Brazil

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 27, 2022 1:50 pm

Bradesco Bank CEO Praises Military And Dismisses Coup Threat
By BRASILWIRE June 7, 2022

Bradesco Bank, and its Bolsonaro-supporting CEO, face backlash over his video praising the military on the eve of a coup-threatened election. It is the latest signal that international capital will back Bolsonaro and the military-political project he fronts, as it did in 2018.

Last year an economist from Santander provoked anger when, in an internal document circulated around the company and its partners, he proposed a “new coup” to prevent former president Lula da Silva returning to office at the forthcoming elections.

Now, Banco Bradesco, and its CEO, Octavio de Lazari Junior, have given the latest sign that it is backing neofascist Bolsonaro, as they did in 2018.

Both banks are members of State Department and CIA-linked corporate lobby, Council of the Americas. Santander’s head of corporate & investment banking Marco Antonio Achón is a director on the Council of the Americas board.

A video of the Bradesco President praising the Armed Forces has circulated on social media, in which de Lazari talks about his own time in the Army, in 1982. It features Bradesco official branding and appears institutional.

“I am the CEO of Banco Bradesco, where I have worked for 43 years. But four decades ago, I presented myself like this: Soldier 939 Lazari, at your command”, de Lazari tells viewers, explaining that military life taught him his principles.

“These principles, which were consolidated over the years, were fundamental for me to build my career, here at Bradesco and in the market, but also to shape my character”, the Banker explains.

Following a backlash, Bradesco insisted that that the video was personal. In a message sent to friends on social media, de Lazari says that the video was for internal use only, made at the request of the commander of the battalion in which he served, and for a visit to the Quitaúna barracks, in Osasco São Paulo, where it was intended to “motivate recruits”.

“Robust democracy”

Weeks earlier in Davos, Switzerland, for World Economic Forum, Bradesco’s two main directors, Chairman Luiz Carlos Trabuco and de Lazari Junior, played down coup threats by Jair Bolsonaro, and described Brazil’s democracy as “robust”, echoing language the U.S. government has recently re-adopted, after earlier warnings about the election. Despite those threats, United States President Joe Biden invited Jair Bolsonaro for bilateral talks during the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.

“We have a robust democracy and the recognition of a judicial system that works. The context of Brazil as a country is being – and will be even more so – a very safe harbor for the flow of international capital,” Trabuco told Estadão newspaper when asked about Bolsonaro’s brazen threats to the October elections, which he is on course to lose.

De Lazari Junior, one of the biggest supporters of Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, said that he had spoken with big hitters of international capital, such as Philipp Hildebrand, vice-president of the board of the BlackRock hedge fund, and that “their feeling is that the Brazil has a consolidated democracy”.

“There may even be a fiercer discussion on one side or the other, but democracy is consolidated and we are not taking any risks in relation to that. The election will be fierce, but I believe that what was built is preserved and we will not have this type of problem.” de Lazari insisted, in the face of widespread threats to the democratic process from his own preferred candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro came to power through the intervention of the Military in the judiciary, and the subsequent jailing of election frontrunner Lula da Silva, who then, as now led polls by 20%. Generals were assured that Lula would not be released before the election, and thus that their candidate, ex Army Captain Bolsonaro, would have a clear shot at the presidency. Lula’s jailer, disgraced formed judge Sergio Moro, was awarded multiple military honours for his lawfare assault on the Workers Party.

De Lazari also talked of the need for more privatizations, while Trabuco, responding to question on Bolsonaro/Guedes Education policy that “human capital retraining” is needed to serve the financial system. With re-election unlikely, Bolsonaro has sought international capital’s support by embarking on an effort to fast track privatisation of state control oil and energy giants Petrobras and Eletrobras.

Bolsonaro and his economy minister Paulo Guedes have been highly profitable for Brazil’s banks. In their first year of government, Bradesco’s profits leapt 13.8%. In the third quarter of 2021, Bradesco, Santander and Banco Itaú saw a 29% annual increase in profits.

“Coup Talk”
Bolsonaro opponents see the de Lazari video as approximation between Bradesco and the far-right, military-dominated government. National coordinator of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), João Paulo Rodrigues, called it a “promiscuous alliance” between the bank and the military.

“We were surprised. On the eve of an election, the president of Bradesco advertising the Armed Forces, especially the Army, which had behaved ridiculously in the pandemic, in addition to being unnecessary, is to create the idea that banks, as well as the army, want to participate in the electoral process. It is a promiscuous alliance that constrains democracy. On the eve of an election, it smells like coup talk. I hope history tells us different” – Rodrigues told Blog do Noblat.

https://www.brasilwire.com/bradesco-ban ... -military/

Brazil’s Coup May Come After Lula Takes Office
By MARCELO ZERO July 26, 2022

In 2023, the bolsonarista horde, kept mobilized by the discourse of electoral fraud, may return to the streets demanding the deposition of the new “illegitimately elected” president.

By Marcelo Zero

Bolsnonaro has been following a well known script, inherited from Steve Bannon, to try to stay in power. He is attacking the electoral system, “denouncing” in advance, without any type of proof, that there will be election fraud. He is also slandering leaders of the judiciary in an attempt to show that they have ties to “terrorism” and have a “secret communist agenda”.

In the bolsonaristas toxic bubble, disconnected from reality, these pseudo-accusations ring deep and keep the horde motivated for unrestrained hatred.They are being primed – well in advance – for an assault on democracy.

This script has two obvious potential outcomes:

1- Refusal to hold elections, under the excuse they are impossible to hold fairly; and

2- Contesting the results of the election with no proof, based only on complaints from bolsonarista voters, which could result in a new version of the US January 6 assault on the Capitol.

However, there is a third possible outcome. This would involve preventing Lula from governing and promoting a coup to remove him after his inauguration as happened with Dilma Rousseff just one year after her reelection. From the ground, this seems like the most likely outcome.

Lula will have to govern in difficult circumstances and in a context of high expectations. The country is destroyed and nearly all the social, economic, political and cultural advances achieved during years of Workers Party governance have been reversed. From 2016 forwards, there haven’t just been 7 lost years, but deep setbacks which will require great effort to repair. Furthermore, the international scenario is conflictive and restrictive due to the economic crisis – now fueled by the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia – which is harming the world’s poorest populations. This creates a delicate and unstable political framework, conducive to coup attempts.

Another factor is the lack of real commitment to democracy by vast sectors of the so-called traditional right. Now disguised as supporters of a “third path”, these sectors actively participated in the 2016 coup and could, given favorable circumstances, easily promote a new coup as long as it is, once again, cloaked in an a veneer of legality.

In order to try to improve the quality of life of the poor a future Lula government will have to promote a progressive tax reform which will certainly displease Brazil’s oligarchies. Another source of great friction with elites is a possible full or partial reversal of the deeply neoliberal 2017 labor reforms, which failed to generate new jobs while deeply exacerbating labor insecurity.

Policies aimed at protecting the environment will displease the most backward sectors of agribusiness. Furthermore policies designed to protect the so-called minorities will certainly encounter resistance in the vast sectors of our population currently dominated by medieval reactionism.

In these circumstances the bolsonarista horde, kept mobilized by the discourse of electoral fraud, may return to the streets demanding the deposition of the new “illegitimately elected” president. The spark of the discovery of a new case of alleged “corruption” will be enough for a great political fire to be ignited. This fire could return bolsonarista neofascism to power.

Therefore, the commitment to democracy cannot not end with the holding of elections and the inauguration of a new elected president. It is essential that such a commitment also extends to ensure that the freely-chosen new administration can govern and to guarantee that a new president can finish his term without major setbacks.

Lula is the great hope of Brazilian democracy. No other ruler has contributed so much to strengthening our democratic process. After all, there is no great solid and advanced democracy without income distribution, without social inclusion and without the full enjoyment of not only political and civil rights, but also social and economic rights. However, this hope needs to be channeled into actions and policies that can change the sad reality of a destroyed, divided and profoundly unequal country that is once again suffering from hunger.

The fascist beast of bolsonarismo will always be on the prowl. Lula and the aligned democratic and progressive forces will need to govern for a long time to disarm all the traps against democracy and put Brazilian neo-fascism where it belongs: in the garbage can of history.

https://www.brasilwire.com/brazils-coup ... es-office/

Greenwald Book’s Curious Blindspot for US Involvement In Brazil
By SEAN T. MITCHELL May 17, 2022

Brazil-based lawyer turned journalist Glenn Greenwald made his name in 2013 with exposures of US spying on the world, including the then government of Dilma Rousseff. Despite regular critiques of US imperialism elsewhere in the world, since 2015 he has published little or nothing on his government’s involvement in Brazil, and his latest book puzzlingly omits documented, openly admitted US participation in Operation Lava Jato, the disgraced bilateral lawfare operation which jailed Lula and brought Bolsonaro to power.

With Bolsonaro now running against Lula for re-election, the United States government has moved to distance itself from any anti-democratic actions which threaten the October vote, making scrutiny of its involvement over the past decade all the more important. – Editors


Review: Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, by Glenn Greenwald. 2021. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

By Sean T. Mitchell. Originally published at FAIR.

Glenn Greenwald’s book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, opens with his recollection of a conversation in which Carl Bernstein, the US journalist of Watergate fame, told him that he’d never get another scoop as “big or impactful” as the Snowden archive (p. viii), for which Greenwald was the principal journalistic source.

Not so. On Mother’s Day 2019, just a few months into the administration of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Greenwald, the US-born, Rio de Janeiro–based journalist (and endless source of Twitter controversy), would receive his second “once-in-a-lifetime scoop” (p. vii). The scoop arrived from a source who had hacked a massive archive of leaks that would go on to transform Brazilian politics. The archive contained years of conversation on the Telegram app by the key prosecutors and judge of the Brazilian “anti-corruption” task force known as Lava Jato (Portuguese for “Car Wash”). Securing Democracy tells the story of the reporting on those leaks by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of all this for Brazil. While the massive, multi-year Lava Jato investigation was receiving rapturous praise in Brazilian and foreign media (FAIR.org, 3/8/21), it was releasing illegally obtained and misleading wiretaps to the media that created the conditions for the soft coup that unseated President Dilma Rousseff of the PT (Workers’ Party) in 2016. And then Lava Jato put the PT’s 2018 presidential frontrunner, former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, behind bars, securing Bolsonaro’s election. The work done by Greenwald and his colleagues (and, later, by Lula’s defense team, once they got the archive) showed all this to be deliberate and farcical: Lava Jato was operating illegally with a key goal of destroying the electorally successful left.

Explosive revelations

Working in secrecy, Greenwald and his colleagues simultaneously released three articles at the Intercept in June 2019, all based on those Telegram conversations. Cleverly named “Vaza Jato” (vaza means “leak” in Portuguese), the series in its first installments showed that Sergio Moro, the key judge involved in Lava Jato (who by then was Bolsonaro’s security minister), had been acting unlawfully as “clandestine chief of the prosecution” (p. xiv).

Those early releases also showed that, despite their denials, the “task-force members openly plotted how to use their prosecutorial powers to prevent Lula’s Workers’ Party from winning the 2018 election” (p. xv). And they showed that the task force brought criminal charges against Lula despite “an absence of evidence…secure in the knowledge that Moro would be the one adjudicating the charges” (p. xv).

Over the coming months, the explosive revelations kept on coming, released by the Intercept Brasil and a variety of Brazilian journalistic partners. To name just a few sordid examples discussed in Securing Democracy: Moro instructed the task force to protect Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former center-right president, because he was “an important political ally”; the task force mocked the death of Lula’s seven-year-old grandson; and they “conspired to conceal information from the Supreme Court” (pp. 158-159).

The work that Greenwald recounts in Securing Democracy leaves no reasonable doubt about the corrupt and politicized character of the “anti-corruption” operation that took down the left and brought the far-right to power in Brazil through extra-democratic means. The book also offers harrowing accounts of the dangers and threats (both legalistic and violent) that Greenwald and his collaborators faced from Bolsonaro’s government and followers for their journalistic work.

For all this, the book is well worth reading, and provides a fundamental service to democracy and freedom of the press in Brazil and globally. But the omissions in the book about the sources that Greenwald utilized are also telling and important.

The missing US connection

As Brian Mier (Brasilwire, 2/18/21) noted, the Intercept and its partners had already published 95 articles based on the Vaza Jato archive, over the course of nine months, before releasing the first article examining the frequent appearance of US government officials in that archive. This, and the series of articles that followed, “The FBI and Lava Jato,” would go on to win Brazil’s Vladimir Herzog Prize. Greenwald’s earlier Vaza Jato reporting had also won this prize, and he refers to it in Securing Democracy as “the most prestigious and meaningful prize a journalist can receive in Brazil” (p. 222), although Securing Democracy does not mention this second Vladimir Herzog Prize.

Intercept Brasil (3/12/20): “Lava Jato did everything to help American justice—including circumventing the Brazilian government.”

This second award-winning part of the larger Vaza Jato series examines how the United States government collaborated with Lava Jato at all phases of its existence, often in secrecy, and under both Obama and Trump administrations. These facts have received criticism from major scholars and political figures, yet not from Greenwald. The first article examining US involvement was released by the Intercept Brasil (3/12/20), drawing on Greenwald’s archive, but only after Greenwald had stopped publishing articles based on that archive. Greenwald does not examine the US role in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy.

Greenwald and his colleagues had shared sections of the archive with some of Brazil’s major journalistic outlets, such as Folha de São Paulo and Veja, both because of the assistance they could offer and to help provide a shield against persecution by Bolsonaro’s government (p. 150). The Intercept reported on the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato, however, with the partnership of a smaller outlet, Agência Pública.

In July 2019, Brazil’s Federal Police apprehended Walter Delgatti Neto, the hacker who had accessed the Telegram archive and contacted Greenwald. Delgatti currently faces the possibility of a lifelong prison sentence. Brazil’s supreme court released parts of the archive to Lula’s defense team in 2021, and the entire archive in January 2022.

It’s from this later examination of Delgatti’s archive that we know that Lava Jato’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, referred to Lula’s arrest as a “gift from the CIA” (Progressive International, 12/2/21), a fact that was published after the release of Securing Democracy. It is worth noting that Bolsonaro and Moro, the Lava Jato judge–turned–security minister, made an unusual visit to CIA headquarters during Bolsonaro’s first presidential trip to the US.

‘Born in the Department of Justice’

I read Securing Democracy with deepening surprise at the lack of analysis of US involvement in Lava Jato. I read the book carefully, and have done searches on the e-book since, worried I had missed something. It’s not there.

Its absence is especially surprising because Greenwald has long been a critic of US foreign policy; because the first bit of the archive that Greenwald examined involved the US Department of Justice (p. 58), although Greenwald does not follow up on this; and because US involvement received passing mention at the very start of the Vaza Jato series.

The Telegram transcripts published in the first Vaza Jato release by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept (6/12/19) included a 2016 comment that Lava Jato’s chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, made to Moro about something that “depends on articulation with the Americans.” It is not precisely clear from the context what the comment means, although Moro and Dallagnol were discussing the prosecution of Lula and other figures. This first appearance of the US at the start of Vaza Jato received analysis at the time in Portuguese (Revista Forum, 6/13/19) and in English (Brasilwire, 6/13/19), but Greenwald never followed up on the thread.

In Vaza Jato releases that came after Greenwald’s involvement with the series, but before the publication of Securing Democracy, his colleagues show that US investigators from the Department of Justice and FBI met frequently with Lava Jato prosecutors (Intercept, 3/12/20). This team, which at times included at least 17 agents, met with Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil for several years (Agência Pública, 7/1/20), and worked on cases including the investigation that removed Lula from the 2018 presidential elections (Agência Pública, 2/12/21). These US investigators were working in Brazil without the authorization of the country’s minister of justice, which is required by treaty to oversee foreign law enforcement in Brazil (Intercept, 3/12/20).

Prior to Vaza Jato, there had been some knowledge of and reporting on US participation with Lava Jato (New York Times, 12/21/16), and Lula’s defense team had filed a motion arguing that this was a violation of Brazilian law (ConJur, 3/16/18).

Additionally, according to the hacker Delgatti, Greenwald only accepted a small portion of the full archive that Lula’s defense team eventually received (Brasilwire, 2/18/21). I’m not sure what to make of that claim, which I find strange. But I do want to flag that the Vaza Jato archive is not the only source of information about US participation in Lava Jato, and Greenwald may never have possessed the full archive.

However, we know of the extent and duration of US participation in Lava Jato because of the work Greenwald’s colleagues did with the archive that he did possess. And their publications are what made US participation in Lava Jato a matter of wide public significance.

For example, Lula responded on Twitter to the reporting by Greenwald’s colleagues with the allegation:

The goal was Petrobras [Brazil’s state-owned oil giant]. It was the Pre-Salt [Brazilian offshore oil]. And the Brazilian companies that were winning bids from US companies in the Middle East.

Lula’s claim, which he has elaborated elsewhere, is that the idea of Lava Jato was “born in the Department of Justice in the United States,” with the aim of destroying Brazilian competitors to US companies (in petroleum, naval construction and civil engineering, all sectors targeted by Lava Jato) (PT, 7/9/20). Perhaps Greenwald disagrees with Lula here. Then surely Lula’s claim deserves a refutation, especially because its principal evidentiary basis is Greenwald’s own archive.

Securing Democracy does note that Greenwald’s work on the Snowden archive “proved that the NSA and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK were spying on [Petrobras,] the state-owned oil company whose proceeds fund Brazil’s social programs” (p. 125). But the question of foreign intervention in Brazil appears principally in the past tense in Securing Democracy, and never in relation to Greenwald’s own Vaza Jato archive.

I should note that I have not seen enough evidence to weigh in with confidence on Lula’s assertion about the economic intentions of the Lava Jato team and its US collaborators, but he is correct about Lava Jato’s economic effects. Brazilian scholars have shown that Lava Jato did severe damage to Brazil’s major companies, and, consequently, to the economy and to employment in Brazil. In contrast, most of the US financial corporations responsible for the fraud that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis were protected as “too big to fail.” Whatever the mix of intentions involved, Lava Jato was part of an asymmetrically structured global politics of corruption that disables companies from the Global South and frequently protects those from the Global North, contributing to global inequality.

From ‘inevitable’ to unmentionable

Despite Greenwald’s silence about US participation in what he convincingly shows to be a regime change operation in 21st century Brazil, Securing Democracy runs through the long history of US regime change operations in Latin America. Discussing US support for the 1964 coup against a center-left Brazilian government that was replaced by a 21-year military dictatorship, Greenwald notes that US “refusal to tolerate any form of leftism in Latin America’s largest country—even if it meant the imposition of despotism where democracy had been taking root—was virtually inevitable” (p. 3). Greenwald also mentions Brazil’s enduring “colonial relationship with the United States” (p. 12), and notes that he learned from Edward Snowden that Brazil has the “largest CIA presence in the hemisphere” (p. 12).

So why doesn’t Securing Democracy examine US involvement in the process that removed the elected left from power in that country in 2016 and brought an admirer of right-wing despotism to power in 2018? What changed between 1964 and 2016 that made US involvement in left-to-right regime change operations in Brazil noteworthy, even “inevitable” then, but not worth mentioning now?

As Greenwald acknowledges in the book, to the United States, the PT governments’ forging of a “foreign policy in a way that diverged from US dictates was intolerable” (p. 14). Fortunately for the US officials who found the PT’s independent foreign policy intolerable, Lava Jato resolved this problem for them. Upon inauguration, Bolsonaro assumed a posture of alignment with Trump’s government in matters of foreign policy.

Although Greenwald does not examine the involvement of the United States in Lava Jato in Securing Democracy, this involvement has become politically important in Brazil and the United States. (One can find further English-language examination of the US role, drawing on both the Vaza Jato archive and other sources, in Le Monde and Brasilwire.) Besides Lula himself, Brazilian public figures ranging from members of Brazil’s supreme court to politicians from Brazil’s so-called “big center” have been critical of the US/Lava Jato collaboration.

In the US, 13 congressmembers wrote a 2019 letter to then–Attorney General William Barr demanding an explanation for the Department of Justice’s collaboration with Lava Jato. That letter was followed up in 2021, when 23 congressmembers sent a similar letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, noting that “it is a matter of public record that US DOJ agents provided support to Brazilian prosecutors that were part of the Lava Jato operation.”

That statement links to a 2017 speech by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco, in which he exults in DoJ collaboration with Lava Jato and in Lava Jato’s conviction of Lula. The congressmembers’ letter also notes that members of the DoJ and FBI were briefed by Lava Jato prosecutors in Brazil, linking to Agência Pública’s reporting (3/12/20) on the Vaza Jato archive. No hint of this appears in Securing Democracy.

