Brazil’s new acting President, Michel Temer, second from left, is pushing the government to the right as a corruption scandal continues to convulse the country. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDRESSA ANHOLETE / AFP / GETTY

The litany of ironies that has accrued from the May 12th congressional vote that suspended Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff—on the grounds that she faked government budget figures and wrongly transferred state money, to win reëlection, in 2014—is growing rapidly. The man who is now the acting President, Michel Temer, moved with alacrity to transmogrify Brazil’s left-of-center government into an unabashedly right-wing one. In doing so, he has made a series of appalling choices.

In a country where half of the population is female and a similar percentage has African or indigenous ancestry, Temer named an all-white, all-male Cabinet. He got rid of the Ministry of Women, Racial Equality, and Human Rights, ordering it to be subsumed into the Ministry of Justice—which he promptly handed over to Alexandre de Moraes, a former security official from São Paulo who is accused of deploying death squads to fight crime in that city. (His former office has denied the accusations.) This came at the same time as news of a horrifying case in which a sixteen-year-old girl in Rio de Janeiro was gang-raped by as many as thirty-three men, some of whom filmed their abuse and posted it to social media. Under pressure from the public, Temer declared his intention to form a special task force to investigate crime against women.

Brazil’s Ministry of Culture was also slated for elimination by Temer, but, after a week of nationwide protests and building occupations by musicians, artists, and other activists, he reversed that decision.

Temer’s choice for agriculture minister, meanwhile, was a portly billionaire senator named Blairo Maggi, who cast the deciding vote in the Senate to unseat Rousseff. Maggi, the former governor of the state of Mato Grosso, made his fortune by cutting down millions of acres of Amazonian wilderness. In a 2007 piece for National Geographic, the journalist Scott Wallace wrote, “Maggi is ‘O Rei da Soja, King of Soy, the world’s largest single producer. Maggi acquired a less flattering honorific when Greenpeace gave him its Golden Chain Saw award in 2005.” For a number of years while he was governor, Mato Grosso led Brazil in deforestation. In 2010, Maggi was elected to the Senate, and, with the support of the powerful bancada ruralista, Brazil’s agribusiness lobby, he became the head of the environmental committee, where he helped push through a set of environmental regulations known as the Forest Code. Among other things, the Forest Code gave amnesty to landowners who had previously engaged in illegal wilderness clearances. Alex Cuadros, in his forthcoming book, “Brazillionaires,” about Brazil’s nouveaux super-rich, writes of the law, “Even as it ordered landowners to preserve eighty percent of their rain forest properties, it freed them from the obligation to restore areas they’d illegally cut down. Many interpreted this as a green light to slash and burn again, since another amnesty might come at a later date, absolving them of any fresh violations.” In an interview with Cuadros, Maggi said, “The people who criticize me are antidevelopment.”

Temer also appointed several officials who are under investigation for corruption, including some who have been implicated in the far-ranging so-called Car Wash scandal, involving the state-owned oil company Petrobras, in which dozens of government officials and legislators are suspected of taking bribes and kickbacks. In the latest twist, this week, in a newly leaked recording, Brazil’s brand-new transparency minister, Fabiano Silveira—in other words, its anti-corruption czar—can be overheard discussing with other politicians ways to avoid prosecution for Car Wash. Silveira said he was only speaking in a “generic” sense. He has since resigned. (I wrote about the first resignation, of Temer's planning minister, Romero Jucá, last week, after he was also recorded in conversation with one of the implicated senators, and heard to be talking about a "pact" that he suggests could halt the Car Wash investigation.)

Understandably, many Brazilians are angry and confused about what is happening to their country. Thirty-one years after the restoration of democracy following two decades of military dictatorship, Brazil is teetering on the brink of disaster. To reëstablish order, as well as the public’s trust, Brazil’s judicial investigation into official corruption should be expanded to include the evidence that has also emerged suggesting that Rousseff’s impeachment might have been engineered, in some measure, to stifle corruption investigations such as Car Wash. If any occupants of Brazil’s high public offices, past or present, are found guilty of these or other offenses, they should be charged and sentenced as ordinary citizens would be. That might sound obvious, but such prosecutions will not be possible unless Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate vote to repeal the laws of parliamentary immunity that currently protect their own members. For Brazilians to restore their democracy to full health, elected public office must no longer be allowed to be a sanctuary for scoundrels.