Brazil

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 11, 2021 2:42 pm

How the US led operation Lava Jato, and why: Congressman Paulo Pimenta

Paulo Pimenta is a Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores/PT) Congressman from the Rio Grande de Sul city of Santa Maria who began his political careers as a student union leader in the 1980s. Since then, he has served as a student union leader, city councilor, state congressman, federal congressman and PT leader in Congress from 2018-2019. It was while serving in this role that he traveled to Brussels and presented a dossier to European Union Parliament, accusing the United States, not just of participating in, but of coordinating the Lava Jato anti-corruption investigation which destroyed key sectors of Brazilian industry causing over 1 million layoffs, and removed the leading candidate from the 2018 presidential elections facilitating the election of Jair Bolsonaro.

In August, 2020, I interviewed Congressman Pimenta for the Redfish Documentary, Dismantling Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Neoliberal Agenda. The following is a full transcript.

Can you tell me about your trip to EU Parliament in 2019? What did you do there?

When I went to EU Parliament in Brussels I brought a complete dossier about the United States’ participation in the coup, with information on names of US prosecutors and concrete proof of the participation of the Americans. I asked the parliamentarians to help us denounce, to the world, this illegal, criminal interference of the United States in Brazil.

The truth is that during this entire period [from the coup forward] we have been accumulating more and more information, we’ve looked for more documents, and this work is being constantly updated. The report which we have today is much more complete than the report which we delivered to the EU. We’ve found more facts, more videos and more documents and we continue to update this report. It’s the same documentation which we sent to the United States – we have also sent it to members of US Congress.

Can you explain more about what is in the dossier?

We prepared this dossier in English and Spanish, and these archives reveal speeches, documents, concrete information including names of US prosecutors, public statements that were made, proof of parallel meetings and events that were held, official agendas, informal collaborations which took place in defiance of Brazilian law, the presence of US agents in Brazil acting without the knowledge of government authorities – all of these things were documented and they make up part of this series of archives that I presented to the European Parliament and which I also sent to Members of US Congress.

There are documents that show Judge Sérgio Moro and the prosecutors in permanent and regular contact with the United States. Lava Jato operated as a kind of laboratory so that they could put into practice the learning and guidance that they were receiving from the United States. I am certain of this direct participation of the United States because I also had the opportunity to speak with parliamentarians from Argentina, where a similar process was taking place, with parliamentarians from Bolivia, Ecuador, leaders from Venezuela, and in all of this, in Bolivia, in Paraguay, there is proof of very similar procedures, even with the same characters. I have no doubt that, in reality, it was the Americans who were giving out the instructions here in Brazil. I also had access to the agreement between Petrobras shareholders with the US government. This deal was struck in the United States, and in this document there are a series of acknowledgments to the Lava Jato task-force for acting as a kind of prosecuting attorney against Petrobras and, due to this, they were compensated by the US with R$2.5 billion which was payment for services rendered for what, in reality, benefited the US from an economic perspective. So Lava Jato operated against the interests of Brazil and was financially compensated for this by the Americans.

Why would the US be interested in dismantling Brazilian companies?

Petrobras was one of the most important petroleum companies in the world, with exclusive technology for deep water drilling which enabled the discovery of the pre-salt reserves, which was the largest petroleum discovery of the 21st Century. Petrobras, associated with Odebrecht, owned Brazil’s 4 largest petrochemical centers in Brazil, and Braskem, which was a petrochemical subsidiary of Odebrecht, was making large investments in petrochemical production on the Gulf of Mexico, competing in the American market inside of the United States. A good part of the primary materials that were planned to be used in this were to come from the pre-salt reserves. At that moment, JBS was the largest animal protein company in the World. Today, JBS is a shadow of what it once was. Odebrecht had 200,000 workers on 5 continents and it engaged in a good part of the heavy engineering industry in Brazil too. Today, this has all been absorbed by multinationals. Embraer competed in the executive jet market with a Canadian company, and today Embraer practically lost all of its market. The technology that was developed by Brazil for the development of its nuclear program was an exclusive technology that was totally destroyed through actions by Lava Jato. All of the principal bases of the Brazilian macro-economy were hit hard and this market was totally absorbed by the multinationals, especially by American companies. This represents hundreds of thousands of jobs that were lost and a political climate that enabled us to now have, in Brazil, a President of the Republic who is a spokesman for American interests in South America.

Lula was convicted with no material evidence, in a state where he never lived, where no crime detailed in the trial was ever committed. How is his case proceeding?

The Supreme Court just released a set of information that cannot be ignored. If we make even a minimally decent reading of the Federal Constitution there is no legal argument that justifies denying a request from President Lula’s defense team for the suspension of jurisdiction of the prosecutors. We are proposing and demanding a retrial. A fair trial, which is the right of any Brazilian citizen, according to the Constitution. So we believe that the federal supreme court will acknowledge that Lula was denied the right to a fair trial and that there was interference not just by interests inside of Brazil so that the Constitution was ignored but there were also external interests. None of this can be ignored by the Supreme Court and I believe that they will declare a mistrial.

Do you think there is any chance that the DOJ will ever be punished for illegal collaboration in Lava Jato?

Regarding the Americans, I don’t believe that any justice will be served. During all the moments in which I had contact with leaders and members of congress in the United States I observed that although they believe what happened was very wrong, there is a greater economic interest behind all of this. The first deals for changing the legislation on the pre-salt reserves were made when the Democrats were running the United States Government and this relationship continued during the Republican government. Since what is at stake is control over South America, subordinating it to US interests, I don’t see any difference in attitude between the Republicans and the Democrats. They all acted against the interests of Brazil. And I have seen no sign that there will ever be a change in posture on this.

Nevertheless, there is comprehensive documentation on this with elements that could enable an investigation in the United States. It would be very important to us to see an investigation made in US Congress that could furnish us with documents and names that we have not been able to access, about the way that Lava Jato worked in the United States against Brazilian national interests. We are not going to give up working to raise consciousness of American members of Congress so they can conduct an investigation on this, that can effectively elucidate the participation of the United States in the coup.

https://www.brasilwire.com/how-the-us-l ... o-pimenta/

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US Intelligence Penetration of Brazil: an Interview with Bob Fernandes
IMPERIALISM LAVA JATO SOVEREIGNTY UNITED STATES
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On July 4, 2015, Brazil learned, through Edward Snowden, that President Dilma Rousseff and 29 members of her government were being spied on by the NSA. At that time, FBI agents were already working inside the Lava Jato investigation.

by Brian Mier

Bob Fernandes is a veteran journalist from Bahia. During his 43 year career he has worked at some of the most important newspapers and magazines in Brazil, including Folha de Sao Paulo and Istoe, covering issues such as the election of Bill Clinton and wars in Angola and Somalia. In 1994 he helped found the weekly news magazine Carta Capital and served as its Editor in Chief until 2004. During this period, he wrote over 100 cover stories, including an award-winning series of 8 investigative reports about CIA, FBI, and DEA operations in Brazil and another cover story which led to the resignation of Brazilian Federal Police Director Vicente Chelotti. For the last 15 years he worked extensively in TV as a news anchor for GNT and TV Cultura. Currently he hosts a show on Bahia State Public Television and maintains a youtube channel which has over 200,000 subscribers. In September, 2020, I interviewed him briefly about FBI and DOJ involvement in the Lava Jato investigation for the Redfish Documentary, Dismantling Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Neoliberal Agenda. The following is the full interview transcript.

How did the US get involved in the coup against Dilma Rousseff and the election season political imprisonment of Lula?

On July 4, 2015, Brazil learned, through Edward Snowden, that President Dilma Rousseff and 29 members of her government were being spied on by the NSA. At that time, FBI agents were already working inside the Lava Jato investigation. They were working far beyond the agreement that exists. There was a legal agreement, but their involvement went far beyond that. There were 18 agents, apparently, including the FBI Anti-corruption director for Latin America, Leslie Backschies – just to give you an idea of the size of this. So at the same time that Brazil learned about the NSA espionage that was being done on Petrobras, the president of the republic and 29 members of her government, 18 FBI agents were regularly meeting with the Lava Jato task force and carrying out activities far beyond what was authorized in the partnership agreement. There is a leaked conversation between Prosecutor Vlademir Aras from the Federal Public Prosecutors Office with Deltan Dallagnol, who was the Lava Jato task force leader, in which he says, “look, we have to respect the agreement, we can’t go beyond it”. And Dallagnol says, “no, let’s go ahead because it will take so long – the government can’t know about this, the Executive can’t know what we are doing.” It is impossible to be any more clear than this. This information was leaked by the Intercept during its so-called Vaza Jato investigation. It leaked all the documentation that shows this. More recently, the investigative journalism site Apublica also published information about the presence and the amplification of the of the FBI in Brazil. In 2017 there was a meeting in São Paulo that Leslie was in, along with other FBI agents and Brazilian businessmen, with Brazilian government representatives to discuss corruption in Brazil and the press were barred from attending. Imagine if this had happened in the United States or in Germany or anywhere else. So this is the current scenario, remembering that in 2014 there was already US wire tapping in Brazil and that Leslie Backschies started working in Brazil in 2012.

How long has the FBI been active in Brazil? Can you talk a bit about your investigative work in the 1990s for Carta Capital?

During the end of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, during the last few years of his government until the time Lula took power, the Brazilian Federal Police did not have enough funding to properly operate. At this time, we published and leaked documents that proved that the DEA, the American anti-drug agency, paid for individual Federal Police agents to conduct drug trafficking investigations through direct deposits into their personal bank accounts. We published documents proving this – legal receipts. I also published articles, with backing documentation, that showed that the CIA was working out of the main Federal Police station’s anti-terrorism unit. In order to work in this unit for the Federal Police at the time, you had to go to Washington and take lie detector tests in hotels -not in Langley – during which they would ask things like, ‘are you corrupt? Are you a homosexual?”

At the time we published the names of many of the agents who went there and years later we published an internal document from the Federal Police that proved all of this. So for you to act inside the main interception base of the Federal Police, you had to take a lie detector test administered by the CIA. It was part of a shared information partnership between the Federal Police and the CIA. This unit was built inside the Federal Police during the Sarney government with money from the US State Department, and its first 20 automobiles came from the CIA in Paraguay. This was all published and nobody ever denied it there is documentation proving it. So this story about US collaboration didn’t start with Lava Jato – it goes back decades. What we have now is a deepening, a widening, it’s a free for all now. Now, with Brazil delivering the Alcantara rocket launching base to the United States, with Embraer sold off and then given back by the Americans, it is now something that is much more in the open. Unfortunately, as Brazil is continental in size and focused in on itself, there is no habit of looking at the outside world, not even at its neighbors. Brazilians don’t think this is important, they don’t pay attention to or understand the meaning of this. Brazilians, in their great majority, do not care or understand what this means. They don’t understand what it means for the Federal Police to have an operation… Brazil had 15 Federal Police bases which operated within the shared information regime with the CIA. Imagine this in any other country.. But here, nobody gave it a second thought.

https://www.brasilwire.com/us-intellige ... fernandes/

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“Put the US attorneys to work” (against Lula): Sergio Moro caught in new scandal

Supreme Court Minister Ricardo Lewandowski has lifted the confidentiality on conversations between prosecutors from Operation Lava Jato and ex-judge Sergio Moro, which were captured via a hack of the Telegram messaging platform in 2018

The new conversations were released to former President Lula’s defence team.

The material, 50 pages long, adds to excerpts released last week which revealed Sergio Moro coaching the Lava Jato task force on how to present the case of the so called triplex in Guarujá, alleged to have belonged to former president Lula, for maximum political impact. It was the case which was used to keep Lula out of the 2018 election, which he was on course to easily win according to polls.