I think there is still room for debate about the intentions behind US involvement in Lava Jato—a Brazilian “anti-corruption” investigation that, as Greenwald shows, pursued aims consistent with the history of US policy towards Latin America that Securing Democracy outlines. However, I see no justification for the complete omission of US involvement in a book that is largely about the politics of Lava Jato, and that draws on the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role. Whatever Greenwald’s position is here, it deserves clarification, and the failure to examine the US role in Lava Jato is a significant flaw in an important book.

The Greenwald wars

I have no perfect theory of why Greenwald chose to omit evidence, stemming from his own “once-in-a-lifetime scoop,” that Lava Jato worked with support from the United States, some of it clandestine. Greenwald is hard to figure out. He’s a former hero of the left (he spoke at FAIR’s 25th anniversary benefit alongside Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Michael Moore) who is now a regular and chummy guest of Trump-favorite Fox News host Tucker Carlson—whom Greenwald has absurdly referred to as a “socialist,” along with Steve Bannon and “the 2016 iteration of Donald Trump.” His merciless polemics against US liberalism often hit the mark, yet he can be dumbfoundingly credulous when conservatives espouse “working-class, anti-imperialism, anti-corporatist politics.”

Securing Democracy was released back in April 2021. (A Brazilian edition will be released at the end of April 2022.) Since then, English-language media outlets have largely ignored it. I was sent a review copy by a highbrow US publication, but they canceled the review before I had written a word, because (they told me) of Greenwald’s brutal feud with his former colleagues at the Intercept. The book got a few reviews in non-US publications, and some from the ideological peripheries of mainstream US politics. But there isn’t much else. In contrast, his book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, had been covered in pretty much every publication that reviews books of political journalism within weeks of its publication.

Although he is now spurned by most of the mainstream, Greenwald knows how to pick an underserved market niche for his polemics, and to serve that niche relentlessly. Perhaps addressing US collaboration in Lava Jato is inconsistent with the niche he is aiming for in Brazil. Or maybe that interpretation is too cynical.

Greenwald does have considerable courage, and he remains an important critic of US foreign policy. He is nearly alone today among English-language journalists of major reach in his principled critiques of the deepening liberal/neoconservative embrace in the US (Glenn Greenwald, 1/25/22)—work that has become especially crucial as a flood of war propaganda (Glenn Greenwald, 2/27/22) raises the horrific peril of nuclear war, and as tolerance for dissent on matters of foreign policy diminishes in the US (Glenn Greenwald, 3/15/22).

‘One of the most consequential reporters’

So I offer no theory of Greenwald, or of Securing Democracy’s strange omissions. But I’ve decided to publish this belated essay because the book’s flaws (as well as its substantial virtues) have been underacknowledged, and because Greenwald, with his 1.8 million Twitter followers and boundless appetite for battle, has a major influence on how foreigners understand Brazilian politics.

I want to make it clear that I haven’t written this review to argue that every analysis of Brazil’s sad political trajectory over the second half of the 2010s must include analysis of the role of the US in this process. There are many domestic factors to examine, and many excellent scholars and journalists examining them.

But because of Greenwald’s influence, his perspective is probably the most important source from which English speakers will form impressions about Lava Jato’s role in Brazil’s recent history (whether they read Securing Democracy or not). Greenwald had unique access to the sources from which we know much of what we do about the US role, and his silence about that role leaves a misleading impression for the US public—the only public with any hope to affect US foreign policy.

In a critique of Greenwald, Current Affairs‘ Nathan Robinson (6/17/21) concedes that “there is a good case to be made that for his role in freeing Lula da Silva from prison and exposing the reach of the US surveillance state, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most consequential reporters in the world.” Yet while the pinnacles of Greenwald’s work have been his exposures of the Brazilian right and US surveillance (and security) state, which deserve high praise, Securing Democracy is also notable for its strange silence about the connections that Greenwald’s own sources of evidence revealed between the Brazilian right and the US security state.

https://www.brasilwire.com/greenwald-bo ... in-brazil/

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Fox Seeks Allies Across the Political Spectrum to Shill for Bolsonaro
BRIAN MIER

Image
Tucker Carlson interviewing Jair Bolsonaro

“Particularly since the 1930s, the connection of PSYOP with ideology and mass communication has made it a constant strategic element of international politics.”

— An Overview of Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (1989)


It is no secret that, since the 2016 legislative coup against President Dilma Rousseff and 2018 arbitrary imprisonment of front-running presidential candidate Lula da Silva, multinational corporations have made billions of dollars from environmental deregulation, dismantlement of labor rights and privatization of Brazil’s natural resources. It’s also now known that corporate media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post normalized the breakdown of Brazil’s rule of law and rise of fascism by ignoring crimes committed by high-profile Judge Sergio Moro that were widely publicized in Brazilian media.

Some people in the US even know how Anglo media outlets like the Washington Post and Guardian misrepresented Lula’s conviction for receiving a nonexistent apartment upgrade by unethically associating it with an alleged multi-million dollar graft scheme in state oil company, Petrobras. Analysis of US media coverage over the last seven years shows systematic bias against Lula, president of Brazil from 2003-10, and his Brazilian Workers Party, even in many left-leaning outlets (Brasilwire, 12/12/18).

However, this year’s Brazilian presidential election appears to have the media in a quandary. Opposing frontrunner Lula, whom they smeared for years (FAIR.org, 12/14/19), looks like public support for neofascist incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, as no other candidate has hit double digits in the polls. On the other hand, supporting Lula implies support for his proposed policies, such as reversing the post-coup labor, pension and environmental reforms that made billions of dollars for their corporate advertisers.

Despite his commitment to austerity policies, however, Bolsonaro is clearly not the right kind of neoliberal for news organizations like CNN or the New York Times. As the old saying goes in Brazil, the bourgeois prefer to support the kind of fascist who eats with a knife and a fork. With the elections looming less than three months away, and Bolsonaro trailing by nearly 20 points in polls, it seems late in the game to revamp his image to make any kind of clinging to power more palatable to an Anglo public.

These limitations, however, haven’t stopped one corporate media giant from stepping into the fray. During the last week of June, the Murdoch-owned Fox Corporation sent its most popular newscaster, Tucker Carlson, to Rio de Janeiro to slander Lula and weave a false narrative of Bolsonaro as a faithful ally in the US’s new cold war against China, which Carlson claims is “trying to take over the world.” (FoxNews.com, 6/30/22).
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Fox’s Tucker Carlson visited Brazil to promote neofascist incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro.
Justifying his visit by filming a documentary on Chinese “colonization” of Latin America, Carlson projected the US political situation onto Brazil’s vastly different political landscape (e.g., it currently has 23 political parties represented in Congress) while making a laughable claim (Fox News, 6/1/22) that Lula, a former steelworkers union leader who is currently polling by more than 2-to-1 against Bolsonaro with the working class, is supported by “a coalition of billionaires, college professors and CNN.”

In fact, CNN Brasil franchise owner Rubens Menin supported Bolsonaro’s campaign for the presidency, and poached the most right-wing, reactionary commentators from Globo TV to work for the network–including Alexandre Garcia, the former press secretary to military dictator João Figueiredo, who has been attacking Lula for 40 years.

Fox frontman Carlson is occasionally praised by US foreign policy critics—including Rio de Janeiro–based pundit Glenn Greenwald—for giving voice to a wider range of opinions than most corporate news program hosts. Opening space for controlled opposition, however, is a tried-and-true tactic of US intelligence, widely employed during the Cold War by the CIA (see Cultural Cold War, by Frances Stoner Saunders) and its partner organizations like Voice of America, which was directed by Carlson’s father Dick Carlson from 1986-91.

Carlson’s wider-than-average variety of guest commentators shows that he and his producers are hardly the “wingnuts” that DNC-aligned media try to portray them as (New Republic, 7/1/22). There is clearly method behind the madness, and it is easy to identify psyop propaganda tactics at work in Carlson’s Brazil coverage.

The world’s 2nd-most important election

In April 2021, at Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Steve Bannon introduced Brazilian member of Congress Eduardo Bolsonaro–son of the president–on stage. Bannon warned of the dangers of a Lula presidency, proclaiming that the 2022 presidential elections in Brazil are the world’s “second-most important” (Business Insider, 8/11/21). Fox Corporation picked up Bannon’s rallying cry, beginning with Carlson claiming that the Bolsonaro administration is Latin America’s last US ally in the battle against China, which he frighteningly claims has a goal of destroying the US way of life.

Villainizing China puts Carlson firmly in alliance, not only with Murdoch family news outlets like the London Sunday Times and New York Post, but with CNN, the New York Times and other so-called liberal news companies that he regularly criticizes on his program for representing elite interests. Claiming that Bolsonaro is allied with the US in standing up to China, thus establishing him as an important asset in the new cold war, hinders efforts by progressive Democrats to pressure the Biden administration to break relations with Brazil’s far-right government. Contrasting “friendly” Bolsonaro with “red” Lula, whom he suggests will immediately transform Brazil into a Communist vassal state, feeds into the Cold War–era safety/fear dichotomy used by psyop actors like Voice of America. Although this kind of dichotomy may strike a chord with casual US news consumers, it has little correspondence with reality, as Brazil is currently much more dependent on China than it ever was when Lula was President.

China has been Brazil’s most important trade partner since 2009, when it passed up the US, but since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, trade with China has increased dramatically. In 2021, the total value of Brazil’s exports of goods and services to China was $125 billion, over four times the $31 billion in exports to the United States. Furthermore, the primary beneficiary of the Bolsonaro administration’s selloff of Brazil’s offshore petroleum reserves has been China, with its state companies being the only foreign investors in auctions in 2019 and 2020.

Due to his son’s relationship with Bannon and xenophobic statements by some of his cabinet chiefs on their social media accounts, many expected Bolsonaro to leave BRICS and cut trade relations with China. It didn’t happen. After labeling everyone from center-right political rivals to the Economist as Communists, Bolsonaro proclaimed, during his first official visit to Beijing in 2019, that China was a capitalist country. When asked about the trade war between China and the US, he said: “This isn’t our battle. We don’t want to get involved in any ideological fight between the world’s [big] economies.”

Shortly thereafter, Bolsonaro forced his two biggest anti-China ideologues to resign, Foreign Affairs Chancellor Ernesto Araujo and Education Minister Abraham Weintraub, and continued to work within the BRICS framework, most recently praising Brazil’s “strategic relationship” with China to Xi Jinping at the BRICS Summit on June 23.

The fact of the matter is, no matter who is elected in October, Brazil will maintain its neutral stance in the new cold war, and will not engage in sanctions against China or Russia, or any other geopolitical enemy of the US. Taking sides against important trade partners does not make rational economic sense to Brazil, which has worked to remain nonaligned in conflicts between world super powers for decades. Fox Corporation certainly knows this, therefore fearmongering about China to drum up support for Bolsonaro can best be viewed as propaganda.

Full-spectrum dominance

Full-spectrum dominance is a military term that was originally used to describe a battle in which once side controls the land, air, sea and political narrative. In the modern era of hybrid warfare, it is often employed to describe control over all sides of a debate, as the CIA attempted to do in the Cold War when it coined the term “non-Marxist left,” and opened up funding for progressive academics and writers who opposed the Soviet Union and other Cold War enemies, often through front organizations like PEN (Cultural Cold War).

Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci viewed bourgeois media as fulfilling the task of maintaining capitalist hegemony–the dominance of the ruling class in the ideological and cultural spheres. Under that lens of analysis, the polarizing arguments over cultural issues between pro-capitalist media corporations like Fox and Carlson’s former employer MSNBC, even as they align on economic and foreign policy, can be seen as a kind of full-spectrum dominance over American news consumers.

Fox‘s Tucker Carlson Tonight program frequently engages in this practice by giving airtime to anti-imperialist critics of US foreign policy in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (but never China), as long as they don’t challenge capitalist economics, or advocate for labor unions or immigrant rights. This goalpost-limiting attempt at full-spectrum dominance was used by Fox in Brazil through the use of Carlson’s frequent guest, Glenn Greenwald–a move that exposed contradictions between Greenwald’s Brazilian and US public personas. Interviewed by Carlson, Greenwald openly supported his former enemy Bolsonaro for the first time ever, in alignment with Fox Corporation.

During a short interview (7/5/22) in his adopted home town of Rio de Janeiro, where Carlson based himself during his visit, Greenwald claimed that Bolsonaro had been “democratically elected”–even though Greenwald wrote an entire book about the illegal tactics used to frame Lula, Bolsonaro’s most serious rival, and remove him from the 2018 presidential election. He claimed that Bolsonaro’s “anti-establishment” platform had turned Brazil’s right-wing media oligarchies against him, and said that Big Tech social media companies had censored him repeatedly over comments he made against Covid-19.
Image
After a multipartisan Congressional investigation, the Supreme Court ordered social media companies to block disinformation from Bolsonaro; Glenn Greenwald (7/5/22) described this to Tucker Carlson’s viewers as Bolsonaro having “been repeatedly censored by big tech platforms.”
In psyop terminology, Greenwald uses the concept of censorship as a glittering generality. Anthropologist William Yaworsky (Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement, Autumn/05), former enlisted man in US Army’s First Psychological Operations Battalion, defines the propaganda tactic of glittering generality as

vague phrases and buzzwords so closely associated with the values of the target audience that they are accepted without having any genuine propositional content…. Such phrases gain popularity because they activate richly laden inference systems in the human brain.

Censorship is an emotionally laden term in the US, a country whose citizens grow up being told they live in the land of the free. It is arrogant and imperialist, however, to believe that all other countries in the World should have the same interpretation of free speech that the US does. It is true that Bolsonaro had several videos about Covid-19 pulled off the air, but it wasn’t done by Big Tech companies, and only happened after a lengthy congressional investigation into criminal negligence in response to the pandemic.

After hearing hundreds of witnesses and looking over thousands of pages of evidence, Brazil’s multipartisan Congress found that Bolsonaro had deliberately used social media to convince followers that ineffective treatments like chloroquine, worm medicine and blowing ozone into the anus cured Covid-19 and that, therefore, it was unnecessary to follow state and municipal public health systems’ social distancing or vaccination guidelines. They concluded that he sabotaged Brazil’s Covid-19 response and that this, in turn, had caused 300,000 additional deaths. They accused him of abuse of authority — a crime for which he is currently under review by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and which he will certainly be formally accused of in Brazil as soon as he leaves office.

Based on the congressional ruling, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered the major social media companies to block Bolsonaro from communicating disinformation on Covid-19 on his social media accounts. In other words, it wasn’t Big Tech that “censored” Bolsonaro—Big Tech was forced to obey a court order. Far from making an impassioned plea for the glittering generality of freedom of speech, Greenwald’s comments on the US’s most popular cable news program suggest that US-based social media corporations ought to ignore the laws of foreign countries they operate in. Meanwhile, the left-branded pundit established full-spectrum common ground with Carlson by portraying Bolsonaro as a victim of authoritarian liberal elites.

Audience and effect

To millions of casual US news consumers, Fox‘s propaganda blitz preemptively sets the stage for the normalization of a possible military coup in Brazil this October–something which is already being announced by Bolsonaro’s vice presidential candidate, Gen. Walter Braga Neto. Furthermore, in the Cold War psyop tradition (Rolling Stone, 10/20/77), it sends a message to Brazilian elites that at least part of the US integral state would support an extra-legal maneuver by Bolsonaro and his military to stay in power, even if he loses the election to Lula.

https://fair.org/slider/fox-seeks-allie ... bolsonaro/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Wed Aug 03, 2022 3:08 pm

Brazil’s Coup May Come After Lula Takes Office
By MARCELO ZERO July 26, 2022

In 2023, the bolsonarista horde, kept mobilized by the discourse of electoral fraud, may return to the streets demanding the deposition of the new “illegitimately elected” president.

By Marcelo Zero

Bolsnonaro has been following a well known script, inherited from Steve Bannon, to try to stay in power. He is attacking the electoral system, “denouncing” in advance, without any type of proof, that there will be election fraud. He is also slandering leaders of the judiciary in an attempt to show that they have ties to “terrorism” and have a “secret communist agenda”.

In the bolsonaristas toxic bubble, disconnected from reality, these pseudo-accusations ring deep and keep the horde motivated for unrestrained hatred.They are being primed – well in advance – for an assault on democracy.

This script has two obvious potential outcomes:

1- Refusal to hold elections, under the excuse they are impossible to hold fairly; and

2- Contesting the results of the election with no proof, based only on complaints from bolsonarista voters, which could result in a new version of the US January 6 assault on the Capitol.

However, there is a third possible outcome. This would involve preventing Lula from governing and promoting a coup to remove him after his inauguration as happened with Dilma Rousseff just one year after her reelection. From the ground, this seems like the most likely outcome.

Lula will have to govern in difficult circumstances and in a context of high expectations. The country is destroyed and nearly all the social, economic, political and cultural advances achieved during years of Workers Party governance have been reversed. From 2016 forwards, there haven’t just been 7 lost years, but deep setbacks which will require great effort to repair. Furthermore, the international scenario is conflictive and restrictive due to the economic crisis – now fueled by the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia – which is harming the world’s poorest populations. This creates a delicate and unstable political framework, conducive to coup attempts.

Another factor is the lack of real commitment to democracy by vast sectors of the so-called traditional right. Now disguised as supporters of a “third path”, these sectors actively participated in the 2016 coup and could, given favorable circumstances, easily promote a new coup as long as it is, once again, cloaked in an a veneer of legality.

In order to try to improve the quality of life of the poor a future Lula government will have to promote a progressive tax reform which will certainly displease Brazil’s oligarchies. Another source of great friction with elites is a possible full or partial reversal of the deeply neoliberal 2017 labor reforms, which failed to generate new jobs while deeply exacerbating labor insecurity.

Policies aimed at protecting the environment will displease the most backward sectors of agribusiness. Furthermore policies designed to protect the so-called minorities will certainly encounter resistance in the vast sectors of our population currently dominated by medieval reactionism.

In these circumstances the bolsonarista horde, kept mobilized by the discourse of electoral fraud, may return to the streets demanding the deposition of the new “illegitimately elected” president. The spark of the discovery of a new case of alleged “corruption” will be enough for a great political fire to be ignited. This fire could return bolsonarista neofascism to power.

Therefore, the commitment to democracy cannot not end with the holding of elections and the inauguration of a new elected president. It is essential that such a commitment also extends to ensure that the freely-chosen new administration can govern and to guarantee that a new president can finish his term without major setbacks.

Lula is the great hope of Brazilian democracy. No other ruler has contributed so much to strengthening our democratic process. After all, there is no great solid and advanced democracy without income distribution, without social inclusion and without the full enjoyment of not only political and civil rights, but also social and economic rights. However, this hope needs to be channeled into actions and policies that can change the sad reality of a destroyed, divided and profoundly unequal country that is once again suffering from hunger.

The fascist beast of bolsonarismo will always be on the prowl. Lula and the aligned democratic and progressive forces will need to govern for a long time to disarm all the traps against democracy and put Brazilian neo-fascism where it belongs: in the garbage can of history.

https://www.brasilwire.com/brazils-coup ... es-office/

Eduardo Bolsonaro “War Council” Visit Triggers Investigation
By BRIAN MIER March 11, 2021

Brazilian senatorial inquiry launched into the congressman’s participation in Washington D.C. planning meeting for January 6 Capitol invasion.

by Brian Mier

A Brazilian Senate inquiry has just been filed, demanding clarification from Foreign Relations Minister Ernesto Araujo on what role, if any, the federal government played in Eduardo Bolsonaro’s participation in a January 5th meeting in Washington DC. The meeting, which is being referred to in the US media as a “war council”, was allegedly held to plan the January 6th invasion of the US Capitol, and was attended by Donald Trump’s sons, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell and other key players in/allies of the Trump administration.

US journalist Seth Abramson’s February allegations, published in a series of articles on Substack, that Eduardo Bolsonaro attended the meeting during a surprise visit to the United States in which he also met with Ivanka Trump and Bolsonaro family guru/astrologer Olavo de Carvalho, had major repurcussions in the Brazilian media. After all, if the allegations are correct, a federal congressman, who is also son of the sitting President, participated in a planning meeting that was held to try to overthrow a foreign government.

As a result of the growing scandal, this week Senator Jacques Wagner (PT/Bahia) submitted an inquiry on the floor of the Senate demanding answers to 8 questions from Foreign Relations Minister Ernesto Araujo:.

1) What type of support did the Brazilian Embassy in Washington give to Congressman Bolsonaro’s trip?

2) Did the Embassy help organize Bolsonaro’s schedule during the visit?

3) What was on the official schedule?

4) Did the Brazilian diplomatic mission help organize the January 4 meeting between Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro and his family with the daughter of Ex-President Donald Trump, Ivanka, in the White House?

