Brazil

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:04 pm

Bolsonaro government reveals plan to develop the ‘Unproductive Amazon’
by Jan Rocha on 28 January 2019

Bolsonaro administration Chief of Strategic Affairs Maynard Santa Rosa last week announced new Brazilian mega-infrastructure projects that include a dam on the Trombetas River, a bridge over the Amazon River, and an extension of the BR-163 highway from the Amazon River through 300 miles of rainforest to the Surinam border.
Santa Rosa, a retired general, said that these Amazon biome infrastructure projects had as their purpose the integration of what he called an “unproductive, desertlike” region into “the national productive system.”
The Trombetas region contains 4 indigenous reserves, 8 quilombo communities and 5 conservation units.
In his radio announcement the official provided few details on the projects, saying nothing about costs, where the money to build would come from, what the socio-environmental impacts might be, or the timeline for the construction.

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Commodities on the move on the completed southern section of the BR-163 highway. A planned extension of the BR-163 could result in major new deforestation along a 300-mile corridor stretching northward from the Amazon River to the Surinam border. Image by Roosevelt Pinheiro courtesy of Agência Brasil.

With Brazil’s Bolsonaro administration not even a month old, the new president’s Chief of Strategic Affairs last week announced plans to build a bridge over the Amazon River in Pará state in order to begin developing what he called an “unproductive, desertlike” region ­– a reference to the Amazon rainforest.

Maynard Santa Rosa, a retired army general and one of seven military ministers in the new government, said the administration plans major construction projects centered on the Trombetas River, which flows into the Amazon from the north, so as to integrate the region into the “national productive system.”

The projects to be built include a hydroelectric dam on the Trombetas River, a 1.5 kilometer (0.9 mile) bridge over the Amazon at the small town of Obidos, and an extension of the BR-163 highway from Santarem north to Brazil’s frontier with Surinam, a distance of roughly 480 kilometers (300 miles).

The general has named the project the Barao do Rio Branco Plan in honor of the 19th century diplomat who negotiated border treaties with Brazil’s neighbors. He made his announcement last week in an exclusive interview to the official radio program Voz do Brasil, thus avoiding any hard questions on the project’s feasibility or environmental impacts.

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An agent of IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, examines an Amazon tree cut illegally by land thieves near the existing portion of the BR-163. Image courtesy of IBAMA.

Santa Rosa justified the project, saying, “The Amazon has a population of 10 million people living below the poverty line. We can’t close our eyes to this anymore. We must integrate this unproductive latifundio [big unfarmed estate] into the national productive system and provide them with opportunities for jobs and income.”

He said the dam will boost Brazil’s energy capacity, providing electricity for aluminium processing and putting an end to frequent power outages in the cities of Manaus and Boa Vista. The BR-163 extension, if built, will allow for the trucking of grain from the Brazilian interior to the nation’s northern border. He said the project would also have other, unspecified, benefits.

The southern section of the BR-163 already exists, running hundreds of miles from Mato Grosso state north to the river port of Santarem in Pará state. The highway is currently used by agricultural producers to transport soy to the grain terminals at Mirituba and Santarem on the Tapajós River, where it is transferred to ships for the trip down the Amazon River for export to the European Union and other nations.

General Santa Rosa did not explain how extending the road hundreds of miles north through dense rainforest to an uninhabited border with Surinam would benefit soy exporters.

He also made no mention of the indigenous and quilombo populations (the descendants of runaway slaves) who live in the area that he described as desertica – a totally inaccurate word with which to describe the world’s largest tropical rainforest and its inhabitants.

For Lucia Andrade, executive coordinator of the Pro-Indian Commission, a Brazilian NGO defending indigenous rights, the project will put at risk “a region of the Amazon which is a mosaic of indigenous and quilombo areas and conservation units of great importance, not only to the population who live there but to the entire planet. To call it an unproductive latifundio is a big mistake.” The Trombetas region contains 4 indigenous reserves, 8 quilombo communities and 5 conservation units.

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Protected areas of northwest Pará state. The BR-163 extension from the Amazon River north to Surinam, though a precise route has not been announced, would diminish the integrity of several of these preserves, likely including the The Grão-Pará Ecological Station (Estação Ecológica Grão-Pará). Managed by Pará state, this preserve protects 42,458 square kilometers (16,393 square miles) of Amazon rainforest, and is one of the largest fully protected tropical forest conservation units in the world. This map does not include indigenous reserves or quilombo communities. Image by Aymath2 courtesy of Wikipedia.

She added that, at a time when the Environment Ministry has been deliberately weakened and responsibility for environmental licensing has been transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture, the Barão do Rio Branco project is extremely worrying.

General Santa Rosa’s announcement represents the latest in a long line of mega-infrastructure projects, proposed over the last 50 years by both military and civilian governments to “develop” the Amazon by means of roads, dams, industrial waterways, railways, and in this case, a major bridge. General Santa Rosa’s description of the project seems reminiscent of the position of Brazil’s military dictatorship which ended more than three decades ago, and treated the Amazon as an empty wilderness, while disregarding the cultures and livelihoods of indigenous and traditional populations who have lived there for centuries.

Brazil’s 1988 constitution rejected this outmoded mindset in which the Amazon rainforest – valued today for its human and natural diversity, and vital to maintaining global climate stability – is seen instead as a physical obstacle that must be overcome to benefit the advancement of Brazilian agribusiness and mining commodity development and export.

