Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby liminalOyster » Sun Jul 28, 2019 8:06 pm

Latest from https://theintercept.com/series/secret-brazil-archive/

THE BOLSONARO GOVERNMENT’S AGGRESSIVE RESPONSE SHOWS WHY OUR REPORTING ON THE SECRET BRAZIL ARCHIVE IS SO VITAL
Glenn Greenwald, Leandro Demori, Betsy Reed
July 28 2019, 2:11 p.m.

Secret Brazil Archive
Part 8

Justice Minister Moro and his defenders are trying to distract attention away from their own misconduct by fixating on the actions of those who revealed it.

WHEN NEWS EMERGED this week that the Federal Police had arrested four people accused of hacking the Telegram accounts of various Brazilian officials and providing some of that content to The Intercept, many of our readers asked: What effect will this have on the reporting that we have done and are continuing to do on this secret archive?

The answer, in one word: none.

The public interest in reporting this material has been obvious from the start: These documents revealed serious, systematic, and sustained improprieties and possible illegality by Brazil’s current Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro while he was a judge, as well as by the chief prosecutor of the Car Wash investigation Deltan Dallagnol and other members of that investigative task force. It was the Car Wash task force, which Moro presided over as a judge, whose prosecution of ex-President Lula da Silva resulted in his removal from the 2018 election, paving the way for the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to become president. The corruption exposed by our reporting was so serious, and so consequential, that even many of Moro’s most loyal supporters abandoned him and called for his resignation within a week of the publication of our initial stories.

As the revelations of corruption by Moro and Deltan grew — reported both by us and our journalistic partners in Brazil — those officials resorted to the tactics used by government officials everywhere when their improprieties are revealed in the press: They tried to distract attention away from their own misconduct by fixating on the actions of the source as well as the journalists who revealed their wrongdoing.

That is what Sergio Moro, exploiting his position as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice and public security, has been attempting to do for weeks. He and his defenders in Bolsonaro’s party constantly speak about the alleged crimes committed by our source and imply that the reporters and editors at The Intercept and other media outlets working with us are criminals and “accomplices” for the role we have played in exposing their corruption. Moro consistently refers to The Intercept’s reporters as “the allies of the hackers.”

And on July 27 Bolsonaro directly weighed in, with the scurrilous charge that Glenn Greenwald got married and adopted children in order to avoid deportation (his marriage occurred 14 years ago); and threatening Greenwald with imprisonment with the line, “he may take a cane here in Brazil.”

But despite their aggressive efforts, Moro and his defenders have been unable to obtain any evidence to support their insinuations that The Intercept did anything in this matter other than exercise our right to practice journalism, which is guaranteed and protected by the Brazilian Constitution.

At the end of last week, after Brazil’s Federal Police had announced the arrests, they released what they called the “confession” of the person they claim is the principal hacker who provided us with this material, Walter Delgatti Neto. After being interrogated for hours and allegedly “confessing” to the hacking, Delgatti Neto said in his official police statement that:

he never spoke to any Intercept reporter until he had already completed his hacking;
he never requested or received any payment from The Intercept (or any other party) for providing the documents;
he only spoke to The Intercept anonymously;
he never altered any of the chats he provided to us and does not believe that it would be technically possible to have altered the chats given how he downloaded them from Telegram; and
his claimed motive for obtaining and leaking these documents was inspired by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: to improve his country by exposing hidden corruption that the public had the right to know.
Because we have not only the right but the duty — under both the Constitution in Brazil and the code of ethics that governs our profession — to protect our sources, we have not and will not comment on the individuals accused by the Federal Police of having hacked into Telegram accounts and then provided information to our journalists.

But what we can confirm is that, as we have said emphatically from the beginning, the work we have done is classic public interest journalism: receiving authentic information that reveals serious wrongdoing by the country’s most powerful officials and then carefully and responsibly reporting it. Even the Federal Police’s account of what their suspect says aligns with what we have said from the start about our role.

When we published our first series of exposés on June 9, we included an editorial explaining the journalistic principles guiding our reporting of the archive and what our role was in obtaining it. We wrote:

Until now, the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable: For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening. …

The Intercept’s only role in obtaining these materials was to receive them from our source, who contacted us many weeks ago (long before the recently alleged hacking of Moro’s telephone) and informed us that they had already obtained the full set of materials and was eager to provide them to journalists.

When we received the archive, we asked ourselves two questions, the same two key questions journalists around the world ask when embarking on a story: 1) can we determine that this material is authentic? and 2) is it in the public interest to report it?

If the answer to those two questions is “yes” — as it was in this case — then we have not only the right but the duty to inform the public about it. That is what we have been doing since June 9 and will continue to do until all of the material in the public interest is reported. This is also why we opened our newsroom and archive to Brazilian journalistic partners, including the major newspaper Folha, the newsmagazine Veja, and others.

We were able to authenticate this material using the same methods that at least six other journalistic outlets used to authenticate it, many of which were the same methods used to authenticate the Snowden archive before reporting on it. They include comparing the contents to non-public material to determine that it was genuine; consulting with sources whose non-public knowledge aligned with its contents; and confirming with legal specialists that the highly intricate, non-public legal material could have been created only by someone with in-depth, inside knowledge of the Car Wash investigations. We were also able to see in the chats the prosecutors’ past conversations with our own reporters, and we found that they were authentic. The other journalists who had access to the material did the same check and came to the same conclusion: The chats are real.

If history is any indication, the attempt by Moro and his defenders to encourage the public to fixate on the actions of the alleged source rather than the content of our journalistic revelations about his misconduct will fail spectacularly. Much of the most important journalism of the last several decades was made possible by sources who illegally obtained vital information and furnished it to journalists. What history remembers is what the reporting revealed, not the actions of the sources who helped reveal it.