5) Was the invitation for the above meeting communicated to the Embassy? Did it go through official channels? When was this invitation made?

6) Did the Embassy know that Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro participated, on January 5th, in a meeting with the sons of Donald Trump with Michael Flynn, ex-National Security Adviser to former President Trump, and several other members of the Republican Party, during which a strategy of resistance to the inauguration of President Joe Biden was discussed, which culminated in an attack on the Capitol? Was this meeting party of the official trip schedule?

7) Did the Embassy negotiate for the possible participation of Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro in this meeting?

8) Was a report on Congressman Bolsonaro’s trip to the United States prepared? If so, please send it to us.

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Brazilian Foreign Affairs Minister Ernesto Araujo is legally required to respond to the inquiry according to Brazilian law. When he does, Brasil Wire will report on his response.

https://www.brasilwire.com/eduardo-bols ... stigation/

**********************

Presidential formula of Lula and Alckmin confirmed in Brazil

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Both the former president and his presidential running mate condemned the attempts to boycott the next elections carried out by current president Jair Bolsonaro. | Photo: @LulaOficial
Published 30 July 2022

he Lula-Alckmin presidential formula was approved unanimously, while the support shown by various political sectors and the Brazilian Congress increases.

The Workers' Party (PT) and the Socialist Party of Brazil (PSB), made official this Friday the formula for the presidential candidacy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Geraldo Alckmin, during the convention of the latter formation in the southern hotel sector of Brasilia .

The electoral formula, favorite to prevail in the next elections according to all the polls, was confirmed unanimously and in the presence of both candidates, deputies of both parties, as well as other political parties that make up the coalition supporting former President Lula.

In this sense, the national president of the PSB, Carlos Siqueira, avoided the announcement that "in the name of simplicity, discretion, competence, and capacity, of Governor Geraldo Alckmin to compose the vice presidency of the Republic with the President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva".



For his part, Lula recognized the support of the signatories of the manifesto for democracy, which already has almost 400,000 signatures and will be read on August 11, at USP's Law School, in Largo de São Francisco, downtown São Paul.

To which he added that "I never imagined, at 76 years of age, with more than 50 years of participation in the trade union movement and in the parties, that we would see a President of the Republic lie to the ambassadors and give a false idea that in Brazil's democracy is at risk due to electronic ballot boxes. The idea that these elections will be stolen," referring to the maneuvers of President Jair Bolsonaro to try to boycott the elections.


"This country will only be successful if it grows again to generate more jobs and better wages," Lula said while denouncing the current Executive for exacerbating the levels of hunger and unemployment in that South American country.

While Alckmin expressed that “it is time for Bolsonaro to leave. His time is up. His ideas and his concepts do not serve the country. His lies no longer hold. His cunning plan against democracy has failed. And the ballot boxes will rid Brazil of all the evil it caused.”


Meanwhile, deputy Jandira Feghali, vice president of the PCdoB, stated about the Lula-Alckmin union that “it has been a construction that expresses the maturity of all these parties at this moment in which we are living. It is not an easy moment, it is not an easy moment, but it required an open mind, a broad mind, to build this unity, which more than anything is a necessity for Brazil and for those who have love for our people and our country.”

During the date it transpired that Andreia Nunes decided to withdraw her candidacy to express her support for the Lula-Alckmin formula; as well as various political sectors and Congress, which in turn have shown their dissatisfaction with the decisions and attitudes of the current head of state, Jair Bolsonaro.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/confirma ... -0001.html

Lula da Silva stars in massive campaign event in Fortaleza

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Lula and the candidates for governor and senator for the PT in Ceará received massive support from the people of Fortaleza. | Photo: @ptbrasil
Published 31 July 2022

The former president and candidate for the PT stressed that these will be the elections of democracy against fascism, of solidarity against discord, and of love against hate.

The candidate for the presidency of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, starred this Saturday in a massive campaign event in Fortaleza, in which the candidacies of Elmano de Freitas for the Government of the state of Ceará were made official; and former Governor Camilo Santana to the Senate.

During the convention of the Workers' Party (PT) in said city, which was attended by representatives of popular movements, political parties, federal and state deputies, and the people in general, said political formation made official a list with only representatives of its own match.

Referring to the work carried out by Camilo Santana Lula, he expressed that “thank you very much for the government lesson you have given Brazil in these seven and a half years governing the state of Ceará. You will be remembered forever and ever; and Elmano does not need to copy anything from anyone, just follow your path, which will be an extraordinary government here in the state of Ceará".


Regarding the next elections, the former president avoided that “it is important that we are clear that these elections are not ordinary elections. This election is not one man against another man, or one party against another party, this election is democracy against fascism, it is democracy against authoritarianism.”

To which he added that it is about “truth against lies, a party against the Government, love against hate, solidarity against discord. In these elections we risk the future of each one of us. We will risk the future of our mothers, our children, our teenagers."

For his part, Camilo Santana pointed out that “you know that I dedicated all my energy in these seven years, facing so many difficulties, economic crisis, drought and the biggest of them, the Covid-19 pandemic, which took the lives of our brothers from Ceará. and Brazilians. In this pandemic I bought four hospitals, I even bought a private hospital, which had been closed for ten years here in Fortaleza, and there I built 150 ICU beds, which helped save the lives of Ceará residents.”


Meanwhile, Elmano de Freitas, the current candidate for governor of Ceará, established as possible priorities for his management investments in education, public security, youth, culture, sports and health.

Meanwhile, the president of the PT, Gleisi Hoffmann, argued about Camilo that “you are the greatest pride for us. To have a governor with his evaluation, with his capacity, with the work he has done here. You are not only a leadership of Ceará, you are a national reference and it makes us feel very proud to be in the ranks of the Workers' Party”.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/lula-pro ... -0006.html

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 13, 2022 2:42 pm

Brazil: Bolsonaro May Be Fined for Early Electoral Propaganda

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The President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro | Photo: EFE / Joedson Alves

Published 10 August 2022 (12 hours 54 minutes ago)

Brazil's Electoral Public Ministry defended on Wednesday before the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) that President Jair Bolsonaro be fined for early electoral propaganda after his speech to foreign ambassadors on July 18.

The electoral deputy attorney general, Paulo Gonet Franco, expressed that there was "unacceptable propaganda" in the president's "victimization" speech due to the false arguments Bolsonaro used to point out that the electronic ballot box system is unreliable and could harm him.

Brazilian law prevents presidential candidates from publicly asking for votes before the beginning of the electoral campaign, which this year formally starts on August 16.

The Electoral Public Ministry understands that Bolsonaro broke the law and, in addition to a fine, asks that social networks remove the video of the meeting with the ambassadors and the attacks on the electronic ballot boxes, something YouTube already did on its own on Wednesday.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0015.html

Worker Fired for Criticizing Bolsonaro to Receive Compensation

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Brunna Leticia Venancio, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @PauloSilva1955

Published 10 August 2022 (17 hours 45 minutes ago)

“I am completely against this misrule and this horrible, corrupt, bad-tempered, fascist, Nazi, imbecile, incapable, and mediocre human being,” Brunna Venancio tweeted.

The Labor Court of the 8th Region determined that the company Grupo Popular must pay compensation of US$24,341 to Brunna Venancio, a Brazilian worker who was fired for posting messages against President Jair Bolsonaro.

"It was with 'a mixture of indignation, sadness and disappointment' that Brunna Venancio, 29, filed a lawsuit against her own father," Brazilian outlet Careta Capital reported and recalled her words.

“I am completely against this misrule and this horrible, corrupt, bad-tempered, fascist, Nazi, imbecile, incapable, and mediocre human being,” Brunna wrote on September 8, 2021, on the eve of a national protest against Bolsonaro.

Her father, one of the company's partners, sent her messages warning her that "antagonistic positions" should be elimitated. The audios recorded on her cell phone served to prove that Brunna was the victim of political harrasment at the workplace.


In the audios, the Brazilian businessman is heard admitting that he is speaking "with full awareness" of what he was doing.

"I own this business, okay?" he said after emphasizing with high-sounding words that he was disgusted and fed up by her political positions.

Brunna Venancio, who worked at Grupo Popular from 2018 to 2021, will receive compensation for unjustified dismissal and other benefits that she did not receive while working, among which are the 13th salary and vacations.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Wor ... -0011.html

A fine sentiment from the young woman with which one must agree. However, would this have made the press had the victim been black and not daughter of the boss?

Bolsonaro Describes Democracy Defenders as 'Mammals'

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President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil. | Photo: Twitter/ @Maringa_Post

His reaction against the businessmen and bankers who signed a letter in defence of democracy is related to his desperation in the face of the October presidential elections.

On Tuesday, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro disparagingly criticized thousands of citizens who signed the "Letter to Brazilians in Defense of the Democratic Rule of Law."

"That manifesto was signed by bankers, artists, and... mammalian businessmen," the former Capitan said wryly, adding that "there are no left-wing businessmen."

Over the last week, members of the Faculty of Law of the University of Sao Paulo have been promoting this letter through social networks and calling on Brazilians to sign it to show their rejection of any coup attempt.

In a matter of a few hours, the citizen initiative achieved the support of over 640,000 signers, including ten former judges of the Brazilian Supreme Court, who have been permanently attacked by Bolsonaro.


His reaction against the businessmen and bankers who signed the letter is related to his desperation in the face of the October presidential elections. So far, all voting intention polls indicate that Workers' Party candidate Lula da Silva will be the next president of Brazil.

Bolsonaro has been trying to overcome his weaknesses by exacerbating evangelism and appeals to the female electorate. While implementing these strategies, he was confident that the capitalists would be faithful to his cause. But that, apparently, is not happening.

"Everyone in the Bolsonarist ship knows that when 'the capital' changes sides it is because the ship has already sunk. The announced shipwreck is due to the bad helmsman, who is lazy and bored, and does not know how to steer the ship," Ricardo Noblat explained in an article published in the Brazilian outlet Metropolis.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bol ... -0009.html

Well, I suppose Bolo was trying to thread the needle, insulting but not alienating his true base. It is a slight amusement that a different class of vertebrate gets unfairly compared to humans instead of the unjustly maligned reptiles.

************************

Letter To Brazilians In Defense Of The Democratic Rule Of Law
By
BRASILWIRE
August 11, 2022

An open letter in defense of Brazil’s democracy against the Bolsonaro government’s preemptive attempt to sabotage this year’s elections, drafted by the São Paulo Federation of Industries (FIESP) has quickly gathered over 1 million signatures. On August 11, Brazilian National Students Day, crowds in the thousands gathered at dozens of public universities where the letter was read out loud, simultaneously. Afterwards, the crowds took to the streets to defend the public education system and protest against the far right Bolsonaro government. Below is the letter in full, translated into English by Luís Felipe Bretas Marzagão & Natalia de Campos.



Letter To Brazilians In Defense Of The Democratic Rule Of Law

In August 1977, during the 150th anniversary celebration of Brazil’s first law school, Professor Goffredo da Silva Telles Junior read a Letter to Brazilians from the free territory of São Francisco square. It exposed the illegitimacy of the military government and the state of exception the country was experiencing. It also demanded the reinstatement of the democratic rule of law and called for a national constitutional assembly.

These seeds sprouted. Brazil overcame its military dictatorship. The National Constitutional Assembly restored the legitimacy of Brazil’s institutions, reestablished the democratic rule of law, and respect for fundamental human rights prevailed.

The republican Executive, Legislative and the Judicial powers are independent. Their duty is to respect and ensure that our Magna Carta, the Federal Constitution, is upheld.

Under the 1988 Federal Constitution, which is nearing its 34th anniversary, we have held regular, free elections so that the political debate on projects for our nation has remained democratic, with final decisions made through popular sovereignty.

Goffredo’s teachings are embedded in our Constitution: “All power emanates from the people, who exercise it through their elected representatives or directly under the terms of this Constitution”.

The electronic voting system used in our elections has set an example to the world. We have had several transfers of power based on the vote and the republican transition of governments. Electronic voting machines have proven to be safe and reliable, as has the Superior Electoral Court.

Our democracy has grown and matured, but much remains to be done. We live in a country of profound social inequalities that lacks essential public services such as healthcare, education, housing and public safety. We have a long way to go to develop our economic potential in a sustainable manner. The State has been inefficient in the face of numerous challenges. Demands for greater respect and equality for race, gender and sexual orientation are still far from being fully met.

In the coming days, in the midst of these challenges, the election campaigns will begin, aiming to renew mandates for lawmakers and executive leaders at the state and federal levels. This is a moment in which we should be celebrating democracy through a race between different political projects that are designed for winning elections by presenting the best proposals for our country’s future.

However, instead of a civic celebration, we are experiencing moments of immense threats to democratic normalcy, risks for the republican institutions, and signs of contempt towards election results.

These baseless attacks, which lack evidence, cast doubt on the electoral process and the rule of law that was arduously fought for by Brazilian society. Threats to other institutions and sectors of civil society and incitement of violence and the breaking down of constitutional order are intolerable.

We recently witnessed authoritarian rants that jeopardized the USA’s historic democracy. There, the attempts to destabilize democracy and the people’s confidence in the fairness of the elections were unsuccessful. Here, they won’t succeed either.

Our civic consciousness is much greater than the enemies of democracy would imagine. We know how to put aside minor differences in favor of a much larger ideal, that of defending the democratic order.

We are charged by the same civic principles that marked the 1977 Letter to Brazilians and are gathered here in the same free territory of São Francisco Square, regardless of our electoral or partisan preferences, to call on all Brazilians to remain alert in defense of democracy and in respect of the election results.

In today’s Brazil there is no room left for authoritarian setbacks. Dictatorship and torture belong in the past. The solution to the great challenges faced by Brazilian society must be subject to the election results. In our civic watch against any attempted ruptures, we cry in unison:
Democratic rule of law now and forever!

Image

The original letter can be signed here https://www.estadodedireitosempre.com/

https://www.brasilwire.com/letter-to-br ... le-of-law/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 16, 2022 2:39 pm

New survey reveals that Lula widens his lead over Bolsonaro in Brazil

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Various political studies show that Lula continues to lead the candidates for the elections next October in Brazil. | Photo: @ricardostuckert
Published 15 August 2022

The founder of the Workers' Party separates 11 percentage points from the current president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.

A survey by the FSB Pesquisa Institute, whose results were released this Monday, shows that the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, continues to lead the candidates ahead of the elections next October, with 45 percent of voting intention.

This result could give the founder of the Workers' Party victory in the first round. The investigation showed that the current far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is next with 34 percent.

In the previous study of this same company, published on August 8, Lula appeared with 41 percent and Bolsonaro with 34. Between both dates, he had a growth of four percentage points.


According to this study, Ciro Gomes (Democratic Labor Party, PDT) was in third place with 8 percent of the votes, followed by Senator Simone Tebet (Brazilian Democratic Movement, MDB), with 2 percent.

Regarding a second round, the investigation revealed that Lula would win over the other candidates with 53 percent, while Bolsonaro captured 38 percent of the votes.

If Lula and Ciro Gomes face each other, he would mobilize 50 percent of the votes compared to 29 percent for his opponent. In case of contending with Simone Tebet, Lula would reach 54 percent of the votes, while the senator from Mato Grosso do Sul would obtain 26 percent.


This result of the PT candidate comes at a time when Bolsonaro, with electoral intentions, launched a group of social benefits such as the Aid Brazil program, which grants aid of 600 reais (110 dollars) to poorer families.

These aids include the distribution of a subsidy to purchase gas cylinders, another for taxi drivers and a third for truck drivers (1,000 reais, 185 dollars), most of whom are part of the current president's support base.

Complete the registration of candidates
This Monday is the deadline for political parties, federations and coalitions to request the registration of candidates for the positions in dispute in the general elections on October 2.

On its website, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) underlines that the term expires to request the annotation of candidates for president and vice president of the Republic, governors and vice governors, senators and their alternates, federal, state or district deputies.


Each political force may present only one candidate for president and vice president, governor and vice president, and senator, with their respective alternates.

For candidacies for federal, state and district deputies, each acronym may indicate candidates in the number of all the seats to be occupied, plus one.

According to the current law, at least 30 percent of the applications must be completed by women.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/estudio- ... -0013.html

Google Translator

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The Amazon to Become a Desert if Bolsonaro Wins, Guajajara Says

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Sonia Guajajara (C) at the Santo Andre Municipal Chamber, Brazil, Aug. 11, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @GuajajaraSonia

Published 15 August 2022 (21 hours 24 minutes ago)

"He is the main enemy of the Indigenous peoples... It would have been better if Bolsonaro had completely forgotten about us," Sonia Guajarara stressed.

The Indigenous leader Sonia Guajajara, one of the world's 100 most influential personalities according to Time, said that she will seek a seat in Congress to put an end to the project of environmental destruction promoted by President Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian right.

“If Bolsonaro wins, the future of the Amazon will be tragic. The Amazon will become a true desert,” she warned, adding that she is confident of a victory for former President Lula da Silva in the October 2 elections.

In 2018, Guajajara made history by being the first Indigenous woman to be nominated for the vice presidency of Brazil. Currently, the candidate for lawmaker for the state of Sao Paulo is sponsored by the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL).

The coordinator of the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) seeks to form the first Indigenous caucus in the Lower House, which is currently controlled by center-right parties linked to large agribusiness companies and evangelical movements.

“We are going to try to get to the place where decisions are made,” she said, recalling that the Lower House has only one Indigenous lawmaker, Joenia Wapichana, a woman elected in 2018.


Sonia Guajajara's tweet reads, "The response from the streets is clear: Get out Bolsonaro! Yesterday we went out to defend democracy and elections in the country. Let's go up!"

“It is a very difficult mission... We are concerned about fighting against the destruction of Indigenous policies, the liberation of mining activities, deforestation, and the sale of our territories,” Guajajara said, referring to what Bolsonaro has done since 2019.

"He is the main enemy of the Indigenous peoples... It would have been better if Bolsonaro had completely forgotten us,” she pointed out, mentioning the political persecution against environmental defenders and social activists.

Guajajara's hopes are shared by millions of Brazilians. On Monday, the FSB Research Institute published a survey showing that the Workers' Party candidate has 45 percent of the voting intentions. Instead, former Captain Bolsonaro only reaches 34 percent of citizen preferences.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/The ... -0010.html

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Tucker/Fox Rally Behind Bolsonaro
By BRIAN MIER June 28, 2022

From Rio de Janeiro, son of former Voice of America chief invents new cold war narrative.

by Brian Mier

Multi-millionaire Fox News host Tucker Carlson, son of former Voice of America and USIA chief Dick Carlson is spending the week broadcasting his popular program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, from Rio de Janeiro. During his first broadcast on June 27, he made it clear what the goal is: to rally support of US casual news consumers behind neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign.

His first guest, on Monday, June 27, was former US embassy economic adviser turned Bolsonaro aid, Filipe Martins. Martins, an alleged white supremacist and disciple of Bolsonaro’s late astrologer/guru Olavo de Carvalho, credited as one of the interlocutors between the Bolsonaro family and Steve Bannon, was given 4 minutes of airtime on the most popular news program in the United States to slander former President Lula, associating him with “$2 trillion of corruption”, as Carlson added, “and he went to jail for it”.

The fact is, Lula was unjustly imprisoned during the 2018 election season over incredibly flimsy allegations of an upgrade to a $600,000 apartment from an apartment that his wife had been paying monthly installment on for years, but he was later proven innocent. Not only was his conviction annulled by the Supreme Court for illegal forum shopping and judicial bias, subsequent attempts by prosecutors in the Brasilia district court that was ruled to actually have jurisdiction over the annulled Lava Jato convictions were immediately thrown out by the judge for lack of evidence. As in the United States, defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty in Brazil, and Lula has not been proven guilty of any corruption allegation.

Meanwhile, there are corruption investigations underway against President Bolsonaro, his sons, his ex-wife, his current wife, his mother-in-law and his grandmother-in-law. Furthermore, multiple Bolsonaro cabinet ministers have been forced to resign due to corruption scandals, including his 3rd Education Minister Milton Ribeiro, who took office after his second education minister, Abraham Weintraub, fled to Florida to avoid criminal prosecution. Innocent until proven guilty applies here too, but unlike Lula’s case, these investigations are ongoing. Any serious journalist, therefore, would have to at least mention them in the context of mentioning any past corruption investigation against Lula.


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Martins has been credited for introducing international white supremacist symbolism to the Bolsonaros

The main purpose of Martins’ conversation with Tucker Carlson, however, appears to have been to convince Americans that Bolsonaro, who is currently being blamed for opening the door to genocide against indigenous peoples and the assassination of former New York Times and Washington Post journalist Dom Phillips, should be reelected because he is a staunch ally to the US in the new cold war against China, whereas Lula will side with China against the US.