The latest release further emphasises that the Lava Jato Task force was acting concertedly against Lula, Dilma Rousseff, and the Workers Party, during the entire coup period between the 2014 and 2018 elections. This was happening in collaboration with U.S. government agencies and its expanded state.

On November 4, 2015, Lava Jato prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol communicates illegally about the Lula case with Judge Sergio Moro. It’s timing shows how malfeasance in Lava Jato, in collaboration with U.S. agencies, was already underpinning the then ongoing campaign for the removal of Dilma Rousseff’s government on corruption grounds, as well as efforts to prosecute Lula.

In it they refer directly to illegal direct contact with US authorities and Moro encourages the use of US attorneys on the case against Lula.
18:32:04 Moro: Did you see the decision of event 16 in case 5048739-91? The due diligence deserves direct contact with US authorities.

21:22:08 Deltan: I haven’t seen … I don’t think there’s been a subpoena from us yet. We will provide…

21:22:16 Deltan: Thanks for informing

21:24:24 Moro: Put US attorneys to work because nothing so far, haha.

21:25:16 Deltan: Haha

21:25:24 Deltan: They are just sucking for now

21:25:32 Deltan: Today I talked to them about the accounts there at Ode (Odebrecht) to see if they do something lol

21:28:16 Moro: This one may now be simpler and perhaps more relevant.
Three months later, on 27th February 2016, Moro asks Lava Jato Task force head Deltan Dallagnol what he thinks of public communications coming from the Workers Party.
11:21:24 Moro: What do you think of these crazy notes from the national directorate of PT? Should we officially react? Or will it help?

12:30:44 Deltan: In my opinion and that of our communication adviser, no, because it has not had repercussion, and we would give more visibility to what has no credibility.
The next day Dallagnol makes fun of the Workers Party’s anniversary celebrations, posting various media articles hostile to the PT and former President, and warns of how they must use the media to their advantage.

03:08:00 Deltan: There were more people in my lecture than at PT’s birthday haha, who were entitled to other attractions. 9 (Lula) is increasingly weakened, although we cannot underestimate him, much less make any movement in the media that strengthens him. We have to take care of communication in this case.

Dallagnol’s colleague then depicts their pursuit of Lula in terms of the atomic bombing of Japan during the second world war.
12:22:20 Januario Paludo: First step: obstruction. Then we talk about the rest. But the agreement is capitulation. If necessary we will use the tactic of US in World War II to force Japan’s capitulation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki
On 16th March, prosecutors are later seen posting photos and videos from right wing protests against the appointment of Lula as Dilma Rousseff’s chief of staff, and celebrating his judicial blocking from assuming the role, which followed Moro’s illegal leak of an edited telephone conversation between Rousseff and Lula. The audio, broadcast on Globo’s Journal Nacional, constructed the impression of wrongdoing on her part, and directly assisted the campaign for her impeachment, which was by then imminent.
21:05:53 Orlando SP: I’m worried about Moro! With the reasons for the decision. There will be representations left over for him.

21:06:48 Laura Tessler: Yes, there will. And against us. We knew that.

21:09:14 Orlando SP: He was justified by STF precedents to release audios?

21:09:25 Laura Tessler: I don’t think so … they have already reached the limits of the bizarre … the population is on our side … any attempt at intimidation will turn against them.
The implications of the latest release of Lava Jato Task force conversation transcripts are still becoming clear. The full document can be found here, with further in-depth analysis to follow.

Document - https://www.brasilwire.com/wp-content/u ... eticao.pdf

https://www.brasilwire.com/put-the-us-a ... w-scandal/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 10, 2021 12:40 pm

MARCH 8, 2021
NYT Fails to Examine Its Participation in Brazil’s ‘Biggest Judicial Scandal’
BRIAN MIER

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The Brazilian Supreme Court on March 8 dismissed all charges against former President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva made during the Lava Jato investigation, a little over a month after the investigation was officially ended. The termination came shortly after the Supreme Court admitted 6 terabytes of leaked Telegram chats between public prosecutors and judges as evidence in the case.

A small portion of the leaks, released slowly by the Intercept Brasil and local media partners in 107 articles, revealed that Judge Sergio Moro illegally instructed prosecutors in cases he was ruling on; these leaks also exposed dozens of secret, illegal meetings with agents of the US FBI. Lula’s defense lawyers have now released new, devastating information, in the context of a series of motions to dismiss.

In one conversation, Lava Jato taskforce chief Delton Dallagnol refers to Lula’s imprisonment as a gift from the CIA. The leaks also show that many coerced plea bargain testimonies were totally fabricated, including a frivolous case that resulted in the suicide of the dean of Santa Catarina Federal University, and that Dallagnol nicknamed them “outsourced testimonies.”

None of these revelations came as a surprise to Brazilians who have been reading legal blogs and the major independent media for the last five years. Many groups have been critical of Lava Jato from the moment Sergio Moro first froze operations at Brazil’s five largest construction companies in 2015.
NYT: Operation Car Wash Was No Magic Bullet
A New York Times (2/26/21) op-ed says of the Lava Jato investigation, “To truly attack corruption and overcome this dystopia, there must be a critical reassessment of the investigation.” This would have to include a reassessment of media’s treatment of the investigation.
But the idea that ethical problems cut this deeply into Lava Jato may have come as a surprise to readers of a February 26, 2021, New York Times op-ed piece by Gaspard Estrada, headlined “Operation Car Wash Was No Magic Bullet,” which called it the “biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.” One paragraph of Estrada’s piece reads:

Although it has long been known that Mr. Moro convicted Mr. da Silva for indeterminate acts and on flimsy charges, we now know that Mr. Moro himself helped mount the accusation against Mr. da Silva, thus violating the Brazilian justice system’s legal principle of not being a judge and a prosecutor at the same time.

The paragraph contains three linked sources. Lava Jato prosecutors’ failure to clearly define any specific crime of corruption committed by Lula is linked to a rare, critical New York Times op-ed piece by the Center for Economic Policy and Research’s Mark Weisbrot (1/23/18). The references to Sergio Moro simultaneously serving as judge and prosecutor are linked to two articles in the Brazilian news medium UOL.

Estrada doesn’t link to a Times article here, because there does not appear to be one. In 37 relevant articles I found with the keyword search “Lava Jato” published by the Times between the outset of the scandal in 2015 and the first week after ex-President Lula’s illegitimate, political imprisonment, I found no mention of it. Apparently the fact that a judge was allowed to oversee an investigation against an ex-president, authorize wiretaps, rule on admissibility of evidence, then preside over the same investigation in a trial with no jury, did not seem relevant enough to be mentioned in dozens of generally sympathetic articles on Lava Jato.

The Times rarely applied any scrutiny to the investigation until Lula’s political imprisonment was imminent. Serious crimes committed by Moro and the taskforce, such as the 2016 wiretapping of Lula’s defense team’s law offices, were either glossed over or not mentioned at all. In article after article, the Times failed to share important information on the investigation. This helped normalize the 2016 coup and the removal of Lula from the 2018 presidential elections, which in turn opened the door for a neofascist/military takeover of Brazil.

Missing in Action: US role
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or FCPA, originally passed in 1977, is a federal law designed to prohibit overseas bribery by US companies. Twenty years later, it was linked to an international treaty, the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention of 1997, which enables the SEC and DoJ to act in any signatory nation in consort with local authorities. These partnerships enable US authorities to investigate any company that has a US bank account, owns real estate in the US, has stock traded in the US, or that has ever conducted any type of transaction in dollars. It was the FCPA, for example, that enabled FBI agents to raid FIFA headquarters in Zurich in 2015.

The fact that Brazil adheres to the Anti-Bribery Convention enabled the US DoJ to work as an equal partner—some critics argue it took the lead—in Lava Jato, levying billions of dollars in fines on Brazilian companies in civil cases, generally based in the Southern New York Court District.

Indeed, anyone interested could read about the US involvement in Lava Jato in legal blogs as early as 2015, in documents published by US Law firms and on the DOJ’s own website starting in 2016, as US Attorney General William Barr pointed out in his reply to a congressional inquiry led by Hank Johnson and 12 other members of Congress into, among other things, whether the US DoJ played a role in Lula’s arrest.

In 37 New York Times articles published on Lava Jato between 2015 and April 12, 2018, however, the US is only mentioned three times. The relationship to Lava Jato is left unclear in two, and the FCPA is mentioned once, in 2016, in the context of a then-record $3.5 billion in fines levied on Brazilian companies in New York.

Decontextualized human interest
President Richard Nixon in 1972 ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in Chile, in order to build popular support for a coup against socialist President Salvador Allende. Together with the ITT corporation, the CIA organized a world-wide boycott of Chile’s primary export commodity, copper, and the country’s economy tanked.
NYT: At the Birthplace of a Graft Scandal, Brazil’s Crisis Is on Full Display
The New York Times (6/10/16) justified Lava Jato in terms of Brazilians’ falling standard of living—which Lava Jato did much to contribute to.
In 2015, Judge Moro ordered all contracts canceled for Brazil’s five largest civil construction companies, bankrupting four of them and causing 500,000 immediate layoffs. With another order, he paralyzed major operations of the Petrobras state petroleum company. Together, according to a study cited in BBC Brazil (12/2/15), these measures contributed 2.5 percentage points to Brazil’s 3.2% drop in GDP that year.

In a 2016 New York Times article (6/10/16), we met a couple who have fallen below the poverty line:

Until last year, Ms. Ribeiro and her husband, Gleiciano, 32, were newly inducted members of the Brazilian middle class. They bought their first car, took frequent vacations and did not think twice about dining out. All that changed after Mr. Ribeiro lost his construction job. Now the couple hesitate before buying meat, and they have postponed plans to have a second child.

The Ribeiros’ plight was presented as sad, but not connected to an investigation that refused to treat important companies as “too big to fail.” Instead, Moro deliberately bankrupted them and “made the economy scream” during the lead-up to the 2016 legislative coup against President Dilma Rousseff. By removing this context, the casual reader was left thinking, “Look how horrible corruption is; thank God someone is doing something about it.”

Glorification of frivolous charges
Shortly after the US-backed 1964 military coup, former Brazilian President Jucelino Kubitchek was accused of receiving illegal improvements on a luxury apartment in exchange for political favors after leaving office. After months of vicious media attacks, all charges were dropped. As in the triplex apartment case against Lula 50 years later, there was no proof he ever owned the place.

In the week before the 1989 presidential election between Fernando Collor de Mello and Lula, a prominent business executive was freed from kidnapping. The media spread a false story that electoral propaganda for Lula was found in the kidnappers’ apartment. Later, the São Paulo civil police presented the kidnappers to the press wearing Workers Party (PT) T-shirts. Days after Collor won the election, it came out that the kidnappers had no connection to the PT and had been tortured by police and forced to wear PT T-shirts for the press conference. A year later, São Paulo Governor Orestes Quercia admitted that the kidnapping story had been manipulated to help Collor win the presidential election. A 2009 academic study by communications professor Diana Paula de Souza cites media manipulation of the kidnapping story as the key factor in Collor’s victory.
NYT: Brazilian Corruption Case Ensnares Ex-Presidents da Silva and Rousseff
The New York Times (9/5/17) credulously reported the theory that former President Lula da Silva was the “center of a huge conspiracy.”
Anyone who knows Brazilian history understands that fake crime stories are regularly used to defame politicians. But instead of applying any scrutiny, the Times treated Lula as guilty before proven innocent. In article after article, frivolous charges waged by right-wing political enemies, which were dropped shortly afterwards, were repeated as truth. “Brazilian Corruption Case Ensnares Ex-Presidents da Silva and Rousseff,” (9/5/17), for example, amply quoted a US academic along with now-disgraced Brazilian Attorney General Rodrigo Janot in support of the outrageous charge (later dropped for lack of material evidence) that Lula and Dilma Rousseff were the heads of a $450 million criminal organization, while saving a few short platitudes of defense from Workers Party officials for the final paragraphs.

