Brazilian Congress removes congresswoman accused of killing husband

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The plenary of Brazil’s lower house decided on Wednesday to dismiss the deputy and evangelical pastor Flordelis dos Santos de Souza, accused of having her husband killed in complicity with some of her children.

The removal of the parliamentarian was approved with 437 votes in favor and just seven against, just over two years after the murder of Anderson do Carmo, her husband and also a pastor, victim of 30 bullets at the door of the house where they both lived in Rio de Janeiro in the early morning of June 16, 2019.

The investigations led the Police to accuse Flordelis of the murder, which would have been due to financial disputes between the two and in whose planning would have participated seven of the 55 children (51 of them adopted) that the pastor, founder of the Evangelical Community City of Fire, has.

According to witnesses who testified in the investigation, this church was the center of blood rituals and orgies. The deputy herself participated together with her faithful and some members of her family.

Flordelis, 60, had adopted Anderson do Carmo, 18 years younger when he was a teenager. Still, they ended up getting married in 1994, they shaped a career that projected her first as a gospel singer and then as a pastor.

She then decided to try her luck in politics. In 2018 was elected federal deputy for the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which supported the candidacy of the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, who had dozens of evangelical pastors among his base.

Flordelis was not arrested until now because she was protected by parliamentary privileges. Still, she is charged with aggravated homicide, criminal association, ideological and documentary falsehood, as well as attempted murder, since, according to the police, she had tried to poison her husband before the murder.

The loss of her seat may now open the doors of jail for a crime that, according to her claims since the death of her husband, was committed by two men who followed them on a motorcycle and shot at her husband when they arrived at their residence.

In her last pronouncement in Congress, when defending herself against the accusations, Flordelis asked this Wednesday that she be judged by the people.

“Here the people brought me. I know I am innocent, and I will prove it. But let me be judged by the people and, if it were the case, removed from this place by the people,” she declared shortly before the vote that removed her from her seat.