China has been Brazil’s most important trade partner since 2009, as US economic influence has waned throughout Latin America. Under Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff, Brazil maintained Brazil’s long tradition of non-alignment in US geopolitical conflicts, most famously when Lula refused to support the invasion of Iraq telling George Bush, “my war is against hunger.”

When Bolsonaro was elected, due to his family’s relationship with Steve Bannon and vocal racism against Chinese people on the social media accounts of his sons and some of his cabinet ministers, many expected him to leave BRICS and cut trade relations with China. It didn’t happen. Instead, China increased imports of Brazilian soy, with an increase of 251% during the first quarter of 2022 alone. Likewise, since Bolsonaro took office, Chinese state petroleum companies have been the overwhelmingly largest buyer of Brazil’s offshore petroleum reserves. Essentially, after China threatened to cut soy imports, Bolsonaro fired his two biggest anti-China ideologues, Foreign Affairs Chancellor Ernesto Araujo and Education Minister Abraham Weintraub, and completely revamped his government’s position on China, most recently praising Brazil’s “strategic relationship” with China to Xi Jinping at the BRICS Summit last week. Furthermore, Bolsonaro disobeyed repeated requests by the US State Department and visited Vladimir Putin this February, calling Brazil-Russia relations “a perfect marriage”, and has refused to join the NATO sanctions campaign.

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The fact of the matter is, no matter who is elected in October, Brazil will maintain its neutral stance in the new cold war and will not engage in sanctions against China or Russia or any other geopolitical enemy of the US. The reason for this is that takings sides against important trade partners does not make rational economic sense to Brazil. Suggesting otherwise, as Glenn Greenwald’s colleague Tucker Carlson is doing, is just another example of Fox News bullshit.

https://www.brasilwire.com/tucker-fox-r ... bolsonaro/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Sep 02, 2022 3:18 pm

Lula da Silva maintains advantage in poll ahead of elections in Brazil

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The former Brazilian president has better results among the poor sectors and inhabitants of the Northeast of the South American country. | Photo: @ptbrasil
Published 2 September 2022

Lula Exhibits 45% of the intention to vote in the first poll carried out after the presidential debate by Datafolha; while Bolsonaro has a 32".

The former president of Brazil and presidential candidate for the Workers' Party, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, maintains an advantage in the upcoming elections with 45 percent of voting intentions, according to the latest survey published this Thursday by Datafolha.

The polling agency details that the current head of state, Jair Bolsonaro, has 32 percent; To which he adds that Lula would have 48 percentage points of the valid votes, which would presumably point to the holding of a second round.

While Ciro Gomes (PDT) is in third place, with 9 percent; escorted by de Simone Tebet (MDB), with a 5; while Soraia Thronicke, Pablo Marçal and Felipe D'Avila appear with 1%.


The polling entity, in its first poll after the presidential debate last Sunday, deepened that the white and null votes add up to 4 percent, and the undecided ones 2.

In the same way, they detailed that in terms of spontaneous votes, Lula has 40 percent of the possible votes; Bolsonaro appears with 29; Cyrus reaches 4; and Simone Tebet scores the 2.

The survey shows that Lula achieves better results among the poorest, those who live in the Northeast region and those who receive government aid; while Bolsonaro exhibits better performance among the richest, whites and evangelicals:

Datafolha interviewed 5,734 people in 285 municipalities between August 30 and September 1 and registered with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal under number BR-00433/2022. They added in this regard that the margin of error of the same is approximately 2 percentage points.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/lula-da- ... -0003.html

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The most important election in the Americas is in Brazil

Former president Lula is in the lead in the polls ahead of the first round of elections in Brazil to be held on October 2. These elections will be transformative for Brazil and will have ramifications across the globe

September 01, 2022 by Vijay Prashad

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Women in São Paulo partake in a rally in support of the candidacy of Lula da Silva. The sign reads: "Lula president and for the lives of women". Photo: Elineudo Meira

Former Brazilian President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) runs about on stage at the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo. He was there on August 22, 2022, speaking at a book launch featuring photographs by Ricardo Stuckert about Lula’s trips around the world when he was the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. Lula is a man with a great deal of energy. He recounts the story of when he was in Iran with his Foreign Minister Celso Amorim in 2010, trying to mediate and end the conflict imposed by the United States over Iran’s nuclear energy policy. Lula managed to secure a nuclear deal in 2010 that would have prevented the ongoing pressure campaign that Washington is conducting against Tehran. There was relief in the air. Then, Lula said, “Obama pissed outside the pot.” According to Lula, then-US President Barack Obama did not accept the deal and crushed the hard work of the Brazilian leadership in bringing all sides to an agreement.

Lula’s story puts two important points on the table: he was able to build on Brazil’s role in Latin America by offering leadership in far-off Iran during his previous tenure as president, and he is not afraid of expressing his antipathy for the way the United States is scuttling the possibility of peace and progress across the world for its own narrow interests.

The book release took place during Lula’s campaign for president against the current incumbent—and deeply unpopular—President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula is now in the lead in the polls ahead of the first round of Brazil’s presidential election to be held on October 2.

Fernando Haddad, who ran against Bolsonaro in 2018 and lost after receiving less than 45 percent of the vote, told me that this election remains “risky.” The polls might show that Lula is in the lead, but Bolsonaro is known to play dirty politics to secure his victory. The far right in Brazil, like the far right in many other countries, is fierce in the way it contests for state power. Bolsonaro, Haddad said, is willing to lie openly, saying offensive things to the far-right media and then when challenged about it by the mainstream media, he tends to feign ignorance. “Fake news” seems to be Bolsonaro’s best defense each time he is attacked. The left is far more sincere in its political discourse; leftists are unwilling to lie and eager to bring the issues of hunger and unemployment, social despair and social advancement to the center of the political debate. But there is less interest in these issues and less noise about them in a media landscape that thrives on the theatrics of Bolsonaro and his followers. The old traditional right is as outflanked as the far right in Brazil, which is a space that is now commanded by Bolsonaro (the old traditional right, the men in dark suits who made decisions over cigars and cachaça, are unable to supplant Bolsonaro).

Both Bolsonaro and Lula face an electorate that either loves them or hates them. There is little room for ambiguity in this race. Bolsonaro represents not only the far right, whose opinions he openly champions, but he also represents large sections of the middle class, whose aspirations for wealth remain largely intact despite the reality that their economic situation has deteriorated over the past decade. The contrast between the behavior of Bolsonaro and Lula during their respective presidential campaigns has been stark: Bolsonaro has been boorish and vulgar, while Lula is refined and presidential. If the election goes to Lula, it is likely that he will get more votes from those who hate Bolsonaro than from those who love him.

Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is reflective on the way forward. She told me that Lula will likely prevail in the election because the country is fed up with Bolsonaro. His horrible management of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deterioration of the economic situation in the country mark Bolsonaro as an inefficient manager of the Brazilian state. However, Rousseff pointed out that about a month before the election, Bolsonaro’s government—and the regional governments—have been rolling out policies that have started to lighten the burden on the middle class, such as the lifting of taxation on gasoline. These policies could sway some people to vote for Bolsonaro, but even that is not likely. The political situation in Brazil remains fragile for the left, with the main blocs on the right (agro-business, religion and the military) willing to use any means to maintain their hold on power; it was this right-wing coalition that conducted a “legislative coup” against Rousseff in 2016 and used “lawfare,” the use of law for political motives, against Lula in 2018 to prevent him from running against Bolsonaro. These phrases (legislative coup and lawfare) are now part of the vocabulary of the Brazilian left, which understands clearly that the right bloc (what is called centrão) will not stop pursuing their interests if they feel threatened.

João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) is a close adviser to the Lula campaign. He told me that in the 2002 presidential election, Lula won against the incumbent Fernando Henrique Cardoso because of an immense hatred for the neoliberal policies that Cardoso had championed. The left was fragmented and demoralized at that time of the election. Lula’s time in office, however, helped the left mobilize and organize, although even during this period the focus of popular attention was more on Lula himself rather than the blocs that comprised the left. During Lula’s incarceration on corruption charges, which the left says are fraudulent, he became a figure that unified the left: Lula Livre, “Free Lula,” was the unifying slogan, and the letter L (for Lula) became a symbol (a symbol that continues to be used in the election campaign). While there are other candidates from Brazil’s left in the presidential race, there is no question for Rodrigues that Lula is the left’s standard-bearer and is the only hope for Brazil to oust the highly divisive and dangerous leadership of President Bolsonaro. One of the mechanisms to build the unity of popular forces around Lula’s campaign has been the creation of the Popular Committees (comités populares), which have been working to both unify the left and create an agenda for the Lula government (which will include agrarian reform and a more robust policy for the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities).

The international conditions for a third Lula presidency are fortuitous, Rousseff told me. A wide range of center-left governments have come to power in Latin America (including in Chile and Colombia). While these are not socialist governments, they are nonetheless committed to building the sovereignty of their countries and to creating a dignified life for their citizens. Brazil, the third-largest country in the Americas (after Canada and the United States of America), can play a leadership role in guiding this new wave of left governments in the hemisphere, Rousseff said. Haddad told me that Brazil should lead a new regional project, which will include the creation of a regional currency (sur) that can not only be used for cross-border trade but also for holding reserves. Haddad is currently running to be the governor of São Paulo, whose main city is the financial capital of the country. Such a regional currency, Haddad believed, will settle conflicts in the hemisphere and build new trade linkages that need not rely on long supply chains that have been destabilized by the pandemic. “God willing, we will create a common currency in Latin America because we do not have to depend on the dollar,” said Lula in May 2022.

Rousseff is eager for Brazil to return to the world stage through the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and offer the kind of left leadership that Lula and she had given that platform a decade ago. The world, Rousseff said, needs such a platform to offer leadership that does not rely on threats, sanctions and war. Lula’s anecdote about the Iran deal is a telling one since it shows that a country like Brazil under the leadership of the left is more willing to settle conflicts rather than to exacerbate them, as the United States did. There is hope, Rousseff noted, for a Lula presidency to offer robust leadership for a world that seems to be crumbling due to the myriad challenges such as climate catastrophe, warfare and social toxicity.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/09/01/ ... in-brazil/

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Bolsonaro Sentenced for Genocide by Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal

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Brazil is the fourth country in the world with the highest number of COVID-19 infections and the second with the second highest number of deaths. Sep. 1, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@LUISLOPEZM98

Published 1 September 2022 (14 hours 44 minutes ago)

Brazil's Permanent Peoples' Tribunal sentenced Jair Bolsonaro for crimes against humanity concerning his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is an instance of symbolic justice that reveals the president's responsibility for the deaths caused in the country by COVID-19, particularly those of health professionals and indigenous and Afro-descendant populations.

Argentina's former Supreme Court of Justice member, Eugenio Zaffaroni, exposed the correlation between Jair Bolsonaro's speech and the crimes against Human Rights in Brazil, the core of the accusation.

On the excessive mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zaffaroni said, "it cannot be considered that this malice was eventual." There was intentionality on the part of Jair Bolsonaro behind the deaths during the pandemic, Zaffaroni said.

The official said that Bolsonaro's decision to reject prevention, isolation, and vaccination constitutes a crime against humanity, besides having urged violence.


According to Zaffaroni, there was evidence of genocide for the "drop by drop" massacres against the native peoples. The Argentine judge recommended that the International Criminal Court analyze the complaints in The Hague.

The legal advisor of the Association of Indigenous Peoples, Mauricio Terena, said: "We leave here and go to The Hague; we are already in The Hague," supporting the proposal for an international accusation.

For his part, Douglas Belchior of the Black Coalition said that in addition to being judged by the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, Bolsonaro should also be considered at the ballot box in October, referring to the presidential elections.


"This court is trying Bolsonaro, but he must also be tried at the polls in October," Douglas Belchior in the Permanent Court of Peoples held the Brazilian president responsible for crimes against humanity.

Brazil has reported 34 429 853 infections and 683 365 deaths from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. It is the fourth country in the world after U.S., India, and France in terms of infections, and the second in terms of deaths, after the U.S.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bol ... -0019.html

Brazil: Deforestation Encourages Fires in the Amazon

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Brazilian Amazon faces the worst August of fire in the last 12 years. Sep. 1, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@solleap

Published 1 September 2022 (13 hours 51 minutes ago)

The Brazilian national space institute reports that more than 33 000 fires have been detected in the Amazon.

The report issued by Brazil's national space institute indicates that the Brazilian Amazon rainforest is suffering from more fires than at any point in nearly five years, with more than 33 000 fires detected by the satellites as a result of deforestation.

The rainforest has entered the peak of fire season, mainly related to the area's high levels of deforestation activity. "The deforestation rate is very high. That means there are many fallen trees ready to burn," said Ane Alencar, coordinator of the Mapbiomas Fire project.

"The fire season will be even more intense in September," she said. Meanwhile, incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro has received criticism for failing to tackle illegal deforestation. According to reports, the fires are provocative by groups making room for cattle to graze, which has directly affected environmental land defenders and Indigenous groups, which have faced violence and suppression.

The data shows that the Amazon rainforest is suffering the worst fire record for August in 12 years. Despite criticism, Brazilian President Bolsonaro has to push commercial activity in the Amazon.


"Brazil does not deserve to be attacked in this way," said Brazil's head of state. "None of those who are attacking us have the right. If they wanted a pretty forest to call their own, they should have preserved the ones in their countries," wrote Bolsonaro on his Twitter account last month.

The Igarape Institute has recently issued a report revealing that Brazilian authorities are not involved enough to curb deforestation in the Amazon.

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

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 20, 2022 3:34 pm

THE BRAZILIAN ARMED FORCES SET UP A PARALLEL VOTE COUNTING SYSTEM
13 Sep 2022 , 11:21 am .

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Voting machines that will begin to be used this year in Brazil (Photo: Superior Electoral Court of Brazil)

The Brazilian Armed Forces invested in a project to verify in real time the totalization of the votes made by the Superior Electoral Court. What does it consist of?

This unprecedented measure in the history of Brazilian democracy consists of taking soldiers to the voting centers to take photos of the QR of the ballot boxes and send them to the Army Cyber ​​Defense Command, which counts the votes in parallel with the electoral body.

Subsequently, the results of both counts will be compared. The military wanted to have access in real time instead of collecting the data that the agency publishes on the web. However, the Electoral Court said that there was still no agreement to "allow differentiated access in real time to the data presented for aggregation."

For their part, the military told Folha that they too will issue their conclusions. Their participation in the process has been used by the right-wing candidate for re-election, Jair Bolsonaro, to generate mistrust in the voting machines and question the results.

In this context of dispute between institutions and mistrust, the general elections in Brazil are held in October, in which former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the favorite so far.

Added to this is the fact that supporters of Bolsonaro are setting up committees of armed people to "defend democracy."

https://misionverdad.com/fuerzas-armada ... o-de-votos

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After Sept. 7: Bolsonaro’s Record Disapproval
By
GABRIEL DESLANDES
September 20, 2021

Beleaguered far right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to boost popularity through public rallies and fascist threats against government institutions has backfired, as his approval rating falls to a new low.

by Gabriel Deslandes

A survey by Datafolha, the research institute linked to Folha de São Paulo newspaper, shows that President Jair Bolsonaro’s disapproval rating has reached a record high. 53% of Brazilians surveyed consider him either poor or very bad, up two points from the record level reached during the last survey, conducted in July.

The survey shows the people’s weariness of the government’s response to issues such as the economic crisis, rising inflation, 14.4 million unemployed and its management of the Covid-19 pandemic. This on top of successive institutional crises involving the attacks by Bolsonaro and his followers on the National Congress and Supreme Court. To make things worse, there is a real possibility of forced electricity rationing by early 2022 and a risk of rolling blackouts, as Brazil faces the worst drought in the last 91 years and hydroelectric plants continue to operate with low reservoir levels.

The survey, which took place between September 13 and 15 based on interviews with 3,667 people in 190 cities across Brazil, is the first since the September 7 pro-Bolsonaro demonstrations in which the president threatened to stop obeying orders by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes is the rapporteur of the so-called “fake news inquiry” (Inquiry 4781), which began investigating the illegal dissemination of disinformation and violent threats against Supreme Court Ministers in 2019. In August 2021, Moraes added Bolsonaro as a suspect, after the he made unsubstantiated accusations about fraud in the Brazilian electronic voting system.

Nevertheless, 22% of the Brazilian population still views the Bolsonaro government as good or excellent by 22%, down 2% from the July survey. And the percentage of Brazilians who view the government as average maintained steady at 24% during the last two surveys. According to Datafolha, Bolsonaro’s rejection level trails only that of Fernando Collor during his 3rd year in office, in terms of post dictatorship-era presidencies. That year, Collor’s rejection level reached 68%.

According to an article by Igor Gielow in Folha de S. Paulo, the poll data contradicts with the scenes of the September 7th Bolsonarista demonstrations across Brazil,especially on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista where the President spoke to around 125,000 supporters. This trend of increasing rejection levels has remained constant in 2021, after initial improvement over 2020, during which Bolsonaro regained some approval against his bungling response to the Covid-19 pandemic thanks, in part, to emergency aid payments to workers affected by the crisis.

Rejection grows among young people, the middle class and evangelical Christians

Although the average disapproval rating of Bolsonaro climbed by two percentage points, the increase is more intense in certain segments of the population. A more significant increase in rejection of the president was identified among those earning five to ten times the minimum wage (41% to 50%) and among those over 60 (45% to 51%).

Rejection also rose among people who earn less than double the minimum wage (54% to 56%) and those who earn 2-5 times the minimum wage (47% to 51%). On the other hand, there was a drop in rejection of Bolsonaro among Brazilians earning over 10 times minimum wage, from 58% to 46%. Entrepreneurs are still the only segment of the Brazilian population in which Bolsonaro has a higher level of approval, 47%, than rejection, 34%.

The Datafolha data shows that Bolsonaro has become more rejected in the North and Midwestern regions of Brazil (16% of the sample), where he traditionally has more support and where many of the truck drivers who threatened to attack the Supreme Court in Brasilia during the acts of the September 7th come from. In these regions, his rejection level rose from 41% to 48%.

Among the millions of Brazilians who only have elementary school education, Bolsonaro’s rejection level rose from 49% to 55%. Rejection levels among those whose highest level of education is high school (46% of the population) remained stable at 48%. Disapproval ratings were highest among 16 to 24 years old (59%), students (63%) and gays and bisexuals (73%).

The most surprising data is on evangelical Christians, a demographic group that was key to Bolsonaro’s electoral victory in 2018. Bolsonaro’s disapproval rating has rising by 11 points since January and is now, at 41%, higher than his approval rating of 29%. In July, these numbers were 34% and 37%, respectively.

Low popularity and the pandemic

The survey also sought to gauge how Brazilians rate Bolsonaro’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic. 54% of Brazilians believe the President is doing a poor or very poor job fighting Covid 19, which has already killed almost 600,000 people in the country.

This appears to be a direct reflection of the Bolsonaro administrations’ denialism since the beginning of the pandemic. For example, parliamentary committee investigating the conduct of the pandemic in the Senate demonstrates, the government took at least three months to buy Pfizer’s vaccines, thanks to the ill will and bureaucracy in the Ministry of Health, which ignored repeated offers from the American pharmaceutical company.

Furthermore, Bolsonaro is also leading a campaign to discredit CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by Chinese bio-pharmaceutical Sinovac in partnership with the Butantan Institute. CoronaVac was brought to Brazil by his political rival, São Paulo state governor João Doria (PSDB), and for that reason it has been constantly attacked by Bolsonaro.

Despite the improvement in Covid-19’s numbers as a result of the progress of the immunization campaign – nearly 70% of the population has already taken the first dose and more than 35% have had both – Brazil’s serious political and economic crises have the potential to further erode Bolsonaro’s image. As things stand today, there is a real chance that the President will not even reach the second round in the 2022 presidential elections. According to Viomundo, the consequence of this fact is that during the next few months we should see more and more attacks against former President Lula and the Workers Party (PT) on the part of the mainstream media, in an attempt to strengthen a “third way” candidate to face Lula in a potential run off.

https://www.brasilwire.com/after-sept-7 ... sapproval/

Israeli Company Hired By Army To “Supervise” Brazil’s Election Spreads Disinformation
By BRASILWIRE
September 13, 2022

Spokesperson for the Mossad-linked Israeli company CySource, Hélio Sant’Ana was IT director at Palácio do Planalto during the Bolsonaro government, and has been found to have spread disinformation about the 2022 election.

By Paulo Motoryn for Brasil de Fato

One of the representatives of the Israeli company CySource, which is in a technical cooperation agreement signed with the Brazilian Army’s Cyber ​​Defense Command – the sector that will supervise the electoral process – has published false news and research about the Brazilian voting system.