About the Lava Jato investigation, the New York Times could have asked: Why was a former president’s case allowed to be forum shopped to a court in Curitiba, Parana—a state that had no relationship with the alleged crimes, where Lula never resided? How could there be quid pro quo if the alleged gift to Lula took place years after he left political office? Why didn’t the deed to the triplex apartment attributed to Lula have his name on it? And why wasn’t the judge replaced after discovery that he ordered illegal wiretapping of the defense lawyer’s office?

Instead, the Times cherry-picked “Lula is innocent” clichés from Workers Party and defense lawyers press conferences, framing any criticism of Lava Jato as partisan. Due to the Telegram leaks, everyone now knows Lula is innocent, but long before this, there was ample evidence of a political witch hunt. By ignoring or downplaying issues that raised doubts about Lava Jato, while giving the hero’s treatment to Sergio Moro, the Times became an active participant in this witch hunt.

The New York Times is an extremely influential newspaper in Latin America. In 2004, when Times reporter Larry Rohter (5/9/04) falsely accused President Lula of being incapacitated by alcoholism, it affected Brazil’s investment rating. Years of censorship by omission, one-sided reporting and lionizing far-right prosecutors as they worked closely with the FBI, helped to destroy the image of a political party that, among other things, moved 26 million people above the poverty line, was the world leader in greenhouse gas reduction, and implemented one of the most ambitious affirmative action programs in history.

As Joseph Joffe wrote in the New York Times Magazine (5/14/06), “Great soft power does not bend hearts; it twists minds in resentment and rage.” As someone who is witnessing the return of street children hawking cigarettes on public transportation, I bet I am not the only one down here with resentment and rage over the New York Times’ complicity in the biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

https://fair.org/home/nyt-fails-to-exam ... l-scandal/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 12, 2021 2:53 pm

ON THE BRAZILIAN STRAIN OF CORONAVIRUS: THE BOLSONARO EFFECT
11 Mar 2021 , 9:21 am .

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Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilian president, has assumed an ineffective administration that has consolidated his country as the epicenter of the global pandemic on the continent (Photo: Reuters)

Before reaching herd immunity, much of the planet continues to suffer the ravages produced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes covid-19, a disease that has impacted the world incalculable just one year after having been declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to data updated to last Sunday (1100 GMT) since the beginning of the epidemic, Europe has had more than 873 thousand deaths (38 million infections), Latin America and the Caribbean incur +696 thousand (21 million), the United States and Canada with +546 thousand (29 million), Asia goes by +259 thousand (16 million), Western Asia (Middle East) has 106 thousand (5 million), Africa with 105 thousand (3 million) and Oceania just +950 (32 one thousand).

BRAZIL AS A CONSOLIDATED PANDEMIC EPICENTER
Brazil, due to the disastrous management of President Jair Bolsonaro, registers more than 270 thousand deaths (38% of the region) and more than 11 million cases (50% of the region) at the end of this note. Close to the previous numbers are Mexico with +190 thousand deaths (+2 million cases), India with +157 thousand deaths (+11 million) and the United Kingdom with +124 thousand deaths (+4 million).

In indigenous peoples alone, more than 49,000 native Brazilians have been infected with almost 1,000 deaths and +160 affected peoples, denounced the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) before the United Nations Human Rights Council. The risk is greater because the illegal invasions of loggers in areas of the Amazon, stimulated by the Bolsonaro Administration, put at risk 114 indigenous peoples who never had contact with the outside.

On March 3, President Nicolás Maduro warned of the presence of a strain or variant of SARS-Cov-2 in the parishes 23 de Enero and El Junquito de Caracas, with two cases, in the Nueva Casarapa sector of Miranda state, also with two cases, and in an area of ​​Bolívar state with six records.


The variant P.1, from Manaus, capital of Amazonas state in Brazil, probably arose in early November, quickly spread to become dominant and caused many reinfection, as said a team of researchers from Brazil and the Imperial College of London.

By that date, many people were infected with the original version of the coronavirus, and blood test results suggested that up to three-quarters of the Manaus population had gained some degree of protection or immunity from this exposure.

But despite this, Manaus was badly hit by another wave of coronavirus and the unprecedented crisis reached its peak on January 15, when crowded hospitals were left without oxygen. When studying the genomics (genetic makeup) of the coronavirus in some of the infected patients, it was learned that this strain, like two others detected in South Africa and Great Britain, are more infectious and can evade part of the immunity generated by a previous covid infection .

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Bolsonaro's refusal to fully manage the pandemic within Brazilian territory has caused high death rates in Manaus, the origin of the P.1 variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Photo: EFE)

Last Tuesday the 9th, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared an "emergency" for all of Latin America, noting that "the situation is very serious and we are very concerned. The health measures that Brazil takes should be aggressive, at the same time that advances in the vaccination ".

In addition, he pointed out that "the concern does not only revolve around Brazil, but also around Brazil's neighbors. It is almost Latin America as a whole." "If Brazil does not take it seriously, it will affect all the neighbors and beyond," he said.

Of the 27 governors of Brazil, 22 challenged Bolsonaro and signed a "pact for life" last Monday to prevent the collapse of the health system that, in some states, is imminent. Some met with the Minister of Health, General Eduardo Pazuello, and told him that the pact would have the support of Congress and the federal government to take joint measures and "apply a national restriction to stop the coronavirus."

¿ WHY A STRAIN AND WHY BRAZIL?
"The more infected people there are in a population, the greater the possibility that a variant will appear," microbiologist Ana Paula Fernandes, coordinator of the national diagnostic network and researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) , told the BBC. .

Viruses, which are not living organisms, have the ability to replicate their genetic information "aided" by receptor cells. A new variant of a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 may have one or more mutations that differentiate it from the predominant variants already circulating in the general population.

It was expected that there would be variants of SARS-CoV-2 throughout the world throughout this pandemic, the important thing for scientists has been to monitor local outbreaks and understand the national landscape, in addition to comparing the genetic differences between the viruses to identify the variants and the degree of kinship between them.

According to the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the P.1 variant of SARS-CoV-2 was first identified in January 2021 in travelers from Brazil who arrived to Japan. It has also been detected in 24 other countries, including Peru, Colombia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

According to some reports, P.1 has 17 unique mutations, including three in the S protein located in the spike (K417T, E484K and N501Y), which is the one that interacts with the recipient cells and towards which much of the response is directed. immune.

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The mutations that produce the SARS-Cov-2 variants occur in the protein S or spike (in reddish colors) that interacts with the cell receptor and displays immune responses (Photo: Getty Images)

It is not fortuitous that a strain like P.1, whose probability of reinfection is between 25% and 60%, has spread in a country like Brazil, much less fortuitous is that hospitalizations and reinfections increase, nor that they change the symptoms, the severity of the disease and even the most infected age groups.

The conditions created by the neoliberal extremism of the Bolsonaro Administration could be facilitating the evolutionary process of the coronavirus. There is an explosive combination for P.1 to become artificially selected leaving natural selection in check: high infection rates and a vaccination process that is still proceeding at a slow pace.

A high contagion rate does not imply a high lethality, but in the case of P.1 other factors play a role, only the high contagion has caused concern because there is evidence to suggest that some of these mutations may affect the capacity of antibodies (from natural infection or vaccination) to recognize and neutralize the virus. Although the severity of the symptoms caused by mutations is uncertain, high viral loads are known to be associated with more serious disease conditions.

There are at least three mutations acting in synergy:

The N501Y (Nelly) mutation is common to the British, South African and Brazilian variants, it produces a structure change in protein S that increases its binding capacity to the cell receptor.
The E484K (Erick) mutation, present in the Brazilian and South African variants, in addition to favoring receptor binding, would make the virus worse neutralized by antibodies, thus increasing reinfections or reducing the effectiveness of vaccines.

Both mutations belong to different evolutionary lines, which indicates their possible advantage over viruses that do not contain them.
Another interesting mutation is the elimination of amino acids at positions 69 and 70 of protein S, it is the same that was detected in viruses isolated from massive infections that took place in several mink farms a few months ago in the Netherlands and Denmark, demonstrates how the spread of the virus in species other than humans may favor the appearance of new variants that are more dangerous for us. This mutation appears to act in synergy with N501Y, further increasing the affinity for the receptor.
This last data could generate indeterminate impacts in a country with high biological diversity and high expansion of the agricultural frontier due to Bolsonaro's deforestation policy , zoonosis has been determined as the probable origin of this and other recent epidemics.

EVERYTHING BUT AN EFFECTIVE VACCINATION PLAN
Today the Bolsonaro Administration relies on the CoronaVac vaccine, developed by the Chinese firm Sinovac and whose effectiveness is around 50% in preventing infections and 80% in cases that require hospitalization. The emergency use of the vaccine in Brazil was approved on January 17 and the purchase of 100 million doses was approved after Bolsonaro spent several months attacking it with claims without evidence, such as that the product could kill or disable those who it will take.

It had even come to discredit it when João Doria, governor of São Paulo, negotiated the Sinovac vaccine directly with China and secured millions of doses that ended up being delivered to the federal government.

The cause of the delay in vaccination has to do with limited supplies and logistical failures. Counting on a national health system present in almost all the thousands of municipalities through hospitals and clinics, in addition to a long history of successful vaccination of its population, the federal government of Brazil has shown the same indifference as its president.

They initially announced an implementation plan similar to that of many other countries concentrating effort on manufacturing 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine by the end of January 2021 and 200 million more by the end of the year, administered first to workers at the AstraZeneca. health and the elderly, and then in the future, in order of vulnerability.

The result was that their vaccine trials took longer than others, and the lack of the active ingredient needed to make the vaccine caused Brazilian laboratories to wait to start production until mid-February.

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Discipline, discredit, insults and contradictions in Bolsonaro's speech have led to unnecessary deaths and delays in the vaccination plan that will make it more difficult to overcome the pandemic (Photo: Brasil de Fato)

Other large countries with similar purchasing power negotiated deals last year to buy other vaccines from companies like Moderna and Sinovac, except for Brazil, which also rejected an offer from Pfizer in August to buy up to 70 million doses of its vaccine.

In that case the government, which has privatized strategic assets as part of the oil company Petrobras, raised concerns about a payment guarantee and an agreement that contractual matters would be handled in a US court.

The virologist Julian Tang, from the University of Leicester, in the United Kingdom, has affirmed to the BBC that the greatest danger could be in the contact of the P.1 variant with recently vaccinated people, because when entering the human cell and encountering a still small amount of vaccine antibodies, the variant can promote more resistant mutations to those antibodies by replicating.

"If those vaccine antibodies arise while the infection is taking place and is spreading through the body, the virus can replicate in a way that evades the antibodies in a process of natural selection," he added, explaining that a vaccinated, but infected person, it can transmit this mutated virus if there are no control measures, such as quarantines and closures of businesses and leisure spaces. Measures that Bolsonaro has rejected or relaxed.

Preliminary research indicates reduced efficacy of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine against variants loaded with the E484K mutation, and the Butatan Institute is investigating its impact on the percentage of protection offered by CoronaVac.

Several research centers are working to redesign or adjust vaccines to better suit some of these new "worrying variants," although existing ones should still provide some protection, particularly against severe symptoms.