In 1971, a former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg stole tens of thousands of pages of top-secret documents proving that the U.S. government was lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He gave those stolen documents to the New York Times and then to the Washington Post, both of which reported them. What people remember are the lies revealed by those stolen documents. To the extent Ellsberg is discussed, he is widely regarded as a hero for enabling this official deceit to be exposed by journalists.

Throughout the war on terror waged by the U.S. and its allies since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the largest media outlets in the west — the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, BBC, the Guardian — repeatedly received vital information from sources who risked prosecution to expose grave wrongdoing, such as torture, CIA black sites, and illegal domestic NSA spying. While a few authoritarian voices called for the imprisonment of the journalists who revealed those secrets, most regarded the reporting as vital and necessary, and all of those exposés received the top prizes of journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize.

The same was true of the reporting in 2013 and 2014 about the secret mass spying on the internet and entire populations around the world by the U.S. government and its allies — reporting that was enabled by documents unlawfully disseminated by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Dozens of media outlets around the world, including Globo in Brazil, were eager to use those illegally obtained documents to report on the secret spying by government officials because journalists understand that what matters is not the acts or motives of the source but the content of what the journalism reveals to the public.

And, of course, what history remembers most about that reporting are not the moral judgments by the U.S. government and its defenders about Edward Snowden’s actions. What matters — what history has recorded — is what the reporting revealed about the mass and indiscriminate invasions of privacy carried out in secret by security state agencies.

We have no doubt that Moro, Dallagnol, and their allies will continue to use the same tactics pioneered by Richard Nixon and his top aides against Daniel Ellsberg and other sources during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals: namely, to focus public attention on the acts of those who revealed their corruption rather than on the corruption they themselves committed.

But we also have no doubt that these tactics will be no more successful in this case than they were in all these prior cases of crucial journalism over the last several decades. What matters to the public is what their most powerful leaders have done in secret. And that’s why a free press is so vital, so indispensable, to a healthy democracy: because only journalism that is independent of the government and unconstrained by corrupt officials can ensure that the public remains informed and aware of what their leaders are doing and that those officials are prevented from carrying out corrupt acts in secret.

Those are the principles on which The Intercept was founded in 2013. Those are the principles that have driven the reporting we have done from the inception of our news organization. And those are the principles that — with your help and support — will continue to drive our ongoing reporting on the Secret Brazil Archive.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/28/bol ... -is-vital/
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby liminalOyster » Mon Jul 29, 2019 3:01 pm

Brazil's Bolsonaro says no evidence indigenous leader murdered

BRASILIA/SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro on Monday said there was no evidence an indigenous leader, whose death was decried by U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, was killed by wildcat miners said to have invaded protected tribal lands.

Bolsonaro’s remarks came after Emyra Wajapi, a leader of the Waiapi tribe who live on protected indigenous lands in the country’s northwest near the border with French Guiana, was found dead last week.

Brazil’s federal police are investigating the death, along with allegations by some Waiapi tribe members that their lands were invaded by wildcat miners.

“There is no solid evidence as of now that that Indian was murdered,” Bolsonaro said as he left Brasilia’s Palacio da Alvorada on Monday.

Bachelet called for an investigation into Wajapi’s alleged killing on Monday, calling it “a disturbing symptom of the growing problem of encroachment on indigenous land – especially forests – by miners, loggers and farmers in Brazil.”

In a statement, the United Nations’ official and former Chilean president also urged Bolsonaro to reconsider his government’s proposal to open up more of the Amazon rainforest area to mining.

Under Bolsonaro, a former army captain, deforestation of the Amazon has soared, threatening protected indigenous reservations.

The president has called the deforestation numbers fake news and repeatedly criticized the existence of protected lands, saying there are too many of them and that they prevent the country from profiting from its natural resources.

“Brazil lives from commodities,” Bolsonaro said on Monday. “What do we have here in addition to commodities? Do people not remember this? If the [commodities] business fails, it will be a disaster.”

Brazil’s Funai, a state agency that defends indigenous rights, said in a statement on Monday the most recent police report on Wajapi’s death showed no evidence of the “presence of an armed group” on his indigenous reservation at the time it occurred.

It said it was still investigating, however.

Bolsonaro on Monday said he was looking for a solution for artisanal miners, who critics say heavily pollute rivers and clear forests in their search for gold and other minerals.

“It’s my intention to regulate and legalize artisanal miners,” he said, adding he also wanted regulations to allow indigenous people to mine their reservations.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-braz ... SKCN1UO208
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 08, 2019 7:43 pm

Brazil Supreme Court Minister Rules to Protect Press Freedom for Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept
Trevor Timm
August 8 2019, 3:55 p.m.
In a crucial victory for press freedom in Brazil, Minister Gilmar Mendes, a member of Brazil’s Supreme Court, has barred the Bolsonaro administration and Justice Minister Sergio Moro from investigating The Intercept Brasil and journalist Glenn Greenwald for its reporting on unethical and potentially illegal conduct involving Moro.

Mendes, in a sweeping decision, wrote that any attempt to investigate journalists for their reporting would “constitute an unambiguous act of censorship” and would violate Brazil’s constitution.

Over the past two months, Greenwald and The Intercept Brasil have published a series of damning articles on Moro’s role as a judge in Operation Car Wash, a string of supposedly anti-corruption prosecutions of Brazil’s political elite. The stories were based on Telegram chats given to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source.

Related
The Bolsonaro Government’s Aggressive Response Shows Why Our Reporting on the Secret Brazil Archive Is So Vital
The stories, which have dominated the political conversation in Brazil for weeks, showed Moro closely coordinating with prosecutors over their strategy in an apparent attempt to steer the cases and help convict defendants — all while Moro publicly portrayed himself as an unbiased and independent judge.

Most critically, Moro presided over the trial of leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and barred him from running for reelection in 2018 — just as polls showed he was the heavy favorite to win. Hard right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro ended up winning the presidency and immediately appointed Moro as his Justice Minister.