Brasil de Fato located at least 7 publications in which misleading information was shared by a Twitter account of systems analyst Hélio Cabral Sant’ana, former director of Information Technology at the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic and CySource’s representative in the agreement with the Army.

Hélio Cabral Sant’Ana is linked to federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro (PL-SP). He is also the brother of Sérgio Cabral Sant’Ana, a former advisor to the Ministry of Education in the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and executive director of the Instituto Conservador Liberal (ICL) , which is chaired by “03”, Eduardo’s nickname. .

Among the lies and fake news published by the CySource employee, are electoral polls without registration with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which violate legislation, and an open campaign for Bolsonaro, the Liberal Party candidate for reelection. Some of the posts were labeled fake by Twitter itself.

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Audit Court endorses agreement with Israeli company

The Federal Court of Auditors endorsed the cooperation agreement between the Army’s Cyber ​​Defense Command and CySource. The contract had been considered by the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) as a strategy to threaten the electoral process, and tried to halt it.

But, in a decision published on the 27th August, the First Chamber of the TCU unanimously ruled that the MPF’s action was unfounded, then closed and shelved the case. The full text of the judgment is available on the Court’s website. Click here to download the document.

Deputy Attorney General Lucas Rocha Furtado, from the MPF, despite having filed the lawsuit with the Court of Auditors, did not intervene in the trial, which paved the way for it to be shelved. The reporter questioned Furtado’s office on the subject, but there was no response.

The case, revealed exclusively by Brasil de Fato in May of this year, was considered by the Court after Deputy Attorney General Lucas Rocha Furtado pointed out that the agreement has indications of misuse of purpose and that it may jeopardize the October elections .

Threat to the electoral process

In the petition that gave rise to the lawsuit, the MPF argued that General Héber Garcia Portella, the Army’s Cyber ​​Defense Commander, had already been appointed to the Elections Transparency Commission (CTE) when he signed the contract with the Israeli company.

“In my opinion, it is unacceptable that the structure of the Brazilian Army is used to meet a whim of Jair Bolsonaro, who has insistently questioned the security of electronic voting machines and the electoral counting procedures adopted by the Superior Electoral Court”, he argued.

Furtado points out that Portella often “has reinforced Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric in the sense that the Brazilian voting system contains risks and weaknesses that could compromise the fairness of the elections”.

For this reason, according to him, the agreement was concluded “not with a view to satisfying a public purpose, but rather in flagrant deviation of purpose, with a view to investigating the alleged risks and weaknesses of the Brazilian voting system”.

In recent days, bolsonaristas have used the agreement between the Army and CySource to argue that the military has the technical capacity to question the Brazilian electoral process. One of the posts made by a supporter of the president even went viral on Twitter.

https://www.brasilwire.com/company-hire ... formation/

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Latest poll shows increase for Lula and possibility of first round victory

The former president polled 47% in voting intentions while all other candidates together reach 44%.

September 20, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch

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Presidential candidate for the Workers' Party (PT) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks to members of cooperatives at the Armazem do Campo of the MST. Photo: Emilly Firmino

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party of Brazil (PT) has a real chance of winning the first round of the presidential election. This is what the survey released on Monday September 19 by Ipec (Intelligence in Research and Consulting) shows. Lula’s vote has moved up one percentage point, and he now has 47% of total voting intentions in the “stimulated” survey (wherein the names of the candidates are presented). The sum of the votes for all the other candidates is 44%.

Jair Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party polled at 31%. Ciro Gomes (PDT) received 7% and Simone Tebet (MDB) had 5%. Soraya Thronicke (União Brasil) polled at 1%. The other candidates do not reach 1%. The margin of error is two points higher or lower.

In the previous survey, published last Monday September 12, Lula had 46%, followed by Bolsonaro (31%); Ciro (7%) and Tebet (4%). The others totaled 1% each or less. The sum of the votes of all the opponents, 44%, was lower than the intention to vote for Lula, and the difference was within the margin of error, that is: there was uncertainty about the need or not for a second round.

Spontaneous
In the spontaneous poll released on Monday September 19, in which the names of the candidates are not presented, Lula went from 44% last week to 45%. Bolsonaro oscillated downward: from 30% to 29%. Ciro has 5%, against Tebet’s 3%. Also in this survey, Lula is guaranteed victory in the first round.

Ipec also registered Lula’s growth in voting intentions in an eventual second round against the current president. He now has 54%, against 35% for the PL candidate. In last week’s poll, Lula had 53% of voting intentions in the second round, against 36% for Bolsonaro.

This week’s Ipec survey interviewed 3,008 people between September 13 and 19. The margin of error is two percentage points higher or lower and the survey is registered with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) under number BR-00073/2022.

Lula grows in FSB/BTG survey
In another survey published on Monday September 19, Lula rose three points above the margin of error and reached 44% of voting intentions in the FSB/BTG survey, compared to a survey by the same institute published a week earlier. Bolsonaro’s intention to vote remained at 35%, while Ciro and Tebet fell two points each, reaching 7% and 5%, respectively. Thronicke had 1%, and the others didn’t score.

The FSB/BTG data indicates the possibility of a second round between the current president and the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT). In this case, according to the same survey, Lula would win with 52% of the votes, against 39% for Bolsonaro. Each rose one percentage point in comparison with the institute’s survey of the second round of voting the previous week.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/09/20/ ... d-victory/

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PBS and BBC Team Up to Misinform About Brazil’s Bolsonaro
BRIAN MIER

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Both the US and British governments supported the rise of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Future Prime Minister Liz Truss had secret meetings with the future president in 2018 to discuss “free trade, free markets and post-Brexit opportunities” (BrasilWire, 3/25/20).

The US Department of Justice was a crucial partner in the Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) investigation, which resulted in the prosecution and jailing of Brazil’s left-leaning former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The politically motivated legal campaign against Lula served to prevent his participation in the 2018 presidential election, in what Gaspard Estrada calls “the biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.”

Because of this history, and because Brazil is a hard country to explain concisely, I was weary to learn that the British and US state-affiliated media outlets BBC and PBS had co-released a documentary about Jair Bolsonaro only a few weeks before this year’s Brazilian presidential election (10/2–30/22). It didn’t fail to disappoint.

Rise of the Bolsonaros was released on August 28 on PBS, and is airing as a three-part series in Britain on BBC2. It tells the story of Brazil’s far-right president through the words of people like Steve Bannon, Bolsonaro’s son Flavio, journalists, and current or former allies of the president, including a far-right lawmaker who is merely introduced as an “anti-corruption crusader.”

Feigned objectivity
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The only time a member of the Brazilian Workers Party got to speak was when Rep. Maria do Rosario was asked to describe her reaction to a misogynistic taunt from Bolsonaro.
With over 20 interviewees, the producers feign objectivity by granting a small proportion of airtime to progressive politicians. Two of the three progressive interviewees, however, are from the relatively tiny PSOL party—a nonthreatening source, given that the party is not even running a presidential candidate this year. The single representative of Lula’s Workers Party, Rep. Maria do Rosario, is given around 30 seconds to answer the following aggressively uncomfortable question: “How did you feel when Bolsonaro told you you didn’t deserve to be raped?”

The cast of journalists included some of the biggest cheerleaders for Lava Jato and Lula’s politically motivated imprisonment. Given the most airtime among the journalist interviewees was Brian Winter, who was introduced as a former Reuters chief in Brazil. The fact that Winter’s current job was not mentioned is indicative of the documentary’s editorial bias.

Winter is vice president of policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas, the think tank founded by David Rockefeller in 1963 that was a key player in the 1973 coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende. Since then, AS/COA has worked, most recently through its media arm, Americas Quarterly—of which Winter is editor-in-chief—to promote nearly every other far-right US intervention in Latin America, including the recent regime-change efforts in Venezuela and Bolivia.

AS/COA held a closed-door meeting in New York in 2017 with US business leaders and Bolsonaro—then a presidential hopeful—evidently prompting Americas Quarterly to lend increasingly favorable coverage to the far-right demagogue. The think tank’s current list of donors reads like a who’s who of mining and agribusiness corporations, many of which have benefited immensely from the massive privatization and environmental deregulation campaigns that followed the 2016 legislative coup against President Dilma Rousseff.

Desertification = development

During the Rise of the Bolsonaros opening montage, as footage of a burning rainforest appeared on screen, Winter said, “Jair Bolsonaro believes that the Brazilian Amazon is the magical path to economic prosperity.” There was no mention of Winter’s prominent role within AS/COA, which counts the agribusiness giant Cargill as one of its “elite corporate members.” This omission is especially glaring, since Cargill has been repeatedly cited as one of the main culprits in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

This set the tone for the film’s treatment of one of the only Bolsonaro policies that was criticized in the nearly three-hour production: illegal deforestation. Every time footage related to this issue appeared, a journalist or Bolsonaro ally arrived on screen to water it down, usually by a ratio of at least two to one.
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Bolsonaro meme designer Camila Azevedo describes how deforestation is helping the Indigenous.
One example came nearly an hour in, when the issue of deforestation was first given in-depth treatment. “From the very beginning, Bolsonaro wanted to develop the Amazon economically,” BBC‘s Katy Watson said—as if it were a given that the desertification of former rain forests, the poisoning of rivers with mercury and the destruction of renewable commodity chains is good for the economy.

Similar treatment was given to Bolsanaro’s systematic persecution and dispossession of Brazil’s Indigenous communities, some of which still live with little or no contact with outsiders. APIB—a coalition of Indigenous associations from across Brazil—has already called on the International Criminal Court to investigate Bolsonaro for genocide and crimes against humanity. After Indigenous leader Maial Kayapó explained how Bolsonaro encourages violence against her people, Camila Azevedo, the Bolsonaro family’s young meme designer, pops on the screen and says: “Most Indigenous, they want land to till…. They don’t want to walk around naked for the rest of their lives.”

Rags to riches
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Jair Bolsonaro gives PBS viewers a tour of his childhood home.
Bolsonaro’s early years are framed as a rags-to-riches story of rugged individualism. The story begins with the laughable claim that Bolsonaro grew up in the “badlands” of Brazil. In fact, Bolsonaro was born in Campinas, a relatively wealthy city with a metro area population of 3.7 million.

The banana-farming town of Eldorado, where they moved when he was 11, while located in one of the poorest regions of Brazil’s richest state of Sao Paulo, could hardly be called a “badlands.” Brazil’s badlands are the semi-arid back country of the Northeast, where gangs of Wild West–style outlaws called cangaceiros roamed on horseback until the 1940s.

In introducing Brazil’s sub-fascist military dictatorship (1964–85), corporate PR flack Brian Winter tells us that it was Bolsonaro’s “golden age.” Brazilian studies professor Anthony Perreira says:

If you were in one of the armed left groups, if you were a member of the Communist Party, if you were a student, and if you were engaged politically, it was a very dangerous time. But for a lot of people, it was a period of growth.

For the last 500 years, Brazil’s export commodity–based economy has been characterized by cyclical boom and bust periods. During the 21-year dictatorship, there was indeed a five-year boom period between 1968–73, but due to the government’s repression of organized labor and its efforts to suppress wages, it was accompanied by a drastic increase in income inequality. By the time the dictatorship ended, Brazil had become one of the most unequal countries in the world.

This inequality was exacerbated by the military government’s lack of commitment to public education, and its eagerness to take out massive loans from the World Bank to fund unsuccessful, environmentally devastating projects in the Amazon rainforest. Such failures led to the economic stagnation, hyperinflation and crippling foreign debt of what is now referred to as the “lost decade” of the 1980s. When Perreira says, “For a lot of people it was a period of growth,” he is clearly referring to the elites who currently finance Bolsonaro rather than the Brazilian working class, which this documentary misrepresents as constituting the president’s primary base of support.

Man of the people

Bolsonaro’s petit bourgeois origins, glossed over in the film, are revealed in the story of his military career. Agulhas Negras, the elite Brazilian army academy where Bolsonaro studied after attending the Preparatory School of the Brazilian Army, has an extremely competitive admissions process. It’s not the type of place where someone who grew up in “rags” would get into, but a traditional pathway of social ascension for members of the lower-middle class.

The documentary also relates how, in September 1986, then-Captain Bolsonaro wrote an article that appeared in Veja (9/3/86), a national news magazine, complaining about military officer salaries. A journalist says Bolsonaro “couldn’t afford to buy a house,” without mentioning that he was arrested for breaking army regulations by publishing the article. The documentary frames Bolsonaro as being broke and unable to support his family, but at the time of the article, Brazilian army captains earned 10,433 cruzados per month—over 12 times the country’s minimum salary of 804 cruzados.
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Brian Winter: “I was there when a reporter asked….” Where was he? At AS/COA. What was he doing there? Introducing Bolsonaro to his corporate sponsors in the mining, petroleum and agribusiness industries.
The salary may have been lower than what Bolsonaro felt he deserved, but it placed him among the roughly 10% of the national population in the upper-middle class. Accurately portraying Bolsonaro as a Brazilian elite, however, doesn’t fit with the director’s attempt to portray Lula, who grew up in a mud shack and started working in a factory at age 14, as a liberal elite, and Bolsonaro as a man of the people, the same way Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson recently did during his one-week stay in Brazil running electoral propaganda for the president (FAIR.org, 7/25/22).

Bolsonaro’s 2017 visit to New York is presented as a brilliant strategy to validate his future candidacy to the Brazilian public, to show that “important people in the US wanted to listen to what he had to say.” Interviewee Brian Winter’s role in introducing Bolsonaro to US business elites is not mentioned at all, only alluded to by his anecdote about how cleverly Bolsonaro answered a question from a US reporter at the time about his rape comments directed at Maria do Rosario.

US-style culture war

Meanwhile, Steve Bannon and his far-right allies like Jason Miller have maintained communications with the Brazilian president’s family for years. In fact, the relationship between Bolsonaro’s sons and the American far right is so good that one of them attended the January 5, 2021, “war council” in Washington, DC, prior to the invasion of Capitol Hill. Bannon’s claim in the documentary that he reached out to the Bolsonaros to learn about their social media strategy seems like a blatant lie, since many of the tactics employed by Bolsonaro were clearly based on the Trump campaign’s culture war rhetoric.

The idea that Lula and Bolsonaro are at opposite ends of a US-style culture war is given disproportionate emphasis in the documentary. For example, at certain times when Lula is discussed, footage of men kissing at a pride parade appears on screen, as does an image of the former president holding a rainbow flag.

Such exaggerated treatment of Lula’s role in the cultural sphere ignores the fact that his popularity was largely driven by massive increases in spending on public health and education and successful poverty-reduction policies. Although, unlike Bolsonaro, Lula is not openly homophobic, he has faced criticism from the LGBT community for not going far enough to advance LGBT rights, and from feminists for not legalizing abortion.
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Showcasing Flavio Bolsonaro’s sensitive side.
Nevertheless, the largest protests of Brazil’s working class since Bolsonaro took office had nothing to do with culture wars. The 2019 Education Tsunami protests, organized by student groups and teachers unions, brought over 2 million people into the streets of dozens of cities, and effectively stalled the Bolsonaro administration’s attempts to charge tuition at public universities.

Rio de Janeiro city councilor and anti–police violence crusader Marielle Franco, who is introduced only as an LGBT activist, was not a member of Lula’s Workers Party. Her assassination at the hands of members of a Rio de Janeiro militia, whose leader Adriano da Nobrega’s wife and mother both worked as “ghost employees” in Flavio Bolsonaro’s state congressional cabinet, is another scandal involving the Bolsonaro family that the documentary glosses over.

Instead, Flavio Bolsonaro, who appears several times in the documentary, shares humorous anecdotes about his childhood, and cries to the camera while remembering the 2018 stabbing incident involving his father, which far-right forces falsely tried to blame on Communists.
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Sergio Moro and Jair Bolsonaro
Conspicuously absent: Sergio Moro, who broke the law to remove Lula from the 2018 presidential elections then went on work as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice, is not mentioned once in the documentary.

The most glaring problem in the deeply flawed Rise of the Bolsonaros is the omission of arguably the single most important player in Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency: former Lava Jato investigation judge Sergio Moro. During a period in which the Lava Jato task force was having frequent meetings with the US Department of Justice and the FBI, Moro repeatedly broke the law by collaborating with prosecutors to discredit the Workers Party and help Bolsonaro.

The documentary doesn’t mention that Lula’s election-season arrest, on charges of committing “undetermined acts of corruption,” was made after the Brazilian supreme court, under threats from the Army, opened an exception to the Constitution to enable his imprisonment while his appeals were ongoing. Instead, it brings up frivolous charges that were dropped before his trial even started, such as “receiving 1 million euros in bribes.” The fact that Lula was ultimately released from prison after the election is written off as a “technicality.” There is also no acknowledgment that this delay was only made possible by the political bias of a crooked judge who illegally colluded with prosecutors throughout the trial.

While stating that the supreme court ruled that Lula could run for public office, the documentary omits the fact that he was fully exonerated on all charges, while the judge who imprisoned him, Sergio Moro, was found by that same court to have been tainted by judicial bias. An especially relevant piece of information left out of Rise of the Bolsonaros is the supreme court’s charge that Moro leaked fraudulent audio tapes to media in order to damage the reputation of Workers Party candidate Fernando Haddad just one week before the presidential elections, and then, in a clear conflict of interest, accepted a cabinet position in the Bolsonaro government.

Not even mentioning Moro, let alone describing the crimes he committed to empower Bolsonaro, discredits the entire documentary. Without Moro, a false impression is left that Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power was based entirely on his family’s cunning.
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Steve Bannon gets the last word.
The program ends, laying any doubts about its lack of objectivity to rest once and for all, with the narrator saying, “The fate of Brazil is in the hands of its people,” followed by a 40-second pep talk by Steve Bannon—giving the last word on the upcoming Brazilian election to one of the main advocates for overturning the last US election.

The fact that US and British state-affiliated media outlets would promote misleading narratives less than a month before the most complicated Brazilian presidential election in modern history is another sad example of the long tradition of Western media facilitating imperialist meddling in Latin American elections.

Featured image: Jair Bolsonaro and sons, pictured in Rise of the Bolsonaros.

https://fair.org/home/pbs-and-bbc-team- ... bolsonaro/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 22, 2022 2:11 pm

Bolsonaro's Speech at the United Nations Outrages Brazilians

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Image of President Jair Bolsonaro at the UN headquarters, NYC, U.S., Sept., 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @FranciscoVonAt2

Published 20 September 2022

One of his most commented fallacies was the statement according to which 75 percent of the Amazon rainforest “remains intact” as it was in 1500.


At the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Jair Bolsonaro described a Brazil that "does not exist." This was the phrase used by Brazilian outlets to refer to "the lies" told by the far-right politician who aspires to re-election on October 2.

Dragged by the voters' high rejection levels, "he addressed his supporters by describing a fictitious country and presenting himself as a speech freedom defender," Brazilian journalist Sandra Cohen commented.

"He behaved like a candidate at the UN plenary session," she added, noting that Bolsonaro lashed out at the Workers' Party presidential candidate Lula da Silva without daring to mention his name.

The O Globo journalist also highlighted that Bolsonaro swore to have rooted out corruption in this South American country despite the fact that there are criminal proceedings and complaints about corruption against his family and his former ministers.


One of Bolsonaro’s most commented fallacies was the statement according to which 75 percent of the Amazon rainforest “remains intact,” which contradicts all the deforestation evidence recorded by international scientists.

“Two-thirds of all Brazilian territory remain with native vegetation, exactly as it was when Brazil was discovered in 1500,” the far-right President said unashamedly.

Bolsonaro also sought to convince that his administration has turned Brazil "into a global example" of political tolerance, economic growth, sustainable development, "a country that feeds the planet thanks to its agribusiness.

"So far, however, recurring voting intention polls contradict so much megalomania," journalist Cohen pointed out.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bol ... -0011.html

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Brazilian activists slam Bolsonaro’s genocidal climate policy

With both the UN General Assembly and Climate Week taking place in NYC, activists protest deforestation and murders of Indigenous people

September 20, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch

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Indigenous activists stand in front of projected images in Midtown Manhattan (Image via: APIB, DDB, Greenpeace)

“Indigenous people protect our future,” read an enormous image projected on the side of a building in Midtown Manhattan. On the evening of September 19, Indigenous and environmentalist leaders collaborated with NYC-based protest projection collective “the Illuminator” to display political slogans against deforestation and violence against Indigenous peoples in Brazil.

Slogans included, “protect Indigenous land, protect the climate,” “timber extraction threatens Indigenous land and increases conflict,” “Indigenous peoples protect all ecosystems,” among others, in both English and Portuguese. The organizations that planned the protest include the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), Defend Democracy in Brazil Committee (DDB-NY), Greenpeace Brazil and Greenpeace USA.