The Bolsonaro administration, by naming its project after the Barão do Rio Branco, seems intent on not only honouring a Brazilian diplomat, but also harking back to the 19th Century’s exploitative attempts to build railways to export Amazon rubber. In recent decades, the government emphasis has shifted to large-scale infrastructure schemes by which to export soy from the Brazilian interior via new roads like the BR-163 in the Tapajos basin, the BR-319 in the Maderira basin, the proposed Grainrail, and a number of Amazon industrial waterways.


Against the backdrop of Amazonia’s dark green rainforest, fires lit intentionally to clear land for agriculture along the existing section of the BR-163 in 2014. An extension north of the Amazon River would lead to new forest clearance, and if extensive, could threaten Brazil’s Paris Climate Agreement carbon reduction pledges. Photo and analysis courtesy of NASA.
General Santa Rosa did not mention Brazil’s legal requirement for environmental impact assessment studies or environmental licencing, but if the proposed dam involves the flooding of indigenous territories, authorization from the National Congress will be needed. Also, the indigenous communities must be consulted under national and international law, including the International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169), of which Brazil is a signatory.

Several ministries will be involved in the planning, and the project is expected to be officially announced within the next two months by means of a presidential executive order, which will prevent any initial congressional scrutiny. However, the president’s order must be approved by the legislature within 90 days, or it is nullified.

Yet the biggest obstacle to the Plan is likely to be financial, as the proposed projects would require billions of dollars in investments. In his interview, General Santa Rosa did not mention any cost figures, or where the money will come from at a time when Brazil is subject to strict austerity measures with a tight limit on government spending.

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/01/bolso ... ve-amazon/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 31, 2019 7:17 pm

Lula will only be released with popular mobilization

January 31, 2019

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Friar Chico visits Lula one day after Vavá's death, with 300 days in prison

Lula's brother, Friar Chico, visited the former president in prison one day after he was barred by justice from going to the funeral of Genival Inácio da Silva, his brother. Frei Chico said that after thousands of people had had the right to bury their next of kin, Lula was barred. "Lula is special. He is a hostage of the judiciary, defending the interests of our Brazilians. They must be defending interests of the economic powers that control that country. "

For Frei, they will only comply with the law when there are street demonstrations. "Let's believe in justice. But there will be no concrete changes and Lula will not be released without popular mobilization. Not with violence, mobilization. And repudiation that they are doing. "

Frei reported that Lula said that "The day they prove my crime, I stop talking." The story they told to condemn Lula, about an apartment in Guarujá, is an "achismo" where a lot of explanations are missing.

Frei explained that Lula was not going to submit to "the dead visit the living". He reported the family's sadness and recalled that Vavá was accused of being a lobbyist, had his house turned upside down, found nothing against him and never apologized. And it's not just the left that has to worry about it, but all the Democrats in Brazil, who are subject to this.

"Just tell me what's going on. The law is not being applied correctly to some people. "

Take full speaking

https://lula.com.br/lula-livre/

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 19, 2019 3:24 pm

Bolsonaro and the death of social housing

The Bolsonaro government freezes funding for self-managed social housing construction, destroys the Ministry of Cities and tries to declare the housing movements as terrorists

by Brian Mier*

Approximately 7 million Brazilian families live in substandard housing, in shacks or simple brick houses that are often built in areas at risk of flooding or landslides that are of low interest to the real estate industry. This is a historic problem that can be traced back to the massive waves of migration to Brazilian cities that happened, first, after slavery ended and states like São Paulo began actively importing immigrants for Italy and Japan to whiten the labor force and, later, from the massive exodus out of the northeast (1950s – 1980s) due to droughts and a process called grilhagem, in which big landowners fenced off and stole millions of hectares of land for monoculture production and cattle ranching, kicking off the small farmers who lived there. During this period, from 1950-1980, the populations of many cities in the more developed southeast quadrupled. Massive favelas of migrants sprung up and city governments have been struggling to provide services for these areas ever since.

During the 1970s and 1980s, liberation theology organizers from the Catholic Church began putting local neighborhood leaders in touch with each other to talk about common strategies to address the housing shortage and the “popular” (or poor peoples) urban social movements were born. These social movements worked together with unions, progressive political parties and academics and gathered over a million signatures on two petitions which resulted in Articles 182 and 183 of the Brazilian constitution. These two articles stipulate that dignified housing ownership is a constitutional right for all Brazilians and that the social function of property has to take precedent over the profit motive. By the 1990s, Social movements like the União Nacional por Moradia Popular (National Popular Housing Union/UNMP, the Movimento Nacional de Lula por Moradia (National Housing Movement Struggle/MNLM, and the Central de Movimentos Populars (Popular Movements Central/CMP), had hundreds of thousands of members in all 26 Brazilian states, and, acting with their academic, union and local NGO partners in the Fórum Nacional de Reforma Urbana (National Urban Reform Forum/FNRU), they pressured the government to pass the landmark 2001 Statute of the Cities, which created legal guidelines to guarantee that city governments respected their constitutional requirements for housing rights and issues such as public transportation and sanitation. Later, newer housing movements such as the Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Homeless Workers Movement/MTST) and the Movimento de Luta nos Bairros (Neighborhood Struggle Movement/MLB) became important regional actors, with MTST leader Guilherme Boulos winning 500,000 votes in the 2018 presidential elections.