But rather than addressing the questions of Moro’s conduct head on, President Bolsonaro has instead attacked Greenwald. Bolsonaro has publicly stated multiple times in recent weeks that Greenwald has “committed crimes” and that he “may do jail time.” In July, a right-wing publication, which regularly publishes anonymously sourced leaks and rumors that benefit members of Bolsonaro’s party, reported that Greenwald’s finances were under investigation by prosecutors controlled by Justice Minister Moro in relation to The Intercept Brasil’s publications.

After Mendes’s opinion, however, any investigations by the government into Greenwald should halt. The petition to the Brazilian Supreme Court was originally filed on July 11 by the center-left environment-focused political party Rede Sustentabilidade, which translates to the Sustainability Network. The leadership of Rede Sustenabilidade was a strong supporter of Justice Minister Moro, until the revelations by The Intercept Brasil and their concerns about the effects any investigation of the journalists involved would have on press freedom in Brazil.

In a win for all Brazilian journalists, Mendes’s stirring opinion went far beyond the case at hand and invoked a powerful and broad defense of journalists’ rights. “The immediate right of free speech is the right to obtain, produce and disseminate facts and news by any means,” Mendes wrote. “The constitutional secrecy of the journalistic source makes it impossible for the State to use coercive measures to constrain professional performance and to impede the form of reception and transmission of what is brought to public knowledge.”

Mendes and the Car Wash task force have long been at odds. The minister has repeatedly publicly criticized the operation and granted habeas corpus to many suspects that the prosecutors argued should be kept behind bars. This Tuesday, El País published Telegram conversations in partnership with The Intercept that showed Car Wash coordinator Deltan Dallagnol and his colleagues attempted to gather evidence in Switzerland that could possibly provoke Mendes’s impeachment from the court. Such an investigation is illegal since, under Brazilian law, the Supreme Court must approve any investigation into its own members, and no such request was ever filed by the Car Wash task force. Another article from the online news site UOL, published in partnership with The Intercept, showed that the Car Wash prosecutors clandestinely used a third party to contest a ruling by Mendes, in an runaround of their own institutional hierarchy.

Join Our Newsletter

Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you.

I’m in

In a statement to The Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation, Greenwald said: “A free press is a pillar of any democracy because it is one of the few tools for shining a light on the corrupt acts carried out by society’s most powerful actors in the dark. That’s precisely why those same powerful actors so frequently want to punish journalists for doing our jobs, as Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and his Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro have been explicitly threatening to do in response to our exposés.”

Greenwald added: “The Brazilian Constitution robustly and expressly protects exactly the work we’re doing, and I’m grateful that the Brazilian Supreme Court has applied those guarantees against the repressive, retaliatory acts threatened by the Bolsonaro government against us. This crucial precedent ensures that not only we, but all Brazilian journalists, can do our jobs even in the Bolsonaro era without fear of official retaliation from the state.”

Rede Sustentabilidade was able to petition the Supreme Court directly instead of first going to a lower court because the issue touched on core constitutional rights protected under the Brazilian Constitution. Rede Sustentabilidade also asked for an “urgent” ruling, given the timely nature of the potential press freedom implications. In Brazil, a single minister in the Supreme Court can rule on such urgent requests in advance of a full panel of judges hearing the case.

Minister Mendes’s ruling is only preliminary, but the full court may take months or years to take on the case, so Mendes’s ruling may stand for a significant length of time. It is a powerful rebuke of those in the Bolsonaro government who have indicated they would like to sweep aside important press freedom rights for all journalists.
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/08/bra ... greenwald/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Aug 22, 2019 2:02 pm

Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest
democraciaAbierta has seen a PowerPoint presentation that shows that Bolsonaro’s government intends to use hate speech to isolate minorities of the Amazon. Español Português

Manuella Libardi
21 August 2019

Leaked documents show that Jair Bolsonaro's government intends to use the Brazilian president's hate speech to isolate minorities living in the Amazon region. The PowerPoint slides, which democraciaAbierta has seen, also reveal plans to implement predatory projects that could have a devastating environmental impact.

The Bolsonaro government has as one of its priorities to strategically occupy the Amazon region to prevent the implementation of multilateral conservation projects for the rainforest, specifically the so-called “Triple A” project.

"Development projects must be implemented on the Amazon basin to integrate it into the rest of the national territory in order to fight off international pressure for the implementation of the so-called 'Triple A' project. To do this, it is necessary to build the Trombetas River hydroelectric plant, the Óbidos bridge over the Amazon River, and the implementation of the BR-163 highway to the border with Suriname," one of slides read.

One of the tactics cited in the document is to redefine the paradigms of indigenism, quilombolism and environmentalism through the lenses of liberalism and conservatism

In February, ministers Gustavo Bebianno (Secretary-General of the Presidency), Ricardo Salles (Environment) and Damares Alves (Women, Family and Human Rights) traveled to Tiriós (Pará) to speak with local leaders about the construction of a bridge over the Amazon River in the city of Óbidos, a hydroelectric plant in Oriximiná, and the expansion of the BR-163 highway to the Suriname border.

During the meeting, the ministers used a PowerPoint presentation that detailed the projects announced by the Bolsonaro government for the region. The presentation, which was leaked to democraciaAbierta, argues that a strong government presence in the Amazon region is important to prevent any conservation projects from taking roots.

The slides are clear. Before any predatory plan is implemented, the strategy begins with rhetoric. Bolsonaro's hate speech already shows that the plan is working. The Amazon is on fire. It's been burning for weeks and not even those who live in Brazil were fully aware. Thanks to the efforts of local communities with the help of social networks, the reality is finally going viral.