THE BOLSONARO LAW OF THE PANDEMIC JUNGLE
In addition to the fact that the contact between vaccinated and variants favors the appearance of "super-potent" mutations, capable of totally circumventing the action of immunization, the confinement measures can complicate the scenario because, under pressure, the most transmissible variants have an advantage in front of the rest, being able to become majority.

The original failure that generated the three "worrying" variants was that in all of them the "functioning of the economy" was privileged and border restrictions and strict confinements were avoided to contain the virus before it could spread.

If the substance of the matter is analyzed further, there is another flaw: the non-dedication of Big Pharma and research centers to develop preventive measures in the face of a threat that had already warned since the 2002 outbreak of SARS, another coronavirus, because there were no expectations of earnings at that time.

Clinging to his turbo-capitalist orthodoxy, the Brazilian president is directly responsible for an unfortunate record of deaths from covid in 24 hours: on March 9, 1,972 deaths were registered in the territory and projections are heading towards 300,000. The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation warned that 25 out of 27 state capitals have intensive care bed occupancy rates higher than 80%, 15 of them with 90% and in São Paulo there are hospitals with 100% occupancy of intensive care beds. informed Doria.

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Evolution of the occupancy index of adult ICU beds due to covid since July 2020. Green: low alert; yellow: medium alert; red: critical alert (Photo: Fiocruz)

Government sources announce that until the beginning of March, more than 6.1 million people had been vaccinated with the first dose (0.02% of the total population), more than 1.6 million had already received the second dose.

The economy that Bolsonaro intended to save has fallen. Comparing 2019 data, Brazil's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has fallen by 4.1% according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), being the lowest historical rate registered since 1996. The services sector presented a annual fall of 4.5% and that of industry 3.5% compared to the agricultural sector, which reflected a rise of 2%.

Brazil's economic recovery weakened in the fourth quarter of 2020 when he himself suspended economic aid for the coronavirus and the second wave of cases hit health systems and businesses.

The confluence between the early vaccination phase and a peak in covid cases is certainly a complex scenario as Bolsonaro repeatedly declares himself against the restrictions. "As for me, we will never have confinement. Never, it is a policy that has not worked in any part of the world," he considers, while the figures deny it.

Investigations from Imperial College London reported that confinement in the United Kingdom reduced COVID infections by more than 60%, reducing infections and the risk of variants emerging by buying time for the vaccination campaign to advance and for the investigation to find Variant-tailored vaccines.

Bolsonaro's fanaticism puts other nations at risk, in this regard Tang has said:

"If you have a barn of virus production in a country, if you do not control transmission, you are going to have mutations that are produced by natural selection, if these variants travel the world and some of them escape vaccines totally or partially, for of course it's a risk. "

At this point, it seems that an optimal solution would be for all governments to be able to vaccinate their populations, but the pandemic continues to reveal the contradictions of capitalism, not only through the hoarding of vaccines or the tragic figures generated by the parishioners of the capital, but also of its ability to export the permanent crisis.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/so ... -bolsonaro

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 08, 2021 5:57 pm

Genocide.
AUTHORITARIANISM CORONAVIRUS EDITORIAL
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It will be assumed by many outside that to describe Brazil’s pandemic as genocide is an exaggeration. Unfortunately it isn’t.

From suppressing vaccines to refusing Brazilian states and municipalities the right to implement lockdown measures, it is wrong for international media to report Bolsonaro’s Covid-19 catastrophe as mismanagement, incompetence, or “failure to act”, when it has been based on an intentional strategy.

One year ago we called Brazil’s pandemic “a tragedy foretold“. Now we call it what it is: Genocide.

The victims of this genocide are Brazil’s poorest, most vulnerable; groups his government detest.

In January of this year, a study published by the Center for Research and Studies on Health Law at the University of São Paulo, and NGO Conectas, proved that the spread of the coronavirus in Brazil was a government strategy. The same researchers now insist the president should be investigated for genocide.

In May 2020, the far-right president insisted that “only the weak, the sick and the elderly should be worried” about Covid-19. What sounded like denialism a year ago now reads like a candid admission.

At that time Bolsonaro’s policy looked similar in content to that of allies Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, yet delivered with darker, more absurd rhetoric; of protecting the economy, of herd immunity, and minimisation of the disease’s seriousness. Aside from his infamous encouragement of maskless public gatherings, and relentless promotion of false remedies, a clear divergence in policy came with the arrival of vaccines against the new virus.

No other country on earth had a head of state actively preventing their population from being vaccinated, whilst leaving the poorest unable to protect themselves through isolation.

A recent study in Brazil’s largest city São Paulo shows that those living in its poorest neighbourhoods are 3 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than those in its wealthiest.

Vaccine Suppression

At that time, as the worst of the pandemic was hitting many parts of the world, the first vaccines against Covid-19 were already in rapid development. Brazil’s federal government was only interested in one.

Until recently Brazil led the world in vaccination. In 2010 Brazil vaccinated 83 million people in 90 days against the H1N1 virus.

The state of São Paulo was pushing ahead with its own vaccine, signing a deal with Chinese firm SinoVac, to develop its own vaccine CoronaVac using the Butantan Institute.

Butantan Institute offered its vaccine, whose early testing showed signs it would succeed, to the federal government 3 times: in July, August and October. The offers were ignored.

In September Butantan had requested emergency approval for CoronaVac. Regulatory body Anvisa, led by a Bolsonaro loyalist, refused. São Paulo governor João Doria insists that they could have had CoronaVac available in October if the federal government had listened. At that point Brazil’s toll stood at 150 thousand, and daily deaths were comparatively low. The total now approaches 300 thousand, records are being broken with over 3000 deaths every day.

Pfizer revealed that they had made several attempts to offer their vaccine to Brazil’s federal government which were ignored. It must be said that Pfizer’s negotiating terms for its vaccine in Latin America at this point were not something that any government should have accepted as was. However, the federal government would end up buying the Pfizer vaccine anyway, 7 months too late.

Perhaps most disturbingly, documents discovered by Brasil Wire revealed that the US government had intentionally pressured Brazil to refuse Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, which was the world’s first to be approved for use, in August 2020. The head of União Quimica, which for months had been preparing to manufacture Sputnik V at a factory in Brazil, revealed that he believed Anvisa was deliberately obstructing its approval and use.

To dismiss these cases as simply Bolsonaro being against vaccines in general is not accurate. The one vaccine his government did order, in July 2020 was Oxford AstraZeneca. Nobody understood why this vaccine had such exclusivity with the federal government throughout 2020.

It would be January, when Oxford AstraZeneca was finally ready, before Anvisa would begin to approve other vaccines. Doses have been slow to arrive. At time of publication 9 out of 10 vaccine doses administered in Brazil have been CoronaVac.

Counterintuitive and illogical behaviour the Federal Government appears to indicate another agenda behind its vaccine moves. Freedom of information requests by Brasil Wire have earlier revealed that the UK government had been lobbying Jair Bolsonaro and his allies on behalf of AstraZeneca and other companies since before he was elected.

This documented intentional suppression of vaccines in Brazil by the Bolsonaro government could well have been responsible for the preventable loss of many thousands of Brazilian lives.

As vaccines finally, slowly roll out, with only 5% so far receiving their first dose, twice as many whites have been vaccinated as blacks/pardos in a country with a minority white population. In addition, Brazil’s black and pardo population is more at risk of infection and hospitalisation from the disease.

Pension Reform

Bolsonaro’s government has been obsessed with pension reform since coming to power, a top priority of Economy Minister Paulo Guedes. For years Brazilian pension reform has had some unusual supporters outside, such as NATO adjunct Atlantic Council.

70% of Brazil’s Covid 19 deaths – around 210,000 – have been people over 60. Social movement the MST calculates that, consequently, the Bolsonaro government is now saving R$231 million per month in pension payments.

In May 2020, when Bolsonaro made his “only the weak, the sick and the elderly should be worried” remark, it was reported by Reuters and major media organisations that Paulo Guedes ally Solange Viera of government department Susesp, who had been involved in pension reforms pushed by Bolsonaro and Guedes the previous year, had remarked in a meeting:
“It is good that deaths are concentrated among the elderly … This will improve our economic performance, as it will reduce our pension deficit.”
This statement was leaked to the media by epidemiologist Julio Croda, head of the Department of Immunization and Communicable Diseases at the Ministry of Health, and corroborated by another official.

The report also added that Viera “showed little urgency when Ministry of Health forecasts were presented in mid-March (2020). The ministry predicted widespread deaths among the elderly, if the virus was not contained”.

Solange Viera’s words were a window to the kind of dark thinking at the heart of Bolsonaro’s administration.

Genocide

On March 20 2021, three authors of the USP study published an article in Folha de S.Paulo to demand Jair Bolsonaro be held responsible for the crime of genocide under international law.

This was triggered by the furore over a police investigation of influencer Felipe Neto, under national security law, because he used the word Genocidist to describe president Bolsonaro.

Deisy Ventura, who is both a doctor of international law and law professor wrote:
‘There is a consensus among public health experts that most of these deaths could have been prevented. This is not a mistake or omission by the federal government. There is a strategy for the propagation of Covid-19 in Brazil, implemented under the leadership of the President of the Republic. It is the duty of the Brazilian legal community to discuss the Brazilian case in light of international criminal law, especially with regard to the genocide of indigenous populations, potentially aggravated during the pandemic, and crimes against humanity”.
By July 2020 Bolsonaro already faced three separate charges of crimes against humanity and genocide at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

Operation Lava Jato and its supporters knew full well what Jair Bolsonaro was in 2018. He had made genocidal statements throughout his political career, yet Lava Jato, its national and international backers – including United States governments, both Republican and Democrat – enabled this genocide by delivering the presidency to a fascist.

When he was elected, some sympathetic western commentators insisted Bolsonaro was not a fascist. Media representatives of corporate interests which supported his candidacy reduced him to “arch conservative”. “If he’s a fascist, then where are the concentration camps?” others sneered.

We can tell you their names: Brasilândia, Brás, Rocinha, Complexo da Maré, Cidade de Deus, Vila da Barca…..

https://www.brasilwire.com/genocide/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 16, 2021 11:23 am

Brazil exceeds 360,000 deaths from Covid-19

Image
A parliamentary commission will investigate the management of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in the face of the health crisis. | Photo: @AndreteleSUR
Published April 15, 2021 (4 hours 48 minutes ago)

The South American giant has to date a total of 13,673,507 infections due to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

The Brazilian Ministry of Health reported on Wednesday that 3,459 deaths from Covid-19 were registered in the last 24 hours, bringing the South American country to a total of 361,884 deaths from the viral disease.

The South American giant to date has a total of 13,673,507 infections due to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus after 73,513 new cases were detected during the day, the health agency indicated.

He noted that during the last week, Brazil reports a daily average of 3,015 deaths from Covid-19.


Sao Paulo is the Brazilian state that accumulates the most cases, with 2,686,031 coronavirus infections and 85,475 deaths.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, exceeded 40,000 deaths from Covid-19, after 300 deaths occurred in the last 24 hours.

To date, 12,170,771 people have overcome the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, while 1,140,852 patients remain under medical observation.



The Brazilian Senate approved last Tuesday 11 members of a commission that, in a period of 90 days, will investigate the management of President Jair Bolsonaro - who has opposed decreeing measures of social confinement - in the face of the health crisis.

The opposition senator Randolfe Rodrigues was the one who requested the creation of the parliamentary committee, which should "investigate the actions and omissions of the federal government to face the pandemic in Brazil."

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-s ... -0002.html

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(not unrelated...)

