Brazil

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The Inglorious Fall of William Waack

In 2006, Globo TV’s senior news editor Ali Kamel wrote a book called “We are not racists“, in which he argued that, despite all the statistics that prove otherwise, there is no structural racism in Brazil. The book was widely criticised, as detailed in this paper by Daniele de Oliveira of UFBA. Kamel later sued fellow journalist Paulo Henrique Amorim for accusing him of actually being racist.

The irony of this book, which reflects the network’s editorial position, came to light on November 8 2017, when a video began to circulate online of Globo’s senior news anchor William Waack, in an interval during his coverage of the 2016 US Presidential election, making a racist remark to a nearby driver. The clip shows him saying “Why are you honking your car horn, you piece of shit? I’m not gonna say it because I know who it is… You know who? It’s a black right? (laughs) Things like this are always blacks”.

Within hours Rede Globo, under fire for the lack of racial diversity in its programming, had announced his immediate and indefinite suspension “until the situation becomes more clear”.

Rumours circulated that the the video was leaked deliberately from within Globo itself.

Brazilian Journalist William Waack has fronted Globo’s late night Jornal da Globo since 2005.

A veteran of various major magazines such as Veja, newspapers such as Estadão, he also served as an international correspondent, covering events such as the first Gulf War, during which he was allegedly kidnapped by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

Now aged 64, he is known for his staunchy Neoliberal, Pro-US positions, and the news programme he has fronted for over a decade was consistently oppositional towards the Governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. He explicitly blamed the recession of 2015-16 on the economic policies of PT, while ignoring the most significant external factors such as the collapse in commodity prices, delayed effects of the 2008 financial crisis, and the freezing of energy and construction sectors caused by Operation Lava Jato. It was also, as per the rest of Globo’s output, highly selective in its reporting on political corruption. The show, which has run since the days of the Military Dictatorship is considered even more propagandist than the evening’s flagship Jornal Nacional, which is fronted by William Bonner, whom some consider “the most important politician in Brazil”.



The new racism scandal around William Waack has also put his history back in the spotlight.

His laughing companion in the clip is Paulo Sotero, a director of Washington D.C.’s Wilson Center think tank, which launched its own specific Brazil Institute in 2006 and whose recent guests include controversial Lava Jato Prosecutor-Judge Sergio Moro.

Waack, who has also been regular contributor to Francis Fukuyama’s American Interest magazine, was in 2010 outed as a US informant in State Department cables, some dating back to the 1970s.

Eric Ehrmann wrote for Huffington Post:

“According to a confidential state department cable published by Jornal do Brasil and other online media, the person of interest is William “Bill” Waack. The (then) 59-year-old Waack moderated a crucial presidential debate in last year’s election and has been an anchor with Globo TV.

Waack did a high profile interview with secretary of state Hillary Clinton that set the stage for president Barack Obama’s 36-hour visit to Brazil and later helped facilitate the objectives of U.S. businesses and policymakers during the tour in March. The state department cable reveals that Waack told U.S. officials that Dilma is not the most qualified candidate and that she seems “incoherent,” statements consistent with his subsequent efforts to characterize her as an unflattering candidate during the presidential campaign.

A heralded foreign correspondent for Globo in European capitals and war zones who came home to anchor the nation’s top nightly news show, the image of Waack as the Walter Cronkite of Brazil does seem to match up with the job description of propaganda asset developed by the CIA’s legendary global media strategist Cord Meyer that remains a staple of U.S. intelligence tradecraft, and that of some allies and competitors in Latin America and other seemingly soft power arenas. Meyer joined the CIA after rooting out communists at the United World Federalist movement, an early globalist organization. His media playbook in Latin America was inherited by Tom Enders, who, like Meyer was a member of Yale’s Scroll and Key secret society and served as assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs during the Reagan era, when Waack first showed up the diplomatic cocktail party circuit that includes journalists.

Over the past few years according to the Jornal do Brasil and other online sources Waack met on several occasions to share information with and receive guidance from the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, and Israeli government officials. Waack’s pro-American views have been amped up in The American Interest, where he has chastised Brazil for its growing trade relationship with China.”

“The outing (of William Waack) is a reminder to press freedom and open internet advocates of how U.S. public diplomacy folded into local media culture can construct political reality in emerging democracies that can change the outcome in the ballot box.”

Waack would later go on to sue outlets which reported the above information, despite it documenting clearly that, like key Coup players Michel Temer, Jose Serra and Romero Jucá, he was also a long-term US informant. His takeover of Jornal da Globo in 2005 coincided with what we now know to have been the beginning of a new strategy by the United States against South America’s ‘Pink Tide’ of popular Leftist Governments, which placed heavy emphasis on media & white propaganda.

If this racism controversy is the sound of a curtain falling on a storied journalistic career, Waack, who in all likelihood enthusiastically supported the ouster of Dilma Rousseff, will neither be missed or fondly remembered by Brazilian Democracy, nor its Afro-descendent population.

http://www.brasilwire.com/waack/

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US admits role in Operation Lava Jato, brags about Lula conviction
A US-backed war on corruption, targeting center-left politicians, is delivering political changes across the continent in line with Washington and Wall Street interests.

December 22, 2017. After US-backed neoliberal Sebastian Piñera wins the Chilean presidential elections following corruption charges against center-left former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet involving Brazilian construction company Odebrecht as part of the Lava Jato investigation, El Clarin reveals that the US State department has publicly admitted it is collaborating with the operation. The admission, something that Brasil Wire have suspected since the disclosure of leaked state department cables which showed US collaboration with Lava Jato judge/prosecutor Sergio Moro since 2009, was made by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco in a speech at think tank the Atlantic Council in July 2017. The full speech can be watched here and read here.

In his speech, Blanco says, “the cooperation between the [US Justice] Department and Brazil has led to extraordinary results. In just the last year alone, for example, the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the Brazilian Lava Jato task force have cooperated and coordinated resolutions in four FCPA cases: Embraer, Rolls Royce, Braskem, and Odebrecht. Odebrecht is particularly noteworthy due to its breadth and scope.”



Kenneth Blanco’s July, 2017 Speech at the Atlantic Council, entitled, “Lessons From Brazil: Fighting Corruption Amid Political Turmoil”
Blanco highlights the criminal charges against former President Lula which resulted in a 9.5 year prison sentence, pending appeal, for allegedly receiving illegal reforms on an apartment the prosecutors were unable to prove he ever owned or set foot in, as putting Brazil at the “forefront” of countries fighting corruption. He continues saying, “At the core of the tremendous cooperation between our two countries is a strong relationship built on trust. This trust allows prosecutors and agents to have direct communications regarding evidence. Given the close relationship between the Department and the Brazilian prosecutors, we don’t need to rely solely on formal processes such as mutual legal assistance treaties, which often take significant time and resources to draft, translate, formally transmit, and respond to.”

The Lava Jato investigation has been hailed in the Anglo press as an objective anti-corruption investigation, but to date it has almost exclusively targeted center-left politicians across South America while ignoring much larger bribery and money laundering charges against conservatives, especially those involving the Brazilian PSDB party, which was widely supported by northern journalists in the 2014 Brazilian presidential elections. A December 22, 2017 Folha de São Paulo article shows that investigators have ignored and maintained in secrecy, more than half of the evidence produced implicating the Odebrecht construction company.

July, 2017. center-left ex-president of Peru, Ollanta Humala is arrested on corruption charges involving Odebrecht construction company as part of the Lava Jato investigation. Current Peruvian president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, also center-left, is facing impeachment charges from the same investigation. Center-left President Dilma Rousseff was impeached for committing a technically non-impeachable infraction, involving no bribery or personal enrichment, that she was later exonerated from. On the eve of the Argentinian senatorial elections, Christina Kirchner is facing corruption accusations of her own from a conservative judge who was allied with neoliberal former president Carlos Menem.



