Brazil’s Cabinet
So Dilma Rousseff was finally evicted from the Brazilian presidency by her right-wing opponents. What does the new cabinet look like? Oh dear.
Brazil’s interim President Michel Temer has pledged to build a “bridge to the future,” but the 75-year old lawyer has shocked much of the country by assembling a Cabinet that appears to have emerged from a previous century.
Of the 22 members of his new conservative Cabinet, 22 are white men. In a country of more than 200 million people, more than half of Brazilians identify as black or dark-skinned, and over half are women. This is the first executive government since the fall of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1980s to not have a woman in the Cabinet.
For whatever Dilma did, her opponents are old-school hard rightists: This should be very worrying to those who do not want the oppression of the 1970s to return to South America.