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The Past Day in Brazil Has Been A Roller Coaster. Here’s Why.

By Zack Beauchamp

What’s happening in Brazil today signals a new era of political instability much like the old Brazil, examines AS/COA’s Brian Winter.

… Again, this all happened within a single day. Can you imagine being Brazilian and having to live with this kind of political inconsistency?

The upshot of all this is that it looks like Rousseff's impeachment is on track, with a vote scheduled for Wednesday. But the past 24 hours of drama highlights just how much chaos the impeachment proceedings have created for Brazil's political system….

… "This is another sign of this new era of political instability Brazil has entered," says Brian Winter, a Brazil expert at the Americas Society and Council on the Americas. "It's quite similar to the old Brazil, which was a place where you really didn't know from one year to the next what kind of government would be in power and what it would do."

It's easy to forget that prior to the past 20-odd years, Brazil had been plagued by political instability — suffering military coups in both 1930 and 1965. The latter military regime lasted until 1988, meaning that Brazil's experience as a stable democracy is only fairly recent….

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