One of the first things that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did upon taking the presidency in 2003 was to create the national Ministry of the Cities to oversee federal investment in urban areas. In one of the most innovative policy decisions in the history of urban planning, the Ministry was controlled by the people through the National Conference of the Cities system. Working on the city, state and regional levels, social movements, residents associations, unions and a guaranteed minority share of business leaders and Brazilian NGOs held regular community meetings and elected delegates. Ever two years, the Federal Government flew 5000 delegates to Brasilia to spend a week voting on legislation and funding for urban reform projects. There, they would elect 100 representatives to sit on the National Cities Council. City councilors were flown to Brasilia every three months to sit in meetings with the Ministry of Cities director and staff and approve or reject legislation and policy initiatives in one of the largest democracy-deepening exercises in the history of urban reform.

The first National Cities Minister was former Porto Alegre mayor Olivio Dutra, who was an internationally renowned figure in urban planning circles due the pioneering work on participatory budgeting done during his tenure as Mayor. His assistant, Erminia Maricatto, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary for the City of São Paulo under Mayor Luiza Erundina, was one of the most respected leftist urban planners in the country. Unfortunately, like so many other Ministries in Lula’s government, the Ministry of Cities fell victim to coalition politics in 2005. Dutra and Maricatto left and from that point forward the Ministry was controlled by conservative political party coalition partners who worked to undermine or bypass the power of the city councilors, although they were not fully successful.

At the 2007 National Cities Conference, President Lula signed a decree ratifying the Federal Social Interest Housing Act – historic proposal of the urban reform movement – and allocated around $1 billion USD for self-managed social movement housing construction. This policy later expanded and transformed into a sub program of the Minha Casa Minha Vida housing program and, over the next 10 years, hundreds of thousands of families benefited from self-managed housing projects that were implemented by the social movements in cooperation with Caixa federal mortgage bank and local construction companies.

Unlike the United States’ public housing program, which has no viable path to ownership and traps residents into the permanent underclass, Lula and the social movements’ program was developed to guarantee ownership and it prioritized single mothers.

During these construction projects, which usually took two to three years, social movement members who had family income levels under 1.5 times the minimum salary would volunteer one day a week, working to clear the land and maintain construction sites in good condition. In exchange for their labor, they would receive larger apartments than in traditional social housing programs, averaging around 542 meters, with subsidized financing which would enable them to gain full ownership after 10 years of relatively low monthly payments that usually averaged around $30 USD. The housing projects that resulted from these programs were cooperatively self-managed, with resident-owners meeting periodically vote on issues related to their upkeep and maintenance.

The program was not perfect. The bidding system was set up so that any community association could bid on a project, and there were limited cases of corruption with fly-by-night neighborhood organizations popping up that later turned out to be shell organizations for construction moguls (or in Rio de Janeiro, organized crime groups). Other criticisms included the fact that most of the housing projects were built on the urban periphery and failed to address the right for poor people to live in the city centers. Nevertheless, as a result of these programs, hundreds of thousands of poor Brazilians moved into the lower middle class through home ownership.

After the 2016 Coup, President Michel Temer canceled the National Cities Conference and gutted funding for Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades. In January, 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro disbanded the National Ministry of the Cities. Not only has his government frozen all new funding for social movement housing construction, but his allies introduced a bill in Congress that would categorize social movements as terrorist organizations.

I produced the following short news story for TeleSur English about one of the last social movement housing construction projects in Brazil. Located on the northwest side of São Paulo, with over 1000 housing units, it is the largest project ever funded by the Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades program. Authorized during the final days of Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, it was created in a way that funding was guaranteed regardless of regime change. It is scheduled to reach completion in the next few months but, as UNMP leader Donizete Fernandes says, it doesn’t look like anything else like this is going happen in Brazil for a long time.

* Brian Mier is a former member of the Fórum Nacional de Reforma Urbana directorate and 3-time delegate to the National Conference of the Cities.

http://www.brasilwire.com/bolsonaro-and ... l-housing/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 23, 2019 3:28 pm

PT moves to block support for Trump’s “humanitarianism”

As the Brazilian government subordinates itself to the US, Workers Party Congressmen move to block support for Trump’s mission in Venezuela.

On February 21, PT Congressmen Paulo Pimenta and Paulo Teixeira filed orders to summon Defense Minister General Fernando Azevedo e Silva and Foreign Affairs Minister Ernesto Araújo on February 21st, to explain Brazilian government support for The US so-called “humanitarian” mission to Venezuela to Congress, and to trigger a Congressional vote on the matter as quickly as possible.

In order, Pimenta and Teixeira say that Brazilian Constitution has clear stipulations to respect the self-determination of peoples, non-interference, the defense of peace and peaceful conflict resolution. It is not in Brazil’s best interests,” the say, to participate in a US-sponsored action in Venezuelan territory.

“Brazil’s participation in any bellicose and dangerous plan coordinated by the United States to destabilize Venezuela’s elected government is a strong indicator of interventionist goals that undermine both South American regional integration and peace on the continent,” Said Pimenta, who also complained of an announcement made on 9 February by Admiral Craig Faller, chief of the Southern Command, during a presentation made to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Faller announced the appointment of Brigadier General Alcides Valeriano de Faria Junior to represent Brazil as Deputy Commander for Interoperability of the US armed forces’ Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) this year.

SOUTHCOM is made up of US Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard troops and has the task of defending US security policy in Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

For Congressman Pimenta, by engaging in US-designed and US-led military operations, Brazil will voluntarily place itself in a position of military subordination to US actions in South America. He says that Trump’s interventionist action in Venezuela is a “direct affront to our country’s interests in the region, which would be much better served with a strategy of peaceful negotiation and respect for Venezuelan national sovereignty.”

