At the request of senator Arthur VirgÀlio, the leader of the opposition party PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy) the Brazilian senate is summoning a psychic service to help elucidate what caused the massive blackout last week, which left 18 of Brazil's 26 states in the dark.
The esoteric foundation Cacique Cobra Coral (Coral Snake Chief), which has a department in charge of forecasting and changing the weather has been called to assist. Twenty people, most of them experts in energy and weather are also being summoned by the senate.
Virgílio says he is not happy that no explanation has been found until now for the disaster, more than a week after the power outage that affected over 60 million people in Brazil and Paraguay.
"Some say that it was a lightning, others that it was a thunderstorm, no one knows. And since no one knows let's call the foundation to have the opinion of a psychic, since science and the public administration are not able to answer our doubts."
While allies of the Lula administration criticized the move saying that the opposition "has lost its mind," Flexa Ribeiro, the PSDB's president of the Senate's Science and Technology Committee approved the request of his colleague to invite the Foundation whose psychic Adelaide Scritori receives the spirit of Chief Cobra Coral who once was Galileo Galilei and later Abraham Lincoln.
The opposition has adopted a strategy of exposing the government's maneuvers to prevent chief of staff Dilma Rousseff – the candidate hand-picked by Lula to succeed him in the presidency – from giving her testimony on the causes of the blackout in the senate floor.
Even senators allied to the government seem annoyed over the political dispute surrounding the blackout. For them, this infighting is only helping to make the senate even less popular.
"I don't think my time is well spent when doing this kind of stuff. I don't understand what's behind this strategy of doing nothing," commented Wellington Salgado from the PMDB.
Another PMDB senator, Valdir Raupp, criticized his colleagues: "This dispute is becoming a joke. The senate contributes to the erosion of its public image when it lends itself to this kind of thing."
PSDB leader Virgílio says that Dilma Rousseff was the one who worked out the current regulations for the energy sector and, because of this, she has to explain in the Senate how the system works.
