Brazilians Rally for President’s Impeachment

Chanting “Leave now!” and “To Prison!” more than 500,000 demonstrators braved heavy rain to converge on the center of Brazil’s largest city Friday, rallying for the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello.

The protest, the largest since a congressional committee implicated Collor in a $330-million influence-peddling scandal in late August, increases the likelihood that the 43-year-old president will be impeached in the coming weeks.

In the midst of the president’s political travail, a family crisis was suddenly added to Collor’s problems. His mother, Leda Collor de Mello, 76, the family matriarch and head of its media business, suffered a heart attack late Thursday and is in critical but stable condition in a Rio de Janeiro hospital.

According to sources close to the family, she suffered what one described as “multiple attacks” soon after reading in a newspaper that her son, Pedro, had made new allegations of corruption against his older brother, the president. Pedro touched off the current national scandal in May by accusing the president of benefiting from corruption.

A close friend of Collor’s mother and sister said that the crisis “is killing their mother.”

Family sources and Brazilian political analysts believe that Leda Collor’s illness could give the president a face-saving way out of the impeachment crisis by enabling him to resign without admitting defeat at the hands of his political enemies.

In another development, federal police reported Friday that an Argentine drug trafficker has said that he smuggled cocaine for Paulo Cesar Farias, Collor’s 1989 campaign treasurer and the accused mastermind of an influence-peddling scheme that forms the basis of the drive to impeach the president. Farias swiftly denied any connection with drug trafficking.

A special congressional committee charged with investigating corruption said in its final report last month that Farias organized a racket for selling nonexistent “services” to companies hoping to do business with the government and that he skimmed money from contracts. The report accused Farias of paying at least $6.5 million into bank accounts used to pay personal expenses of Collor and his relatives.

The committee said that evidence and testimony “lead to the conviction that the illicit acts practiced by . . . Farias were well known to the president.” That accusation is the foundation of the impeachment process.

At Friday’s rally here, Dr. Euripides de Cavalhos, president of the National Physicians Assn. and a declared foe of Collor, drew loud cheers from the demonstrators when he declared, “The only thing sicker than the mother of the president is the presidency.”

In addition to protesting Collor’s involvement in the corruption scandal, the demonstrators attacked Collor’s free-market reforms.

Thousands of students and labor union activists, their faces painted with the green and gold national colors, cheered wildly and waved political party banners as speaker after speaker leveled verbal assaults at the 2 1/2-year-old Collor government’s anti-inflation and free-trade policies.

Calling for a national strike on the day Congress votes on impeachment, Roberto Requiao, governor of the state of Parana, told the crowd, “Say no to Collor, say no to neo-liberalism.”

Throughout the crisis Collor has maintained his innocence and accused the Brazilian left of using the scandal to undermine his economic reform agenda.

Despite a heavy focus on Collor’s economic program, the protest here drew backing from business groups and centrist political parties that have helped win approval for much of the president’s reform agenda. The co-sponsors of the event--the hard-left Workers’ Party mayor of Sao Paulo city, Luiza Erundina, and the centrist Democratic Movement Party governor of Sao Paulo state, Luiz Antonio Flury--have been frequent political and ideological opponents.

Still, the organizers’ hopes of 1 million demonstrators were hurt by the rain and the withdrawal last week of the backing of the powerful Sao Paulo State Federation of Industry, a management organization. Originally, the federation had asked its members to let workers off early to take part in the rally, but it changed its mind, federation sources say, when members realized that their support might lend backing to opponents of economic reform.

The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the country’s Congress, plans to vote on an impeachment motion against Collor before Oct. 1. If the motion passes by a two-thirds vote, Collor will be replaced by Vice President Itamar Franco and face trial in the Senate. Federal authorities are also considering the filing of criminal charges against the president.

Pro-impeachment forces consider street protests, such as Friday’s, crucial to their cause. Several Brazilian newspapers have accused Collor of trying to win over wavering deputies by making federal expenditures in their home states.

“Success (of the impeachment drive) depends on the degree of public indignation,” Sen. Mario Covas, a leading anti-Collor figure in Congress, said Friday. “Those voting on impeachment must know what the public will is.”