Fallout: US suppression of Russian vaccine in Brazil becomes diplomatic incident
CORONAVIRUS FOREIGN POLICY UNITED STATES

On Sunday March 14 2021, Brasil Wire published an exclusive story on how the United States pressured its ally, Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime, into rejecting Sputnik V, the world’s first approved Covid-19 vaccine, developed by Russia’s Gamaleya institute.

The story, by investigative journalist John McEvoy, was based on discovery of a report from the US Department of Health and Human Services, in which they boasted of combatting “malign Russian, Cuban and Venezuelan influence in Latin America”, through persuading governments to refuse offers of medical help, cooperation and technology transfer.

One of the success stories HHS referred to in the 2020 report, was that they had convinced Brazil not to purchase Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. Another point of US pride was discouraging Panama, which has one of the region’s worst Covid-19 rates, from allowing Cuban doctors into the country to alleviate its own crisis.

US efforts to prevent Brazil deploying Sputnik V in its fight against the world’s second worst Covid-19 outbreak fit into a wider campaign of western propaganda against the vaccine, in which it was depicted as untested, unsafe and ineffective, due to its emergency rollout before the publication of stage 3 trial data.

Sputnik V

Sputnik V was approved for use in August 2020, and began to be offered globally, with Argentina, Venezuela, Palestine, Hungary, UAE, and Iran among the early takers of both the vaccine, and the technology to manufacture it. Medical journal the Lancet later reported that Sputnik V was safe, and had 92% efficacy against the virus.

Dr Julian Tang, clinical virologist, told the BBC: “Despite the earlier misgivings about the way this Russian Sputnik V vaccine was rolled out more widely – ahead of sufficient Phase 3 trial data – this approach has been justified to some extent now. Such pandemic-related vaccine rollout compromises have, to be fair, been adopted in the UK vaccination programme also – with the extended intervals between the first and second doses. So we should be more careful about being overly critical about other countries’ vaccine designs.”

With Brazil’s death toll approaching 280,000, the new revelations triggered fresh public outrage that Brazil had wasted a golden opportunity to begin its vaccination campaign months earlier, and worse, that it was under duress from the Donald Trump administration.

It was a dead-eyed calculation by the US that denying Brazilians access to Sputnik V was a price worth paying for preventing a Russian soft power victory in the region. It is a decision which could well have caused the deaths of thousands of Brazilians.

Media furore

The day after publication, our story began to filter through to Brazilian and international media.

Independent platforms Brasil 247 and Revista Forum, and Russia’s RT, were followed by Brazil’s largest and most influential newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, which ran the story under the headline: “Trump Government pressured Brazil to reject Russian vaccine Sputnik V”. Folha was followed by Globo’s G1, and then, later that evening, TV Globo’s Jornal Nacional, the country’s flagship news bulletin ran its own segment based on the earlier Brasil Wire revelations:

“A report by the American government from the time when Donald Trump was president shows that the United States tried to persuade Brazil not to buy the Sputnik vaccine, developed by Russia. The document states that the Department of Health used diplomatic relations to combat what it called “the malign influences of countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Russia in Latin America.” Last week, the Brazilian government announced the purchase of ten million doses of the Russian vaccine, after governors in the Northeast negotiated another 37 million doses. Sought out by Jornal Nacional, the American Embassy declared that both it and United States consulates in the country never discouraged Brazil from accepting vaccines against Covid that were authorized by Brazilian regulatory bodies.”

Central to the US Embassy’s flimsy rebuttal of a story based on an official US Health and Human Services document, was that it specified that they never discouraged purchase of Anvisa approved vaccines. In the timeframe covered by the HHS report, there were no approved vaccines in Brazil at all.

Russia responds

By the following morning, the story began to appear across a range of international media platforms, and sparked a response from the Russian government.

Reuters reported: “The Kremlin said on Tuesday that pressure on some countries to refuse to buy Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19 was at unprecedented levels, but that said such efforts had no chances of success. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the remarks when asked to comment on a U.S. government report which appeared to show that the United States had attempted to dissuade Brazil from buying Sputnik V. He said Russia was against politicising the situation around vaccines.”

As the story spread it was also revealed that Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had been in direct contact with former Brazilian President Lula, who held a remote meeting with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, in a personal effort to secure more vaccine doses for the country. Russia later agreed to send 37 million doses of Sputnik V, targeted for the north eastern region of Brazil, whose governors had fought a long legal battle with the federal government for the right to deploy such vaccines.

https://www.brasilwire.com/fallout-us-s ... -incident/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 20, 2021 1:54 pm

“A Sign of Progress”: How a Tiny Corporate Media Clique Inverted Reality During Brazil’s 2016 Coup
April 19, 2021 Editor2
By Brasil Wire – Apr 17, 2021

On the fifth anniversary of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the role foreign media played in propagandising for it still warrants further investigation.

Little of international media coverage of Brazil’s 2016 coup and its centrepiece, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, has dated well. But one opinion piece in US newspaper the New York Times stands out as emblematic of the inverted reality being presented to the world, as Brazil’s first female president was facing a right-wing plot to remove her and her progressive government from office.

Written by Op-Ed contributor, the Associated Press Rio correspondent, Juliana Barbassa, it was headlined “Why Brazil’s Corruption Scandal Is a Sign of Progress”. It was published on March 15, 2016, one month before the first congressional vote to impeach Dilma Rousseff and with the campaign against her at full tilt.

At this point it was already apparent to any serious analyst that something was very wrong. Anti-Coup protests were occurring in equal frequency and numbers to the yellow and green demonstrations for Dilma’s impeachment, yet the article begins: “Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets over the weekend to protest their government and to send a message to the country’s political class: No one is untouchable. Brazil’s politicians should take that to heart. The Federal Police temporarily detained Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former president, for questioning earlier this month in connection with a huge — and expanding — graft investigation. President Dilma Rousseff, Mr. da Silva’s handpicked successor, could be next.”

Media consumers who consider themselves engaged with world affairs would have no doubt seen an article like this one in the paper of record, taken it at face value, and have had no idea how wrong it was, nor how incestuous its conception.

They might consult multiple trusted sources and see this inversion of reality corroborated. They wouldn’t know that the most prominent English language reporters were meeting regularly and sharing notes. For example, on the very same day, the Guardian published an editorial calling for Rousseff to resign.

They could look at news agency Reuters, and see something broadly in line with what they had read in the NYT.

They wouldn’t know that Brian Winter, until recently the Reuters Brazil correspondent, now worked indirectly on behalf of Chevron, one of the principal lobbyists for, and beneficiaries of the coup. They wouldn’t know that both Winter and Brazil bureau chief Todd Benson had recently left Reuters following a scandal in which it was seen to have censored information that was considered favourable to Dilma and the Workers Party.

They wouldn’t know that the Reuters correspondent had got the NYT pieces’ author, Juliana Barbassa, a job at oil, agribusiness, banking and mining industry lobby Council of the Americas‘ in-house magazine Americas Quarterly, from where she became the New York Times’ Latin America and Caribbean desk editor.

They wouldn’t know that the author’s husband Chris Gaffney, was a primary source for Dave Zirin’s character assassination of Lula, Dance with the Devil, who, living in a penthouse apartment on Rio’s Botofogo bay, used the World Cup as a platform to attack the PT from a radical left standpoint.

They wouldn’t know that the Brazil bureau chief at Associated Press, Brad Brooks, was personally forbidding staff from use the word Coup/Golpe to describe what was happening in Brazil, regardless of their belief, and even on their private Facebook pages.

They wouldn’t know that a group of young and influential Brazilian reporters, including those from AP, had been taken on all expenses paid trips to the US, for briefings at the State Department, to learn about “sustainable funding models”.

Finally, they might look for opinions from across the political spectrum.

They wouldn’t know that ostensibly leftist voices they may have followed in Brazil were funded by corporate philanthropy from Ford Foundation, Pierre Omidyar and OSF, nor that they were closer professionally and socially to this same group of corporate reporters than they were the actual Brazilian left. This promiscuity can be confirmed by reading hundreds of friendly bar-setting twitter engagements with AS/COA Americas Quarterly editor and Alvaro Uribe / FHC biographer Brian Winter, by journalists such as New Yorker’s Alex Cuadros and LA Times correspondent Vincent Bevins during Dilma’s impeachment, and in the lead up to Lula’s arrest two years later.

This appearance of consensus fed into foreign television, as US comedy writers used the NYT as their principal source. Brian Mier writes: “Even John Oliver made a joke about Dilma Rousseff and Petrobras corruption. It wasn’t based on facts, but helped his liberal US audience feel comfortable about the illegal impeachment of Brazil’s first woman President and subsequent US corporate oil grab.”Daniel Hunt adds “Don’t ever doubt the cumulative effect foreign media coverage can have on the actual political scenario inside a country like Brazil, which is uniquely fixated with how it is covered abroad. All the liberals were sharing this nonsense at the time of Rousseff’s impeachment.”

It was only after the April 2016 congressional vote, from which Jair Bolsonaro launched his 2018 presidential bid that the hand-wringing began, from a cluster of mostly US media professionals who had shown no critical analysis as the campaign against Dilma raged, from her re-election in October 2014, right through to her impeachment.

Maybe a fascist elected as president wasn’t the outcome they imagined, but with no tanks on the street, the 2016 coup was staged in the media, which late Brazilian journalist Paulo Henrique Amorim labeled, The 4th Power. Brazil is living with the deadly consequences now, and every journalist who endorsed, normalized and enabled a subversion of democracy, who went along with the narratives of right-wing regime change, holds a degree of culpability.

Not only did their often brazen propaganda actually influence opinion within Brazil’s media classes, together they created a screen of editorial cover which stunted international solidarity for Rousseff and her centre-left government in their hour of need. This was no unfortunate accident; it was an ethical and journalistic disgrace, with observers as actors.

There is no “They wouldn’t know” on the reporters’ part, and this is not hindsight. Some people were paid to be wrong.

https://orinocotribune.com/a-sign-of-pr ... 2016-coup/

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Brazilian Federal Court of Audits Acquits Dilma Rousseff
April 17, 2021 orinocotribune Brazil, Brazil's Supreme Court, Brazilian Court of Audits, Corruption, Dilma Rousseff, Lava Jato, lawfare, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Petrobras, political persecution
On Wednesday, April 14, the Federal Court of Audits of Brazil acquitted former president Dilma Rousseff of all charges in a case regarding the purchase of a refinery in Pasadena, United States, by the Brazilian state petroleum company Petrobras in 2006.

At the time of the purchase, Rousseff was the minister of mines and energy in the administration of Lula da Silva.

The judges of the Court of Audits decided to acquit Dilma after taking into account that the Directorate of Petrobras had no responsibility in the case.

“There is no evidence in the records indicating that anyone involved in this case knew of the scheme,” said judge Vital do Rego. “As regards the members of the Board of Directors, the documents that were submitted to them and the information present in those documents did not contain contradictions or indications that might have allowed them to realize that the proposal of the acquisition was of a much higher value,” she added.

The purchase made by Petrobras in Pasadena was the subject of an investigation for presumed overvaluation and diversion of funds within the framework of Operation Lava Jato, a strategy of lawfare with which Dilma was impeached and Lula da Silva was sentenced to prison.

The court found the former president of Petrobras, José Sérgio Gabrielli, responsible for the losses incurred in the purchase of the US refinery.

Supreme Court confirms Lula’s acquittal
The Federal Supreme Court of Brazil, in a majority decision, discarded the appeal by the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic that tried to reverse the annulment of the charges brought against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by the Federal Court of Paraná in the context of Operation Lava Jato.