This protest comes as a response to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and Climate Week currently taking place in New York City. On September 20, right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro opened the UNGA. Activists in Brazil have charged Bolsonaro with genocide for his deadly mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis, as well as crimes against Black and Indigenous people. Bolsonaro has also been accused of wreaking havoc on the environment, in particular regarding ramped up deforestation of the Amazon.


“Indigenous Lands are the most preserved areas in all of Brazil, but this does not translate into our rights being protected,” said Dinaman Tuxá, Executive Coordinator at APIB. Indeed, Indigenous peoples play a tremendous role in protecting the Amazon environment. As made obvious by satellite imagery, the area surrounding the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau reserve is 70% deforested, while the reserve itself is only 2% deforested.

At the same time, Indigenous peoples are some of the most persecuted in Brazil, a persecution that has only worsened during Bolsonaro’s term. As of August 2022, 176 Indigenous people have been murdered during Bolsonaro’s third year in office. At least 6 Indigenous people were murdered in September alone, thus far. These assassinations include that of Indigenous leader Victorino Sanches of the Guaraní-kaiowá on September 13.

Notably, in June 2022, Indigenous activist Bruno Periera and journalist Dom Phillips were found dead in a remote part of the Amazon. At the time, Sônia Guajajara, executive coordinator of APIB and candidate for Federal Deputy commented, “[it is h]ard to wake up in one of the countries that kills the most environmental defenders. They want us to give up, but we will not give up. Brazil is Indigenous land and we will make our whole lives a life of struggle for our peoples!”

UN address or campaign speech?
Bolsonaro’s address to the UNGA on the morning of September 20, focused on elevating the policies carried out by his administration and attacking prior governments, leading many analysts to denounce it for being akin to a campaign speech. He stated that “As regards the environment and sustainable development, Brazil is part of the solution and stands as a reference to the world.”

“In the Brazilian Amazon, an area as big as Western Europe, more than 80% of the forest remains untouched and pristine, contrary to what is often reported by the mainstream national and international media,” Bolsonaro continued.

These statements have been widely criticized for being misleading. Studies show that environmental destruction has accelerated during Bolsonaro’s term as president. According to Greenpeace Brazil, as of January, during the past three years, deforestation has increased by 52.9% in the Amazon, compared to the three previous years.

According to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), 7,135 km2 of the Amazon rainforest, nine times the area of New York City, was deforested from January to August 2022. This is the highest rate ever recorded for this length of time.

The INPE data also indicates that deforestation reached the highest rate last month since 2017, surpassing the infamous 2019 “day of fire” in which rural producers agreed to burn pasture and deforestation areas on August 10 of that year. Also in August of this year, 33,116 illegal fire hotspots were recorded in the Amazon.

Carol Pasquali, Executive Director of Greenpeace Brazil, said, “What happens in the Amazon doesn’t stay in the Amazon. All over the world, we are already seeing the impacts of the climate crisis…We need our forest standing and its people protected from those who want to make short-term profits off of it.”

The organizers of the September 19 action said that the projections were intended to call out Bolsonaro “for anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental policies that have led to an explosive increase in deforestation along with violence against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/09/20/ ... te-policy/

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UN Alerted Over “Unprecedented Authoritarian Risk” To Brazil Election
By BRASILWIRE May 22, 2022

Monica Bergamo reports in Folha de S.Paulo newspaper that UN Special Rapporteur for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Diego Garcia, received a document on the 17th May in which 85 Brazilian professors and jurists warn of “an unprecedented campaign of mistrust and threats” against the country’s superior courts.

With the imminent presidential election under explicit coup threat should frontrunner Lula da Silva win as expected, Brazilians have looked to international bodies for assistance in guaranteeing its already fractured democracy.

The text states that judicial independence in Brazil faces challenges not seen since post-military dictatorship redemocratization since 1985. It also says that this year’s elections and democratic continuity are threatened by the attacks promoted by President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies.

The letter was prepared by the Observatory for Monitoring Electoral Risks in Brazil (Demos), made up of legal and political science researchers such as Emílio Peluso Neder Meyer, Clara Iglesias Keller, Estefânia Maria de Queiroz Barboza and Diego Werneck Arguelhes.

“Bolsonaro has invested heavily to delegitimize elections. He has repeatedly claimed — without ever providing any evidence — that the electronic voting system the country adopted in the 1990s is open to deliberate manipulation,” the researchers say.

“Those who believe that democracy in Brazil is sufficiently guaranteed and protected, and that the institutions are functioning perfectly, are mistaken. It is not exactly easy to see when the line between democracy and dictatorship has been crossed, and Brazil may be crossing that line in the coming months.” the letter reads.

The document asks the UN to carry out an official visit to Brazil to assess the attacks on judicial independence, and hear testimonies from magistrates at the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) and STF (Federal Supreme Court), as well as members of civil society. The document asks that the UN demand explanation for these threats, from the Bolsonaro government.

The initiative is also supported by 28 entities and research groups, such as the Washington Brazil Office, the Center for the Analysis of Freedom and Authoritarianism, and the Laboratory for Security and Defense Studies at UFRJ.

The signatories also report to the UN that the Jair Bolsonaro government encourages public attacks on institutions and violence against political opponents, as well as undermining the peaceful resolution of electoral conflicts.

They recall that Brazilian elections have been supervised by the Electoral Justice since the 1930s, and that, between 2018 and 2021, the country dropped five points in the general index of Freedom House, a human rights organization that measures political freedom in territories Worldwide.

“Bolsonaro tests the limits of institutions, encouraging his supporters to act against the courts and their judges, eroding support for institutions in a way that strengthens his own illiberal and authoritarian agenda,” they warn.

“Bolsonaro has supported disinformation and false accusations of fraud in the 2018 elections, even though he himself was the winner”, the document notes, and recalls episodes such as the September 7 2021, a “dress rehearsal coup” which took place last year with direct participation by the president, and the pardon he granted to far-right ally Daniel Silveira after conviction by the Supreme Court.

The letter also describes the latest standoff between the Electoral Court and the Armed Forces around the 2022 election: “Fostering a permanent institutional crisis has been Bolsonaro’s strategy to avoid judicial and electoral checks on his power, generating distrust and undermining institutional legitimacy in a way that could last even after the 2022 elections,” it reads.

“Even if the current government is defeated at the polls, measures must be taken to combat attacks on the judiciary, as the government’s narratives and influence will certainly overcome the election.” the letter concludes.

https://www.brasilwire.com/un-warned-ov ... -election/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Sep 29, 2022 2:15 pm

Bolsonaro Wants to Believe Lula Will Not Win in the First Round

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President Jair Bolsonaro, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sept. 24, 2022. | Photo: EFE

Published 26 September 2022

The Brazilian president continues to insinuate that he will not respect the results of the October elections if they do not favor him.

On Sunday, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stated that it is "impossible" for the Workers' Party candidate Lula da Silva to win the October 2 presidential election in a single round, despite voting intention polls saying that is the most likely result.

"Will he win in the first round? I see it as difficult. No, it is not difficult. It is impossible. Impossible and full stop!" tweeted Bolsonaro, who has a disadvantage of between 10 and 15 percentage points with respect to Lula.

The former Capitan, who has repeatedly threatened to ignore the electoral results if they do not favor him, says that he "does not believe much" in surveys. Bolsonaro is sure that he will win in the first round because Lula "is not capable of mobilizing the people."

Over the last few months, Bolsonaro has been sowing suspicions about the legitimacy of the electoral authorities and the electronic voting system, which has been in operation for decades and allowed him to take office in 2019.


Brazilian democratic political forces have expressed concern about his narrative, which continues to insist that the elections will be respected by Bolsonaro as long as they are "clean and transparent."

The far-right President also attacked the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), which prohibited him from broadcasting live programs from official offices, such as the Planalto Palace in Brasilia.

"Could it be that the TSE knows where I am doing this live broadcast from?," Bolsonaro said ironically on Sunday, insinuating that he does not care about the orders of the electoral authorities related to the transparency of the political campaign.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bol ... -0006.html

Violence Shakes Final Stretch of Brazil's Presidential Campaign

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Jair Bolsonaro simulating with his hands that he fires weapons. | Photo: Twitter/ @siteptbr

Published 28 September 2022 (17 hours 59 minutes ago)

"When the Republic's main leader encourages people to be violent, they feel authorized to behave in that way," RAPS Director Sodre pointed out.


Less than four days before the presidential elections to be held on Sunday, October 2, Brazilians are outraged by new cases of political violence generated by supporters of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

The authorities are investigating the murder of at least four people after political arguments and other violent attacks on militants and democratic candidates. As a result of the escalation of threats, the Workers' Party presidential candidate Lula da Silva has chosen to attend the latest political rallies accompanied by a large security apparatus.

"The knife is already sharp" was the message of one of the most recent threats against the leftist leader. Authorities managed to find the cell phone of the suspect in the incident.

The tension that far-right militiamen are unleashing has crossed the borders of this South American country, motivating the concern of other governments and international observers.


The tweet reads, "The Indigenous lands are less devastated but their inhabitants pay for it with their lives. Bolsonaro is an irresponsible fanatic who encourages violence and devastation across the country! Even under attack, Indigenous lands manage to avoid further devastation. In 37 years, deforestation on Indigenous lands was only 1.7%, while it exceeded 21% in unprotected areas."

On Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre condemned the latest violent incidents and indicated that Washington hopes that the Brazilian presidential elections take place "in a fair, transparent, and credible manner." The situation, however, could worsen on election day.

In anonymous statements to the EFE news agency, a Sao Paulo Military Police officer said that "he does not rule out altercations" in the streets, in the event that Lula da Silva wins in a single round, which is the most likely result according to all voting intention surveys.

The first serious political violence case took place in July in Foz do Iguacu, where a prison officer shot dead a Workers' Party leader while he was celebrating his birthday. Later, on Sept. 7, another Bolsonaro supporter stabbed to death a work colleague who admired Lula.


The tweet reads, "A Bolsonarista doctor threatens to shoot at the face of a Workers' Party militant, who was distributing campaign material in downtown Curitiba. People called the police and took him to the police station to file a protection action. He was transferred accompanied by the victim and witnesses."

One of the most recent political assassinations occurred over the weekend in Ceara, where a Bolsonarista entered a bar, asked who supported Lula, and then stabbed a man.

In this context, the Brazilian Forum of Public Security and the Political Action Network for Sustainability (RAPS) published a survey showing that 7 out of 10 Brazilians are afraid of being physically attacked as a result of their political opinions.

Among the reasons for that fear is the discourse openly in favor of violence against leftists, the poor, and social leaders that Bolsonaro has promoted since he became president in 2019.

"That has consequences because when the Republic's main leader encourages people to be violent, they feel authorized to behave in that way," RAPS Director Monica Sodre pointed out.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Vio ... -0009.html

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“It is not a sin to vote for Lula”: The left and Evangelicalism in Brazil

Evangelicals are a crucial voting block in Brazil but they are in no way a homogeneous group. Progressive Evangelical groups and people’s movements are campaigning to dispel misconceptions and bridge the gap between the community and the left

September 29, 2022 by Zoe Alexandra

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Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law participates in a Fora Bolsonaro protest in Maranhão. Photo: Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law

Ahead of the historic election in Brazil on October 2, campaigning is in its final stage. Across the country, parties and supporters are organizing mass rallies, parades, festivals, motorcycle processions, social media campaigns, and more to promote their candidates and their vision of the country.

One of the major groups which candidates and their campaigns have attempted to court in this campaign is Evangelical Christians*. According to a survey by the Datafolha Institute, Evangelical Christians are one of the fastest growing religious groups and today account for at least 31% of the population. In the 2018 elections, 70% of voters that identified as Evangelical Christians voted for Jair Bolsonaro and were the decisive vote that helped Bolsonaro achieve victory.

While Bolsonaro defines himself as Catholic, he is one of the most prominent political figures supporting Evangelicalism. He himself was baptized in 2016 by Pastor Everaldo from the Social Christian Party and the Assemblies of God Church and his wife is an active Baptist in the mega-church Igreja Batista Atitude. Throughout his presidency and during the campaign, Bolsonaro has demonstrated and proclaimed his support for Evangelical churches, whether it be through meetings with pastors, participation in “Marches for Jesus,” or using Christian concepts in his campaign rally speeches.

However, leading up to the 2022 elections, the support for far-right candidate and incumbent president Bolsonaro has decreased among Evangelicals. A Datafolha survey indicated that 48% of Evangelical voters support Bolsonaro, while 31% support Workers’ Party candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Recognizing the importance of reaching out to this broad section of the population, various progressive organizations such as the Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law, the Popular Struggle Committees (formed to reactivate grassroots political work ahead of the elections), the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), the Movement of Workers for Rights (MTD), and others have been organizing dialogues and targeted campaigns to engage with this sector of the population and attempt to bring some of the Evangelical vote to the left.

Angélica Tostes, theologian and researcher from the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, told Peoples Dispatch during a “Dialogue with Evangelicals” event, “We often say that in politics there are no empty spaces. So if we are not talking with at least 31% of the population, we are not talking with a big group.”

Addressing misconceptions
For these organizations, the process of swinging the Evangelical vote begins with breaking down the misconceptions among the left of who Evangelicals are in Brazil.

“The majority of Evangelicals do not fit the profile of what the media shows us – the white middle class man, those pastors who call for violence,” the Tricontinental researcher told Peoples Dispatch. “We are usually talking about poor, Black women from working-class neighborhoods who are at the base of the capitalist pyramid and are the most affected by these policies of neoliberal dismantling.”

It is essential that the left not homogenize this section of the population, Tostes said. “Not all Evangelicals are fundamentalists, nor are all of them conservative. So, when we dismantle this idea that Evangelicals are the same, we can better understand this field, which is complex…because nobody has just one identity. They are Evangelicals but they are also people who are facing racism and gender inequality, and struggling – especially the youth – to find jobs.”

She concluded, “We need to understand a little more of our working class, which today is Evangelical.”

Tostes helped compile a report published in February 2022 by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research called “Resisting with Faith,” which through interviews and research sought to explain some of the key questions surrounding the growth of Evangelical Christians in the country, such as: Who are Evangelicals today in Brazil? What drives people to go to Church? What do they look for there? What are their perspectives on the left?

Looking left
Another central focus of the grassroots work between Evangelicals and progressive movements is to convince those who attend Evangelical churches of the importance of a people-centric, left political project, which in these elections is represented by the presidential candidacy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party.

As the Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law explains in its mission statement: “Brazil is going through a religious transition and is witnessing the rise of the Evangelical Right. Its groups are organizing a parliamentary caucus, blocking the advance of human rights, manipulating huge groups through moralistic agendas and selling false solutions to the people. This has also been the case in several other countries around the world. However, we discover, day after day, that there is growing space for the political awareness and organization of this segment. Unfortunately, part of the popular-democratic field still does not recognize the need to approach the evangelical people, except on electoral occasions.”

Lívia Martins de Carvalho, a pastor of the Pentecostal Evangelical Church of Jesus Christ and Bishop of the Iglesia Antigua de las Américas who participated in the “Dialogue with Evangelicals” event told Peoples Dispatch that the coming together of progressive spaces and the church is natural. She said, “When we are talking about the question of the progressive sector, we are talking about something more oriented to the people, something more focused on social issues. And I see this a lot in the actions of Jesus, the social issues, the people, this act of giving food, and multiplying, of caring for those who are oppressed by the State because they are despised.”

Carvalho, who belongs to a “garage church”** in São Paulo’s periphery, pointed out that, “the importance of the Church entering into dialogue with progressive sectors is there, with the people, with the social issues.”

However, she points out that there are still significant challenges, and while the majority of Evangelical churches are independent and not affiliated to the conservative mega-Churches, those politics of the latter still permeates. This, she explained, largely has to do with the high level of desire to attend Church services amongst Evangelicals. “You visit one church one day and then the other. If there is no service in your church on Tuesday, you go to the church that has one. If there is no service on Wednesday, you go to the other one…Because of this flow, you have many more fundamentalist, more conservative thoughts, which end up reflecting in my community, for example. My community has people that are Bolsonarists, those who are already PTistas (Workers’ Party supporters), and then there are others from the center. It is very diverse in this sense, and we coexist.”

Carvalho emphasized that the crucial element here is to increase spaces of dialogues and exchange. “I believe that more meetings like this one will help us so that the dialogue will grow and the actions will grow.”

In the lead-up to the October 2 elections, the Evangelical Front for the Rule of Law published and distributed campaign material in diverse formats to engage in this crucial dialogue and address right-wing messages that are often held up by faux-religious arguments. Their “Believers Do Not Fight With Human Weapons” pamphlet provides Christian arguments against the Bolsonarist gun drive. They produced a music video directed towards believers called “It is not a sin to vote for Lula”.

Whoever says it is a sin to vote for Lula doesn’t know what he is talking about.

He doesn’t read the Bible correctly and doesn’t even know what democracy is.

To vote for Lula is a right of every Brazilian, whether a believer or not.

A president of the Republic must govern for all, not only for a group of religious people.

Rest assured, my brother, my sister, it is not a sin to vote for Lula. It is a sin to promote death and destruction.


[youtube]http://youtu.be/PUfQYx-v3YE[/img]

* Evangelicalism is a broad movement within Protestant Christianity focused on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, spiritual rebirth, and spreading the “gospel” or good news.

** Garage churches refer to the self-organized churches that are often created in response to community members’ desire to worship. They are often not linked to the larger Churches.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/09/29/ ... in-brazil/

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Attack against Brazilian deputy sympathizer of Lula da Silva

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"I am in my eighth election and I have never seen such absurdity, it is unacceptable," said deputy Paulo Guedes. | Photo: Screenshot
Published 26 September 2022

This is the second attack that has occurred in Montes Claros in recent days, after last Friday a person fired into the air to threaten PT militants.

A Brazilian deputy who supports presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva denounced on Sunday that he was unharmed in an attack against him committed by a supporter of President Jair Bolsonaro, a week before the general elections.

Legislator Paulo Guedes, a member of the Workers' Party (PT), led by Lula da Silva, stated that his vehicle received three shots from a firearm fired by a Bolsonarist, reported the teleSUR correspondent in Brazil, Nacho Lemus.

For the attack, which occurred in the city of Montes Claros, in the north of the state of Minas Gerais, the police arrested a person who, according to the legislator, would be an active military police officer.


“I am on my eighth election and I have never seen such absurdity, it is unacceptable. We were at the end of the caravan when the Voyage appeared and the passenger came barreling down the avenue. I was," Guedes told the local press.

"It was a race, a child in a panic, crying. A car from my team managed to follow them, we called the police and the suspect was arrested. He is an active military policeman, young," he explained.


This is the second attack that has occurred in Montes Claros in recent days, after last Friday a person shot in the air to threaten PT militants as part of the electoral campaign ahead of the October 2 elections.

Lula da Silva, candidate for the presidency of Brazil for a coalition of parties led by the PT, has the greatest intention to vote, followed by Bolsonaro, who is running for re-election, according to the most recent polls.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-d ... -0003.html

Google Translator

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Brazil: More Fascism and Neocolonialism or a Path Back to Self-Determination?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 27, 2022
Danny Shaw

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When you arrive in another country, there is nothing more precious than new friends who adopt you, protect you, and teach you about their language, music, culture, and traditions. For an open-minded traveler, ethnographer and anti-imperialist organizer, this new family is more valuable than any air-conditioned hotel, amount of comfort or money.

When I moved to Brazil in May of 2003, Binho, Mateuszinho, Thiago and their family and neighborhood crew took me in and put me up in O Morro do Santo Cristo and O Complexo da Penha, the heart of Río de Janeiro’s favelas and drug war. They walked me through the complex landscape of Rio’s corrupt brutal police who shoot first and rarely ask questions later, their violent blitzes (Río slang for stop and frisks), and a maze of morros (ghettos spread across hills) divided between two major paramilitary drug gangs: O Comando Vermelho and O Terceiro Comando (The Red Command and The Third Command).

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Professor Danny Shaw meeting members of the Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores in Brazil (photo credit: Danny Shaw).

On the eve of what Steve Bannon is calling the “second most important election in the world,” the October 2nd showdown between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro, I returned to Río nineteen years later.[1] Full of saudades (memories or nostalgia), I surprised the old crew in hopes of getting us all back together.

Everyday Survival

What became of my three friends?

From the outset, it is important to steer the English-speaking reader away from the stereotype that Rio de Janeiro represents Brazil or that my organic contacts represent all of Rio. Only a tiny percentage of favela residents make a living in the drug trade while most families reject lumpen lifestyles and find ways to eke out an income in hostile economic terrain by any means necessary.