The online reaction is far from being sensationalist. This year alone, Brazil had 72,000 fire outbreaks, half of which are in the Amazon. The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) reported that its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018.


hannah
@negativiq
The Amazon rainforest provides 20% of the world's oxygen. People are deliberately starting fires in effort to illegally deforest land for cattle ranching. President Bolsonaro is letting this slide!! #AmazonRainforest #PrayforAmazonas


Attacking non-governmental organizations is part of the Bolsonaro government's strategy. According to another of the PowerPoint's slide, the country is currently facing a globalist campaign that "relativizes the National Sovereignty in the Amazon Basin," using a combination of international pressure and also what the government called "psychological oppression" both externally and internally.

This campaign mobilizes environmental and indigenous rights organizations, as well as the media, to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Brazilian institutions. The conspiracy also encourages minorities – mainly indigenous and quilombola (residents of settlements founded by people of African origin who escaped slavery) – to act with the support of public institutions at the federal, state and municipal levels. The result of this movement, they say in the presentation, restricts "the government's freedom of action".

Those are, according to a slide, "the new hopes for the Homeland: Brazil above everything!"

So it is unsurprising that Bolsonaro's response to the fires comes in the form of an attack on NGOs. On Wednesday, August 21, Bolsonaro said he believed non-governmental organizations could be behind the fires as a tactic "to draw attention against me, against the government of Brazil.".

Bolsonaro did not cite names of NGOs and, when asked if he has evidence to support the allegations, he said there were no written records of the suspicions. According to the president, NGOs may be retaliating against his government's budget cuts. His government cut 40 percent of international transfers to NGOs, he added.

Part of the government's strategy of circumventing this globalist campaign is to depreciate the relevance and voices of minorities that live in the region, transforming them into enemies. One of the tactics cited in the document is to redefine the paradigms of indigenism, quilombolism and environmentalism through the lenses of liberalism and conservatism, based on realist theories. Those are, according to a slide, "the new hopes for the Homeland: Brazil above everything!"

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democr ... ainforest/
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Aug 22, 2019 5:44 pm

Why is the Amazon burning? Why is distant Sao Paulo experiencing daytime darkness from the smoke? Because on his first day as president, Bolsonaro announced that his government intended to nullify all indigenous group rights and open all Amazon land to privatization and exploitation. This has set off a wave of killings and arsons by land speculators to drive indigenous peoples off their lands. This needs to be emphasized. Bolsonaro is an avowed supporter of the old military dictatorship and its practice of torture, a mobster family chief closely associated with a paramilitary death squad, a fascist-talking religious fanatic and corporate servant installed thanks to the parliamentary coup that pushed out Dilma and the imprisonment of Lula on fabricated charges. The justice minister Moro, formerly the judge in the "car wash" case against Lula and others, has been exposed for illegally orchestrating the verdicts. Right now the U.S. corporate media are mocking Bolsonaro for his statement that the fires are being set by environmental NGOs looking to raise money. But why do they not report that arsons are, in fact, the primary cause of the fires? Bolsonaro's statement is not a "conspiracy theory" that he actually believes. It is an intentional distraction from the true authorship of this catastrophe by his government and its corporate sponsors.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby 8bitagent » Fri Aug 23, 2019 4:35 am

JackRiddler » Thu Aug 22, 2019 4:44 pm wrote:Why is the Amazon burning? Why is distant Sao Paulo experiencing daytime darkness from the smoke? Because on his first day as president, Bolsonaro announced that his government intended to nullify all indigenous group rights and open all Amazon land to privatization and exploitation. This has set off a wave of killings and arsons by land speculators to drive indigenous peoples off their lands. This needs to be emphasized. Bolsonaro is an avowed supporter of the old military dictatorship and its practice of torture, a mobster family chief closely associated with a paramilitary death squad, a fascist-talking religious fanatic and corporate servant installed thanks to the parliamentary coup that pushed out Dilma and the imprisonment of Lula on fabricated charges. The justice minister Moro, formerly the judge in the "car wash" case against Lula and others, has been exposed for illegally orchestrating the verdicts. Right now the U.S. corporate media are mocking Bolsonaro for his statement that the fires are being set by environmental NGOs looking to raise money. But why do they not report that arsons are, in fact, the primary cause of the fires? Bolsonaro's statement is not a "conspiracy theory" that he actually believes. It is an intentional distraction from the true authorship of this catastrophe by his government and its corporate sponsors.


100% Jack. Ball-sacknaro said he was going to do exactly this. Both his critics and boosters said he was going to profit after the Amazon forests. Now there's some Reichstag shit going on, it only points in one direction.

Not surprisingly Balsanaro is using tried and trueconspiracy blame games, saying it's "Environmentalists" doing this. but it does feel like some sort of endgame. As a kid in the 1980's, the "Amazon rainforest" was always a source of intellectual debate, even the source of early 1990's kid's animated theatrical cartoons like Ferngully. Now it's burning to the ground like Notre Dame, and Balsanaro is claiming all sorts of indifference.
Image

As Amazon burns, Brazil's Bolsonaro tells rest of world not to interfere
The threat to what some call "the lungs of the planet" has ignited a bitter dispute about who is to blame.


Amid growing international criticism over the wildfires raging through the Amazon, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday admitted farmers could be illegally setting the rainforest ablaze but told foreign powers not to interfere.

The threat to what some call "the lungs of the planet" has ignited a bitter dispute about who is to blame.

Bolsonaro traded Twitter jabs on Thursday with France's president over the fires.

French President Emmanuel Macron called the wildfires an international crisis and said the leaders of the Group of 7 nations should hold urgent discussions about them at their summit in France this weekend.

"Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produces 20% of our planet's oxygen — is on fire," Macron tweeted.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/amaz ... e-n1045666

Who could imagine that a guy who literally loves and embodies the "throw commies from a helicopter Augusto Pinochet" memes and ran on a platform for destroying Brazil's rainforests....would...oversea the destruction of the rainforst?
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
User avatar
8bitagent
 
Posts: 12243
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Aug 23, 2019 3:12 pm

Image
User avatar
Iamwhomiam
 
Posts: 6572
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2007 2:47 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Aug 23, 2019 5:42 pm

Translated from Spanish by Google
DECLARATORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCY

OPEN LETTER OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

DECLARATORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND HUMANITARIAN EMERGENCY

BEFORE THE EVIDENT DISABILITY AND LACK OF WILL OF THE STATES OF BOLIVIA AND BRAZIL TO PROTECT THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND BIODIVERSITY BEFORE FOREST FIRE IN THE BOLIVIAN CHIQUITANIA IN SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA AND THE STATES OF MREATO, GROSSATO SOUTH GROSSO IN BRAZIL

QUITO, AUGUST 22, 2019


The voice of Indigenous Peoples before a Genocide in the eyes of the World!

CONSIDERING

That: as a result of the historical process of struggle of Indigenous Peoples worldwide and under the mandate of our own laws and the recognition of our recognized rights in different international instruments such as: ILO Convention 169, the Universal Declaration of United Nations Human Rights, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the OAS, the Amazon Cooperation Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention against Change Climate and the Convention on Biological Diversity, among others.

And also that at the international level there is a common interest in continuing to advance in the consolidation of an alternative development model that emphasizes the protection of biodiversity, climate stability and the conditions to guarantee life for future generations in which they are fundamental contributions of traditional and spiritual knowledge systems to the life of indigenous peoples;

That for years, Indigenous Peoples and Organizations have warned of the need to change priorities in the “Sustainable Development Goals” to focus all social, cultural, political and economic efforts on the protection of life and the territory of the entire humanity, that in a relationship harmony and balance can guarantee global climate stability.

Despite our struggles, progress is few, while the prevailing economic model continues to use the planet as a resource bank, mainly indigenous territories, which exacerbates the risk of the planet becoming uninhabitable, and where a physical and cultural Genocide is clearly evidenced in the light of the eyes of the world.

That even when International Declarations and Agreements have been formulated, governments such as those of Brazil and Bolivia demonstrate their lack of interest, negligence, racism and structural discrimination against the life and integrity of Indigenous Peoples, and only seek to favor interests of large economic groups that intend to convert the Amazon into lots for agricultural megaprojects, miners, dams and energy projects; which is why they criminalize and point to our indigenous authorities and organizations.

These facts, and the behaviors of the Governments of Evo Morales and Jair Bolsonaro for their action and omission have evicted all environmental and social strategies to strengthen the environmental governance of the Amazon, going against the exercise of government that from ancestral knowledge and traditional indigenous people have preserved it for millennia and that also contradicted the objectives set out in the international climate agenda, flagrantly the lack of capacities of these governments and their lack of political will cause the serious environmental tragedy that for weeks and unprecedented already shows having irreparable environmental repercussions for humanity.

That the action of all the social, public and private actors in unity is necessary to intervene and put a stop to this threat against life in all its forms, which already have at imminent risk of extinction more than 506 Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon basin and the thousands of species of flora and fauna that inhabit them because of the 73,843 sources of fire that have incinerated more than 700,000 hectares of forest after almost 18 days of neglect and prevention; and that according to preliminary data there are and more than 100,000 indigenous people affected.

WE DECLARE

 Indigenous Peoples from our Law of Origin, Major Law and Natural Law hold the Governments of Jair Bolsonaro and Evo Morales responsible for the disappearance and physical, environmental and cultural Genocide that is currently presented in the Amazon, and that for their action and omission becomes increasingly serious and they are irreparable losses for humanity. Therefore, we sanction, condemn and declare these two NON-FREE Governments for the Amazon Basin.

 That the responsibility of these leaders is aggravated with their signaling to all indigenous and social organizations, by taking responsibility for the damages caused by their economic policies that from governments such as those of Bolivia and Brazil favor the indiscriminate extraction of all biodiversity and Ignorance of all the human rights of Indigenous Peoples recognized by international conventions.

 That before this the social, cultural, political and economic sanction to these governments and the empowerment of civil society is necessary for the sovereign exercise of protection of life in all its integrity and to give a twist to the formulation of the policies that They define the concept of development for the Amazon.

 That we therefore call on all mankind to act immediately against the actions that criminally entrusted to the different causes of this unprecedented tragedy, at a time when climate stability is at risk.

We support the coherent position of the organic CIDOB of Bolivia, by rejecting and whipping the Bolivian government for perpetrating this environmental and social disaster in order to promote an economic agenda contrary to reason and disrespectful of indigenous fundamental rights.

We support the position of COIAB of Brazil to continue on the hard path of struggle against the visions and actions, political, economic, administrative and procedural of the Brazilian Government that permanently violate indigenous fundamental rights and humanity itself.

We request the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the United Nations to rule on the need for immediate action by the international community to address this emergency and to formulate measures International in nature to prevent them in the future.

We request the activation of international cooperation and other allies for solidarity and humanitarian purposes so that the basic needs of the peoples affected by this scourge can be met and the restoration measures of the affected biodiversity can be initiated

We recognize the heroic work of the indigenous peoples and all those civil society allies that are facing the fire doing what is humanly possible to stop the conflagrations.

We call and summon the unity and solidarity of all the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala and the World to accompany, denounce and end the genocide and ecocide that the peoples are suffering from the ancient ancestral territories of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon Basin.

The equilibrium of Mother Earth depends on the Amazon Basin, allowing its devastation implied the extermination of Humanity.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND ORGANIZATIONS OF THE AMAZON BASIN

https://comisionddhhpi.com/2019/08/22/d ... manitaria/


The Amazon Forest Fires Are a Form of 'Genocide'
Indigenous women have been protesting Jair Bolsonaro's presidency.
Photo: AP

Yessenia Funes
Today 12:30pmFiled to: GUARDIANS OF THE FOREST

When Richard Pearshouse visited indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon in April to investigate illegal deforestation, he heard countless horrors of land grabbers directly threatening and intimidating people. One story, however, really stuck with the head of environment and crisis with Amnesty International: a 22-year-old mother who finally lulled her children to sleep despite the sound of nearby gunfire only to find herself suffering the same insomniac fate. She was so scared, she couldn’t sleep.