Eight members of the Supreme Court voted in favor and three against the ruling that had declared that it was outside the jurisdiction of the criminal court of Curitiba to try the former president. This decision allows Lula to retain his political rights that he regained when the court annulled all charges against him on March 8, 2021, and to be free to run for the presidency in 2022.

Featured image: Former presidents of Brazil, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, were targets of judicial persecution in Operation Lava Jato. Photo: Exame

(Mision Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/brazilian-fe ... -rousseff/

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Image

Confirmed! Lula Totally Acquitted, Can Run for President Again
April 16, 2021 Jose Manuel Blanco Diaz

With a vote of eight judges in favor and three against, Brazilian leader Luis Inazio Lula da Silva received confirmation of his complete acquittal on the charges laid against him regarding alleged acts of corruption in the infamous Lava Jato case.

With this decision by a majority of the plenary session of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Federative Republic of Brazil, the court determined that the 13th Court of Curitiba, through which they issued the sentence, is incompetent to rule on the case.

For this reason, the sentences imposed by this body, through Judge Sergio Moro, were annulled, and if any of the cases against Lula are to be tried, this must now be done in Brasilia.

The accusation of the judge, ally of Bolsonaro and the US embassy in Brazilia, kept Lula in prison for 580 days. However, the intention was that his sentence would keep the political and labor leader there for 20 years. Once the possibility of Lula’s candidacy in the 2018 presidential elections was eliminated, Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power was facilitated.

Lula or Bolsonaro?
With this new decision issued by the Supreme Court of Justice of Brazil, the path has been cleared for da Silva to challenge the presidency of his country in the next elections, scheduled for next year

According to local opinion polls, Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva currently holds an advantage, and would defeat Jair Bolsonaro in elections if they were held today. However, like any political scenario, some experts warn that there is still 18 months to go before the presidential elections, so it is difficult to secure a verdict.

Bolsonaro’s popularity has plummeted since the WHO declared a pandemic. This has happened largely due to the ruler’s attitude of denial, which has put the lives of millions of Brazilians at risk with the country’s failure to establish timely and reasonable health policies.

In numerical terms, the scenario could be compared to that of 2018, when Lula da Silva enjoyed the support of a majority of the population, while Bolsonaro remained in second place. However, it is currently necessary to assess the rejection that Bolsonaro has unleashed, in the midst of the onslaught of COVID-19 in Brazil .

Featured image: Former Brazilian president, Luis Ignacio Lula Da Silva. File photo.

(RedRadioVE) by Jose Manuel Blanco Diaz

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/JRE/SL

https://orinocotribune.com/confirmed-lu ... ent-again/

Acquittals are good, but the immense damage done remains. US Justice and State departments to the Hague!
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri May 14, 2021 11:53 am

Bolsonaro’s R$3 Billion Bribery Scheme To Keep Himself In Power

A fascist president, brought to power through a spurious anti-corruption campaign faces his most serious corruption scandal yet, with the revelation of what could be the world’s biggest bribery scheme – a play to keep the crumbling Bolsonaro-Guedes regime in power.

An explosive report in newspaper Estado de S.Paulo has revealed that Brazil’s far right president Jair Bolsonaro created a secret R$3 billion budget of money earmarked to buy off Congress.

With Bolsonaro already facing over 100 impeachment requests, he and his family have already faced multiple corruption allegations since taking office, but the scale of the latest report dwarfs anything that has gone before, in what could be the biggest bribery case in the world.

The secret scheme of illegal pork payments, or emendas, exemplifies the systemic corruption which US-backed operation Lava Jato, which brought him to power, was supposed to eradicate.As news broke on Sunday, social media users quickly named the scandal Bolsolão, after the so called Mensalão and Petrolão corruption scandals of previous decades. Both of those schemes were used to attack the Workers Party specifically, despite pre-dating PT governments and involving almost the entire political spectrum. It was the selective prosecution of those scandals which were used to build the narrative for both the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the jailing of Lula da Silva, the two illegitimate acts which opened the door for the military-dominated Bolsonaro-Guedes regime to take power.

Though Bolsonaro’s popularity is already at a record low, and he is facing extremely serious allegations over his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, the latest revelations will erode further what remains of the legitimacy, given the discredited means by which he came to power.

Questions are being asked about what budgetary cuts were made to pay for the secret R$3 billion budget, particularly in regard to the procurement and development of Covid-19 vaccines.

The new revelations also expose the real risk that any attempted impeachment of the far right president could be defeated in Congress through such a bribery scheme.

Bolsonaro created the parallel budget at the end of 2020, in order to secure support from the so called “centrão” conservative bloc in Congress. Estado de S.Paulo reveals that the budget included, for example, the purchase of tractors and agricultural equipment at ​​up to 259% above market price. The data was found in over one hundred letters sent by deputies and senators to the Ministry of Regional Development. The letters, obtained by the newspaper over the past three months, show that this scheme breaks budgetary laws, since it is ministers and not parliamentarians who should define where resources will be spent.

The agreements and the allocation of the money were not public, and the distribution was not equal among the congressmen, revealing the electoral interests of the government. Senator for Amapá Davi Alcolumbre, of Democratas, ordered the investment of R$277 million in public funds from the Ministry of Regional Development alone. Under budgetary rules this would be the responsibility of Minister Rogério Marinho. If Alcombre, a former Senate President, was to request this investment through conventional means it would take 34 years, since each parliamentarian has a limit of only R$8 million per year. Alcolumbre also sent R$81 million to the Development Company of the São Francisco and Parnaíba Valleys (Codevasf), a state-owned company under his control. The documents also show that the senator allocated R$10 million for works and purchases outside his own state of Amapá. This money was destined for construction projects in the state of Paraná.

Those named in the report include former deputy Flávia Arruda from Partido Liberal. Arruda is a member of the Bolsonaro cabinet, serving as chief minister of the Government Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, and is directly responsible for articulating with Congress.

Further developments on this story are expected over the coming days.

https://www.brasilwire.com/bolsonaros-r ... e-exposed/

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Brazil Passes Law To Reduce Gov't-Led Environmental Assessment

Image
According to the journal Biological Conservation, the government of Jair Bolsonaro has passed 57 legislation to weaken environmental conservation since the far-right president took office. | Photo: Twitter/ @theworlddaily24

Published 13 May 2021 (14 hours 48 minutes ago)

The new regulation leaves some of these projects completely exempt from environmental licensing, a major blow to conservationist groups who continue denouncing the devastation of the Amazon rainforest and the human rights violations of its Indigenous peoples.


Brazil's Congress lower house passed on Thursday a bill to further reduce state-conducted environmental assessments and allow companies to carry out their impact study instead, a decision widely rejected by activists and human rights organizations.

The bill lifts control over a series of economic ventures from the construction of roads to agriculture, which used to require a state-led environmental study to be approved. According to the previous mechanism, a federal government entity would carry out the analysis alongside the Brazilian environmental agency Ibama.


"With Bolsonaro's support, the Chamber of Deputies approved the bill that restricts or withdraws the tools for analysis, prevention, and control of environmental impacts. The State will abandon these functions, and those who may commit environmental crimes will be granted "self-permits.""
The new regulation leaves some of these projects completely exempt from environmental licensing, a major blow to conservationist groups who continue denouncing the devastation of the Amazon rainforest and the human rights violations of its Indigenous peoples.

According to the journal Biological Conservation, the government of Jair Bolsonaro has passed 57 legislation to weaken environmental conservation since the far-right president took office. In addition, in April, Bolsonaro cut the Environment Ministry budget by 24 percent, a day after promising that he would double it to fight deforestation.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0020.html
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 05, 2021 2:00 pm

The Beginning Of The End: #29M Anti-Bolsonaro Protests
AUTHORITARIANISM CORONAVIRUS PROTEST SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
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On Saturday May 29, 2021, Brazil saw its biggest public mobilisations since the Coronavirus pandemic began. Hundreds of thousands of protesters, organised in 213 cities nationwide, took to the streets against the Bolsonaro-Guedes regime. Amongst the visible messages, anger was directed specifically at its mishandling of the pandemic, with demonstrators demanding vaccines, emergency payments, and indignant at the spiralling cost of living.

But the #29M protests were built around a unifying and unambiguous demand: an end to the Bolsonaro presidency.

“Being on the streets to fight is an extreme act, to say enough is enough, we are all tired of the suffering imposed on the country”, said Workers Party president Gleisi Hoffmann, while former PSOL presidential candidate Guilherme Boulos of the MTST homeless workers movement, insisted in a speech to São Paulo demonstrators that it is “impossible to wait until 2022” for Bolsonaro’s inevitable fall.

Renan Calheiros, Senator and rapporteur to the inquiry into the government’s handling of Covid-19, predicted the protests would only grow.

A new conjuncture

Whilst these were not the first public protests against the Bolsonaro regime during the pandemic, the scale of the latest demonstrations have taken some observers by surprise. After a year of panelaços against the president, and staged efforts to bolster Bolsonaro’s dwindling support over recent months, Brazil’s progressive forces reclaimed the streets in a show of strength which corroborated recent opinion polls showing that a majority of Brazilians want the far-right president removed. Revelations from the Senate Inquiry into the Bolsonaro regime’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic have only intensified demands for his removal.

Facing 130 impeachment petitions, and with 57% favouring impeachment, Bolsonaro’s approval is collapsing, and he falling far behind in electoral polls. Journalist Aquiles Lins, remarks that one of the main ingredients for impeachment is no longer missing: the people on the street. “The political cost of supporting Bolsonaro is going to increase progressively from now on, as new protests happen”, the pressure on congressional president Arthur Lira to accept one or more of these impeachment petitions is growing daily.

In the words of politician Ulysses Guimarães, during the military dictatorship: “The only thing that scares these people is people on the street.”

The protests were led by social movement and trade union groups, popular fronts Frente Brasil Popular and Povo Sem Medo, along with organisations such as Black Rights Coalition, and supported by the main left parties. Many of those who support the removal Bolsonaro were reticent to go out on the streets during the pandemic, but expressed respect for the courage of those who did. Others considered the risks too great. With Covid-19 cases still alarmingly high in Brazil, masks and alcohol spray were provided in some instances, and distancing was encouraged.

Some studies on the experience of Black Lives Matter protests in the United States during 2020 found that fears such outdoor masked protests could cause a spike in Covid-19 cases were unfounded, and risk of transmission was actually low. But the calculus of the Brazilian demonstrators was that a show of strength was necessary, despite risk. A slogan circulating on the streets and social media went: “If people need to protest in the middle of a pandemic it is because the government is more dangerous than the virus”.

Two hundred cities

A total of 213 Brazilian cities held protests, and 17 outside the country, with a conservative estimate of 430,000 participants nationally.

Images of huge demonstrations Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Belem, and Porto Alegre circulated during the day. The biggest was, as usual, in megacity São Paulo, which saw astonishingly high turnout in the circumstances.

That this protest was taking place at the weekend was a key difference. It was a surprise to see this latest protest permitted on a Saturday, with a State Governor now openly opposed to Bolsonaro. Since 2015/16 the battle for legitimacy between pro and anti coup forces was regularly measured by protest attendance. The former always had Sunday afternoons on Avenida Paulista, whereas the anti-coup demonstrations usually took place on midweek evenings, putting them at significant disadvantage, even before we begin to talk about the pro-impeachment demonstration’s active promotion by the media. During that pre-coup period, Military police estimates also notoriously undercounted any protest of the left and amplified those of the right.

São Paulo’s latest protest followed a favoured route, assembling at Museum of Modern Art on Avenida Paulista, building critical mass until it occupied ten blocks of the avenue, until marching 3 kilometres down eight lane Consolação to Praca Roosevelt.