The “war on corruption” in Latin America has been promoted abroad with slick propaganda such as this video from the David Rockefeller-founded AS/COA organisation which is made up of former US State Department and Intelligence figures, in collaboration with Transparency International whose largest financial donor is the UK Government.
December 12, 2017, Buenos Aires. Dilma Rousseff and Christina Kirchner meet to issue a joint statement about the use use of the judicial system as a weapon to destroy political parties and leftist politicians, in a process which they call Lawfare. “The objective is the same in Brazil as in Argentina,” they said, “To hide the economic disaster that neoliberal governments are carrying out in the region.”

The United State government is suspect on corruption issues, due to its 70 year history of propping up corrupt right wing regimes in Latin America including those of General Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Papa Doc Duvailer in Haiti, the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964-1985), General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and, more recently, immediate legitimization and increased funding for the coup government in Honduras (2009-present). The fact that it publicly admits collaboration with the Lava Jato investigation, which is specifically targeting left and center left governments, shows that the real purpose is not fighting corruption but opening up markets and lowering taxes for US corporations operating in the area, paving the way for a new generation of neoliberal leaders to restart negotiations for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, which is widely opposed by the majority of the people in Latin America. This admission of guilt by a top US Justice Department official represents yet one more page in a long and ugly history of criminal assaults on democracy and sovereignty in the region.

http://www.brasilwire.com/us-admits-rol ... lava-jato/

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The Atlantic Council & Latin American Regime Change
Putting Northern interests first, Washington DC think tanks weaken democracy in the South

Founded in 1961, the Atlantic Council (AC) is part of the NATO offshoot Atlantic Treaty Association, an umbrella organization which acts as a network facilitator in the Euro-Atlantic and beyond that claims to draw together “political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats in an effort to further the values set forth in the North Atlantic Treaty, namely: democracy, freedom, liberty, peace, security, and the rule of law”.

Together with the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA), the Wilson Center and other organisations (between which there is a revolving door for personnel), the Atlantic Council has been an international platform and promoter for both the controversial anti-corruption operation Lava Jato (Car Wash), which helped paralyse the Brazilian economy, and the 2016 removal of the Rousseff Government from power.

The organisation insists it is independent from both the US Government and NATO, however it receives the majority of its funding, of an undisclosed total, from various NATO member governments.

It was recently in the news for donating a million dollars, provided by the US State Department, to an opposition group in Venezuela, the latest in an estimated USD$45+ million in US funding to pro-opposition groups since 2008.



In October 2013, one year ahead of a crucial run of regional elections and after a burst of destabilisation in Brazil, the Atlantic Council launched its new Latin America effort, named the ‘Adrienne Arsht Center’, with a stated aim to “study, educate, and strengthen the trends transforming Latin America into a strong Western partner”.

The center was founded by Peter Schechter, a consultant who is the executive producer and host of Altamar, a foreign policy podcast. Until June, 2017 he was the Atlantic Council’s Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives as well as the founding director its new Lat Am operation.

Born in 1959 in Rome, Schechter was raised in Italy, Bolivia, and Venezuela. In 1993, he became a founding partner of Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates, a Washington, DC-based company which advises politicians, companies, non-profits, and international organizations. His clients were wide-ranging: from presidential elections and fighting “regulatory encroachment” on US banks in Latin America, to enabling Hunt Oil’s Camisea project in Peru, which was threatened by protest from indigenous groups.

The bulk of his work, however, was serving as election advisor to conservative and neoliberal candidates in nearly every country in Latin America, including work for a number of current presidents. Past clients included Venezuela opposition leader Henrique Capriles, Alvaro Uribe (his fourth presidential client in Colombia), and 1994-2022 Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

His expertise in the region has made him a sought-out voice on Latin American political issues. He is a frequent guest as political analyst for television shows around the region as well as US-based Spanish language networks Univision and Telemundo, noted for their right-wing bias.

In September 2009, Schechter’s firm signed a four-month contract with the interim Honduran government of Roberto Micheletti to provide public relations services following the June 28, 2009 coup d’état. According to Foreign Agents Registration filings with the US Department of Justice, the firm received over $292,000 to boost the interim regime’s image in the US. The contract put Schechter’s firm in the spotlight and sparked letters of condemnation. On October 19, 2009 a protest took place in front of the firm’s Washington, DC office in response to its work on behalf of the interim Honduran government.

On Brazil, Atlantic Council personnel could be found quoted in the press and on television networks eulogising Lava Jato, normalising the judicial/parliamentary Coup d’état which removed Dilma Rousseff, and also promoting the neoliberal programme of Michel Temer’s post-coup government, such as fiercely resisted cuts to workers rights and a programme of pension reform which would raise retirement age as high as 74 for millions of ordinary Brazilians, which is above life expectancy in some areas of the country.

Irony missed in this kind of State Department talking point-based coverage of Rousseff’s removal was that it stemmed in part from both the public fervour generated by the partisan anti-corruption operation, and also, perversely, the economic effects it had created – with some economists estimating that the resulting Lava Jato mandated shutdown of economic sectors in 2015 accounted for half a million unemployed in construction alone, and 2.5% of GDP – turning a mild recession into something Wall Street talking heads in its corporate media could portray as the “worst economic crisis in a century“.

Lava Jato not only had profound effects on Brazil’s economy and democracy, it has also indirectly enabled capture of the country’s strategic resources, and corporations such as Embraer, which is now a target of takeover by US competitor, Boeing, sparking outcry amongst Brazilian developmentalists, nationalists, and the left as a whole.

The roots of the operation can be traced back as far as a 2002 Bush-era initiative, encouraged by infamous Office of Public Diplomacy propagandist, former Venezuelan ambassador, and one time head of Council of the Americas, Otto Reich, which made anti-corruption the principal tool for enabling political and economic outcomes in the region.

Mr. Reich, like Schechter was also hired to propagandise on behalf of Honduras Post-Coup Government. Following the Coup, Reich sent his thoughts to members of Congress by e-mail. “We should rejoice,” he wrote to one member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “that one of the self-proclaimed 21st Century socialist allies of Chávez has been legally deposed by his own countrymen.”

Also in 2009, leaked cables reveal that Lava Jato’s main protagonist, inquisitorial prosecutor/judge Sergio Moro, was already in collaboration with the State Department and Department of Justice on an embryonic strategy which would evolve into Operation Lava Jato. Brazil, a one-time ally of Venezuela, has seen its democracy, economy and sovereignty severely impacted by the operation, which has been deemed “Lawfare” and “War by other means” by observers. The ongoing role of public relations from within or around organisations like Atlantic Council and AS/COA and their relationship with large commercial news organizations warrants maximum scrutiny, and is indicative of whom is directing the real power being wrought in the region.

Using these non-conventional weapons, the so called ‘Pink Tide’ of leftist governments across the continent has been reversed, to the delight of Washington, London and Wall Street. Corruption allegations are affecting the political scene across South America, in Chile, Argentina and Peru, and frontrunner for Brazil’s own 2018 election, former President Lula, faces an appeal on 24th January in what amounts to a kangaroo court, a trial which could shape the country’s future for a generation.

And the impact is not only economic and political but military and strategic. Joining its traditional beachhead in Colombia, there has been the establishment of new US presences in Argentina, Paraguay, Peru and now Brazil’s Amazon and North East. It is a telling sign that Liliana Ayalde, US Ambassador to Brazil from September 2013, throughout the 2014 election and subsequent Coup d’état, is now serving as civilian deputy commander of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

http://www.brasilwire.com/the-atlantic- ... me-change/

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Honduras Today Is Brasil Tomorrow

By Laura Gontijo. Original version in Jornal O Homem Livre.

In Honduras, the crisis which began with the coup d’état in 2009 continues and shows us what awaits Brazil following the coup of 2016.

The entire process that culminated in Brazil’s coup first took place in Honduras on June 28, 2009. This was followed by Paraguay, Thailand, Egypt and Ukraine. In all there is a common modus operandi; a campaign against corruption, mobilization of thousands on the streets against the government, support of the bourgeois media and many areas of the Judiciary.

The right wing who took power in Honduras did everything possible to prevent the candidate backed by former President Manuel Zelaya from emerging winner in the recent elections, as the partial results show.

Zelaya’s candidate, Salvador Nasralla, appeared to have a large advantage when the country’s top electoral court suspended all disclosure of the partial results of the election, claiming a system failure and announcing a final result in which the coup candidate and current president, Juan Orlando Hernández was the victor.