For the Amazon’s indigenous peoples, the destruction of their home is nothing new. It’s an unfortunate reality they’ve had to deal with since the Portuguese pillaged their lands in the 16th century. Now, under far-right racist maniac President Jair Bolsonaro, this devastation is building to a new fever pitch as the ongoing fires in the Amazon Rainforest show. And this inferno is almost certain to impact Brazil’s indigenous peoples in ways the rest of us can only imagine. Their home—literally—is on fire.

A number of groups representing the Amazonian indigenous peoples declared an environmental and humanitarian emergency on Thursday in an open letter. They are calling on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the United Nations to take action as the violent fires threaten their people with what the letter calls “extinction.” They blame both Bolsonaro and Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose portion of the Amazon is also ablaze. Morales, at least, has authorized firefighters and firefighting aircraft to stop the fires, but the groups are denouncing the president for his failure to protect the indigenous people of Bolivia. Bolsnaro said on Friday he may mobilize the army to fight the fires.

These fires aren’t a surprise timing-wise. Every year around this time, the forest fires grow in intensity and severity as farmers prepare for the next harvest season. The dry season, or fire season, runs from August to February though fires can burn at any time in the region. Since January, the number of forest fires in Brazil has already increased by 84 percent compared to the same time frame last year.

“This is a bit scary because we are just in the beginning of the season,” Ane Alencar, the science director of Amazon Environmental Research Institute, who has been analyzing satellite imagery of the fires, told Earther.

“The deforestation that we’ve been able to document on demarcated indigenous lands has already started,” Pearshouse told Earther. “In the wet season, they were already intruding and cutting down forests in indigenous lands.”

While on-the-ground groups and individuals haven’t been able to confirm to Earther whether these ongoing flames have reached indigenous lands and villages, they have no doubt the raging fires—which have been burning for weeks as cattle ranchers illegally clear room for pastures to eventually sell the land to soy farmers—are disproportionately impacting the indigenous peoples who depend on the rainforest to survive.

Amnesty International wrote up its findings in an investigation earlier this year. The group met with 23 indigenous people from three territories—the Karipuna and Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in Rondônia state and the Arara in Pará state—who told the organization that their members had received death threats and that the nearby illegal logging felt “different” this year, as Pearshouse put it. Land-grabbers have been chainsawing trees closer to villages than in years past, tribal members said. The illegal activity typically reserved for the cover of night was taking place in daylight. What would’ve been two dozen people at most coming into indigenous lands in years past has exploded into hundreds, according to Amnesty International.

“What we are seeing in the burning season is the intensification of this,” Pearshouse said.

In at least one territory Amnesty International visited—the Karipuna, which sits in the northwestern portion of Brazil—the number of fires has increased by nearly fourfold since January this year compared to last year, according to the organization’s analysis of NASA data. Only 25 fires were set between January 1, 2018, to August 21, 2018. This year, there have already been 101. Pearshouse expects a similar pattern is happening across Brazilian indigenous territories.

Bolsonaro ran his presidential campaign promising to privatize the magnificent rainforest and hand it over to the agriculture and mining sectors. He’s been clear since the beginning that the needs of his indigenous constituents are the least of his priorities. Just days after taking office in January, Bolsonaro began to dismantle formal federal protections for indigenous communities, including eliminating FUNAI, Brazil’s bureau of indigenous affairs.

The consequences of all the president’s words and actions have reached a boiling point in recent weeks. Farmers coordinated a formal “Fire Day” last week to set the forest on fire in tandem throughout the southwestern state of Pará, home to the Arara that Amnesty International visited. Now, the forest has become a furnace.

The current blazes have formed what Janet Chernela, a professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, dubbed a “ring of fire” around indigenous territories, including the lands of the Kayapó and some 16 tribes that live in the Xingu Indigenous Park. This pattern isn’t unique to these recent fires. Farmers usually burn the fires this way, Chernela, who has worked with indigenous peoples in the basin, told Earther. Rather, the arsonists avoid these areas because of the indigenous people.

“All of those groups are keeping deforestation at bay by their very presence,” Chernela told Earther. “But they can only do so much. They need government support, and that government support is lacking.”

Many more fires are burning than usual this year. While fewer are burning in the lands governed by these tribes than the surrounding areas, some fires are still there—and the larger ones aren’t that far from their territories, as data from the NASA Fire Map shows. All that heat and smoke? It can’t be good for their health, and it certainly isn’t helping the greater ecosystem.

The yellow outlined area shows where the Xingu Indigenous Park sits, as well as the lands of the Kayapó. There were fewer fires (indicated by red dots) burning there as of late August.
The yellow outlined area shows where the Xingu Indigenous Park sits, as well as the lands of the Kayapó. There were fewer fires (indicated by red dots) burning there as of late August.
Image: NASA Fire Map
“Their very land is under threat. The air is polluted by big fire,” Chernela said. “They must have rainforest for game. They must have rivers for fish. And they must have forestland to grow [food] in small plots.”

This dependence on the forest is exactly why the fires can be so detrimental to the well-being of indigenous peoples. These communities don’t have supermarkets or pharmacies to go to. They have the Amazon. The forest serves as all that and more. It’s where they hunt, where they fish, where they gather materials to build their homes.