In their orders summoning the Ministers, the Congressmen note that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves – 298.3 billion barrels – 17.5% of the world’s reserves. During the Hugo Chávez administration Venezuela began to refocus its foreign policy and reduce its economic dependence on the US, with significant investment in regional integration and South-South cooperation, contrary to Washington’s interests. Furthermore, they say that it was not a coincidence that the fourth US fleet – the Southcom naval force – was reestablished in 2008, 58 years after it was deactivated, coincidentally shortly after Brazil announced the discovery of the gigantic pre-salt offshore oil reserves.

In the order, Pimenta and Teixeira say that the Brazilian Congress and Brazilian society need to know the extent of any military cooperation with the US that has been negotiated by the right wing extremist government of Jair Bolsonaro.

http://www.brasilwire.com/pt-moves-to-b ... tarianism/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 25, 2019 6:54 pm

Coalition collapse: Bolsonaro allies reject Venezuelan “adventurism”
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Generals Santa Cruz and Augusto Heleno warn US is trying to use Brazil as bait to trigger conflict in Venezuela and serve as a buffer during a military intervention.

By Brian Mier

After pretending that the relatively unknown opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido was the legitimate president of Venezuela failed, the Trump administration engaged in a second coup attempt in Venezuela on Saturday, February 23rd. After a week of saber rattling and threats, with US troops and a bitter, scowling Mike Pence nearing the Colombian border, Venezuelan hired guns lit their own aid trucks on fire and blamed the Maduro government, in a massive media PR stunt, with papers like the Guardian and WAPO lying to their readers about nearly everything, from the size of Richard Branson’s bogus coup-aid concert, to the origins of the attacks on US food trucks. In what appears to be an intelligence gaffe reminiscent of the Iraqi war days, the US seems to have overestimated the level of support for Guaido among both civilians and the military. The anticipated outpouring of popular support to facilitate the entrance of Trump’s energy biscuits to the nation never materialized. In the aftermath, a flummoxed looking Guiado appeared on Anglo TV begging the Americans to bomb him and his people. Meanwhile, there were rumblings on the border with Brazil.

An old friend, a pro-cameraman working in the uberized TV economy as a freelancer for a media company owned by an oil billionaire, was up on Brazil border filming a half dozen angry looking Venezuelans throwing rocks at the border guards. As he posted photos and commented about them in the social media, the Brazilian aid caravan arrived on the scene, consisting of two flat bed pickups with a few hundred kilos of powdered milk. Too small to light on fire, the confused mob continued to throw rocks. I asked my friend if he thought this was all a PR stunt. “It is definitely a PR stunt, but people are also going hungry in Venezuela,” he answered. In country where millions of people have descended into hunger since the 2016 coup, the best “humanitarian” gesture that President Bolsonaro could come up with was 2 pickup trucks. It did not appear to be a very wholehearted attempt to give the support that he had pledged to John Bolton, after saluting him at a shitty breakfast/photo op in late 2018. Hearing about the shipment, Nicolas Maduro immediately offered to pay for it. Why couldn’t Bolsonaro muster at least one semi-truck to provide a decent photo op for Trump’s media allies? What was really going on?

According to Folha de São Paulo, as Trump’s ultimatum approached, Bolsonaro’s governing consensus broke. House leader Rodrigo Maia, Senate leader Davi Alcolumbre, Supreme Court Minister Dias Toffoli, cabinet ministers and a junta of military generals met with the President to deliberate whether the Brazilian government should support US attempt to depose Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Despite Bolsonaro‘s promise to not allow US troops to enter Venezuela from the Brazilian border, they were unable to establish consensus on support for Trump’s publicity stunt, with Rodrigo Maia siding with the Generals opposing the idea.

Without totally ruling out a future intervention, Generals Santos Cruz and Augusto Heleno warned that the US government was trying to use the Brazilian military as bait to trigger armed conflict, and serve as a buffer between US and Venezuelan troops. Bolsonaro’s civilian ministers of Foreign Relations and Defense, along with Senate President Davi Alcolumbre supported engaging in the “humanitarian” exercise. The results of the statement were a typical Brazilian compromise: two pickup trucks full of powdered milk on the border and a handful of people throwing stones for the photographers.

Then, arriving in a meeting of Mike Pence’s Lima Group on February 25th, Brazilian Vice President, General Hamilton Mourão announced that Brazil’s military is not going to intervene in Venezuela. “We believe in diplomatic and economic pressure as the best way to reach a solution,” he said, “without adventurism.”

Brazil has not engaged in a war against any of its South American neighbors in 149 years. As the generals break from Bolsnoaro on the issue of Venezuela, many are beginning to ask who is really running Brazil?

http://www.brasilwire.com/coalition-col ... venturism/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 28, 2019 2:48 pm

Meltdown: Bolsonaro breaks public disapproval record
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As approval rating falls to 38.9%, Bolsonaro sets record for least popular presidential start of the 21st Century. The poll, by CNT/MDA, began measuring presidential popularity at the two-month mark in 1998.

by Brian Mier

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January, 2003, in the midst of a currency collapse and one of Brazil’s worst economic crises in history. Two months in, the CNT/MDA poll measured his approval rating at 56%. Two months into her second mandate, as the PSDB and hostile media oligarchies did everything they could to sabotage her government, Dilma Rousseff was evaluated as good or excellent by 49% of the electorate. After two months of public gaffe’s, ham-fisted policy moves and corruption scandals reaching the highest level of his disintegrating coalition, Bolsonaro has broken the rejection record in the CNT/MDA poll, which began evaluating public opinion of new presidential mandates in 1998. His approval rating of 38.9% represents the lowest level ever measured for incoming presidents in the poll’s history. Why has this happened? The following is a partial list of events that have had an effect on the right-wing extremist‘s popularity levels:

1) Shortly after Jair Bolsonaro won the election last year, his son Flavio was accused of using ghost employees to kick salaries back to him through multiple, small bank deposits. Furthermore, it was revealed that both the mother and the wife of the leader of the Escritorio de Crime militia, under investigation for the assassination of city councilwoman Marielle Franco, worked for years in his state congressional cabinet.