The population took to the streets demanding a recount of the votes. Juan Orlando Hernández filed a state of emergency for 10 days with a curfew, barring people from taking to the streets from 6:00 pm to 6:00 am. A typical dictatorship measure. People were killed in the protests and Police refused to shoot the population on the streets. This is the current situation in the country. The population has taken to the streets, defying the curfew, to avoid a new coup d’état by an unpopular right-wing who can not even win their own controlled elections.

The coup in Honduras could be considered a simulacrum of the coup in Brazil, had it not happened before. Zelaya was accused of “national treason” for proposing that in the 2009 elections voters should also be consulted on the proposal to convene a National Constituent Assembly. In just 48 hours the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office for deposition of the president-elect was approved by the Supreme Court. The same speed as Sérgio Moro and the prosecutors of Lava Jato when it comes to condemning PT politicians.

After the coup, claimed by many to be “constitutional,” the right suspended constitutional freedoms, persecuted opponents and leftist militants and won the elections in 2010 and 2014. Having altered the judges and ministers of the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Tribunal, Juan Orlando Hernández obtained the authorisation to run for a second term, even with the ban on the country’s constitution. Unsatisfied, they openly defrauded the election this month.

The Honduran population, however, resists this right-wing coup financed and supported directly by the United States. As was evidenced by the funding and training of the security forces promoted by the US to the president sworn in with the coup d’etat of 2009. With charges including promotion of extrajudicial executions of opponents of the coup government.

Two days after the false election results were released, the US offered millions of dollars in “aid” to “certify” that the country’s authorities are committed to fighting corruption and protecting human rights.

The Honduran resistance shows that if Brazilian workers do not want to watch the same film happening today in Honduras, they must immediately resist the coup with all possible force.

Believing that, after a coup, the right will accept any prospect of electoral defeat is the worst mistake one can make right now.



http://www.brasilwire.com/honduras-toda ... -tomorrow/

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Lula’s Witch Trial: Who Are The TRF4?
DEMOCRACY LAVA JATO LAWFARE

Some are calling it the Coup’s endgame, others the “final battle” for Brasil’s next decade.

Former President Lula, who held office from 2003-2011 has twice the support of his nearest rival to succeed Putschist Michel Temer in the October 2018 elections.

However, on the 24th January in the southern city of Porto Alegre, he will face judgement on his appeal against a conviction which could prevent him running for office, a case which numerous critics, at home and abroad, have dismissed as baseless and without actual evidence. If his conviction is upheld he would not only be barred from the Presidency but face arrest and up to a decade in prison.

It is now widely believed, and not only amongst his supporters, that the case against Lula is political-legal persecution, or Lawfare, and there is also ample evidence to suggest that it has the full support of North Atlantic powers and corporate interests, which are represented by lobby organisations and think tanks such as AS/COA and the Atlantic Council, and thus permeates through English-language coverage of Brasil.

A conspicuous failure to prosecute anyone from the conservative US-backed PSDB (to whom Lava Jato’s inquisitorial Prosecutor-Judge Sergio Moro is connected), despite far greater and more tangible evidence such as that surrounding their defeated 2014 presidential candidate Aécio Neves, has made a mockery of insistence that the vast (and unprecedentedly well promoted) anti-corruption probe is politically neutral. In addition, the economic effects of Lava Jato, from its mandated freezing of construction and energy sectors, contributed to the economic contraction which many used to justify Dilma Rousseff’s illegal impeachment, a deepening of recession which Atlas Network-connected group MBL, campaigning for her removal, actually celebrated as a means of recruitment to their cause.

Crucial to this story is that the conservative bloc which now occupies Temer’s post-coup cabinet (and has since implemented a brutal neoliberal programme without the will of the people) includes 4 times defeated PSDB and heirs to ARENA Government of the 65-85 Dictatorship, now living on as “Democratas”, who have failed between them to win a Presidential election since 1998. These are, naturally, the political forces most involved, and most most vocal in their support of the case against Lula and the war on his PT (Workers Party) as a whole. The Brazilian right and their international supporters, although trying to rush through unpopular reforms and privatisations before Temer must leave office, know that they cannot realistically expect to win an election in which the still wildly popular Lula is a candidate, despite decades of intensifying media vilification.

Past articles 2015- present, that Brasil Wire has published on the subject of Lawfare in Brasil can be found assembled here.

There are also enormous concerns about the impartiality of Regional Federal Tribunal 4, or TRF4 which will judge on Lula’s appeal. The tribunal is made up of conservative judges João Pedro Gebran, Victor Laus and the more liberal Leandro Paulsen. Gebran, who is the TRF4’s rapporteur to the Lava Jato task force, is also from Curitiba where it is based, and a personal friend and former university colleague of controversial judge Sergio Moro. There have been some allegations that he is a godparent to Moro’s children or vice versa, which he denies. Lula’s defence team even asked for their respective wedding and children’s birth certificates to corroborate, a request which was refused.

During 2017, overseer of the appeal, TRF4’s President Carlos Eduardo Thompson Flores Lenz, in a brazen breach of conduct, enthused to the media about Moro’s handling of Lula’s case, calling it “impeccable”. The chief of his cabinet also shared various facebook campaigns demanding that Lula be imprisoned.



Historian Fernando Horta has grave doubts about the fitness of TRF4 in its current configuration to judge a case such as that of Lula, with its enormous political ramifications – in short it will decide Brasil’s political future; an unelected trio of Judges will decide Brasil’s 2018 election and its definition as a sovereign nation or neoliberal viceroyalty.

“There are two things that strike me. One is that none of the 3 TRF4 judges are specialists in criminal law, they are in health, commercial and civil law. The other thing that frightens me is that Gebran, the leader of the Tribunal, is a personal friend of Moro. They went to university together and afterwards both worked in the same court in Western Parana state. And this is unusual in that the first Lava Jato conviction ever occurred in that court and was presided over by Moro. In 2013, there was a motion for clarification filed there which represents the first time a Lava Jato case rose to the district court level. In Brazil, this process is done through lottery and their court was the one which was this case was awarded to. And from that point, all the Lava Jato resources passed through the same court with the same prosecutor/judge. So, their court was awarded the first Lava Jato case in 2013. In 2014 both of them were transferred. They opened two judge positions in the court, where they knew the Lava Jato case would continue. Moro was transferred out and Gebran, his personal friend, was transferred into the court where they knew Lava Jato was going to continue. In other words, they chose who would decide on Lava Jato in advance. The court is composed of various groups of three prosecutors. Each one has a president, but the Court (TRF4) itself also has a president who can step in and make a judgement in case of a split decision. If the ruling against Lula is 2 – 1 the court president can step in. If Lula receives one vote in his favor there is a legal maneuver called an implementation motion in which judgement advances to a decision of the entire court, which if I am not mistaken is made up of 9 prosecutor/judges. But it is the court president (Carlos Eduardo Thompson Flores Lenz) who would coordinate that.”

The day of the judgement will be potentially explosive. Despite an effort to outlaw protests; Trade unions, and Social Movements such as MST, are planning to travel to Porto Alegre in support of Lula on January 24th. The PSDB Mayor of the city, Nelson Marchezan Júnior has in response taken the likely illegal step, of directly requesting that Michel Temer make the Armed Forces available to him against the demonstrators’ constitutionally-protected right of assembly.

http://www.brasilwire.com/lulas-witch-t ... -the-trf4/

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The Rolling Coup: How Michel Temer is turning Brazil into a Banana Republic
17 January 2018 • International & Foreign Policy
by Brian Mier

In December, 2017, Gabriel Souza, a São Paulo vocational school student, fell and hurt his back while working at his job at Burger King. When he brought a doctor’s note authorizing medical leave to his employer he was was fired. He went to the local labor courts to sue and was told that, due to the new laws, if he lost the case he would be responsible for paying all legal costs. Gabriel’s story is an example of one of several that I have heard informally within my circle of friends during the 6 months since illegitimate president Michel Temer reformed Brazil’s labor laws. As in the case of other countries in Latin America where US-backed neoliberal regimes have taken power, the structural adjustments have happened so fast that that the citizens are still struggling to find out how they will be affected by them. The Brazilian social welfare state, which started with Getulio Vargas’ workers rights legislation and the nationalisation of key industries in the 1930s, and was significantly strengthened during the 13 years of center-left PT party rule, (2003-2016) is being dismantled in record speed. While too much has changed to document everything in the space of a single article, the following 12 changes made since Military Dictatorship era public prosecutor and US informant Michel Temer took office on August 31, 2016, have helped transform Brazil from a rising nation with a growing middle class into a democratically-weakened US puppet state.