That’s why these tribes have learned to live in harmony with the ecosystem. If they take too much, the land runs out of gifts to give. Unfortunately, when the forest is on fire, the flames can engulf many of these resources too, leaving little behind for the people who need it—whether it’s wildlife to hunt or the small farms they’ve cultivated as part of the forest. Even lands untouched by the fire are impacted because the system is all connected. As the forest burns, more land dries out, worsening drought throughout the area. Plus, the loss of forest wrecks the whole rainforest system. Normally trees release water into the atmosphere, which releases it as rain. Without forest, clouds and rainfall patterns would shift, leading to further disruptions. Even for in a natural system as extensive as the Amazon, recovery after an event like this will be tough.

“Any time you have a mass destruction of an area, you really change the functioning in an ecosystem and the way that all biodiversity depends on that ecosystem,” Lesley de Souza, a conservation biologist at the Field Museum in Chicago who has worked with Amazonian tribes for her research, told Earther. “When you’re living in that environment, you’re completely dependent on those resources, as well. You become a part of the system.”

“This tragedy is not only a crisis for indigenous people but for all of us.”
De Souza has walked through the Amazon after a fire. She saw the bodies of animals who couldn’t escape, the ones that got left behind. There were snakes and lizards, as well as rodents too small to outrun the monstrous flames.

“It’s pretty devastating to walk through,” de Souza said. “It’s a war zone. You see the destruction of the land, the forest, but then all the things that lived there and are dependent on that.”

And that destruction impacts the guardians of the forest themselves. The loss of this land affects indigenous groups’ ability to survive. And they need to survive—not only because it’s their human right to a safe and prosperous life but because the forest depends on them.

Several studies and reports have shown that deforestation decreases in the lands formally held by indigenous groups. Part of that is cultural; many indigenous groups view plants and animals as people, Raffaella Fryer-Moreira, an anthropologist at University College London, explained to Earther. There’s no distinction between environmental rights and human rights for many of these communities.

“The forest fires we are witnessing today will be understood by many communities not only as an ecocide but as a genocide,” Fryer-Moreira said in an email.

Indigenous communities help protect the land and guard it against miners and loggers looking to destroy it even as the threat from private interests is growing more and more dangerous. More individuals die a year fighting to protect their environment than some soldiers die annually fighting wars, and Brazil has seen an outsized number of environmental defenders die protecting their communities and the forests they rely on.

The fires are just the latest manifestation of this battle between capitalist obsessions with growth versus nature and the very existence of indigenous groups and cultures. And the fate of the planet is in balance, too. The Amazon is one of the world’s largest carbon sinks.

“While it is clear that indigenous communities are disproportionately affected by this damage—in terms of immediacy and scale of impact, as well as an absence of alternative resources—we cannot ignore the fact that our species as a whole depends on the global environment,” said Fryer-Moreira. “This tragedy is not only a crisis for indigenous people but for all of us.”

https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-amazon- ... 1837507793
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 04, 2019 6:09 pm

Related:
Bolsonaro Family Death Squad Killed Marielle Franco?!
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... 52&t=41560

See the story about Lula refusing to leave prison, below. This is incredible.

As an experiment, try searching Brazil on news.google.com and see what you get there. Like different universes.

And don't let anyone tell you the corporate media respond purely on ratings and spectacle. Often they do. But often they know exactly where they prefer not to go, no matter how damn dramatic the narrative is. And the algorithm does the rest of the work. (You can get more directly on the story by searching Brazil Lula).

Also: New pic surfaces of Bolsonaro chumming with another accused Marielle Franco assassin.
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/10/4/ ... cos_murder

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/04/fea ... a-refuses/

theintercept.com
Fearful of Lula’s Exoneration, His Once-Fanatical Prosecutors Request His Release From Prison. But Lula Refuses.

Glenn Greenwald
glenn.greenwald@​theintercept.com@ggreenwald

The same Brazilian prosecutors who for years exhibited a single-minded fixation on jailing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are now seeking his release from prison, requesting that a court allow him to serve the remainder of his 11-year sentence for corruption at home. But Lula — who believes the request is motivated by fear that prosecutorial and judicial improprieties in his case, which were revealed by The Intercept, will lead to the nullification of his conviction — is opposing these efforts, insisting that he will not leave prison until he receives full exoneration.

In seeking his release, Lula’s prosecutors are almost certainly not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Quite the contrary: Those prosecutors have often displayed a near-pathological hatred for the two-term former president. Last month, The Intercept, jointly with its reporting partner UOL, published previously secret Telegram messages in which the Operation Car Wash prosecutors responsible for prosecuting Lula cruelly mocked the tragic death of his 7-year-old grandson from meningitis earlier this year, as well as the 2017 death of his wife of 43 years from a stroke at the age of 66. One of the prosecutors who participated publicly apologized, but none of the others have.

Far more likely is that the prosecutors are motivated by desperation to salvage their legacy after a series of defeats suffered by their once-untouchable, widely revered Car Wash investigation, ever since The Intercept, on June 9, began publishing reports based on a massive archive of secret chats between the prosecutors and Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw most of the convictions, including Lula’s, and who now serves as President Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and Public Security.

The prosecutors’ cynical gambit, it appears, is that the country’s Supreme Court — which two weeks ago nullified one of Moro’s anti-corruption convictions for the first time on the ground that he violated core rights of defendants — will feel less pressure to nullify Moro’s guilty verdict in Lula’s case if the ex-president is comfortably at home in São Paulo (albeit under house arrest) rather than lingering in a Curitiba prison.

But this strategy ran into a massive roadblock when Lula demanded that he not be released from prison unless and until he is fully exonerated. He wants to ensure that nobody — least of all Supreme Court judges who will rule on his appeal — feel relieved of their obligation to decide correctly by telling themselves that there is no need to take such a drastic step as nullifying Lula’s conviction given that he is no longer in jail but at home.

“I won’t trade my dignity for my freedom,” the former president proclaimed in a hand-written letter “to the Brazilian People,” explaining why he would resist efforts to swap his home for his cage as his prison. “I’ve already proven that the accusations against me are false. It is [the Car Wash prosecutors and Sergio Moro], not me, who are now prisoners of the lies they told Brazil and the world.”

