Yesterday Manchester University’s Global Development Institute hosted a meeting in which staff and postgraduate students had an opportunity to meet and talk with former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Elected for a second term in 2014, and the first woman to become president of her country, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party was removed from office by a “constitutional” coup d’état in 2016. The charges of administrative impropriety used to justify her ouster were, in fact, unfounded, yet in practice they proved virtually irrelevant to the grounds on which members of the congress declared their support for votes in favour of the president’s impeachment.  It was a political lynching by politicians willing to do the bidding of an economic elite determined to make working people pay for the economic downturn provoked by reduced Chinese demand for export commodities.

In the light of the abysmal record in office of her now deeply…