Brazil’s bought votes and presidential perils
JUST another of those routine scandals which, like exotic butterflies, from time to time dart colourfully across Brazil's public life for a few days, only to die in swift oblivion? It might have seemed so when last week Folha de Sao Paulo, a daily paper in that city, published a story based on tape-recordings in which two federal congressmen from Acre, in Brazil's Amazon region, boasted of receiving cash for their votes. To President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's cost, it was more than that.
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