Impeachment is an English word, yet it now rings across the vastness of Brazil.  It is chanted in the massive street demonstrations in the country's cities and intoned in the Congresso Nacional (Brazil's parliament), where the lower house voted to impeach Dilma Rousseff, the nation's first female president.

Impeachment entered the Portuguese-speaking country's political lexicon as a result of the heavy northern influence in matters of democracy.  Brazil's state-based federal presidential system was copied from America's.  The constitution of what is now called the Old Republic (1889-1930) was patterned on the United States constitution. 

Since then, Brazil has had a rough ride to democracy, most notably the heavy-handed military regime that lasted from 1964 to 1984.  The first president elected by popular vote following army rule, Fernando Collor de Mello, was impeached in 1992.  For Brazil, which has long suffered from high levels of inequality and corruption, impeachment was a vast improvement from the golpes de estado (coups) that were an integral part of Latin America's politics until the 1980s, when democratization began to take hold across the continent.

So it was a great step forward for Brazilian democracy when the country became one of the founding members along with the United States of The Open Government Partnership.  The Partnership is an initiative of the United Nations that aims "to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance."

At the first annual summit of The Open Government Partnership, which took place in Brasilia in 2012, then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton lavishly praised her co-chairperson, President Dilma Rousseff:

There is no better partner to have started this effort and to be leading it than Brazil, and in particular, President Rousseff. Her commitment to openness, transparency, her fight against corruption is setting a global standard.

Hillary, who attended Rousseff's first inauguration in 2011, admires the Brazilian economist, who in her twenties was imprisoned and tortured by the military regime for her activities in Marxist urban guerilla groups.  The tough-minded Dilma served as chief of staff for her wildly popular predecessor, Lula da Silva, before seeking her first elected office with his backing.

Now a year and a half into her second term as president, Dilma's case is on its way to the Brazilian Senate where, as in the US model, she will be tried for undermining the country's financial well-being by fudging the national budget.  Ironically, Hillary is seeking the presidency while under investigation for risking national security by using a personal server to convey classified information.

Neither woman denies the facts; both claim that while their actions were in bad judgement, they were not illegal.  Both Rousseff and Clinton point to the political motivations behind the proposed criminalization of their acts.  Meanwhile, deeper accusations of corruption lurk over both women. In Rousseff's case, her government is deeply mired in a scheme to siphon off billions from Petrobras, Brazil's oil conglomerate.  While there is no evidence of wrongdoing on her part, she was chairwoman of the company's board of directors when the scandal occurred. Clinton is being investigated for "the possible 'intersection' of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business which may have violated public corruption laws."

Dilma Rouseff and Hillary Clinton are the same age (68) and share a similar leftist ideology.  A comparison of their alleged misconduct and their pretexts can tell us a lot about how our potential first female president's legal baggage and personal corruption could damage the United States.

Alleged misconduct

Rousseff is accused of "pedaladas fiscais," creative accounting techniques, which hid some 26 billion dollars of debt incurred by her government's social programs.  Cooking the books may have allowed her to be re-elected in 2014 by a slight margin, but it has also contributed to the reduction of the country's credit rating to near junk levels.  Brazil is mired in its worst recession since the 1930s.

From 2009 until 2013, then-secretary of state Clinton operated a private basement server in her New York home, which had been in use by her husband's Clinton Foundation, to conduct classified State Department business.  She communicated on her personal BlackBerry through a private email domain set up on the server by a staffer.  Although no security breaches have yet been reported, Jason R. Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration told the New York times, "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario – short of nuclear winter – where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business."

They should have known better:

"Dilma was alerted in 2013 that the 'pedaladas' were illegal and could lead to the downgrading of Brazil's investment grade rating. … [Y]et the President took no action." according to Ives Gandra Martins, a leading jurist interviewed by Brazils' Globo network (author's translation).  He declared her directly responsible for violating Brazil's fiscal responsibility law.

According to the Washington Post, "Clinton … took obvious security risks in using the basement server, while her aides and senior officials neglected repeated warnings about the security of the BlackBerry."

Their excuses: everybody does it

Rousseff claimed that her accounting techniques have been employed by previous governments at both the state and national levels.  "The same practices that today are called pedaladas were done by all governments prior to me."

"It wasn't the best choice," Clinton said during the March 9 Democratic debate in Miami.  "I made a mistake.  It was not prohibited.  It was not in any way disallowed.  And as I have said and as now has come out, my predecessors did the same thing and many other people in the government."

Blame the opposition

Rousseff reacted to the vote in Congress, saying: "In the past I confronted a dictatorship out of conviction.  Now I am also confronted by a coup ... under the guise of democracy" (author's   translation).  In fairness to Dilma, it is true that many of those involved in the impeachment process are directly implicated in crimes more serious than hers.  Corruption in Brazil is a matter of degree.  The New York Times reports:

Altogether, 60 percent of the 594 members of Brazil's Congress face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide, according to Transparency Brazil, a corruption-monitoring group. 

Clinton compared the email investigation to the alleged scandals during her husband's presidency:

During the '90s there were a bunch of them. … [A]ll of them turned out to be not true. … I can't predict to you what the Republicans will come up with, what kind of … charges or claims they might make.

Dilma is being impeached for "crimes of responsibility," a somewhat vague clause in the Brazilian constitution akin to the equally open to interpretation "high crimes and misdemeanors" of the U.S. Constitution.  Hillary's emails may well constitute a "high crime," yet it is doubtful that she could be impeached as president for acts committed in a previous position.

What is clear is that both women have failed to live up to the lofty ideals expressed in Brasilia.  "The cure for corruption is openness," Hillary said in her remarks at the Open Government Partnership plenum with Dilma by her side.

Brazil's fragile democracy is at a crossroads.  The rot of corruption has become endemic.  While the United States' relations with the southern colossus have sometimes been rocky, we have served as Brazil's role model for its democratic aspirations.  Instead of providing a hemispheric ideal, a Clinton government will mirror the corruption and political dysfunctionality of many of our Latin American neighbors.

The author is a "self-made multiculturalist" who has lived and worked in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.  He recently began blogging at The Multicultural Conservative: Conservative by Nature – Multicultural by Choice.