lead his party, the PSDB, to lose its registration.

In these past few weeks, Temer The Usurper took no prisoners to turbo charge the impeachment timetable farce, at the same time preventing Dilma to mount a detailed defense. His excuse; he needs to go to Hangzhou, China, for the G20 summit starting on September 4. And he needs to go as president-in-charge – not as «leader» of an unelected caretaker government acting like they’ve earned their mandate in the polling booth.

The real reason for the rush, though, is that Temer feared the serious Odebrecht corruption charge like the plague. Other charges may be imminent. Yet he’s protected – at least for now; the Mob – as in the Goddess of the Market, Brazil’s big banking and their shills in corporate media – is on his side.

Brazil remains totally paralyzed by the political/institutional farce. The 8^th largest economy in the world, second largest exporter of food products, and largest industrial platform in the developing West is bleeding, badly. Oil workers are accusing the Mob for 1.5 million lost jobs. Huge infrastructure projects are stalled. Large construction companies are virtually broke; Odebrecht by itself fired over 70,000 workers.

In parallel Temer The Usurper’s «government» has already started to enact its masterplan – straight from disaster capitalism’s playbook. One of the key «policies» is to sell out Petrobras – and the pre-salt reserves – to foreign, as in US corporate, interests. Lula correctly identified the pre-salt reserves – the largest oil discovery in the 21^st century so far – as the privileged source for a new development drive for Brazil.

But there are way more disasters in store; selling out indigenous Brazilian industrial development via hardcore privatization, abandoning the defense of Brazilian engineering know-how; severe cuts on education, health, science and technology; «flexibilization» of workers’ rights, as in attacking them on all fronts; a regressive attack on pensions; and sabotaging Mercosur – the South American common market – to the benefit of vassal subordination to US interests.

The – legitimate – Uruguayan Foreign Minister, Rodolfo Nin Novoa, was even compelled to denounced the – illegitimate – Brazilian Foreign Minister, the lowly Serra, for trying to buy Montevideo’s help to prevent Venezuela from stepping up to the temporary presidency of Mercosur. In a little over three months, Serra managed to reduce Brazilian diplomacy to a heap of rotten bananas.

And then, of course, there’s the cherry in the cheesecake; the lame duck Obama administration’s full support for the coup and the impeachment farce.

Obama did not have the balls to say it upfront. That came in the form of Secretary of State John Kerry meeting with the repellent Serra in a trip to Brazil in early August. Kerry even issued a long statement – for all practical purposes legitimizing the coup.

Kerry did not have the balls to meet Temer The Usurper. So what; the whole Global South now knows where Washington stands. Parliamentary / institutional regime change is of course OK. As long as it prevents BRICS integration and Chinese trade/commercial advance in Latin America.

Move on, nothing to see here – as Washington proceeds to the serious business of negotiating two crucial military bases with Argentina’s neoliberal vassal Mauricio Macri; one in resource-rich Patagonia, the other smack into the Brazil / Argentina / Paraguay triple border, right by the largest aquifer on the planet.

And there’s all that pre-salt oil about to go to Chevron! How not to love the smell of regime change in the morning? Definitely smells like victory. And you don’t even need to send the Marines for it.

Since the agent, Michel Temer, is now Brazil’s appointed ‘interim’ leader, the context of that cable is important to understand – especially because the situation here is similar to other recent examples in which the US President has, essentially, selected the leader of a foreign government after a US-backed coup has occurred there:

After an American coup overthrowing the existing democratically elected President in Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk was the interim leader of Ukraine from 27 February 2014 till April 2016, chosen by the US President (via his agent Victoria Nuland); and after an American-backed domestic-aristocracy-perpetrated coup overthrowing the existing democratically elected President of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti was the interim leader of that country from 28 June 2009 to 27 January 2010, chosen by the US President (in conjunction with Honduras’s 12 aristocratic or «oligarchic» families). In both instances, only candidates who were acceptable to the US President were allowed to compete in the subsequent ‘election’, and massive propaganda was issued to the local public, with US government approval, for each of those candidates. That operation then produced the ‘non-interim’ regime, which still rules each of these now-dictatorships.