Labor Law Reforms set worker rights back 80 years
Starting with President Getulio Vargas in 1930, Brazil was one of the most progressive countries in the Americas in terms of labor rights. Every Brazilian citizen had the right to a labor card. After a 90 day provisional period, employers were forced to either lay off the worker or sign the labor card. Once the card was signed, workers had the right to benefits such as compensation for transportation to and from work, free lunch, one month paid vacation per year, paid maternity and paternity leave and a generous mandatory severance package in case of firing, which lowered stress levels by generating a climate of job security. Employers were only allowed to hire temporary workers for a period of up to 6 months. If a worker was unionized, a small deduction was made from his or her paycheck and given to the respective union. In 1941 Vargas established a labor court system that provided free legal assistance to workers who wanted to sue their employers for labor rights violations.

On July 11, 2017, Temer ratified a new labor code, which critics, like Labor Judge Magda Biavaschi, say brings labor rights back to the 19th Century. Lunch breaks are reduced to 30 minutes and, due to new laws regulating autonomous workers, who receive none of the legal benefits conferred by the labor card, there is no longer a 6 month limit on how long they can be employed. Mandatory labor union deductions have been eliminated and workers can now negotiate collectively with employers without unions. Furthermore, employers are now allowed to keep workers on permanently in a state of intermittent employment, meaning that they can invite them in to work only on days that they need them, with none of the labor rights guaranteed to permanent employees. Although the Labor Court system continues to operate, the new labor laws mandate that if an employee loses a case against his employer he is required to compensate for all legal costs of the proceedings, basically eliminating the right of the average worker to sue.

The immediate results of the new labor laws were tens of thousands of layoffs across the country, as companies capitalized on the new opportunity to hire autonomous and intermittent workers. Estacio de Sa University is one example. One month after the new labor laws were passed, it fired 1200 university professors and hired replacement, intermittent workers, who will not be paid during school vacation periods.

For the first time ever, Brazil lowers its minimum wage
When Lula was elected, the Brazilian minimum wage was equal to USD$49/month. He enacted a policy of annual above inflation minimum wage hikes. According to a huge study conducted by IPEA (Institute of Applied Economic Research) these minimum wage increases were the most important causal factor of 36 million people rising above the poverty line during the PT years. For the first time since Getulio Vargas created it, Michel Temer lowered the minimum wage for 2018, from R$969 to R$954/month, after a year which had seen an official inflation rate of 3%.

Brazil’s first All White, Male Cabinet since the Military Dictatorship
Brazil has a long history of gender imbalance in public office. Although Dilma Rousseff did not achieve gender parity in her cabinet, she appointed 9 women out of a total of 37 ministries. One of the first actions that Michel Temer took upon assuming the presidency was to fire them all and establish the first all male cabinet since the Military Dictatorship era.

Destruction of important Government Ministries
While running for president in 2002, Lula promised the Brazilian people to perform a tightrope act that would aim to please the business sector and international capital while simultaneously enacting income redistribution programs and support for small businesses. This position is exemplified by his government’s relationship with the agricultural sector. They subsidized export-geared, mono-culture production, primarily through the Ministry of Agriculture, while using the Ministry of Agrarian Development to support family farmers through subsidized credit, technical support and innovative laws such as PAA (Programa de Aquisicao Alimentar/Food Acquisition Program) which obligated public schools and hospitals to purchase all of their food from local family farmers. During an average fiscal year during PT rule, 2012, the Federal Government gave around R$13 billion in subsidies for agribusiness and R$12 billion, split between the MDA and the Ministry of Agriculture, to family farmers. One result of this was that before the coup, most food consumed by Brazilian citizens was still produced by family farmers.

When Michel Temer took office, he eliminated the Ministry of Agrarian Development. He also disbanded the Ministry of Woman’s Rights, the Ministry of Afro-Brazilian Rights and the Ministry of Human rights. These Ministries previous functions were downgraded to Secretariat status and had their budgets decimated. For example, the peak funding level of the PAA program was R$839 million in 2012. Temer cut funding to R$439 million in 2016 and R$150 million in 2017 and is now threatening to end the program completely. Important human rights programs are suffering similar cuts and cancellations. The hypocrisy was glaring when he raised judiciary salaries by 41% and absolved R$20 billion in back taxes owed by Itau Bank while cutting support for women victims of domestic violence from R$42 million to R$16 million with the excuse that the government could no longer afford it.

Massive Petroleum Hand-off to European and American multinationals
Shortly after the Coup, top officials from the PSDB party flew up to Washington to meet with US State Department Officials. Immediately afterwards, Michel Temer announced a privatization of a large portion of Brazil’s massive offshore pre-salt petroleum reserves. As the Chevron backed think tank AS/COA and its journalist staff fed misinformation to the American press denying that a coup had just taken place, Michel Temer announced the auction of billions of dollars worth of oil at vastly below market rates.

On December 5, 2017, he signed Decree number 795, which will provide an estimated USD$330 billion in tax abatement for foreign oil corporations. The main beneficiaries are Shell and Chevron. Not surprisingly, very little criticism of this measure appeared in the northern Corporate media.

On January 3, 2018, the Department of Justice-backed Lava Jato investigation team awarded USD$3 billion to American shareholders in Petrobras, the mixed-ownership Petroleum company that had been targeted and crippled by the investigation. Ostensibly compensation for losses incurred by bribery within the company, the amount handed over represents 6 times the amount of confiscated bribes and is a value superior to Petrobras entire 2017 profits.

1.2 Million poor families removed from Bolsa Familia Welfare System
Building and deeply expanding on earlier programs, President Lula created a conditional cash transfer program called Bolsa Familia in 2003, in which poor families receive a small monthly income supplement ranging between $30-60 USD/month, if their children stay in school and receive regular free doctors' exams. The effect of this program on poverty reduction during the PT government years has been exaggerated internationally by groups like the World Bank, which likes to deemphasize the benefits of minimum wage increases, but IPEA showed that it was the third largest causal factor in poverty reduction during the PT years.

However, in a country with hundreds of years of history of famine and malnutrition, Bolsa Familia had a significant influence on the large reduction in hunger and growth stunting among Brazilian children. Since taking office, the Temer government removed 1.2 million families from the program, and stalled entrance into the program for 500,000 poor families who are on the waiting list.

Dismantlement of poverty eradication programs in the Semi-arid northeast
The Brazilian northeast, home to 50 million people, has been plagued by crippling droughts for centuries that cause cyclical hunger crises in this historically poorest region of Brazil. From the 1950s to the 1990s, droughts caused millions of poor north-easterners, including Lula’s family, to migrate to the southeastern cities, as places like Rio and Sao Paulo saw their populations swell by as much as 500%. During the 1990s a coalition of environmentalist agronomists and activist organizations formed the Articulacao do Semi Arido (ASA). They conducted studies and concluded that, although cyclical droughts are a natural phenomenon, their effects on the poor were heavily exacerbated by local political machines that funneled public funding into private dams, lakes and ponds, concentrating water in the hands of local political families who would give water away for free during election years and charge exorbitant prices for it during non election-year droughts.

The ASA came up with a series of recommendations, including rainwater capture and introducing crops and domestic animal species that were more adequate for the local climate. When Lula came to office, he adopted the ASA recommendations as policy and hired many ASA leaders to his staff. Over the next decade they built one million rainwater capture systems for poor families in the region, significantly changing the local political power dynamic. This water security, together with the minimum wage hikes from R$200 to R$880/month, a policy which mandated that retired workers receive at least minimum wage and the Bolsa Familia program, was an important causal factor that contributed to lifting 20 million people above the poverty line in the northeast. Since Michel Temer was elected, the rain water capture policy has ground to a halt and old policies to concentrate control over water in the hands of a few local political families are returning to the area. During the last round of elections, local strong men from Temer’s PMDB party were seen sending water trucks into poor neighborhoods to give away “free water”.