Roosevelt is where protests of the left often terminate in barrage of police bombs and tear gas. This time it didn’t.

Although earlier in the day rumours circulated on social media that police violence had begun in São Paulo, assumedly to discourage attendance, the question is if São Paulo Governor João Doria, one time ally now sworn enemy of Bolsonaro, actually instructed the usually truculent PMSP (Military Police) to leave the protest alone.

Recife’s demonstrators were not so fortunate. At its demonstration, some hours before São Paulo’s began, Military Police attacked the peaceful assembly with tear gas and rubber bullets. One man who was even not part of the demonstration was shot in the eye and subsequently lost it. Workers Party city councillor, Liana Cirne, confronted a police car to urge them to stop targeting the demonstrators. She was pepper sprayed and left lying on the road.

The PCdoB vice governor of Pernambuco State Luciana Santos posted an urgent message to say that the police actions were not authorised by their government. This was a worrying sign that the Military Police might be acting autonomously or being guided by another authority. Governor Paulo Câmara of the PSB has since announced that he is firing police who attacked protesters, as well as his state’s Military Police Commander.

Media omission

Folha de S.Paulo was the only major paper to feature the protests prominently on its Sunday cover. Whereas the anti-Dilma demonstrations of 2015 and 2016 were front covers, Estadão meanwhile had only a small item about protests causing agglomeration and covid risk, and O Globo also omitted the massive protests from its cover.

Globo gave some coverage to the protests on its 24 hour news channel throughout the day, but did not cover them live as was the case with the Anti-Dilma protests of 2015 and 2016. Following criticism of minimisation on flagship news show Jornal Nacional, and pressure on social networks, Globo’s Fantastico carried analysis of the protests the following evening.

El País journalist Eliane Blum wrote: “Today’s Globo and Estadão covers are much more than a historic shame. Big newspapers, with public responsibility, betraying the facts. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians occupy the streets of Brazil shouting “Fora, Bolsonaro” and Globo headlines “GDP rises” and Estadão talks about “tourism”. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians shouting in the streets “I hold you responsible, Bolsonaro” and Globo and Estadão think they can simply minimize – and they are so sure they can, that they minimize. Fact, what fact? News, where?”

It should surprise nobody that these media organisations would omit mass protests against a political project they explicitly supported. While it is evident that whilst Anti-Bolsonaro sentiment may exist within them, it is also now clear their owners are not yet desperate for him to be removed, despite the pandemic catastrophe which has already left almost 500 thousand dead. The re-emergence of Lula da Silva since his absolution from the charges that kept him out in 2018, with a viable centre-right competitor yet to emerge, has seemingly put the fear of god up them. The idea that Lula will be the “establishment candidate” against Bolsonaro is apparently far fetched.

Ghosts of June 2013

Some lingering distrust of mass street mobilizations dates back to June 2013, the eventual repercussions of which resulted in the ouster of a then popular centre-left government, and its replacement with a military dominated far-right one; something its original protagonists never envisaged.

One of the features of June 2013 was the substitution of its original progressive messages with those of anti-corruption and outright reaction. This shift was not spontaneous as many suggested; it was stimulated by both hegemonic media, such as Globo, and even by internationally funded NGOs. For example, opposition to PEC37, legislation which was depicted as an impunity law, appeared on the demonstrations – protesters could even download ready made placards to print – and the bill was defeated in congress under perceived pressure from the streets. This in part enabled the excesses of what would become Operation Lava Jato, which was already in gestation.

These ghosts of June 2013 still haunt Brazil. In an echo of this, TV Record, owned by Bolsonaro allied founder of the Neopentecostal Universal Church, Bishop Edir Macedo, reported the #29M protests as being simply a demand for extension of pandemic welfare payments, which had given the president a short lived popularity boost during 2020.

Thus there is an underlying paranoia that Bolsonaro, and the broader right coalition which initially supported him, could somehow manipulate and benefit from these new demonstrations. Suggestions that subsequent actions to adopt the yellow and green of the right wing protests which underpinned the coups of 1964 and 2016 have caused some alarm. The parallel in 2013 was a demand to abandon organisation flags and banners, for the protests to be “without parties”, to use only the national flag, which enabled inchoate proto-golpista messages to be projected onto them.

International repercussion

There was widespread coverage of the protests in the international press. Spain’s El País, and France’s Libération both highlighted the left protagonism of the protests, the latter calling them a show of strength. Germany’s Der Spiegel called Bolsonaro “more unpopular than ever. Whilst U.S. Network CNN reported on the demonstrations, the New York Times did not. The BBC featured the protests on its website.

UK newspaper the Guardian got in early on #29M with what appeared to be a pre-prepared report which underestimated attendance as to to be in the tens of thousands. It spoke too soon. The São Paulo demonstration alone exceeded this number, with an estimated national total closer to 450 thousand, symbolically close to the number of lives lost to Covid-19. After seeing its Latin America coverage pilloried, in particular its support for right wing coups, including Brazil’s, the Guardian now tries to rebuild trust on the left by getting on the anti-Bolsonaro bandwagon, whilst Brazil will accept any help it can get.

It is important to appraise how the world’s media interpreted these new protests in context of the recent past.

Coverage of protests is historically uneven, both nationally and internationally. Those which rocked Brazil in June 2013 got blanket coverage around the world, as did those 2015/16 calling for recently re-elected Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment. Both of these interpreted as threat to a sitting centre left government. There was however a virtual blackout on coverage of massive anti-coup demonstrations that were often equal or greater in attendance than those of the right. Brasil Wire covered this issue extensively at the time, for example: ‘Brazil’s prescribed revolt: A tale of two protests in São Paulo‘ (March 2015), ‘Repression of pro-democracy protests‘ (August 2016), ‘#15M The Big Hush‘ (March 2017).

As we documented at the time, much like conservative Brazilian media the Anglosphere was only interested in protests against Dilma Rousseff which fit the Lava Jato narrative. It ignored similarly sized mobilisations against the coup, and provided no analysis of the lawfare process which brought Bolsonaro to power by jailing Lula, nor coverage of constant demonstrations against his imprisonment. Following his election, the Guardian framed an early demonstration of resistance in these terms: “Thousands of Brazilian protesters have marched through the heart of São Paulo to tell their newly elected far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, they recognize his democratic election […]”

This bizarre spin fit a pattern in anglo media, of emphasising the legitimacy of Bolsonaro’s mandate, the “freeness and fairness” of the election, whilst omitting what was already known; that his main opponent had been jailed to keep him off the ballot, with the cooperation of the Military and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Thus the Anglo media response to the latest Brazilian demonstrations suggests that, editorially at least, something has changed. Former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim recently remarked that he expects the United States to accept a Lula presidency, and that Bolsonaro is simply too much trouble for the Biden administration.

The beginning of the end

These latest protests should have at the very least killed off the the final remnants of Bolsonaro’s image as “Business Friendly” “Arch-Conservative” with broad popular support, which had been the depiction in some quarters since the 2018 election campaign.

Until relatively recently, some sectors of international press were even depicting Jair Bolsonaro as “more popular than ever”. From his U.S. business backers at Americas Quarterly, through to their curious allies the Guardian again, whose October 2020 article ”He became a hero’: Bolsonaro sees popularity surge as Covid-19 spreads’ was sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Whilst these were based on misreading of short term polling data, Bolsonaro has been more resilient in office than many expected. From isolation in congress, to rumours he had been sidelined to a ceremonial role by the Military, there have been a succession of hopeful predictions of his imminent demise. Unfortunately for Brazil he is still standing.

The recent revelation of a $3bn real bribery scheme to keep him in the presidency may explain why none of the 130 impeachment petitions against him have been put to the vote by two successive congressional presidents. But current president of congress Arthur Lira now says that he will consider them, as a result of the Senate covid inquiry, and even before the #29M protests.

Outside his core, estimated to still be around 15% of the electorate, few people expect Bolsonaro to win in 2022, barring some new lawfare attack on former president Lula, who is currently on course to win in the first round. The question is whether Bolsonaro will be a candidate at all, or will have fallen before it comes to that.

But there remains a chunk of the electorate, and foreign business and banking, whose support was for Minister of the Economy Paulo Guedes, not Bolsonaro himself, and they will hope that his ruinous ultraliberal economic programme can continue in a post-Bolsonaro scenario.

Time will tell if a new wave of protest does hasten Bolsonaro’s removal. #29M may indeed have been a sea change, but progressives should be warier than ever of its appropriation by the very forces responsible for Brazil’s current plight, at home and abroad.

https://www.brasilwire.com/29m-anti-bolsonaro-protests/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 14, 2021 1:49 pm

BRASIL WIRE , MAY 19, 2021
Sabotage and Denial: Brazil’s Disastrous Coronavirus Response

The following interview with Brasil Wire co-editor Brian Mier was conducted by Şerbet Sağlam for the Turkish newspaper Gazete Duvar.

Şerbet Sağlam: In the last year, the number of daily cases and death rate in Brazil has increased dramatically in particular in April 2021. How does government manage the pandemic? What happened in April as we witnessed rise of deaths, especially of children?

Brian Mier: Our President, Jair Bolsonaro, seems to be the last World leader who still continually denies that Covid is a problem, who still claims – with no scientific data to back him up – that chloroquine cures Covid 19 and that masks and lock-down measures are unnecessary. So all measures that have been effective in any way in combating the pandemic have come from governors and mayors, many from opposition parties to Bolsonaro. But, unfortunately, our neofascist President has made threats against local officials for instituting partial lock-down measures and has continually sabotaged efforts by governors to purchase more vaccines. Unfortunately, the dramatic rise in deaths in Brazil – nearly 100,000 in April alone – seems to be connected to new mutations of the virus, especially one which started in the Amazonian city of Manaus. Half the people who were interned in ICU unites during the month of April were under the age of 40. This new mutation seems to be killing young people just as effectively as the original Covid-19 killed people over the age of 70.

Şerbet Sağlam: Vaccination has become a big issue for some countries like Turkey and India. Brazil has started vaccination, what is the vaccination situation?

Historically, Brazil has had one of the best vaccination programs in the world. This is shown by statistics regarding annual flu deaths. Due to its free public vaccine program, Brazil has averaged less than 1000 flu deaths per year for the last 20 years, whereas in the US, these numbers have averaged around 30,000 per year during this period. During the last year of Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s government, they vaccinated 90 million people against the flu, with vaccines produced in Brazil, in 60 days. Unfortunately this is all water under the bridge now as the Brazilian President has actively worked to sabotage the national vaccine program.

Şerbet Sağlam: Like Turkey, Brazil has also preferred vaccines from China. But in addition to that Brazil has rejected Sputnik V, Russia’s vaccine. What kinds of vaccines are available? Do people access them easily?

Brian Mier: Unfortunately, the Bolsonaro government, including Economics Minister Paulo Guedes, has been treating the vaccine emergency as a geopolitical issue. Therefore, despite the fact that 90% of vaccines administered in Brazil have been the Chinese/Brazilian developed Coronavac – a partnership between Brazil’s Butantan Institute and the Chinese company Sinovac – members of Bolsonaro’s team continue to spread misinformation implying that it is somehow inferior. Regarding Sputnik V – after a consortium of left wing governors from the Northeast, negotiated directly with Russia for the purchase of 67 million doses, the Bolsonaro government worked to cancel the order, without showing how it could provide anything in its place. Later, it came out that the US government sent an envoy to Brazil in 2020, specifically to convince the Brazilian government to not purchase Sputnik V.

Şerbet Sağlam: Is there any economic relief for people of Brazil during the pandemic? Does the Bolsonaro Government support people to handle the economic pressure of the pandemic?