This particular cable, on 11 January 2006, was from Christopher J. McMullen, the US Consul General at the US Embassy in Sao Paulo, to the US Secretary of State, US Southern Command, National Security Council, and to seven US Embassies and Consulates throughout Latin America. It transmitted the information from the then Brazilian Federal Deputy Mr Temer, who was at the time also the national president of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which was the Party (with no ideology whatsoever) that had been set up to take over Brazil for the US CIA if and when Brazil’s ruling progressive party of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known simply as Lula, could be overthrown. Lula’s chosen successor, from Lula’s Party, the Workers' Party, was Dilma Rouseff, who ruled until Temer, the US informant, was installed as Brazil’s President by Brazil’s Congress, on 12 May 2016.

Lula was President until 2011, when his former Chief of Staff, Rousseff, succeeded him, and the former President, Lula, became her Chief of Staff on 16 March 2016 in order to shield him from prosecution that would be based upon recent police information that he had illegally transferred funds from the semi-public Petrobras, Brazil’s oil company, to his political Party, a party which Brazil’s aristocracy refuses to fund. The Workers' Party is vigorously opposed by the aristocracy. Consequently, in order for the Workers’ Party to exist and to win any national election, there are only two options: Either the Party must cooperate with the aristocrats, so that the public won’t actually rule (the aristocracy will); or else, the Party must find some other way of funding its campaigns – an illegal way, because the aristocracy make the laws. Consequently, Brazil’s Supreme Court quickly ruled that the appointment of Lula to become the Chief of Staff to President Rousseff was invalid.

In Brazil, they make the laws via the Congress, the key faction of which has been the PMDB Party, the Party of Mr Temer.

Here is how he maneuvered himself into the office of being Brazil’s Vice President, so as to inherit the government from his opponent, Dima Rousseff, when she’s forced out; this is how it was described by Grazielle Castro, Huffington Post’s Political Reporter in Brazzil: «In 2010, then-President Lula asked the current President of the Senate Renan Calheiros and the current Senator Jader Barbalho if he could name the vice president in Dilma’s ticket. He tried everything he could to get Henrique Meirelles, then-president of the Central Bank, on Dilma’s ticket. The PMDB congressmen refused – and so Lula sought three other nominations. A few days later, both congressmen came back with the same answer: ‘Our nominations are: Michel Temer, Michel Temer and Michel Temer.’ Although the members of the Workers’ Party considered Temer to be overly voracious when he defended a greater participation for PMDB in the government, they had little choice but to accept his nomination».

So: now, Temer struck and made his move for the Presidency. This was the time to do it, because the US government and the Saud family had agreed in September 2014 (soon after America’s successful coup in Ukraine) to drive down oil prices, in order to drive out-of-office the rulers of major oil-producers that they want to defeat – especially Russia, Brazil, and Venezuela. (The results are actually even worse in Venezuela than in Brazil, because Venezuela is the world’s most oil-dependent economy.)

The 2006 cable opened: «Federal Deputy Michel Temer, national president of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), believes that public disillusion with President Lula and the Workers' Party (PT) provides an opportunity for the PMDB to field its own candidate in the 2006 presidential election. However, party divisions and the lack of a compelling choice as a candidate could force the PMDB into an alliance with Lula's PT or the opposition PSDB».

And now, ten years later, Mr Temer – and the US regime, and Brazil’s aristocrats – finally struck, because the iron was just about as hot as it would get.

In the eyes of President Barack Obama and his administration, the largest Latin American country is a hostile state because it dares to implement independent policies. The US goal is to subjugate the ruling elite of Brazil and make it dance to the US tune.

This turn of events has been predicted by a number of Latin American presidents, including Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay among others. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro put it bluntly saying the events in Brazil are nothing else but a coup d’état staged by the US. According to Maduro, the attack against Dilma Rousseff threatens democracy in Brazil. It is also directed against such regional organizations as Celac (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), Unasur (the Union of South American Nations), as well as public and political movements protecting people’s interests. Maduro called on all left-wing movements in Latin America to join together and protest against the smear campaign against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The Venezuelan leader believes they must act to protect peace and prosperity on the continent.   

The compromising evidence (real and fabricated) used against the Brazilian leadership had been obtained by the US National Security Agency (NSA) before Snowden escaped to make his revelations public. The information was spread around through controlled media to destabilize the country’s political and public life. It will make it easier for Washington to have its people appointed to key positions. The so called «constitutional procedures» to dismiss Dilma Rousseff are nothing else but a camouflage to cover the creeping coup d’état. Obama will go to any length to achieve the goal before his tenure expires. He may even order to stage a Maidan in Brazil, if need be. 