An Estimated 12.6 million people fall below the poverty line
During the PT years, 36 million people rose above the poverty line. Starting in 2014 Brazil suffered a recession. As the recession grew, corporate media companies in the anglophone North, fed by a barrage of misinformation from corporate think tanks such as the Rockefeller family’s Americas Society/Council of the Americas rushed to blame it on corruption. The fact is that, although the recession was originally triggered by the Rousseff administration's miscalculation of the SELIC rate, it was greatly exacerbated by economic sabotage in the lead up to the coup caused by the US-backed Lava Jato investigation.

Unlike in Northern countries where corrupt corporations like Goldman Sachs and Seimens are considered too big to fail and receive government support during corruption scandals to guarantee that operations continue normally, in 2015 the Lava Jato investigation paralyzed Brazil's 5 largest construction companies, causing an immediate 500,000 direct job losses and, according to an economic study cited by the BBC, a 2.5% GDP reduction in 2015. While there are certainly macroeconomic factors at play in the 9 million Brazilians who fell below the poverty line in 2015 and 2016 and the estimated 2.5-3.6 million who fell below the poverty line in 2017, slashing funding for social programs and removing 1.2 million families, (around 4.2 million people) from the welfare system, has certainly exacerbated the problem.

Constitutional Amendment freezes Public Health and Education Spending for 20 years
Michel Temer worked closely with conservative allies in Congress and the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment freezing the spending on the already underfunded public Health and Education systems for 20 years, a period in which population is projected to grow by 27 million. A recent study estimates that, due to the new laws, the education system will lose an estimated R$25 billion per year during this period.

Decimation of Science and Technology Research
One of the cornerstones of developmentalism is to expand a nation's capacity for scientific research. In 2011, Dilma Rousseff created a program called Sciences Without Borders, which provided full scholarships for 101,000 science and engineering students to study at the best universities in Europe and North America. In 2017, Michel Temer cancelled the program, claiming that the government had run out of money for it. That year he also cut R$1.71 Billion from the Federal Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which funded important studies in fields like stem cell research and nanotechnology. R$1 Billion of these cuts were taken directly from grad school scholarships and stipends for 176,000 students.

A fatal blow to the National Cities Conference Assembly System
When Lula took office in 2003 he created a new ministry to oversee urban programs called the Ministry of the Cities. In a pioneering move, he passed deliberative control over the Federal urban budget to an enormous people’s assembly system, with guaranteed majority representation of the poor and working class. Cities across the country held local popular assemblies in which voluntary delegates were elected to represent them at the state level. State level assemblies were held to elect 5000 delegates for a national assembly which took place every three years called the Cities Conference during which they met in Brasilia to vote on federal urban legislation and elect voluntary councilors, who would meet in Brasilia every three months during their mandates to vote on Ministry of the Cities policies.

Although the amount of power held by the councilors and delegates was curtailed in 2005 when Lula expanded his governing coalition to included conservative political parties as a response to the Mensalao scandal and the Ministerial post was handed over to members of other political parties, there were still significant victories made by the men and women of the council. Initiatives that were pushed through by the Councilors and Delegates include: 1) a $1 billion fund for self-managed, self-constructed social movement housing; 2) A national sewage law which prevents further privatizations; and 3) A national transportation law which obliges city governments to prioritize pedestrian and bicycle traffic and public transportation over the automobile.

Although the National Cities Conference system lost power over the years to coalition politics it remains as one of the largest people’s assembly systems in world history. On June 7, 2017, Michel Temer issued a decree to cancel the 2018 National Cities Conference, enabling the government to abandon the election system for councilors and appoint them directly.

Constitutional Amendment makes it easier for Agribusiness to Steal Land
Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the World and and an important cause of this problem lie in its incredibly unequal land distribution in the countryside, which has its roots in slavery. During the 1980s, the Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Landless Workers Movement/MST) fought to include language in the 1988 Constitution that guarantees the right for landless farmers to occupy small parcels of land in the countryside, generally up to 40 hectares depending on the biome, that are not being used productively, and through this have been able to get land deeds for 350,000 families.

The fact that they are frequently treated as criminals by the Brazilian media, judiciary and plantation owners is ironic because almost all large ranches and plantations in Brazil are situated on land that was originally stolen in a process called grilagem. Grilagem is a process in which someone buys, say, 10 hectares of land and builds a fence around 1000, often hiring gunmen to kick everyone who is living on it out by force. He then alters the deed to make himself appear to be the legitimate owner. When this process exacerbated during the 1950s and 1960s, millions of landless rural workers were forced to migrate to the big cities in the Southeast.

On July 11, 2017, Michel Temer issued decree number 759, which greatly reduces penalties for large landowners who steal land. The new law increases the limit for avoiding criminal charges from 1500 to 2500 hectares, and moves the amnesty date for the crime forwards from 2004 to 2011. According to Greenpeace Brazil’s Márcio Astrini, the main effects of this new law will be felt in the legal Amazon region, where ranchers and Agribusiness companies like Cargill are producing a large percentage of the soybeans and beef consumed in North America and Europe.

What comes next
The unravelling of the Brazilian social welfare system and assault on human rights is an ongoing process. As Luis Gonzaga Gegê da Silva said in a recent interview, the coup is being enacted on Brazilian workers on a daily basis and, in fact, is only just beginning. The list of laws going through Congress is long, but two of them that are currently circulating are worth mentioning here.

The first is a bill, pushed by the powerful and conservative evangelical Christian lobby, that aims to criminalize abortion - already illegal in most cases - for rape victims. Although Dilma Rousseff has publicly criticized the bill, Michel Temer has given no indication that he will veto it. The second is a bill that, if passed would reform the retirement system. It is true there are abuses in the Brazilian retirement system, mainly involving elected officials, military officers and members of the unelected judiciary who are able in many cases to retire after two years of service and receive full pay for the rest of their lives, even passing it on to their unmarried children when they die. When so-called “liberal” newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times talk about how important retirement reform is in Brazil, they commonly cite examples like this. Unfortunately, high ranking government officials, military officers and judges will be exempt from Temer’s proposed retirement reforms. The vast majority of the Brazilian working class will see their retirement age raise as high as 70, which is higher than the life expectancy in Maranhão and equal to the life expectancy in two other Brazilian states. Those citizens will essentially lose their right to retire.

During the period in which the center-left PT party won 4 consecutive elections before being removed from office in soft coup, some people in the Northern left labeled them as neoliberals who had sold out the Brazilian people in a similar manner to what the ANC did in South Africa. As I write in the conclusion to my new book, Voices of the Brazilian Left, this is an unfair assessment which I believe was generated by lack of Portuguese language skills, lack of knowledge of what the PT governments were doing on the ground and too much reliance on analysis from members of the tiny PSOL (Partido de Socialismo e Liberdade/Socialist Liberty Party) which, although vocally critical, is a faithful ally of the PT in the Brazilian Congress.

There is a consensus among the vast majority of the Brazilian left that the most viable strategy for undoing the damage that has been done to the Brazilian social welfare system and to human rights since the 2016 coup is to elect Lula for president in October, 2018. While there is much soul searching and criticism within the organized left about how it ended up in a position where Lula would be their only chance, he is currently leading all polls, with double the popularity of his nearest opponent, neo-fascist former Military Dictatorship official Jair Bolsonaro, an evangelical Christian who is running on an anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Afro Brazilian platform. Last year a kangaroo court sentenced Lula to 9 years in prison for receiving illegal reforms on an apartment that prosecutors, working in tandem with the US Department of Justice, were unable to prove he ever either owned or set foot in.

