The downfall of the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff follows not only an end to her own idealism but a refusal to listen to the advice of liberation theologians

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s deposed president, is not corrupt. She has never been accused of taking money for herself, her family or friends, unlike many of the senators who voted to remove her from office. That is one of the few things on which all observers agree. Most also agree that the financial decisions on which her impeachment was based were technicalities, practised by governments in the past without the same consequences. In other words, Rousseff’s impeachment was political.

It is a sorry end to a career that began when she joined guerrilla groups fighting Brazil’s military dictatorship, included being imprisoned and tortured, changing parties from Democratic Labour to the Workers’ Party (PT), becoming first a minister and then Brazil’s first woman president.