BRASÍLIA: Brazil's Senate was to vote Wednesday on stripping Dilma Rousseff of the presidency in a traumatic impeachment trial set to end 13 years of leftist rule over Latin America's biggest country.
Senators loyal to Brazil's first female president debated into the night Tuesday in a final attempt to halt the apparently unstoppable momentum toward her dismissal.
Despite the impassioned speeches, which followed 14 hours of testimony by 68-year-old Rousseff herself on Monday, her fate was apparently sealed.
Rousseff, from the leftist Workers' Party, is accused of taking illegal state loans to patch budget holes in 2014, masking the country's problems as it slid into its deepest recession in decades.
She told the Senate that she is innocent, saying the impeachment trial amounts to a right-wing coup d'etat.
However, huge street demonstrations over the last year have reflected nationwide anger at her management of a country suffering double-digit unemployment and inflation.
Two thirds of the Senate -- 54 of 81 senators -- must vote in favor of impeachment to convict her.
"The chances of impeachment not passing and the president being made to step down are virtually nil," political analyst Adriano Codato of Parana University said.
If Rousseff is forced from office, her former vice president turned bitter foe Michel Temer will be immediately sworn in as president until the next scheduled elections in late 2018.
The seventy-five-year-old took over in an interim role after Rousseff's initial suspension in May and at once named a new government with an agenda of shifting Brazil to the right.
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