2) Justice Minister Sergio Moro, who promised the Brazilian public that he would never get into politics while he was removing Lula from the 2018 presidential elections to guarantee electoral victory for his new boss, has just introduced an anti-crime bill which will allow police officers to legally kill people if they feel “afraid”. This proposal immediately triggered a complaint to the Organization of American States by a group of 37 Afro-Brazilian rights organizations and social movements, who are worried that Brazilian police, who executed over 5000, primarily black youth in 2017, will now feel like they have a license to kill. Moro has also moved to protect crooked politicians who receive illegal campaign donations. After declaring that illegal campaign contributions were “worse than corruption” while persecuting the PT party, he now says that he accepts Bolsonaro’s chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni’s apology for receiving illegal campaign funds from JBS meat packing company, and has removed illegal campaign contributions as a punishable offense from his new anti-crime bill, protecting his employer and his family.

3) Two of Bolsonaro’s cabinet ministers have been discovered lying about their academic credentials. Environmental Minister Ricardo Salles, who was recently convicted of committing fraud while serving as São Paulo State Environmental Minister, was outed by the Intercept for lying about having a Masters Degree from Yale. Damara Alves, head of Bolsonaro’s new Woman, Family, and Human Rights Ministry, who claims to have personally met Jesus in a guava tree, presented herself to the public as being a lawyer with a masters degree in education. When Folha de São Paulo newspaper found no record of her holding either degree, she responded by saying that her degrees are biblical. “Unlike secular degrees,” she said, “which require one to study at a university, the Christian churches give the title of ‘master’ to anyone who dedicates himself to biblical study.”

4). The international finance community can barely stifle its enthusiasm for Bolsonaro’s academically mediocre Economic Minister Paulo Guedes, who has ties to the Pinochet dictatorship, believes the 1988 Brazilian constitution was a mistake and has promised to “privatize everything”. Americas Quarterly, which feeds corporate PR narratives into Anglo mainstream media outlets, recently called him “Brilliant and disciplined”. In December, 2018, the Brazilian Federal Police opened an investigation into Guedes for the disappearance of millions of dollars from private pension funds under his management.

5) A corruption scandal is destroying Bolsonaro’s political party and governing coalition. According to investigators, Bolsonaro’s close friend and campaign coordinator Gustavo Bebianno, leader of the PSL party, nominated dozens of fake candidates in 2018 regional elections. These candidates did not campaign and received votes averaging in the low hundreds, but had millions of Reais from the governmental electoral fund transferred into their bank accounts and re-transfered into the bank accounts of top PSL officials during the final weeks before the election. The scandal prompted Bebianno’s ouster as Minister of the General Secretariat, and looks like it will cause the resignation of Bolsonaro’s national Tourism Minister. The exodus of elected officials out of Bolsonaro’s party into other far-right parties, like Democratas, has already begun.

In addition to the scandals, Bolsonaro and his cronies are making constant public gaffes. After he was unable to build consensus for supporting Trump’s Venezuelan coup attempt on February 23, 2019, his promise of “humanitarian aid” at the Venezuelan border turned out to be two pickup trucks full of powdered milk and rice supplied by an ally in the local government. His Minister of Affairs, recently called the World’s worst diplomat, was publicly corrected by Military generals after announcing that he was going to move the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem. His Education Minister Velez Rodrigues was forced to reverse a recent illegal order that all public school teachers film their students repeating Bolsonaro’s fascist campaign slogan,“Brazil and God above all”, prompting an congressional inquiry and public apologies.

As a result of these scandals and gaffes, even Brazil’s conservative media oligarchies are now openly attacking the Bolsonaro administration, with both O Globo and Estado de São Paulo encouraging the military to take control of the government in recent editorials, and veteran journalist Mauro Lopes arguing that they already have.

Bolsonaro may be able to limp along until the end of his mandate, but without the illegally funded social media hate campaign that built him up for the elections, his popularity will continue to slip, and with it, his ability to fulfill campaign threats to eliminate leftists, gays and indigenous reservations should be harder to deliver.

http://www.brasilwire.com/meltdown-bols ... on-record/

Yeah, a military coup will make things better....His numbers bout the same as Trump & his support from the ruling class likewise shakey & conditional. They like the goodies but the baggage & bad optics repel them, which is also optics.(They know they are assholes but cannot be seen as such.)
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 07, 2019 5:29 pm

Triggered, Bolsonaro commits impeachable offense – tweets porn video

After 5 days of ridicule at the hands of Carnaval goers, right wing extremist President makes homophobic rant and tweets porn video to 3 million followers, including thousands of children.

Brazil’s 2019 Carnaval will go down in history as one of the most politicized ever. From tributes to slain Rio de Janeiro socialist city councilwoman Marielle Franco made on live national TV by Vai Vai and Mangueira Samba Schools and Paraiso do Tuiutí’s one-hour tribute to Lula, to the spontaneous chants of tens of thousands of bloco revelers on the streets of cities across the country for Bolsonaro to “screw himself” and for freedom for Lula, the mood on the streets was overwhelmingly anti-fascist.