On January 24, his case goes up to appeal in Porto Alegre in front of another US DOJ-backed legal team as part of the Lava Jato investigation which has routinely ignored much graver cases of corruption with much larger bodies of evidence against conservative politicians from the US-supported PSDB party, such as the recent discovery that two time former presidential candidate Jose Serra received R$52 million in illegal campaign contributions from the Odebrecht construction company. Under the banner of, “An election without Lula is Fraud” thousands of people from labor unions and social movements, including the MTST, are traveling to Porto Alegre on January 24 to show solidarity with Lula. The local mayor has declared protesting illegal on that day and officially requested for the Army to come in. The events, as they play out, will have serious repercussions for Brazilian democracy.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/brazil-post-coup/

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Brazil: Lula’s Defense Slams Graft Charges Ahead of Trial
Published 22 January 2018

Ahead of Lula's trial, thousands of his supporters are participating in mass demonstrations across Porto Alegre, where his trial will be held.
Corruption charges filed against former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who is set to stand trial on Jan. 24, are examples of targeted “political oppression,” his defense team has asserted.

During a legal and logistical briefing held Monday, Lula’s team of lawyers addressed the charges, which they described as “politically motivated.”

In July 2017, Judge Sergio Moro alleged the former leftist president was guilty of corruption and money laundering, resulting in a ten-year jail sentence. The sentence was grounded on claims that he and his wife illicitly received millions in kickbacks from the OAS Group construction company as well as furniture and improvements for their beachfront apartment in Guaruja.

In exchange, Lula’s prosecutors claim, the construction company was able to win profitable contracts from Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned energy company.

Lula has denied these allegations.

Now, the Workers’ Party leader is set for a regional appeals court trial to be held in the southern city of Porto Alegre.

“Accusations are opened against the country's biggest political leader without evidence to allow an accusation to be opened,” Lula’s defense team said during the briefing.

“There is an abuse of the right to accuse. Nowadays, there is political oppression on the part of the accusers.”


His attorneys went on to say that the only time Lula visited the apartment in question was in 2014, when he was no longer president of Brazil, so he could not have used any political advantage to help the OAS Group win contracts with Petrobras.

“The person registered as the owner of the apartment is OAS Ventures,” his defense team added.

“Lula never had the keys; never spent a day or a night in that apartment.”

They also questioned the main source of reports claiming his alleged corruption, Rede Globo, which has been critical of Lula’s political career, both as a president and a labor activist. Red Globo was founded by Roberto Marinho, one of the wealthiest media moguls in Brazil’s history.

“The accusation is based on a Globo TV report in which it is said that there is an indication of corruption with that apartment, saying it was from Lula,” his defense team said.

“But a report is not enough proof to be able to make a trial and open a trial.”

Finally, the leftist former president’s attorneys raised concerns about Leo Pinheiro, a former OAS Group executive whose testimony serves as primary “evidence” against Lula. Pinheiro’s testimony was given as part of a plea bargain after he was arrested on other charges.


“He (Moro) also takes the word of a witness who is imprisoned, and who is negotiating to lower their sentences,” they said.

“There is no strong evidence to allow an accusation to start — there is no email, no purchase contract, no key delivery, nothing. How can someone be condemned based on such a witness?”

In the past, Lula’s defense team has questioned the logic of Moro's case that the apartment was a kickback for Petrobras contracts awarded to the OAS Group. Those contracts, his defense team recalled, go back to 2009, making it strange for the kickbacks to come only four or five years later, once Lula had long ceased to be president.

Defenders of Lula also claim the charges are intended to prevent him for running for non-consecutive presidential re-election in October, adding to the argument that the case is politically motivated.

Several opinion polls conducted across Brazil have placed Lula as the frontrunner in the election.

Ahead of Lula's trial, thousands of his supporters are participating in mass demonstrations across Porto Alegre, where his trial will be held. The Landless Workers' Movement, known as MST, the Workers' Party and several dozen grassroots groups are participating in the demonstrations.

While the march continues through Porto Alegre, demonstrators stick banners saying that election without @LulapeloBrasil is a fraud.

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... -0011.html

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Brazil: Workers' Party Says Lula Will Still Run for President
Published 25 January 2018 (1 hours 28 minutes ago)

“We will confirm Lula's (presidential) candidacy during our party convention,” the Workers' Party said in a statement.
Brazil's Workers' Party has released a statement saying that former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva continues to be their presidential candidate following his lost appeal against a 2017 corruption conviction yesterday.

The party said there will be no surrendering “before injustice” and that the people will not "passively sit by" and "watch democracy and the will of the majority be trashed."

“We will confirm Lula's (presidential) candidacy during our party convention and register him on Aug. 15, rigorously adhering to the electoral legislation,” the party said in a statement.

It went on to note that "if they believe that this history ends with the judgement (handed to Lula) today, they are very fooled, because we will not surrender before this injustice."

"The left-wing parties, social movements ... we are all more united than ever before, strengthened by the days of struggle that have mobilized the masses over the past few months."

The statement concluded that the “will of the people will, once again, carry our fellow, Lula, to the Presidency of the Republic.

Following the judicial ruling to uphold Lula's conviction, the former head of state gave a speech in Republic Square in the capital city Sao Paulo, where he said, “just wait, we will return.”

He went on to say that he doesn't want people to be “concerned” about him, but to be “concerned with the 210 million Brazilians, above all the workers,” according to Brasil 24/7. He added that “they can detain Lula, but they cannot detain a dream of liberty, they cannot detain ideas, they cannot detain hope.”

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... -0009.html

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Hidden History: The US “War On Corruption” In Brasil
The story of how an overlooked Bush-era Foreign Policy edict led to Brazil's Coup of 2016 and its consolidation in the conviction of Former President Lula

DEMOCRACY EDITORIAL FOREIGN POLICY HISTORY LAVA JATO LAWFARE

“US involvement in Lava Jato is not relevant” argued a Brazilian commentator recently, recognising its self-evidence. This is a familiar sight; the great taboo of empire is breaking the fourth wall, winking to camera, and acknowledging its existence.

Like its market forces alibi, US imperialism is considered elementary, as natural as the breeze, unnecessary background detail that we simply don’t need to question or talk about. This denial of empire is central to its persistence, and the accusation of “blaming the Yanqui for everything” is the dusty rhetorical device used by both US pundits and the comprador class across Latin America, to shut down any rational criticism of a status quo which has historically protected their privileges.

In recent years commentators have even tried to deny the extensively documented US role in Brazil’s Military Coup of 1964, or point to Dilma Rousseff’s own diplomatic remark that “we have enough coup plotters of our own”.

Despite public ignorance and its root in the media blindspot on this matter, US involvement in Brazil’s Anti-Corruption Operation Lava Jato, which has already resulted in $3bn payout to North American investors, is not some fringe theory, as some like to pretend – US Acting Attorney General Kenneth Blanco has publicly boasted about it himself:

“It is hard to imagine a better cooperative relationship in recent history than that of the United States Department of Justice and the Brazilian prosecutors. We have cooperated and substantially assisted one another on a number of public matters that have now been resolved, and are continuing to do so on a number of ongoing investigations.

The cooperation between the Department and Brazil has led to extraordinary results. In just the last year alone, for example, the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the Brazilian Lava Jato task force have cooperated and coordinated resolutions in four FCPA cases: Embraer, Rolls Royce, Braskem, and Odebrecht. Odebrecht is particularly noteworthy due to its breadth and scope.

Indeed, just this past week, the prosecutors in Brazil won a guilty verdict against former President Lula da Silva, who was charged with receiving bribes from the engineering firm OAS in return for his help in winning contracts with the state oil company Petrobras. It is cases like this that put Brazil at the forefront of countries that are working to fight corruption, both at home and abroad.”

With the fall of its allied Washington consensus governments to the so called pink tide at the turn of the century, US primacy in the region was genuinely threatened for the first time in generations. Many lauded this as Bush Jr’s failure, and the United States “losing” the region permanently, as if assuming there would or could be no response. In answer to these defeats, parallel to the War on Terror in the Middle East and War on Drugs already present in the region, a new front, a “War on Corruption” opened up across the continent, becoming part of official foreign policy in 2002, just prior to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva taking the Brazilian Presidency at his fourth attempt. Around the same time, a new rebranded hemispheric agency would replace notorious “exporter of torture” the School of Americas with expanded scope, and was tasked with bringing the continent to heel via its own police forces and militaries.