Brian Mier: In 2020, due to pressure from the opposition parties in Congress, the Bolsonaro government agreed to give between R$600-R$1200 to poor families during the pandemic. In dollar terms this would be the equivalent of $120-240/month. Unfortunately, after the program expired and families received nothing for the first 3 months of 2022, the government lowered its payments to R$150-R$300 (US$ 30-60). To put things in perspective, the minimum wage in Brazil is R$1000/month.

Şerbet Sağlam: Last year Bolsonaro called the governors tyrants due to their lock-down measures to curb the virus spreading. Are there any changes in his attitude, are there any lock-down or curfew measures to prevent virus spreading?

Brian Mier: It does not look like he is changing his position on this at all – to the contrary, his threats are becoming worse.

Şerbet Sağlam: Lastly, Bolsonaro first said “Covid 19 was a basic flu”, then he said “the vaccine (from Pfizer) will transform people into crocodiles”. What is your opinion about the president’s accroach to the virus and vaccines?

Brian Mier: I believe that he has been deliberately encouraging a culling of the elderly population so that his government can save money on social spending. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement estimates that the Bolsonaro government is now saving around $120 million/month on federal pension payments due to the number of senior citizens who died from Covid 19 last year. Furthermore, and aid to Bolsonaro’s Economics Minister Paulo Guedes was caught on tape last year talking about how much they would save on social spending if 100,000 seniors died. This is the only explanation I can think of as to why a president wold deliberately encourage the dying off of 400,000 of his citizens. The only other explanation I can think of is that Jair Bolsonaro and his Cabinet Ministers like Paulo Guedes are insane.

https://www.brasilwire.com/sabotage-and ... -response/

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NATHALIA URBAN , MAY 21, 2021
Brazilian Vaccine Production Halted After Bolsonaro’s China Attacks
By Nathalia Urban

The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) interrupted its production of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine due to lack of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (IFA).

The institute says that a shipment of IFA should arrive tomorrow (22/05). AstraZeneca and CoronaVac are the only two vaccines of the Ministry of Health’s National Immunization Program (PNI), that are produced in Brazil. The Pfizer vaccine is imported from the United States.

Fiocruz should deliver another 5.3 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. With this shipment, the foundation will hit the mark of 40 million doses delivered.

Last week, the Butantan Institute also had to completely suspend the production of the CoronaVac vaccine due to lack of IFAs.

The institute is awaiting the release by the Chinese government of 10,000 litres of IFA, equivalent to 18 million doses, in order to resume production. Currently, the foundation’s production capacity reaches about 1 million doses per day. According to a statement from the institute, there is still no forecast that the temporary interruption may impact future deliveries.

The Butantan Institute director said last week that President Jair Bolsonaro’s statements criticizing China affect the export of IFA by the country’s authorities.

In his latest attack on China, Bolsonaro suggested that the country would have benefited economically from the pandemic and said that the covid may have been created in a laboratory – echoing a hypothesis that is not supported by any investigation from the World Health Organization (WHO) on the possible origins of the virus.

Nine days after Jair Bolsonaro attacked China, raising suspicions that the country used the coronavirus as a “biological warfare”, the Butantan Institute halted the production of the main vaccine in use in the country, because of the lack of IFA supplies from China.

It is not the first time that Chinese IFA’s have been blocked because of attacks by the president and his family on the Asian country, which is the main producer of CoronaVac’s IFA and Brazil’s largest trading partner. But yesterday (20/05) China’s ambassador to Brazil, Yang Wanming, announced on social media the release of new IFAs for the production of vaccines against covid-19 by the Butantan Institute and Fiocruz. Wanming attended a meeting of the Governors’ Forum to discuss the release of these raw materials required for Brazil to manufacture the vaccines.

After four months since the start of the vaccination against Covid-19 in Brazil, only 39% of the elderly over 60 years of age were vaccinated with two doses of any vaccine in Brazil

https://www.brasilwire.com/brazilian-va ... a-attacks/

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BRASIL WIRE , MAY 28, 2021
Brazil’s Ex-Health Minister: “250 thousand deaths could have been prevented with Coronavac alone”
By Julinho Bittencourt. Revista Forum.

Former Health Minister Artur Chioro, commenting on an excerpt from the testimony of the Butantan Institute’s director, Dimas Covas, this Thursday (27th), at the Senate Inquiry (CPI) into the pandemic response, that “we could have prevented at least 250 thousand deaths, with Coronavac alone”, if it had been bought in time by the Bolsonaro government.
Chioro explained that, “according to Dimas Covas’ testimony, we lost three and a half months to offer vaccines due to government interference. In other words, we could have prevented at least 250,000 deaths, with Coronavac alone. Imagine if we add to that what we failed to offer from Pfizer, Janssen, Sputnik, among others?”, asked the ex-minister.
“Adding together information obtained at the CPI so far, we would have been able to anticipate 18 million doses of Pfizer by March and 100 million of CoronaVac three and a half months earlier. Adding that to the doses already distributed, it would have been possible to vaccinate the entire vulnerable population (78 million people), plus 74.5 million non-vulnerable Brazilians”, said Chioro, a physician and university professor who served as minister of health in the Dilma Rousseff government.
The ex-minister added: “In other words, we would have 152 million vaccinated Brazilians (71.2% of the population) and we would already have vaccine herd immunity”.
In his testimony, Butantan director Dimas Covas also said that Brazil could have been the first country in the world to start vaccination if the institute had not been hampered in its contracts with the Ministry of Health. Vaccine testing in the country began in July 2020 in six states, in addition to Brasilia DF. The first vaccine offer to the Bolsonaro health ministry was made in July 2020, according to Covas.
At that time, 60 million doses were offered that could be delivered in the last quarter of 2020. According to Covas, there was no positive response. The contract with the ministry was closed only in January 2021.

https://www.brasilwire.com/brazils-ex-h ... vac-alone/

Chip off the old Trump, ain't he? But beyond the politics of personality there are the interests without whom these creatures from the wrong end of the spectrum of human behavior could not function on the public stage. There is money to be had, be it profits or 'savings', and they will have them, because they can. And perhaps even the half-bright among them see a nasty horizon and would 'get while the getting is good'.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 22, 2021 1:37 pm

Protests against Bolsonaro Gain Strength and Mobilize around 750 Thousand People
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 21, 2021
Peoples Dispatch

Image
“Vaccine in the arm, food on the plate and get out Bolsonaro” protest in Porto Alegre (RS). Photo: Jorge Leão

Actions for “Vaccine in the arm, food on the plate and get out Bolsonaro” were organized in at least 400 cities across Brazil and saw the participation of 750 thousand people

The conclusion is unanimous. The actions on June 19 for “vaccine in the arm, food on the plate and get out Bolsonaro,” were bigger than the mobilizations of May 29. According to the organizers, activities were organized in around 400 cities in all of the states in the country. Despite the rain which caused the cancellation of actions in some regions, around 750,000 protesters took to the streets, 25% more than the protests last month.

“The discontent with the Bolsonaro government that is already manifesting in polls was also expressed on the streets. 19J mobilized more people and there were even people participating that were already vaccinated, because while 29M saw the participation of mostly youth, there were also elderly in 19J,” explained Jessy Dayane of the national board of Levante Popular da Juventude (Popular Youth Uprising).



The central trade unions part of the call for the mobilization also had a positive evaluation.

“The political dispute in the country is on another level. There is an increase in discontent with Bolsonaro and the feeling of opposition is gaining strength in our country. Many people that voted for Jair Bolsonaro took to the streets yesterday to say enough of this project of national destruction,” declared Edson Carneiro, director of Intersindical.

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Protester in Uberaba/MG holds a sign saying “Vaccine now!”.

While the country has suffered 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 and there have been around 17.8 million infected, protesters participated in the mobilizations using masks and distributing hand sanitizer. People carried signs referring to the evidence presented by the CPI (Senate Investigative Committee) on the pandemic about the responsibility of the Executive for the deaths so far.

There were around 100 emails from the Pfizer company, according to Senator Randolfe Rodrigues (Rede-AM), offering vaccines at a lower price than established on the market that were unanswered. In addition to this, the government refused 11 other vaccine contracts, while it sought on 84 different occasions to buy chloroquine, a medicine that does not have proven effectiveness against sars-cov2 but was included in the kit of “early treatment” shared by the government.

“If the government had been minimally oriented by science, it would have sought to work alongside the state governors and the mayors, and Brazil could have avoided 70% of the deaths that occurred due to the complete lack of control and policy of Bolsonaro to test herd immunity through contamination,” affirmed the director of Intersindical.

Response

On social media, several political leaders also declared their support to the mobilizations.

“With rain and cold, Curitiba resists! We are all tired of this government of death, of hatred, and of lies. In all of Brazil, the mobilizations took place with the strong message of Out Bolsonaro!,” wrote the president of the Workers’ Party of Brazil (PT), Gleisi Hoffman.
With rain and cold in Curitiba had resistance! We are all exhausted from this government of death, hate and lies. Por todo o Brasil as manifestações aconteceram com o firme recado de #ForaBolsonaro pic.twitter.com/HMw9crNBKC

— Gleisi Hoffmann (@gleisi) June 19, 2021
The senator and president of the CPI for the Pandemic, Renan Calheiros also criticized the Executive. “The expressive mobilizations in rejection of the government of death have become more relevant in the context of the pandemic. All of Brazil mourns 500,000 deaths, except the president. This says a lot about his character,” affirmed the member of parliament.
The expressive manifestations in repudiation of the government of death acquire greater relevance due to the pandemic. The whole of Brazil regrets the 500 thousand deaths. Except the president. That says a lot about your character. #500MilDead #CPIdaPandemia #cpidacovid #Vaccinesalva pic.twitter.com/dHdkZpyyqW

— Renan Calheiros (@renancalheiros) June 20, 2021
In the same sense, the minister of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Gilmar Mendes wrote: “I hope that the lessons learned can build a more just and supportive society for the future. Social responsibility now.”
Today we reached the mark of 500 thousand dead by #COVID19 . I register my solidarity with the legion of bereaved families and friends. I hope the lessons learned will build a fairer and more supportive society for the future. Social responsibility now!

— Gilmar Mendes (@gilmarmendes) June 20, 2021
Internationally, there were protests in 17 countries across the world with Brazilians and non-Brazilians condemning the public health crisis suffered in the country.

“Without a doubt it will have a national and international impact to question and pressure the president Bolsonaro. We believe that this will increase even more the discontent with the government to be able to defeat it with an impeachment or in the polls next year,” analyzed Jessy Dayane.
#ForaBolsonaro around the world

Saturday #19J was the day of demonstrations against Jair Bolsonaro throughout Brazil and abroad. Images from London, UK. #19JForaBolsonaro

Photos: Democracy for Brazil/ London Fight Committee pic.twitter.com/1RnwDyA1PO

— Brasil de Fato (@brasildefato) June 20, 2021
Next steps

Now the people’s movements, political parties, and popular fronts that called for the last mobilizations will organize a meeting to define the next steps, considering that the prediction is that Brazil will face a third wave of infections.

For Edson Carneiro, it is a moment to intensify street protests, because while traditional media has changed its position towards the current government, the elites continue to support the economic agenda of Bolsonaro.

“In this confrontation of the extreme-right and of neoliberalism of the traditional right, the unity of people’s movements around a project of national reconstruction is what will make the difference in the political battle in the next period in Brazil,” declared the trade union leader.

At the same time, a “super request” for impeachment is being elaborated, that brings together 20 denouncements of crimes of responsibility committed by Bolsonaro. The current president broke a record of 122 impeachment requests made in his term.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/ ... nd-people/

Tweets translated by Google
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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