With growing evidence implicating a right wing organized crime militia that has proven ties to Bolsonaro’s son Flavio in the assassination of Franco and corruption allegations that are destroying his PSL party and top cabinet members, before carnaval even began the flailing President already saw his popularity drop to the lowest level of any new Brazilian President in the 21st Century.

On the night of Fat Tuesday, the beleaguered president snapped. “I don’t feel comfortable showing this,” he tweeted, “but we have to expose the truth to the population, so it can have knowledge and always make the right priorities. This is what many Brazilian Carnaval street blocos have become. Make your comments and draw your conclusions”. The post was accompanied by a cellphone video of undetermined origin of two men engaging in a sexual act.

The President of Brazil had just shared, on a public platform to his 3.3 million followers, including tens of thousands of children, an amateur gay porno movie.

The historically conservative Folha de São Paulo newspaper immediately pointed out that Bolsonaro had just committed an impeachable crime, by violating Law number 1.079 of April 10, 1950, the so called “Impeachment Law.”

The Impeachment Law details offenses which are punishable by immediate removal from office and banishment for 5 years of engagement in politics. Although “fiscal peddling” the budgetary infraction which was used as an excuse for impeaching Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and was legalized by the Senate two days later, does not appear in the list of impeachable crimes, the Folha de São Paulo observed that sharing pornography with children violates Article 9 of the law, “acting in a manner incompatible with the dignity, honor and decorum of the office.”

As #ImpeachmentBolsonaro became the top trending topic on Brazilian Twitter, the beleaguered President first denied that he had made the post saying it was one of his aids and revealing to the nation that he has been lying about making his own tweets. Then he stuck his foot in his mouth again, tweeting, “what is a golden shower?”.

Meanwhile, critics of Bolsonaro’s right-wing extremist government were quick to point out that the President has done a lot of things worse than publishing a porn video. In Brasilia, Marcelo Zero said that as bad as that crime is, it is not as serious as, “publicly defending torture, proposing to kill members of the opposition and defending the military dictatorship.”

As Bolsonaro quickly became a national laughing stock, his allies began to enact revenge on Carnaval. Rio’s right wing evangelical Christian Mayor Mayor Marcelo Crivella announced that, for the first time in over 80 years, the city government may stop funding the Samba School parade, Rio de Janeiro’s most important annual tourist event, in 2020. In São Paulo, after honoring Marielle Franco to a television audience of millions, the city’s all time biggest Carnaval champion Vai Vai was declassified from the first division, for the first time in its 89 year history.

http://www.brasilwire.com/triggered-bol ... orn-video/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:07 pm

US DOJ gives Lava Jato $682 million kickback

In a measure that bypasses Brazilian transparency legislation and governmental oversight, the US Department of Justice awards 80% of Petrobras fines to Brazilian partners to set up a privately managed fund to “fight corruption”. Petrobras profits were initially earmarked for Public Education and Health systems.

By Brian Mier

Over the past 4 years, as most Anglo media completely ignored the issue, Brasil Wire has extensively covered US government involvement in the Lava Jato corruption investigation. We have written on how the NSA spied on Petrobras, which began shortly after Brazil discovered massive offshore oil deposits. We documented how the Lava Jato investigation appears to have been planned at a 2009 meeting between the DOJ and Brazilian public prosecutors office, and how DOJ officials visited Sergio Móro in Curitiba during the investigation. We wrote on how US Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco bragged, in a speech at the Atlantic Council, about their constant “informal communications” which resulted, among other things in the political imprisonment and removal of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the 2018 presidential elections which opened the door for a victory for Jair Bolsonaro who, ironically, hired the man behind Lula’s illegal arrest to be his Justice Minister. We also wrote how these public comments by Blanco resulted in Lula’s defense team filing a motion to dismiss all charges on the grounds that the Lava Jato task force broke the law by illegally bypassing official protocol to collaborate with a foreign government.

We also wrote about the effects of the Lava Jato investigation on the crippling Brazil’s nationalist business sector, which was a key ally for job generation in the PT governments development strategy, when it paralyzed Brazil’s 5 largest construction companies during a recession, causing 500,000 job layoffs, how it’s legal harassment of Embraer opened the door for its sell off to Boeing, and how, after the 2016 coup, 75% of Petrobras petroleum reserves were sold off, at below market rates, to Northern Petroleum corporations.

Now, a new chapter on the debacle of US DOJ/Lava Jato partnership is being written. On March 6, the Lava Jato task force announced that the US DOJ is going to transfer 80% of the fines it levied against Petrobras to the Brazilian Public Prosecutors Office (Ministerio Publico Federal/MPF) to set up a privately managed “anti-corruption investment fund” that will bypass all of the public institutions and laws that were set up to protect against corruption, including the Federal Auditing Courts (TCU), the Federal Transparency Portal, and federal budget and budgetary planning laws. This transfer, which essentially constitutes a kickback to the Lava Jato task force for its help in sabotaging Brazil’s national development strategy, turning its oil reserves over to US corporations, attacking the PT party and jailing Lula, is valued at $682,560,000. Plans have also been announced for the SEC to kick back 80% of it’s Petrobras fines to the same project which would raise the total value of the fund to $2.5 billion. In 2014, President Dilma Rousseff issued a decree earmarking 100% of Petrobras’ royalties to the Public Health and Education systems. This maneuver, therefore, essentially, represents a technically illegal transfer of funds that were meant to benefit the Brazilian people, into the hands of a politicized, right wing agency that has been working in tandem with the US government since 2014. Ironically the Lava Jato task force, which was hailed in the Anglo Media as being a heroic group of impartial corruption crusaders, is now slated to benefit from its own shady Petrobras deal.

http://www.brasilwire.com/us-doj-gives- ... -kickback/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 12, 2019 3:00 pm

Police arrest Bolsonaro neighbor in Marielle Franco killing
AUTHORITARIANISM CRIME RIO DE JANEIRO

Suspect Ronnie Lessa, a former Military Policeman lived in luxury condo within yards of the President’s home.