Some people among the US embassy staff, as well as in American consulates spread around the country, are already working to carry out the assigned mission.  

Liliana Ayalde, the US ambassador to Brazil, started her career path as a Senior Assistant Administrator for the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) coordinating important development assistance programs in Haiti, Mexico, and the Caribbean. She is a member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Career Minister having been posted in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, and Washington, D.C. with USAID. It means she closely coordinated her activities with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other special services. Between 2008 and 2011 she served as the US Ambassador to the Republic of Paraguay preparing to overthrow President Fernando Lugo. In June 2012 the parliament of Paraguay impeached the President. Back then, Brazil protested. The Brazilian government noted that the President was deprived of his right for defense. According to the constitution, the Vice President of Paraguay took the highest office in the country. Lugo called the impeachment a coup d’état staged against the will of the people. By and large, the same scenario is taking place in Brazil. 

Andrew Bowen is the Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Brasilia. He knows a lot about Latin America. Prior to arriving to Brazil, Andrew was the interim Deputy Chief of Mission and Director of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) Affairs Section at the United States Embassy in Bogota, Colombia. His previous assignments include Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Honduras. About fifty people work in economic and political sections of the US embassy mainly used for secret CIA operations. One of them is Alexis Ludwig, Political Counselor, who was involved in well-known scandals in Bolivia and Argentina. Some people working for special services are known for their vigorous activities, including public affairs officer Abigail Dressel, legal attaché Steve Moore, financial management officer Gwendolyn Llewellyn, USAID director Michael Eddy – the list can go on.

Dilma Rousseff had to step down «temporarily». She called the decision a «political farce» and a «coup». Leaving the presidential palace, she called her removal from power an act of «sabotage» and a tragic day for young Brazilian democracy. Rousseff said it was not her suspension from the office, but the respect for election results, the will of people and the constitution that mattered. «I may have committed mistakes, but I never committed crimes», she said. «It’s the most brutal thing that can happen to a human being – being condemned for a crime you didn’t commit. No injustice is more devastating».

Rousseff struck a defiant tone, condemning the «treachery» of those who sabotaged her government and vowing to fight on against the coup.

Vice President Michel Temer, who was elected on Rousseff’s coat-tails in 2014, became Acting President. If he ran for office, he would never get more than 2 percent of the votes. He is a kind of a man who always knows where the wind is blowing. Temer is also known as a master of compromise able to form coalitions. Back in the 1990s his Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) cooperated with the Brazilian Social Democracy Party led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In 2003 PMDB formed a coalition with the Workers’ Party headed by Lula da Silva.

Temer formed a new government. One of the first steps was to reduce the number of ministries from 32 to 24. There are no women in the new cabinet. There was no such discrimination in the government of Dilma Rousseff. «Trust me», he said in his emotional inaugural speech at the Planalto presidential palace. «Trust the values of our people and our ability to recuperate the economy». «My first word for the people of Brazil is the word ‘confidence», he said vowing national salvation. «Confidence in the values that form the character of our people, the vitality of our democracy», he added, with an acknowledgement that «it is urgent we pacify the nation and unite Brazil. It is urgent to create a government of national salvation».

He spent most of his speech talking about the damaged Brazilian economy, vowing to renew trust in the country on the part of foreign investors and attract corporations that could provide jobs and take the burden off the government. He did not elaborate on foreign policy issues. He is expected to be a pro-US leader.

Temer is the son of Maronite Lebanese immigrants. He is a lawyer, who chairs the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party the largest party in Brazil. In the 1980s he served as State prosecutor and twice as State Secretary for Public Security, in both capacities working in São Paulo. That’s when he established close ties with the US embassy.

He took the office of Vice President after standing as the running mate of the Workers' Party candidate Dilma Rousseff in the 2010 election. Actually, he was a US Trojan horse in the administration. His party left the government coalition after the Petrobras scandal broke out.

It should be added that he barely avoided an investigation over testimony implicating him in the Petrobras graft scandal.

The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff paved the way for neo-liberal reforms focused on privatization of state companies. The United States will take an active part in the process. The people who have come to power in Brazil are involved in corruption scandals, but this time their integrity is not questioned by the US.