Then in Government, Cuban-born cold warrior and Office of Public Diplomacy propagandist Otto Reich, with characteristic hubris, took credit for encouraging the new focus on corruption in Latin America, describing it in military terms as a “target rich environment”. It was embraced in Washington as a new method to force political-economic realignment and “win back” the continent, especially having seen David Rockefeller’s baby the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) brought down by an alliance of Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Brazil’s Lula at the Mar del Plata conference in 2005. This was an escalation, and the US Government was, according to cables, fearful that the regional trade bloc, Mercosur, and its parallel military institution, Unasur, would be consolidated.

Lava Jato’s inquisitor judge Sérgio Moro’s first recorded visit to the United States was in 1998, on an exchange programme with Harvard University, to study anti money laundering practices in Brazil’s domineering hemispheric neighbour. That year the US stood accused of multi-faceted interference in Brazil, to guarantee the re-election of its favoured candidate, the pro-market former dependency theorist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Currency crash, IMF bailout followed, and cut-price privatisations continued.

In 2004, following graduation from University of Paraná, Moro published the paper “Considerations of Mani Pulite”, his interpretative thesis on the 1990s Italian (with US-cooperation) anti-corruption probe which decimated Italy’s political order, in particular its centre-left, and paved the way for both political emergence of Silvio Berlusconi, the most corrupt leader in its history, and a wave of privatisations of its massive public sector nicknamed “the pillage of Italy“. Mani Pulite, in particular its use of the media to whip up public indignation in support of convictions, served as the prototype for Moro’s own operation Lava Jato, launched a decade after his paper. US officials’ open admission of involvement was all but ignored in Italy, as it has been in Brazil.

Also in 2004, the Mensalão scheme of cash for votes in Congress was being uncovered. It developed into a media scandal so great it almost gained traction enough to trigger the impeachment of then President Lula, despite originating under previous administrations. Lula was not charged, but it did result in prison for some of his closest party allies. A private spy agency, Kroll, which operates a revolving door with the CIA, was implicated in attempts to ensnare Lula when caught spying on communications of Government staff. In 2010 it was also exposed as a recruiter of Latin America based journalists to spy on behalf of Oil Giant Chevron, its client. It would, almost unbelievably, then go on to be given the contract for running the CPI (Parliamentary Inquiry) into state-controlled Oil company Petrobras, which would provide the seeds for Operation Lava Jato. Somewhat perversely, architect of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment Eduardo Cunha (whose prosecution was delayed until after Rousseff was gone) would later suggest using Kroll to shut down Lava Jato before it reached the coup plotters themselves. The company was more recently in the news after being hired by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to smear his victims.

Following Lula’s re-election, in 2007 with the new US “War on Corruption” displacing clumsy attempts to spread its spurious War on Terror to Brazil, Moro would visit the US again, this time on an official State Department fellowship, the “International Visitor Leadership Program“, liasing with U.S. agencies and institutions responsible for combating money laundering.

Then, in 2009, Judge Moro appears in leaked State Department cables, speaking at a joint event with the US DOJ under the banner “Project Bridges” in Rio de Janeiro. Outlining an operation similar in configuration to the future Lava Jato – ostensibly set up to investigate illicit funding for terrorism – the event coordinators talked about creating a partnership between the Department of Justice and the Brazilian judiciary to investigate corruption. The cable talks about how task forces could be set up in cities such as Campo Grande or Curitiba, which they identify as having a strong fervour for action on corruption. Those cities are known for their conservatism and default opposition to then governing centre-left Worker’s Party. Curitba and Campo Grande are also amongst the most enduring power bases of de-facto heirs to the dictatorship Government, ARENA, now called “Democratas”, which despite a collapse in its vote between 2002 and 2014, is now in Temer’s Post-Coup coalition, and enjoying life in Government for the first time in almost 20 years.

Around the same time as the Rio de Janeiro conference in 2009, new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an address to the Council of the Americas in New York, which now feels prescient. In her speech to the David Rockefeller-founded Wall Street lobby, a grinning Secretary Clinton promotes a theme that “the ballot box is not enough” in Latin America, and that “sustainable democracies do more than have elections”. While pointedly reaffirming her commitment to democratic “ideals”, she suggests a “independent, capable judiciary” and “vibrant civil society” are what is really needed in the region for its democracies to mature.



The speech is all the more remarkable coming off the back of US loss of influence in the hemisphere following electoral defeats of its favoured candidates, and that in the intervening decade since, the US Government has gone on to bet on the most powerful, unelected arm of government in Brazil – the Judiciary – which is predominantly white, male and conservative, and now nicknamed “The Dictatorship of the Toga”.

Clinton’s predecessor John D. Negroponte (Council of the Americas Chairman Emeritus), as outgoing Director of National Intelligence, identified “Democratisation in Latin America” as a primary threat to US National Security, alongside Chinese Military expansion and Iran’s Nuclear programme – on which Lula, along with Turkey’s Erdogan, later broke from UN security council’s shackles and negotiated a deal directly. Negroponte also lamented high oil prices as a gift to governments who do not support US interests. By this point, along with Mercosur, the worldwide multipolar bloc of China, Russia, India and Brazil, BRIC (later BRICS following addition of South Africa), was being consolidated as a direct challenge to US hegemony, in particular the continuing reliance on the US dollar. Brazil, along with Russia, Venezuela and Iran, would later, under Barack Obama’s administration, fall victim to Negroponte’s desired policy of encouraging low energy prices in order to throttle competitors’ Oil-dependent economies. US Presidents and their approach to public relations change, objectives do not. Between the mandated freeze of Lava Jato, those low energy prices, and change in law enabled by the removal of Dilma Rousseff, Petrobras, despite record production, lost its monopoly on Brazil’s massive offshore oil reserves which are being sold off for cents to foreign producers such as US Chevron & ExxonMobil, UK’s BP & Shell, and Norway’s Statoil, at an estimated loss of R$1 trillion – funds once earmarked by Dilma Rousseff for a revolution in public education & health investment, deemed Brazil’s “Passport to the future”.

As publicly available cables cease in mid-2010 we do not know what level of collusion there was between Moro and the United States Government in the intervening years prior to Lava Jato’s official inception in early 2014, but his endorsement or presence at think tanks featuring current and ex-USG personnel such as CFR, Wilson Center, AEI, AS/COA (Council of the Americas), and NATO adjunct Atlantic Council – which launched its own Latin America wing in 2013 – are at the least an indicator of continued collaboration, as is the level of unanimously positive international media coverage, unprecedented for any foreign judge, lawyer or legal operation (an often excruciating parade of grey men in suits which would otherwise generate no outside interest). Those organisations come complete with their own patronage networks of aligned journalists, scholars, thought leaders and promoted commentariat.

Although she was never officially implicated beyond innuendo, Moro’s selective and accelerated pursuit of figures from her Workers Party supplied the essential media pretext for elected President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, only for her to be replaced by her actually proven corrupt PMDB vice, former US informant Michel Temer. We can see in leaked 2011 emails from “Shadow CIA”, Stratfor, that the wider intelligence community were already betting that Temer would take office during Rousseff’s first term, and become the “bulldog” they needed to push through their Wall Street-prescribed reforms – against the will of the Brazilian electorate. This desired outcome was finally delivered in 2016, with tacit support from the Obama Administration in the form of Clinton’s replacement Secretary of State John Kerry and 2009-13 US Ambassador to Brazil Tom Shannon, who by then had returned to State Dept Bureau of Hemispheric affairs, having taken a demotion for his tenure in Brazil. Shannon was replaced in Brazil by Liliana Ayalde, who is now at Southcom overseeing the rollout of US Military presence across the continent, having been earlier implicated in Paraguay’s 2012 Coup while serving as Ambassador there. Obama’s VP Joe Biden recently boasted of manipulating Ukraine’s Judiciary by blackmailing the Government into firing their Prosecutor General in late March 2016, a few weeks before the Congressional vote on Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment – now revealed to have had votes secured via bribes to congresspeople.