Binho went to prison in 2004 for an armed robbery of a bakery that left his three partners in crime dead in a shootout with the police in ​​Jacarepaguá. A police officer who responded to the scene said he didn’t pull the trigger because Binho’s face reminded him of his son. The crime of armed robbery, Article 157 of the penal code, afforded Binho four years in Bangu prison. The vibrant 22-year old sustained brain injuries and psychological trauma from beatings from rival gangs. He contracted AIDS and has not been able to access the necessary medications. His wife Ronenete died of AIDS complications four years ago. I sat by his bedside remembering old times, nostalgic of the once cocky, invincible bandido (thug) who mentored me on why in Rio, “você não pode vacilar” (you can’t get caught slipping.)

Mateuszinho was a low level hustler for the Comando Vermelho, Rio’s largest gang and drug trafficking entity. He was a quick-talking, street smart 24-year old who conversed his way out of every brush with death, laughing it off and embarking upon his next mission. For seven 12-hour shifts per week as a vapor (the highest look out at the top of the morro), he earned $60 (120 reais in 2003) per week. I remember him parading around with other teenagers and young men toting M-16s and other automatic weapons as they protected the open drug operations and patrolled a baile funk, a weekend block party attended by thousands of local residents. With the police in plain view, the CV soldiers fired their weapons into the air in an open show of force sometime after 2 A.M., yelling their signature slogan “É nós.” I tracked down Mateuszinho at the science museum (Museu do Amanhá) where he now works as head of security. He is now one of over 65 million Brazilians, in an Evangelical church, the fastest growing religion in Brazil, second only to the Catholic Church with 105 million members.[2]

Rene continues to coordinate Arte Transformadora which serves 476 youth from O Complexo da Penha, 13 favelas spread over 13 hills where landless families first eeked out an existence when slavery was officially “abolished” in 1888.[3] Brazil was the last nation on earth to officially outlaw slavery. Deprived of forty acres and a mule or any type of support or reperations from the state, millions of newly “freed” slaves were left to fend for themselves in a caste society regimented by race and class. Favelas, named after a type of tree native to the Northeast, home to many slaves and migrant laborers who headed South, emerged as the name of these hilltop shantytowns. Rene matter-of-factly talked about identifying and delivering the bodies of youth soldiers of the Comando Vermelho to their families after they were shot down by the UPP (Police Pacifying Unit). Often, the police only allowed him or another community leader to cross police lines to retrieve the bodies. Rene still jokes with hustlers armed with walkie talkies and automatic weapons, children he held in his own arms only a decade before. Arte Transformadora seeks to plant seeds of hope and success in the minds of preteens and teens who may otherwise become cannon fodder for Rio’s drug war.

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Professor Danny Shaw at Arte Transformadora in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, teaching a boxing workshop (photo credit: Danny Shaw).
Visiting these close friends nearly two decades later gave me deeper insight into the two different directions this South American economic juggernaut might take on October 2nd.

The Showdown

156,454,011 Brazilians are eligible to vote next week for the president, 27 governors, 27 senators, 513 Congress people, 1,035 state representatives, and 24 district representatives. 28,274 candidates are squaring off for these positions, representing a vast array of parties, ranging from socialist to far-right.[4]

Jair Bolsonaro is the incumbent president who won the 2018 presidential election over the Partido dos Trabalhadores’ (PT) Fernando Haddad, due largely to the lawfair and misinformation campaign that had been underway against the PT since it first won executive power in 2003. Bolsonaro has employed Trump-esque tactics, preemptively questioning the integrity of the voting machines. Netlab, a unit at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro,[5] found that YouTube was favoring algorithms that promoted these Bolsonaro myths. Bolsonaro and his fellow senators have a history of denigrating and intimidating journalists.[6] As the presidential campaigns began to heat up, this former Army Artillery Officer is actively trying to get the military further involved in politics[7] and positioned to overturn the decisions of the Electoral Commission[8] to verify the elections if he were to lose. Some analysts are contemplating whether his camp has the power to stage an October coup.[9] More recently, however, Bolsonaro has tried to strike a more conciliatory tone saying “If it’s God’s will, I’ll continue (as president). If not, I’ll pass the (presidential) sash and retire.”[10]

For the past two weeks Globo, CNN Brasil and the other mouthpieces of the economic and political establishment have published headlines stating that Datafolha polls give Lula 45% of the vote and Bolsonaro 33%.[11] A student of Trumpian tactics, Bolsonaro has for the past four years positioned himself as the victim of “the liberal media” and “fake news.”[12] A military insider and political “outsider,” Bolsonaro has more recently made a list ditch effort to implement populist economic measures to shore up more votes, approving a $7.7 billion dollar stimulus package, which increases cash handouts to struggling families by 50%. According to the same Brazilian study, 61 percent of voters view this eleventh hour move as politically motivated to cut Lula’s lead in the polls.[13]

Datafolha’s research lays out the demographics of Brazil’s divided vote:

50 percent of women are expected to vote for Lula and 27 percent for Bolsonaro. Young people, aged 16 to 24, are twice as likely to vote for Lula. The demographic least likely to vote for Bolsonaro is Black women. Afro-Brazilians in general, and families making less than twice the minimum wage (which is roughly 55 percent of the electorate), are less likely to vote for him. Bolsonaro is leading among white males; and among families making over five times the minimum wage, he polls at 47% to Lula’s 35%.[14]

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Professor Danny Shaw participates at a Conference at the Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca (CEFET). Photo credit: Danny Shaw.

According to another Datafolha study, Lula maintains 53 percent of the Catholic vote versus Bolsonaro’s 30 percent.[15] In the case of other religions — such as the Afro-Brazilian candomblé, the PT candidate is polling four times higher than his Liberal Party rival. Lula has a comfortable lead among self-defined atheists, with 60 percent expected to vote for him and 22 percent for the incumbent. Among Evangelical Christians, Bolsonaro’s main base, he is polling at 52 percent. Bolsonaro’s appeal to this sector comes from the fact that he “promotes conservative family values and opposes abortion and same-sex marriage.”[16] The fact that 34 percent of the people in Bolsonaro’s key demographic now say they will vote for Lula is immensely significant. On September 9th, Lula met with members of the Evangelical Church of São Gonçalo on the outskirts of Río and in an emotional appeal laid out why he is the real candidate for those who believe in God and in justice.[17]

The attempt to build a popular anti-fascist front with more right-leaning and center candidates led Lula to select former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckman as his running mate. Professor Luis Mergulhāo elucidates why many on the left find Alckman objectionable.[18] Regardless of these valid critiques, seven former Brazilian presidential candidates have come out in support of Lula. His ability to build the largest electoral alliance in the six times he has run for president shows that Lula is an astute political strategist.[19]

There are other exciting historic races under way as well. Though beyond the scope of this article, it is worth highlighting one such race. Black City Councilwoman Carol Dartora is running under the slogan “Paraná is also ours.”[20] Dartora managed to push through Affirmative Action legislation in the southern Curitiba city government even though 70% of the council men and women were right wing, representing the racist politics that have long dominated the region. She joined Lula at a massive campaign rally on September 18th showing that Brazil’s three Southern states, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, which are a majority European descendent, also have a strong PT base.[21]

The Lula and Dilma PT Years: Social base and sister organizations

Brasilwire, a website that closely follows the twists and turns of Brazilian politics through an anti-imperialist lens, offers an overview of the anti-neo-liberal track record of the PT. Between 2003 and the Lawfare coup against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, the PT helped lift 40 million Brazilians out of poverty,[22] expanded university access for working class and Afro-Brazilian students, granted labor rights to Brazil’s long exploited domestic servants,[23] and stimulated internal production and created a market for nationally manufactured goods.[24] Lula speaks the language of the masses of Brazil, challenging the arrogance and invincibility of the other candidates who represent Brazil’s 0.1 percent. On Sunday, August 27th, in the first nationally televised presidential debate, he stood up to the other candidates who challenged his executive track record, saying “You may not have seen the changes we (the PT) carried out, but your gardeners, your drivers, your bodyguards, and your maids did.”[25] Millions erupted into applause as their Lula spoke truth to power.

Lula’s social welfare programs did not always bring about structural change, but they did lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty. One of Lula’s stated goals, which he speaks about on the campaign trail, is to ensure every Brazilian is able to eat three meals a day. The PT democratized higher education. According to a World Bank study, in 2002, there were zero students from the poorest 20 percent of the population attending college and only 4 percent of college students came from the poorest 40 percent.[26] Two-and-a-half terms of PT leadership changed this dramatically. By 2015, approximately 15 percent of higher education students were from the two poorest quintile of Brazilian society. For the first time, working-class and Black Brazilians could get that critical university education.

To further understand the PT’s defense of the poor, we must look at its base and its sister organizations and the work that they do on the frontlines of the class struggle. The true working class base of the PT is the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT).[27] The largest union in South America and fifth largest in the world, the CUT has 7,847,077 dues-paying members and 23,981,044 associated union members.[28] 48 CUT leaders, representing a vast array of trades from public workers to professors, are running in the current elections. Citing the 1988 Brazilian constitution, the CUT writes: “Article number 1 states all power emanates from the people who exercise it through elected representatives or directly in the terms of this constitution.”[29] The Ibitinga, São Paulo-based teacher and CUT Secretary of Administration and Treasury, Ariovaldo de Camargo,[30] lays out a class-based view of these elections: “Bosses pick bosses. Workers vote for workers. We have a wide array of workers before us to vote for.”[31]

The Movement of Landless Workers, the MST, works closely with the PT and other leftist parties. Since the 1980’s, the MST has mobilized some 370,000 families to carry out 2,500 collective land occupations against latifundios (massive estates held by individuals or corporations).[32] Despite constant threats and attacks from the Military Police, the largest social movement in the history of the hemisphere has liberated 7.5 million hectares of land and set in motion critical education programs, increased agricultural production, cooperatives, and quality health care.

The National Movement for Struggle for Housing, The MNLM, builds “solidarity in urban spaces, in a unique, organic relationship with the MST. Beyond land, we fight for housing lots, homes, sanitation and the other needs of marginalized populations.”[33] This organization of “squatters” has appropriated homes for thousands of families and set up collectived educational centers and child care.

Victories by the PT, the Party for Socialism and Liberty (Psol), and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) would keep space open for such redistribution and reparations to continue. A Bolsonaro victory would heighten the intensity of violence against society’s most vulnerable social actors and social movements.

Implications for Brazil’s foreign policy

The Bolsonaro administration has been a firm ally in Washington’s drive against left and left-leaning governments in Latin America, and has distanced Brazil from the cause of regional integration. In stark contrast, a third Lula administration would once again make Brazil a champion of regional independence and integration by playing an active role in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) which Brazil left in 2020, and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) which Brazil left in 2019. Lula would also be a strong advocate for Bolivia’s full membership in the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR). And just as Colombian President Gustavo Petro has made amends with the Chavista government of Venezuela, if elected, Lula would cease all hostilities and embrace a cooperative relationship with the Bolivarian Republic. Brazil would play a stronger role in BRICS and the building of a multipolar world. During his presidency, Lula served as an international peace maker trying to help negotiate a “nuclear deal” between the United States and Iran; if elected, he would likely resume efforts to advance world peace.[34]

Lula’s foreign policy will represent the reintegration of Brazil into the Bolivarian family and further momentum for the progressive transformations underway across the continent from Cochabamba to Caracas to Mexico C/ity.[35] Lula has spoken of building a unifying South American currency, the Sur. At a campaign rally, Lula remembered: “The US was very afraid when I discussed a new currency and Obama called me: ‘Are you trying to create a new currency, a new euro?’. I said, ‘No, I’m just trying to get rid of the US dollar. I’m just trying not to be dependent.’”[36]

Despite such massive gains against an entrenched economic and political elite, segments of the U.S. “left” have been very critical of the PT.[37] Though the PT has been subject to legitimate critique, Brazil Wire documented how Jacobin, a magazine affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, published 38 articles on Brazil from 2014-2017. All 38 presented a negative view of the PT. A far cry from the more radical policies of other Pink Tide presidents like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro, most of the left in Brazil today is united behind electing Lula and other progressive candidates as the next step towards challenging Brazil’s status as a neo colony of the West. Up against such a formidable proto-fascist foe, how important is it for the U.S. left to stand with those most under attack?

Bolsonarismo: the Militarization of Brazilian Society

For a country that lived through a two-decade-long military dictatorship from 1964-1984, the specter of the return to a police state is real. The newspaper A Nova Democracia conducted a study of “The Super-Salaries of the Generals” that Bolsonaro has worked alongside, inherited, appointed, and promoted.[38] According to author Gabriel dos Santos, 215 Military Officers receive monthly salaries of R$32,153,77, 30 times more than the minimum wage in Brazil. Other generals such as Vice-president Hamilton Mourão, Augusto Heleno, and former Defense Minister and currentVice-presidential candidate, Walter Souza Braga Netto, have received phantom titles as 4-star marechais (marshalls) and earn a whopping 111.2 thousand reais per month, about 100 times what an everyday worker earns. Bragga gained notoriety when he coordinated the 2014 military occupation of Complexo da Maré, a series of oppressed communities with a population of over 130,000 in the North Zone of the city of Río de Janeiro.[39]

Many of these generals oversaw the 2003-2018 United Nations’ Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). 30,000 Brazilian soldiers, led by generals who today occupy high-ranking positions in Bolsonaro’s cabinet, occupied Haiti and contributed to massacres in Cite Soleil, Fort National, and Belè.[40] These same generals returned to play a role in the occupation of Rochinha and other favelas to conduct “a War on Drugs” that reached its zenith with 1,814 official police killings in Rio in 2019.[41]

Scholar Thiago Sardinha, a specialist on paramilitary groups across Brazil, highlights the training Brazilian military and paramilitary groups have received from both France and the United States.[42] Used for U.S. interventions in Haiti and Central America, the Agency for International Development (AID) has a special department called The Office of Public Security.[43] In Brazil this office is in charge of training foreign police. Sardinha identifies the reign of terror of both the offical police in São Paulo, Goias and beyond, and the role of paramilitary, extra-official militias which control and collect taxes in many Rio communities.

Bolsonaro’s rhetoric has led the New York Times to lead with the following headline: The Question Menacing Brazil’s Elections: Coup or No Coup?[44] The president’s camp recently met with Steve Bannon, who repeated the same unproven claims that “Bolsonaro will win unless it is stolen by, guess what, the machines.”[45] Jason Miller, a Senior Trump Strategist, spoke at Brazil’s bicentennial independence day.[46] Bolsonaro, amidst a sea of yellow and green Brazilian flags, turned “the independence day celebrations” in Copacabana, Brazilia, and throughout the country into campaign rallies. He is now under investigation for illegally combining these two events.

Bolsonarismo: Polarization and the Open Veins of Brazil

FAIR published a scathing critique of a new documentary BBC and PBS released two weeks before the election which present Bolsonaro as a heroic rags to riches story.[47] While the liberal media has traditionally been at odds with the Trumps, Dutertes, and Bolsonaro, why would the Tories ofEngland and sectors of the U.S. ruling class, particularly business interests, so openly embrace such an odious, graceless figure like Bolsonaro?

From the perspective of foreign capital Bolsonaro represents unfettered access to the open veins of Brazil, the world’s tenth largest economy with a GDP of 1.8 trillion dollars.[48] Bolsonaros’s party is called the Liberal Party and the Minister of Economy is Paulo Geudes, who was trained in a PhD program at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman in the 1970s. Because Lula, Dilma, and the PT would not go along with the Washington consensus, they had to be removed from power and, in the case of Lula, imprisoned. Lula was cleared of all 26 of the bogus charges.[49]

The showdown between a former union leader who lost a finger in a São Paulo factory and a career military man who emerged as the mouthpiece of Brazil’s economic and military elites speaks to the deep divisions in Brazilian society.

The Brazilian Senate approved a 1,100 page report evaluating Bolsonaro’s denial of the COVID-19 pandemic and his disastrous handling of it.[50] Brazil has had the most deaths from COVID, 685,422 in total, after the United States.[51] Despite his disastrous handling of the COVID-19 epidemic, Bolsonarismo has a strong social base. Even a robust win for the PT will not make this base go away overnight. Centuries of white supremacy and class rule have segregated Brazilian society along class, racial, and gender lines.

Black Brazilians continue to face an epidemic of police violence and systemic discrimination. Journalist Jean Wyllys, Brazil’s second openly gay member of parliament and first gay-rights activist congressman, and translator and activist Julie Wark, summarize the struggles of Black and indigenous Brazilians: “The human and physical destructiveness of capitalism, a system in which pretos (Blacks), whose slave labour was essential toits construction, are very far from the spheres of power, wealth, and decision-making. Rather, they are under the yoke and marginalized. In Brazil, Blacks account for 75.2 percent of the population in the lowest income group whereas 25.4 percent of the general population lives in poverty; A Black person earns only 56.1 cents for every dollar a white person earns; 32.9% of Black people live below the poverty line ($5.50 per day); while 8.8 percent live in extreme poverty ($1.90 per day).”[52]

Anti-racist organizers in the U.S. can relate to the situation in Brazil. Just in 2019, Bolsanoro’s first year of governance, 31 activists were murdered for defending their land.[53] There were no convictions against any of the assassins. This is similar to what The Boston Globe calls “vehicle ramming” against Black Lives Matter protestors (The Globe has investigated 139 such hate crimes in the U.S. since the murder of George Floyd).

On September 8th, a Bolsominion, the slang name for Bolsonaro’s supporters, murdered a Lula supporter after a disagreement overpolitics.[54] These incidents have become more and more common. On September 17th, a group called the “Communist Hunters” warned the PT’s Minas Gerais state lawmaker Andréia de Jesus: “We are going to shoot you in the back like a traitor, Marielle (Franco) awaits you. Viva Ustra.”[55]

Recovery, Redemption, and Reparations: Which Way Forward?

I will forever be grateful to Binho, Mateuszinho, and Rene. My dozens of pages of quickly scribbled notes in my pocket notebooks speak to what they taught me. “As viagems formam a juventude,” (Travelling helps define our youth). My greatest tribute to them is helping fight for a world that does not confine our children from O Complexo do Alemão to the Bronx to a suffocating everyday rat-race battle for survival and a shred of dignity.

In his legendary essay, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” James Baldwin wrote “A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.”[56] Capitalism and white supremacy and their inevitable bastard offspring – generational trauma, gangs, drugs, misogyny, prison, and a long list of social ills – guarantee more human suffering and humiliation. Brazil suffers from a crack epidemic and alcoholism that has shattered hundreds of thousands of families. Bolsonarismo deploys rhetoric that enables the most retrograde actors a free reign to enact more violence upon women, the LGBT community, Black Brazilians, and Indigenous communities. What we are witnessing in Brazil is late neocolonialism’s desperate attempts to divide society and scapegoat the most oppressed layers so that society’s overlords can save their own skin.

While Río de Janeiro is but one small piece of the fabric of a diverse society of 210 million people spread across the world’s most diverse lands in terms of fauna, flora, and animal species, these human stories are a microcosm of the lives and struggles of how many millions of working-class Brazilians?[57]

Every victory for the Partido dos Trabalhadores, and other progressive parties like the PCdoB and the Psol at the local, state, and federal level–and chiefly, of course, for Lula at the presidential level–brings Brazil and this generation of fighters that much closer to realizing Baldwin’s dream.

(The author has changed certain names and details to protect individuals’ privacy.)

Danny Shaw is Senior Research Fellow at COHA and an academic at City University of New York.

Fred Mills, COHA’s Deputy Director, and Jill Clark-Gollub, COHA Assistant Editor/Translator, edited this essay.

