Brazilian ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hinted strongly at seeking a return to power Monday in a fiery speech that dismissed corruption charges against him as persecution.

Lula, who was massively popular when he left office in 2010 and remains a giant of the Latin American left, was campaigning in western Rio de Janeiro on behalf of Jandira Feghali, a communist candidate running for mayor in local elections next Sunday.

Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday slammed as a "farce" his pending prosecution for allegedly masterminding the large-scale plundering of the state oil giant Petrobras.

"I am sad because I just learned (Judge Sergio) Moro accepted the charge lodged, even though it is all a farce, a huge lie," the ex-president said from Brazil by videoconference to New York, where his lawyers held a solidarity event for him.

Eduardo Cunha, Brazil's scandal-plagued former congressional speaker who spearheaded the drive to remove president Dilma Rousseff from office, could be stripped of his seat Monday if his peers vote him out.

Cunha, who is often compared to the dark, manipulative hero Frank Underwood of the hit Netflix series "House of Cards," used his position as speaker of the lower house to put Rousseff on an unstoppable path to impeachment.

Michel Temer expects to become Brazil's full president if his rival Dilma Rousseff gets impeached this week. If he trips up, the country will fall deeper into crisis, analysts warn.

Here are some of the economic, political, social and legal challenges facing him if he secures the job of dragging Latin America's biggest economy out of recession.

Brazil's Supreme Court chief justice has rejected a request from suspended president Dilma Rousseff to annul the session at which senators voted to open an impeachment trial against her.

Rousseff's lawyers had argued that some of the procedures used at the session, held August 10, violated her rights.

Brazil's suspended president Dilma Rousseff enters her final battle to win back power on Thursday, when senators open an impeachment trial expected to remove her from office for good.

That would formally end 13 years of leftist rule in Latin America's biggest economy.

At the eastern edge of the rural Bekaa Valley, where the rocky hillsides are stippled with cherry trees, a generations-old kinship with Brazil has imbued two Lebanese villages with a Latino spirit.

Lusi and Sultan Yaacoub are home to more than one thousand Brazilian nationals, many of whom speak Portuguese as fluently as they do Arabic.

Brazil's interim government was rocked Monday by a new corruption scandal in which a key minister allegedly discusses using impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff to halt a massive probe into embezzlement.

Folha newspaper published what it said were excerpts of secretly taped conversations in March between Planning Minister Romero Juca and Sergio Machado, an ex-president of Transpetro oil company, both of whom have been caught up in the corruption probe.

After 13 years in power, the Workers' Party has been forced out by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff's suspension and impeachment trial, its emblematic red star tarnished by corruption and economic collapse.

Can it battle back?

Brazil entered a new era Thursday as interim president Michel Temer took power from suspended leader Dilma Rousseff, installing a business-friendly government that ends 13 years of leftist rule in Latin America's biggest nation.

The center-right former vice president wasted no time in putting his stamp on Brazil, naming a new government he said would restore "credibility" after months of economic and political turmoil.