At 4 AM on the morning of March 12, the Rio de Janeiro Civil Police raided the houses of, and arrested two suspects in the killings of socialist city councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes. Both men, Ronnie Lessa and Élçio Viera de Queiroz, are current and former Military Police officers, and were living in economic conditions that suggest they were making a lot more money that the average policeman salary of $1000/month.

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Before his arrest, Lessa was living in a condominium complex in the wealthy beach-side neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca. This alone would raise suspicion, but, Lessa was living in the same condominium complex as President Jair Bolsonaro – the same location where the President had breakfast with John Bolton, amid all of the presidential and US government security apparatus.

Barra da Tijuca is located across a small lagoon from the four favelas that are controlled by the right wing, Escritorio de Crime militia. Originally founded by local police officers to protect residents from the drug trafficking gangs that were trying to move into the neighborhood, it quickly degenerated into an extortion organization that charges local business owners for protection and operates as a parallel justice system that enacts extreme punishment, including death, for crimes such as possession of small amounts of recreational drugs. Last month information surfaced that both the mother and the girlfriend of Escritorio do Crime leader, Antonio Nobrega, worked for years in Bolsonaro’s son Flavio’s cabinet while he was a state congressman. Flavio’s connection with the Escritorio de Crime, which is under investigation for Franco’s murder, raises questions about possible involvement of the Bolsonaro family in the crime. Now, as one of the trigger men is arrested within yards of Jair Bolsonaro’s residence, the plot thickens.

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Élçio Viera de Queiroz with Jair Bolsonaro, August 2018, an image posted on the Ex-Military Policeman’s own social media
When Marielle Franco was brutally murdered last year, Jair Bolsonaro was the only presidential candidate who refused to make any public statement of sympathy. His ally, state Governor William Witzel, was photographed at a campaign stop cheering while a friend ripped a Marielle Franco street sign in half. These new arrests are one more piece of the puzzle, but investigators are still trying to discover who ordered the killings.

http://www.brasilwire.com/police-arrest ... o-killing/

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 15, 2019 8:59 pm

“Our Bastard”: Bolsonaro At The White House
The Neofascist’s invitation ridicules U.S. foreign policy rhetoric on human rights
AUTHORITARIANISM DEMOCRACY LAWFARE SOVEREIGNTY UNITED STATES
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On March 19 2019, extreme-right President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro will meet President Donald Trump in Washington DC, on official invitation to the White House. Whilst Trump sidemen John Bolton, Mike Pompeio, Mark Rubio, and rehabilitated war criminal Elliot Abrams, manipulate, confect and pontificate about the situation in Venezuela, they will entertain a man who has openly stated that he does not believe in the concept of human rights at all.

The official White House statement reads: “President Donald J. Trump will welcome President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil to the White House on Tuesday, March 19, 2019. President Trump and President Bolsonaro will discuss how to build a more prosperous, secure, and democratic Western Hemisphere. The leaders of the Hemisphere’s two largest economies will also discuss opportunities for defense cooperation, pro-growth trade policies, combatting transnational crime, and restoring democracy in Venezuela. Finally, they will talk about the major role that the United States and Brazil are playing in the effort to provide humanitarian assistance to Venezuela.”

For a Brazilian President, Bolsonaro is unprecedented in terms of the extent to which he combines a spurious, asinine form of nationalism, with an absolute economic, diplomatic and strategic subservience to the United States. He also heads the most incompetent and out of depth government it has seen since direct elections returned in 1989.

“He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” is a quote attributed to various U.S. Presidents and officials for nearly a century, used to describe an array of dictators and unpleasant political figures in Latin America and elsewhere. It isn’t difficult to imagine the same words uttered about Jair Bolsonaro in the corridors of U.S. power today. Bolsonaro is apparently upset at his international image, and will surely hope that this high profile visit will improve it. The proven racist, and open admirer of genocidal dictators, is reportedly perplexed that he is seen as a “racist dictator” outside Brazil.

He and his family are now embroiled in a scandal far deeper and darker than anything in modern Brazilian political history. The Bolsonaros are linked to Rio de Janeiro Militias, gangs of former Military Police involved in extortion, money laundering and murder on an industrial scale. Most pertinent is their proximity to the assassination of Rio City Congresswoman Marielle Franco, as detailed in this article published on the one year anniversary of her killing.

How ironic, with a low-level mafia family actually now occupying power, to remember that the centre-left Workers Party (PT) Governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff had been depicted as “criminal organisations” by a rabid oligarchic media, during a decade long campaign of defamation which much of the U.S. media enthusiastically endorsed. The most solid period of inclusive growth and development in Brazil’s history, with the country emerging as a genuine global actor, is now a distant memory.