Sources

[1] ​​Estrategista de Trump, Steve Bannon ecoa Bolsonaro em mentiras sobre urnas eletrônicas”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_3WSn7jOfo

[2] “Why Brazil’s Bolsonaro is courting evangelicals in the world’s biggest Catholic nation”,

https://www.wlrn.org/news/2022-08-25/wh ... lic-nation

[3] Artetransformadora”, https://www.instagram.com/artetransformadora/

[4] “Eleição este ano terá mais de 28 mil candidatos; veja os números”, https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/ma ... os-numeros

[5] “YouTube Pushing Pro-Bolsonaro Content To Brazilians, Study Finds”, https://www.brasilwire.com/googles-yout ... nds-study/

[6] TelesurEnglish https://twitter.com/telesurenglish/stat ... uhu1dyBo9g

[7] “Eleições. Militares poderão colocar Justiça Eleitoral sob suspeita”, https://noticias.uol.com.br/colunas/wal ... speita.htm

[8] “Brazil Military’s “Parallel Vote Count” Poses Great Risk To Democracy”, https://www.brasilwire.com/militarys-pa ... democracy/

[9] https://twitter.com/BrianMteleSUR/statu ... uhu1dyBo9g

[10] “Brazil’s Bolsonaro says he will retire if he loses October vote”,

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/2 ... tober-vote

[11] “Pesquisa Datafolha para presidente: Lula tem 45%; e Bolsonaro, 33%”, https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/p ... sonaro-33/

[12] “Mentiras sobre Bolsonaro mostram que ninguém está livre das fake news”, https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/menti ... -fake-news

[13] “Voters see through Bolsonaro’s Economic Populism, Poll Says”, https://brazilian.report/liveblog/2022/ ... -populism/

[14] https://especiaisg1.globo/politica/elei ... e/1-turno/

[15] “Datafolha: Lula reage entre evangélicos, e vantagem de Bolsonaro recua sete pontos”, https://extra.globo.com/noticias/politi ... 73698.html

[16] “Why Brazil’s Bolsonaro is courting evangelicals in the world’s biggest Catholic nation”, https://www.wlrn.org/news/2022-08-25/wh ... lic-nation

[17] https://twitter.com/J_LIVRES/status/156 ... aZg4XQTdQg

[18] https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ch7oWESJ ... A0NjI3M2I=

[19]https://twitter.com/telesurenglish/stat ... TCZbl89POg

[20] https://twitter.com/caroldartora13

[21]https://twitter.com/caroldartora13/stat ... TCZbl89POg

[22] Cerca de 40 milhoes de pessoas ingressaram na classe aponta pesquisa”, https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/cerca ... gv-2756988

[23] “Dilma assina regulamentação dos direitos das domésticas, diz Planalto”, https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2 ... nalto.html

[24] “Impactos da Redução do Imposto sobre Produtos Industrializados (IPI) de Automóveis”, https://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/images/s ... _dimac.pdf

[25] https://twitter.com/dannyshawcuny/statu ... TCZbl89POg

[26] “The Persistence of Inequity in Brazilian Higher Education: Background Data and Student Performance”, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10 ... -69691-7_4

[27] https://www.cut.org.br/conteudo/breve-historico

[28] https://www.cut.org.br/conteudo/breve-historico

[29] “Para lutar por direitos sociais e trabalhistas, CUT lança 49 candidatos no país”, https://www.cut.org.br/noticias/para-lu ... -pais-54a2

[30] https://www.cut.org.br/biografia/ariovaldo-de-camargo

[31] “Para lutar por direitos sociais e trabalhistas, CUT lança 49 candidatos no país”, https://www.cut.org.br/noticias/para-lu ... -pais-54a2

[32] “What is the MST?”, https://www.mstbrazil.org/content/what-mst

[33] https://www.google.com/url?q=https://li ... Rovz1S2jMu

[34] “The Most Important Election in the Americas is in Brazil’, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/09/01 ... in-brazil/

[35] https://twitter.com/dannyshawcuny/statu ... TCZbl89POg

[36] https://twitter.com/dannyshawcuny/statu ... TCZbl89POg

[37] “How The US Left Failed Brasil”, https://www.brasilwire.com/how-the-us-l ... ed-brasil/

[38] Dos Santos, Garbrel. December 2021.

[39] “Braga Netto, o general que Bolsonaro escolheu como candidato a vice”, https://www.infomoney.com.br/perfil/walter-braga-netto/

[40] “10 Reasons Why UN Occupation of Haiti Must End”, https://haitiliberte.com/10-reasons-why ... -must-end/

[41] “Number of deaths caused by police intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 2003 to 2021”, https://www.statista.com/statistics/100 ... io-brazil/

[42] https://revistaopera.com.br/2021/05/07/ ... no-brasil/

[43] https://revistaopera.com.br/2021/05/07/ ... no-brasil/

[44] “The Question Menacing Brazil’s Elections: Coup or No Coup?”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/worl ... -coup.html

[45] https://twitter.com/dannyshawcuny/statu ... TCZbl89POg

[46] https://twitter.com/dannyshawcuny/statu ... aZg4XQTdQg

[47] “PBS and BBC Team Up to Misinform About Brazil’s Bolsonaro”, https://fair.org/home/pbs-and-bbc-team- ... bolsonaro/

[48] “The World’s Largest Economies, 2022”, https://ceoworld.biz/2022/09/05/the-wor ... mies-2022/

[49] https://twitter.com/BrianMteleSUR/statu ... TCZbl89POg

[50] “The Toll of Bolsonaro’s Disastrous Covid-19 Response”, https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/27/tol ... 9-response

[51] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... as-spread/

[52] “Brazil, Amazon, World: Being Black”, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/07/21 ... ing-black/

[53] “Zero convictions as impunity blocks justice for victims of Brazil’s rural violence”, https://news.mongabay.com/2021/02/zero- ... -violence/

[54] “Apoiador de Bolsonaro mata defensor de Lula a facadas em MT após discussão”, https://www.cartacapital.com.br/politic ... discussao/

[55] https://twitter.com/BrianMteleSUR/statu ... uhu1dyBo9g

[56] “Fifth Avenue, Uptown”, https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a ... ue-uptown/

[57] “Brasil is not Rio”, https://www.brasilwire.com/brasil-is-not-rio/

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/09/ ... rmination/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sun Oct 02, 2022 10:19 pm

Polls Begin to Close In Brazil’s Elections

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Published 2 October 2022 (1 hours 54 minutes ago)

Polls in this Sunday's general elections in Brazil began to close at 17.00 local time (20.00 GMT), after a day of voting that took place normally.


The Superior Electoral Tribunal clarified that the people still in line at the voting centers may remain there to cast their vote.

The counting of votes is expected to be fast thanks to the electronic system used in the country, and the result will be known within a few hours.

If a candidate obtains 50 percent plus one of the valid votes, he/she will get the victory without the need to go to the ballot, scheduled for Sunday, October 30.

More than 156 million Brazilians were called to vote on this day.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Pol ... -0010.html

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TSE counts votes after presidential elections in Brazil

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Polling stations opened at 08:00 local time (11:00 GMT) and closed at 17:00 (20:00 GMT). | Photo: EFE
Published 2 October 2022 (26 minutes ago)

More than 156 million voters were enabled to exercise their right to vote.

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) of Brazil counts the votes of the presidential elections held this Sunday in the South American country.

READ ALSO:

Polling stations closed in Brazil after general elections

Through its web portal, the entity indicates that with 20.26 percent of the tally sheets scrutinized, the current president Jair Bolsonaro has 47.93 percent, that is, 10,900,934 votes.

For his part, the leader of the Workers' Party (PT), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has 43.32 percent, with 9,853,677 votes.


She is followed by candidate Simone Tebet with 4.53 percent and former minister Ciro Gomes, who has 3.05 percent. The other candidates have so far reached less than 1 percent.

The polling stations opened at 08:00 local time (11:00 GMT) and closed at 17:00 (20:00 GMT), ready for more than 156 million eligible voters to exercise their right to vote.

This first round of the presidential elections can be won by the candidate who receives more than 50 percent of the votes. Otherwise, there will be a second round between the two candidates who had the most support and it will take place on October 30.

On this day, 27 governors, the 583 deputies, a third of the Senate are also elected, and the representatives in the legislative assemblies are renewed.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-t ... -0027.html

Google Translator

*********

Lula and Bolsonaro on Ukraine and Sanctions Against Russia

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Several people walk in front of a street towel stall with images of the current president of Brazil and candidate for re-election, Jair Bolsonaro, and his contender, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva | Photo: EFE / Andre Coelho

Published 30 September 2022

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) are the favorites for the presidential elections that Brazil will hold on Sunday, October 2. Over the last few months, they have made several statements that portray what they think about the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia.


Lula seems to be the clear favorite in all opinion polls. His vision of the conflict was evident in an interview he gave Time magazine in May this year. Here are some of his most memorable phrases:

"He (Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky) wanted war. He would have negotiated a little more if he didn't want war. That's how it is. I criticized (Russian President Vladimir) Putin when I was in Mexico City, saying it was a mistake to invade. But I don't think anyone is contributing to peace. People are stimulating hatred against Putin. That is not going to solve it. You have to stimulate an agreement, but there is an encouragement (to confrontation)!"

"Sometimes I see the president of Ukraine on TV as if he's celebrating, being given a standing ovation by all the parliaments, you know? That guy is as responsible as Putin. He's as responsible as Putin."

"Biden could say, 'Let's talk some more. We don't want Ukraine in NATO, period. It's not a concession.'"

In early September, Lula said that if he wins the election, he intends to talk with Russia and Ukraine about ending the conflict.

"If we win and the war is not over, we will talk with them and tell them that war is of no interest to anyone, only to arms sellers, and we want to sell culture, books, food to humanity."

In April, he had already said during an event at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) that Brazil would be a better negotiator and that peace could be reached at a bar table, which caused uneasiness in the diplomatic representation of Ukraine in Brazil.

"Who is interested in this war? From everything I understand, read and hear here in Brazil, this war would be solved at a table drinking beer; if not at first, at the second, if not at the third, it would continue until the bottles run out for a peace agreement."

BOLSONARO'S VISION

In February this year, Bolsonaro met with Putin in Moscow, shortly before the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, and expressed solidarity with Russia.

"We are in solidarity with Russia. We have a lot to collaborate on in several areas. Defense, oil and gas, agriculture and the meetings are going on."

In June, Bolsonaro and Putin had a phone conversation to discuss energy and the shipment of Russian fertilizers to Brazil.

"I recently had a phone call with President Putin, from Russia, where we discussed food security and energy security (...) so, Brazil is working, making progress, moving forward and we are winning."

In July, during a conversation with supporters, he openly criticized the sanctions against Russia.

"The US and European economic barriers against Russia did not work. My line was that of balance, in addition to negotiating fertilizers, food security for the world and the sovereignty of our Amazon."

In the same month, Bolsonaro stated that he would propose to Zelenski that he do what Argentina did in the case of the Falklands in 1982, accept defeat and surrender.

"I will give my opinion on what I believe—the solution for the case. I know what the solution to the case would look like, but I'm not going to advance it. The solution to the case... How did Argentina's war with the United Kingdom end in 1982? That's the way it goes. We regret it, the truth is that these are things that hurt, but we must understand it".

It was in September of this year, in his speech at the UN General Assembly, that he spent the most time addressing the issue:

"At the United Nations and other forums, we have tried to avoid blocking the channels of dialogue caused by polarization around the conflict. In this sense, we are against diplomatic and economic isolation."

"The consequences of the conflict are already being felt in the world prices of food, fuel and other inputs."

"We support all efforts to reduce the economic impacts of this crisis. But we do not believe that the best path is the adoption of unilateral and targeted sanctions, contrary to international law. These measures have harmed the recovery of the economy and affected human rights of vulnerable populations, including in countries in Europe itself."

"The solution to the conflict in Ukraine will be reached only through negotiation and dialogue."

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Lul ... -0015.html
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 03, 2022 2:32 pm

Leftist Lula Wins 1st Round of Brazil’s Presidential Elections

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Former president and presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva greets supporters celebrating the results of the presidential elections today, on Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo | Photo: EFE / Fernando Bizerra

Published 2 October 2022 (16 hours 38 minutes ago)

With 99.74 percent of the votes counted, Lula has won the first round with 48.36 percent in this Sunday's elections, leaving behind Bolsonaro, who obtained 43.65 percent, according to Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE). There will be a runoff election between Lula and Bolsonaro.


Lula says that he will win the runoff on October 30

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) expressed confidence that he would win the October 30 runoff against incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.

"Throughout this campaign, we were ahead in the public opinion poll of all the institutes, even those who did not want us to win, and it always seemed to me that we were going to win these elections, and I want to tell you that we are going to win these elections. It is just an extension", he said in one of the auditoriums of the Jaraguá hotel in this state capital.

Lula obtained 48.20 percent of the valid votes on Sunday, while Bolsonaro won 43.39 percent.

Bolsonaro is optimistic ahead of the runoff: "We defeated the lie."

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was optimistic on Sunday ahead of the October 30 runoff, highlighting that the polls were wrong and that his party had a good result in the National Congress.

"We defeated the lie, now we have a second time ahead of us," the president said in statements to the media.

Of the 156 454 011 Brazilians eligible to vote today, nearly 80% exercised their right to vote in the elections for which the leader of the Workers' Party (PT), Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, and the Liberal Party, Jair Bolsonaro, were the favorites in all opinion polls.

For more than 156 million Brazilians eligible to vote, 496 856 polling stations opened their doors at 8:00 local time (11:00 GMT) and closed at 17:00 hours (20:00 GMT). The second round of elections will be held on October 30.

According to the latest poll, Lula led with 50.7 percent of the valid votes, while Bolsonaro was in second place with 41 percent in the race for the presidency, in which 11 candidates participated.

Polls showed until close to today's vote that the former president was leading the voting intentions since the beginning of the campaign and even showed his possibility of victory in the first round. On the other hand, the right-winger Bolsonaro, second in the race, maintained high levels of rejection.


The key points of Lula's campaign were the fight against hunger and poverty, in addition to the defense of the Amazon, which comprises Brazil's biodiversity, and economic reactivation.

The left-wing candidate was the first of the favorites to exercise his right to vote at the polling station in the neighborhood of Asunción, in the state of São Paulo.

"This country needs to finally recover its right to be happy (...) We want a country that lives in peace, a country that has hope, a country with a future and a country that can produce and build its future from the participation of its society," Lula said after voting.


Minister Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), said about the first round voting that a "calm and harmonious" environment has reigned. "Absolutely calm elections, a calm environment (...) We have noticed a smooth, calm climate," said Moraes.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Lef ... -0011.html

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Lula and Bolsonaro go to the second round of presidential elections in Brazil

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The second round is scheduled to be held on October 30. | Photo: Telam
Published October 2, 2022 (12 hours 9 minutes ago)

The second round is scheduled to be held on October 30, according to the schedule established by the electoral authority.

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) of Brazil counts the votes of the elections held this Sunday in the South American country, and indicated that there will be a second presidential round between the most voted candidates, being Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro.

The second round is scheduled to be held on October 30, according to the schedule established by the electoral authority.

Through its web portal, the entity specified that with 99.99 percent of the tally sheets scrutinized, the candidate and leader of the Workers' Party (PT), Lula, has 48.43 percent, which represents 57,257 .473 votes.

In turn, the current Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has 43.20 percent, that is, 51,071,106 votes.


In third place is the candidate Simone Tebet 4.16 percent and former minister Ciro Gomes, who has 3.04 percent. The other applicants have so far reached less than 1 percent.

For his part, the president of the TSE, Alexandre de Moraes, presented a balance of the day and reiterated that "mathematically it is already defined that there will be a ballot."

"We had an entire day of elections in absolute calm, which obviously does not mean that there were not some isolated events, like any other election, but we reached the end of the day with the certainty that electoral justice once again fulfilled its constitutional mission of guaranteeing security and transparency. in the elections," he stressed.


The official stressed that "Brazilian society demonstrated its degree of democratic maturity. The male and female voters went to the polling stations, voted, chose their candidates in absolute peace and security. I thank all those who in one way or another participated in this festival of democracy".

"We had half the blank and null votes compared to the 2018 election, for example, when we had 8.8. So of the 80 percent who attended today we had 4.20 percent, that is, approximately 7,500,000 of those who They attended to vote for candidates, they stopped voting null or blank. Perhaps because it is an even or polarized election, and that is why people voted more," he declared.

After confirming the second electoral round, Lula declared to thank the support of those who voted for him and promised to continue working to win the elections and recover Brazil.


For his part, Bolsonaro also stated that they will talk to people to show them "the best side" for them.

The polling stations opened at 08:00 local time (11:00 GMT) and closed at 17:00 (20:00 GMT), ready for more than 156 million eligible voters to exercise their right to vote.



This first round of the presidential elections can be won by the candidate who receives more than 50 percent of the votes. Otherwise, there will be a second round between the two candidates who had the most support and it will take place on October 30.

On this day, 27 governors, the 583 deputies, a third of the Senate are also elected, and the representatives in the legislative assemblies are renewed.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-t ... -0027.html

Google Translator

*************

Brazil: On Lula’s Majority
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 2, 2022

Image

Joāo Pedro Stedile, one of the national directors of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) provides an analysis of the situation in Brazil and the forces backing former President Lula.

The current crisis has affected the historic interests of the bourgeoisie. To give you an idea, during the past six years 28,000 industries have closed down, I’m not talking about restaurants or small bars, but 28000 industries. I think only Argentina and Colombia have as much total industry as that which they’ve closed in Brazil. The environmental crisis has affected the agribusiness of the bourgeoisie, it has affected productivity because here in São Paulo we depend on the rain that comes from the Amazon, it has affected the production of cane, of orange, which are the two principal agricultural products of this state.

Image

In politics as well, the bourgeoisie is worried because historically they need a state that can guarantee stability and protect them from social conflict. The ghost that haunts them is the possibility of social conflict, but the current political crisis has only deepened social conflict, there is no solution and they know it. So if you look at what they’re saying in their media is that after four years of crisis there will be a social convulsion, and nobody knows how that will turn out. Not even the left has the capacity to organize all those people.

What has changed in Brazil this year? The classes have changed their political positions. The bourgeoisie that once marched united and gave us four coups is now divided, thanks to god and to the contradictions in the class struggle. A small part of the bourgeoisie is with Bolsonaro, but they no longer represent the majority who used to support him and financed him with two huge servers firing out 80 million fake news messages per hour. That campaign was a hurricane aimed at the heads of the poor. Some of those resources came from the campaign of Donald Trump who’s no longer in power. It was discovered later that of the two servers that fired out this fake news, one was in Israel and the other in Taiwan, those were Bolsonaro’s links with the extreme right, and now they aren’t there for him.

A large part of the bourgeoisie tried to build a third way, neither Bolsonaro nor Lula, but what happened? Their parties and leaders couldn’t unify the bourgeoisie, if they had then they would win these elections, because they have all the economic and media power, they managed to put a psychopath in the presidency.

I’m convinced that the majority of the bourgeoisie are now with Lula. On Tuesday, Lula held a dinner with the 100 biggest businessman of Brazil, these are the people that control the country’s GDP. There are 200 businessmen that control the GDP, only 200 because capital is very concentrated here, about half of them are connected to international capital and banks. Out of those 200, 100 of them had dinner with Lula and applauded him. That means that the economic and media power controlled by these people is turning against Bolsonaro.

Middle class and working class

The middle class also supported the four coups in this country, they have extremely reactionary views. Now, around 90% of the middle class is with Lula, these people were the first to migrate from supporting Bolsonaro to supporting Lula. We can see this in the cultural expressions of the middle-class youth, you will have seen the ‘Rocking Rio’ festival where tickets cost 80 USD. Every night there were 200,000 young people, every night they were chanting ‘Bolsonaro out, viva Lula’. The middle class alone is not very powerful because they’re only about 8% of the population, but they have a lot of influence on the working class, remember that Brazil is the country with the 3rd highest number of domestic servants, there’s 8 million of them. They are very influenced by what their employers say.

Among the working class there has also been a change. The working class didn’t come out to defend Dilma [during the coup], it was only us militants who mobilized, around 50,000 people. Meanwhile, the middle class mobilized half a million in the marches against Dilma. That’s because workers were suffering the effects of the crisis at the time, but neither Dilma, nor the PT, nor the MST, were able to explain that the crisis was a crisis of capitalism, not the government. Of course, Dilma made the mistake of trying to govern with the capitalists instead of combating them, that was her undoing. Her economy minister was Joaquim Levy, imposed by the Banco Bradesco and the IMF to look out for the interests of international finance capital. He was Dilma’s Minister. However, now, the working class, through its parties and unions, are all with Lula.

This new correlation of forces has allowed us to analyze the situation and say that yes, we are going to win these elections. The social power of the 3 classes is with Lula. In the past week, the strength of that social force is finally being reflected in the polls. Lula is now 7 points ahead of Bolsonaro, so we can say that mathematically, we’re pretty sure that Lula will win in the first round.

So I think we should meet on Monday to do an analysis, or I guess we could drink all the Malbecs that the Argentinians have brought us!

Kawsachun News

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... -majority/

Ending Hunger, Reviving Agriculture: The MST’s Vision for Post-Election Brazil
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on OCTOBER 2, 2022



João Pedro Stedile of the national leadership of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) talks about the current crisis in the agrarian sector and the way forward. He explains how the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro has wrecked agriculture, leading to a rise in hunger. He also talks about the MST’s proposals for reviving the sector which include both immediate steps to alleviate hunger and structural solutions to long-term problems. These include the key role cooperatives must play in the country.



https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/10/ ... on-brazil/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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