Even before the impeachment was officially concluded, accelerated privatisations, decimation of workers rights and overhaul of the pension system, all demanded by Wall Street, were hastily set in motion by the interim Government. Temer himself admitted in a speech to the Council of the Americas that the real reason for Dilma Rousseff’s removal was her refusal to implement the capital-friendly “Bridge to the future” policy platform, which brought with it a 20 year constitutionally protected freeze on investment health & education, tying the hands of any near-future social democratic government. Science and Technology funding was also slashed. In 2017, with Rousseff gone, Attorney General Janot addressed the economic elite at Davos, and eulogised Operation Lava Jato, which he described as “Pro-Market” – a clear political/ideological position that both its protagonists and ardent supporters insisted it did not have.

Whether by accident or design, Moro has helped change the course of Brazil’s political history already. His continued pursuit of former President Lula – the single politican popular enough to reverse it – on a flimsy charge without material evidence, which has been admonished by Brazilian legal scholars and the international legal community alike, now threatens democracy further, with the clear 2018 front-runner facing a decade in jail, with a dangerous precedent set.

Whatever theoretical long-term advantages Lava Jato was supposed to bring, with Temer’s Brazil institutionally and morally adrift, Government decision making processes are increasingly captured with the unholy trinity of bribery, blackmail and violence.

Now imagine if you will that Moro was a Prosecutor-Judge (if such thing existed) from the United States and his training, fellowship and collaboration was with Russia. US media, and the that of the Anglosphere at large, would go into meltdown. It would gift Democratic pundits far more clear examples of collusion and interference than anything so far produced out of the red mist called “Russiagate”.

The emergence of more evidence is inevitable, but it can already be established on the basis of what is available that despite denial and obfuscation, Sérgio Moro has, in collaboration with various wings of the US Government and its expanded apparatus, aided the removal of an elected President, convicted a former President, and future candidate – all of the same party – and with that significantly contributed to a change in Brazil’s political direction, away from social democratic, mildly redistributive developmentalism, and towards discreet re-colonisation as authoritarian client state or neoliberal viceroyalty. This comes combined with a new US Military presence on Brazilian territory which was simply unthinkable just a few years ago.

While transnationals scramble for its riches, delivered to them by an entreguista elite whom in his seminal ‘Open Veins of Latin America‘ Eduardo Galeano christened the “commission-agent bourgeoisie”, ordinary Brazilians go about their daily business unaware that they are now akin to a population on the losing side of a kinetic war. Post-coup recipient of military honours, Moro, is planning a move to the United States once the Lava Jato investigation is concluded.

What on earth would Rachel Maddow and the rest make of all that.

http://www.brasilwire.com/dont-call-it-brazilgate/

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As Evangelical Mayor Cuts Funding, Rio Carnaval Politicizes

By Gabriel Deslandes.

Rio de Janeiro Carnaval parade groups, called Samba Schools, are preparing social and political criticism for the 2018 carnaval, with parades that will denounce politicians, social problems and recent political scandals. Of the 13 most important Samba Schools, 4 will focus on protests during their parades in the Rio Samba stadium, the Sambadromo.

With the theme, “My God! My God! Is slavery extinct?”, Paraiso de Tuiuti will remember the 130 years since slavery was abolished (in 1888) through criticism of the recently approved labor law reforms, which, according to the group, represents a modern form of servitude. The final parade section will present the costume of the “Warrior of the CLT”. The CLT is the nickname for the Brazilian labor card, a right to all citizens which was created after the first labor rights legislation in Brazil was consolidated in 1940. Many of these rights were eradicated with the Coup government’s recent labor reforms. “Already overloaded with various tasks, the worker tries to protect himself from the bosses exploitation. In his defense, he uses his labor card, which is transformed into a shield in our parade,” says Tuiuti’s costume designer Jackson Vasconcelos.

In another parade section, the paraders wear an inflatable duck around their waists referring to the giant inflatable duck which became a symbol of the conservative protests in favor of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016. The costume also includes a large hand, suggesting that the protesters were being manipulated. “The figure is a criticism of the manipulation that took place when the poor protested in favor of maintaining the historic system of social exploitation. In otherwords, they are puppets of a dominant class which dictates the rules,” says Vasconcelos. In Tuiuti’s last float, there will be a man dressed as a vampire representing president Michel Temer.



Estação Primeira da Mangueira, one of the oldest and most traditional samba schools in Rio, is parading with the theme, “With or without money, I’ll play”, as a direct provocation to Mayor Marcelo Crivella, who cut public funding to carnaval by 50% this year. Crivella announced the cuts alleging fiscal austerity, but many of his critics see religious motives behind it, since he is also a bishop of the prosperity-focused Universal Kingdom of God church, which uses biblical dogma to classify carnaval as a “diabolical party” associated with “idolatry”, “witchcraft” and “libidinous acts”.

Mangueira has created a parade celebrating the cultural manifestations of the street which depend on little or no financial support. For the designer of the parade, Leandro Viera, the theme also criticizes the samba schools, which have begun to invest in more and more expensive and luxurious parades, distancing themselves from their neighborhood roots. “For a long time, there has been a feeling that Carnaval has been watered down to transform itself exclusively in entertainment, and with this it has withdrawn from the population. By looking at the mayor’s position, we found a way to satirize carnaval itself. This theme was developed to embrace the sambista. The mayor is trying to implement a conservative agenda in the cosmopolitan city of Rio de Janeiro.”

The Mangueira parade will commemorate carnaval street blocos, samba jam sessions, bars, Afro-Brazilian altars and food offerings, the GLBT parade and dancers who wear costumes that criticize the political class. In other words, as Leandro Vieira says, “everything that Mayor Crivella doesn’t like”. One parade float will feature an image of the patron saint of Brazil, the black Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Aparecida, whose image was kicked over on an evangelical TV program during the 1990s by a pastor associated with Mayor Crivella. Another float will feature a bare-breasted statue of pioneer Brazilian drag queen Laura de Vison (1939-2007). The school also promises to feature a giant statue of a cellulite-ridden ass with a tattoo on it that says, “Crivella”.

Beija Flor will extend its protest to Brazil as a whole, making a parallel between the horror novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, which will celebrate its 200th anniversary since first publication in 2018, and the political moment in the country. With the theme “A monster is someone who doesn’t know how to love: the children abandoned by the nation which birthed them”, it denounces things like corruption, social inequality, unemployment, environmental destruction, religious intolerance, and homophobia.

Beija Flor will tell the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, a being created in a laboratory with pieces other people, crudely sewn together, who was not recognized as human due to his abnormal appearance and rejected by his own creator. The headquarters of Petrobras, a company targeted in the lava jato investigation and Maracana stadium, which received overpriced reforms, will be represented on floats developed by choreographer Marcelo Misailidis and designer Cid Carvalho. The theme song is already one of the most popular of the season, with verses such as, “Beloved homeland, where are you going? You children can’t take it anymore!” and “Greed wears a suit and tie, where hopes die”.

In Portela, another historic school, the experienced designer Rosa Magalhães, who has one the most titles of anyone currently in activity in Rio, created the theme, “Suddenly, from here to there, from there to here” about a group of Dutch Jews, exiled by the inquisition after Portugal conquered the northeastern state of Pernambuco from Holland during the 17th Century, who immigrated to the United States and helped found New Amsterdam, which later transformed into New York. The parade will feature Mohamed Ali Kenawy, a Syrian refugee who suffered xenophobic attacks when he started peddling on the streets of Rio in August 2017.

Portela’s parade will honor immigrant workers and protest against xenophobia and ethnic and religious intolerance. It will reference the European refugee crisis and controversies involving US president Donald Trump’s persecution of immigrants. Portela’s official program for the 2018 carnaval states that, “starting from this adventure, Portela will deliver a humanitarian message against discrimination, religious persecution and all sorts of attacks against the diversity of peoples”.

With all of this engagement in the heart of Brazil’s largest cultural spectacle the 2018 Rio de Janeiro Carnaval parade, which will happen on February 11 and 12, looks to be the most politicized in decades.

http://www.brasilwire.com/as-evangelica ... liticizes/

I am reading Amilcar Cabral, he has much to say about culture being the wellspring of liberation.