Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has officially been impeached

Impact

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's first female president, has officially been impeached after a 61 to 20 Senate vote.

The impeachment process has been ongoing since April 17, when the country's lower chamber of Congress passed a motion for the impeachment.  

Rousseff was convicted of what the BBC describes as "creative accounting" — manipulating government accounts to make the country's financial situation seem more favorable, while simultaneously dispelling mounting economic anxieties. 

While the leftist Brazilian Workers' Party, of which Rousseff is a member, has been mired in corruption scandals in the past, supporters of the president were skeptical about whether or not the financial deception was an impeachable offense.

Rousseff herself described the movement to oust her from office as a coup, according to the New York Times, claiming that fiscal fibs were common practice among her predecessors.

Andrew Burton/AP

"I am the victim of a process that is rooted in injustice, and legal and political fraud," she said in April after the initial vote to begin impeachment.

Despite her insistence that she has done nothing illegal, Rousseff's detractors say that the impeachment symbolizes the death knell for the Marxist-born Workers' Party, which began as a movement to give voice to the underclass but ultimately became embroiled in numerous corruption scandals.

One such scandal was the skimming of billions of dollars from Brazil's national oil company, Petróleo Brasileiro, also known as Petrobras, which elected officials then used to line their own pockets.

Michel Temer — who previously served as Rousseff's vice president and has been embroiled in corruption scandals of his own — will now assume the presidency for the remainder of the current term, until a new election is held in 2018.