In her first year, Brazil President Dilma Rousseff cleans house

RIO DE JANEIRO — When Brazilian Labor Minister Carlos Lupi was scrambling to save his job after being accused of corruption last month, he was defiant at first, saying that “only a bullet” would force him from office.

Then he tried sweet-talking his way out of trouble, apologizing to Brazil’s irritated president, Dilma Rousseff, and assuring her in public comments, “I love you.”

(Nacho Doce/Retuers) - Demonstrators take part in a protest against corruption at the Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo on Nov. 15, 2011. Civil society groups organized the march through social networking sites to protest against what they say is corruption and the misuse of public money by ministries in Brazil.

But Rousseff, the country’s first female president and a no-nonsense technocrat who is about to complete her first year on the job, has shown little patience for any whiff of corruption in a cabinet that includes several holdovers from the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. So last week, Lupi became the sixth scandal-tainted minister to be ousted from Rousseff’s 38-member cabinet — the latest in a string of departures that she has signaled may continue.

“I am not an adolescent, nor a romantic,” she said after Lupi’s last-gasp effort to keep his job. “I analyze objectively.”

Analysts here say that the removal of ministers linked to kickbacks, bribe-taking, diversion of funds and influence peddling has simultaneously underscored Rousseff’s political independence and highlighted the scope of the rot in the capital, Brasilia, just as Brazil’s global visibility and influence are expanding. Corruption is a top public issue, polls show, but many Brazilians question whether Rousseff can succeed in dismantling a system rooted in patronage and backroom deals.

“There is something new that’s happening now,” said Sylvio Costa, director of Congress in Focus, an anti-corruption group in Brasilia. “I think she’s trying to avoid practices that other presidents were not so bothered to accept. But this is a hard and long process.”

Under Brazil’s proportional representation system, political parties of all stripes abound, with 23 of them now operating in the 513-member lower house of congress. To get initiatives approved, presidents must thus form broad coalitions among parties that frequently lack ideology but are intent on controlling as many ministries as they can, said David Fleischer, a Brasilia-based political scientist.

The free-for-all system, enshrined in the 1988 constitution, lends itself to corruption, because those ministries come with thousands of jobs, dispersed nationwide, and big budgets, analysts say.

“It’s something that’s frightening,” Costa said. “I think the core of the problem is a culture of people getting posts in the state and using their power to make private profits illegally, and I think this has a long tradition in Brazil.”

A problem in one presidency after another, the pervasive corruption exploded in scandal in the middle of Lula’s eight-year term when reports emerged that lawmakers had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the president’s Workers’ Party to keep the ruling coalition together. Known as the “monthly payoff,” the practice led to the departure of Lula’s top confidants and indirectly cleared the path to power for a quiet but strong-willed policy wonk, Rousseff.