That the U.S. was passively hostile to that Brazil but friendly to the present day version is telling in the extreme, and goes far beyond partisan lines or ideological allegiances. Back in 2013, the country’s first female President Dilma Rousseff cancelled a scheduled state visit to the United States following revelations of mass spying on her, her government and Brazilian industry by the U.S. National Security Agency, and FVEY allies such as the U.K. and Canada, exposed in documents passed by Edward Snowden to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

A hitherto unpublished document in this caché revealed that at some point before April 2013, when Snowden made his getaway, Brazil was already featured in President Obama’s daily National Security briefing, which he would read in the oval office on a specially designed tablet device in the company of his advisors. In the document, Brazil, an ostensible US ally, appeared alongside trouble spots such as Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela. This was months before the outbreak of instability in Brazil which followed the Snowden revelations in early June 2013.

We must ask what the reasons were for Brazil’s inclusion. (We also request that the document itself is made available to the Brazilian public).

As a result of the spying scandal, a furious Rousseff cancelled her visit to the United States, and sought advice as to how Brazil could protect itself. In her U.N. General Assembly address that September, Rousseff lamented her country’s treatment and invoked an imperial past, of U.S. support for Neofascist dictatorships in Latin America, like the one she herself was imprisoned and tortured whilst resisting.

It was then that Rousseff’s Government also decided to reject Boeing in the re-equipment of the Brazilian Airforce, opting instead for a deal with Sweden’s SAAB which offered full technology transfer, and would turn the country into a manufacturer and exporter of Gripen NG Fighter Jets, through its aerospace conglomerate Embraer.

Dilma’s visit to the U.S. eventually came in June 2015, with her ouster already in motion, where she sat opposite grinning ambassador Liliana Ayalde, who once the coup was concluded would take over as a civilian commander of U.S. Southern Command, overseeing the expansion of military presence across the continent. Just under 6 years later, Embraer has been all but sold to Boeing, and a US-backed Neofascist occupies the Brazilian Presidency, a man who brazenly eulogises the very Dictatorial regimes that Rousseff had lamented to the UNGA.

Jair Bolsonaro’s invitation to the White House makes a mockery of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric, especially in Latin America, and only an idiot would fall for it. From the use of its armed forces and/or territory for a military attack on Venezuela, to the lease of the Alcantâra rocket launching base to the United States – the first base on Brazilian soil since the second world war – the Bolsonaro Government and Military Junta behind it are now the principal US ally in South America along with Colombia. Just five years ago Brazil had a sovereign foreign policy, and was central to the advancement of the BRICS project with India, China, Russia and South Africa which envisaged a multipolar world that the United States saw as a threat to its hegemony.

While in Washington D.C. a dinner is to be held in Bolsonaro’s honour. Folha do São Paulo writes: “Philosophers, journalists and investors, all aligned with conservatism, were invited for the welcome dinner and are expected to influence Bolsonaro’s decisions during his visit to U.S. president Donald Trump. The VIP guest list proposed by Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo and diplomat Nestor Forsters includes Gerald Brant, one of Bolsonaro’s first supporters among American investors and entrepreneurs and Mary Anastasia O’Grady, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Writer Olavo de Carvalho and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, both longtime Bolsonaro supporters, are also confirmed.”

That the WSJ’s O’Grady will be present is no surprise, given that her magazine explicitly supported his candidacy during the election, representing the seamless alliance of neoliberals in the global north, and client fascists in the south. Wall Street lobbies and NATO think tank the Atlantic Council alike are hopeful he will deliver on their peculiar shared fixation with pension reform – which, if passed which would mean most Brazilians die before retirement. Justice Minister Sérgio Moro, the US-trained judge who ran the prosecution of Lula da Silva which opened the door to Bolsonaro’s Presidency will also accompany him on the trip, as will Paulo Guedes, the Millenium Institute’s “Chicago Boy” Economy Minister.

Also on Bolsonaro’s agenda is a new nuclear accord with the United States which would see Brazil become an importer of technology, having had the godfather of its own civilian atomic programme, Almirante Othon, jailed by the Lava Jato investigation in 2016. The deal will also open up uranium mining in the country to U.S. companies. Brazil is the only country besides the U.S. and Russia to possess both uranium reserves and proprietary technology for enriching it.

Although the optics and methods change, the objectives of empire do not. Would an image conscious Barack Obama have invited Bolsonaro to Washington? Probably not, but his Government, in particular his Department of Justice, did a great deal to help put him there, through its focus on Brazil’s judiciary, its unconstitutional collaboration on the Lava Jato investigation and its main prize, the politically motivated imprisonment of former President Lula da Silva, who was poised to win the 2018 election until forced withdrawal. Rousseff called Lula’s imprisonment “phase two” of the judicial coup which removed her in 2016, a perversion of democracy which the Obama administration accepted and endorsed beneath a veneer of public concern, insisting that “Brazil’s institutions are working”. In 2009, new Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had insisted that “the ballot box is not enough” in Latin America.

Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar recently called Barack Obama “a pretty face who got away with murder”. Stripped of the protection that savvy public relations enabled, he and his Democratic administrations certainly have blood on their hands, and his Republican successor inherited a virtual cakewalk in Brazil and Latin America as a whole. Key is that without Brazil onside with the United States, action against Venezuela would have been impossible.

Beneath the shallow public diplomacy of such visits, differences and constants in the modus operandi of US Governments in the maintenance of what it sees as its Latin American colonial estate, are laid bare. No more so than now.

The U.S. evidently preferred the Brazil of the 1960s- 70s over its 2000s model. Now it has a loyal President who wants to take Brazil back there.

http://www.brasilwire.com/our-bastard-b ... ite-house/
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