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The great insurgencies that brought back democracy to many countries in Latin America after decades of military dictatorship are now targets of growing assaults by police, military and private militias. From Honduras to Argentina, from Brazil to Colombia, labor, indigenous and black social movements are embattled. The governments’ criminalization of social movements is “legitimizing” death squads, murders and in some cases massacres.

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Well aware that the votes were most likely not going her way, she stoically delivered a defense aimed more at the history books and the broader public than at the senators. She recalled her previous appearance at a show trial during the dictatorship, and the torture she endured as a result. She discussed the Workers’ Party project and policies. To the irritation of her accusers, she repeatedly referred to the proceedings as a “coup” and an affront to the Brazilian people

The grounds for it are baseless, and many of the legislators pushing it are themselves under indictment for serious crimes.

 Identifying the myriad problems is easy. More difficult—and more important—is to resist seeing them as “general chaos.” We need to avoid the facile explanation provided to me by Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes: “These things happen when you host an Olympics in the developing world.” Instead, we need to understand that Rio’s “state of public calamity” is an extreme version of what happens when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) comes a-calling.

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More than thirty years have passed since the end of the dictatorship but Brazil's democracy is again being challenged.

Romero Jucá, recently appointed planning minister, was recorded saying: `We have to stop this shit. We have to change the government to be able to stop this bleeding - the corruption investigation. The motives and nature of the plot to remove Rousseff are apparent in the transcript of the phone conversation between Jucá - a ally of new president Michel Temer - and Sérgio Machado, former senator who until recently was president of the state oil company, Transpetro.

Corruption is not the cause of the effort to oust Brazil’s twice-elected President, Dilma Rousseff, merely the pretext. Brazil’s elite and their media organs have repeatedly failed to defeat Rousseff and her Workers' Party at the ballot box. So the plutocrats are now attempting, through a bizarre mélange of evangelical extremists, far-right supporters of a return to military rule, and non-ideological backroom operatives, to simply remove her from office.

The judicial coup against President Dilma Rousseff is the culmination of the deepest political crisis in Brazil for 50 years. Dilma's second victory sparked a heated panic among the neoliberal and U.S.-aligned opposition. The fourth consecutive election of a President affiliated to the centre-left PT (Workers' Party) was bad news for the opposition, because it suggested that PT founder Lu¡s In cio Lula da Silva could return in 2018.