In response, Deltan Dallagnol, the task force’s nominal chief and a prime subject of The Intercept’s reporting, insisted that Lula has no say in that matter: that if he is ordered to leave prison, he has no power to resist or reject the terms. So weakened is the Car Wash prosecution that, in a surreal spectacle, the prosecutors who worked for years and broke numerous rules to ensure Lula’s imprisonment are now demanding that he leave prison (albeit on their terms), while Lula categorically refuses to do so absent full acquittal of the crimes of which they accused him.

The Car Wash prosecutors have good reason to worry that Moro’s and their gross misconduct could lead to a nullification of Lula’s conviction. Beyond the alarming-to-them Supreme Court ruling from two weeks ago, numerous developments reflect a newfound hostility to their work.

On Friday morning, Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, reported that the Supreme Court is moving to judicially authenticate The Intercept’s archive so that its contents can be used in judicial proceedings to review the legitimacy of the anti-corruption probe’s convictions. Meanwhile, President of the Court Dias Toffoli announced this week that the court will shortly decide several looming questions about Car Wash that could, by themselves, lead to an annulment of Lula’s conviction.

Beyond the Supreme Court, Moro’s “anti-crime” package — which is principally designed to fulfill Bolsonaro’s dream of immunizing the police and military when they kill poor, innocent favela residents — has suffered multiple defeats in Congress. Bolsonaro’s choice for chief prosecutor, Augusto Aras, was confirmed by the Senate in September only after he publicly condemned the “excesses” of the Car Wash prosecutors, claiming that the prosecutors’ youth and lack of adult supervision made them believe they could cross all ethical lines.

Longtime defenders of the Car Wash probe — including one of the center-right leaders in the Senate of the 2016 impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, as well as the former chief prosecutor in his new book — have expressed remorse about the unethical components of the prosecutors’ actions as revealed by The Intercept’s last several months of reporting. One Supreme Court minister, Gilmar Mendes, this week read from The Intercept’s published Telegram chats to accuse Moro and the prosecutors of engaging in “organized criminality” and being “torturers” (for using the tactic of “preventative imprisonment” as a means of forcing defendants to accuse others as a condition for being released).

A new bill to punish prosecutors and judges for abusing their power — aimed at least in part at the abuses of Moro and the prosecutors — easily passed both houses of Congress last month, and most of Bolsonaro’s vetoes of parts of the bill were swiftly overridden. Numerous disciplinary proceedings are pending against the chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, and at least several harsh punishments are expected. A clear anti-Car-Wash momentum is now driving many of Brazil’s key institutions.

And the erosion of Moro and Car Wash’s credibility is now global: last month, 17 leading anti-corruption scholars from around the world – including one, Yale Law School’s Susan Rose-Ackerman, repeatedly heralded by Dallagnol as the “world leading anti-corruption expert – signed a letter that, citing the Intercept’s reporting, condemned Moro’s “illegal and immoral practices” and demanded Lula’s immediate release; on Thursday, the Paris City Council, citing the Intercept’s reporting, voted to make Lula an honorary citizen of Paris; last month, members of the Democratic House caucus wrote a letter to the Justice Department which, referencing the Intercept’s reporting, proclaimed that “these reports appear to confirm that the actions of both Judge Moro and the Lava Jato prosecutors have been motivated by a political agenda that seeks to undermine the electoral prospects of Brazil’s Worker’s Party.”

To be sure, there will be significant pressure applied to, and even not-so-subtle threats against, the Supreme Court to avoid anything that would exonerate Lula. Each time Lula’s case has made its way to the highest court, members of the military, both active and retired, have warned the Court in quite explicit terms that they were being watched, and expected the Court to keep Lula where he was. Shortly prior to his father’s successful election victory, Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo (who the President is currently attempting to nominate as his Ambassador to the U.S.) warned that any adverse Supreme Court decisions could be addressed by “sending a solider and a corporal” to the doors of the court.

Notwithstanding those pressures and threats, Moro and the legitimacy of the Car Wash probe are far weaker and more vulnerable than they were four months ago. The prosecutors clearly fear that the crowning jewel of their work — Lula’s head on a stake — is in jeopardy. Much of their legitimacy has already been eroded, but any reversal of what they regard as their most cherished accomplishment would be a fatal blow.

Trying to get Lula out of his jail cell and into a more palatable prison — his home — is a desperate attempt to avert that catastrophe. And Lula knows it, which is why — remarkably — he is so insistent on remaining in prison until he receives the full acquittal he believes he is due and which, with the truth about Moro and the prosecutors’ actions finally known, he believes is imminent.

As more revelations continue to be published by the Intercept and its reporting partners about the misconduct of Moro and the prosecutors, the likelihood of a full reckoning for the once-revered prosecutors and the Judge who led them increases. Lula’s calculation that he should remain in prison until he is fully cleared may prove to be erroneous, but there is certainly a solid basis in fact for his conclusion.


.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/10/4/ ... cos_murder

Image

In Brazil, a newly surfaced photo shows far-right President Jair Bolsonaro smiling and posing with a man who’s been arrested in connection with the murder of human rights activist and Rio City Councilmember Marielle Franco. Josinaldo Lucas Freitas was arrested Thursday and charged with disposing of the guns used in the March 2018 assassination. It’s the second known photograph of Bolsonaro taken with a suspect in Franco’s murder. Another photo circulated in the Brazilian press shows Bolsonaro in a friendly embrace with a former police officer who’s been charged with driving the car used in the shooting. Marielle Franco, who was black and a vocal member of the LGBT community, was a longtime critic of Brazil’s police, who have been linked to thousands of killings and incidents of brutality in Rio’s impoverished favela neighborhoods.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby alloneword » Fri Nov 08, 2019 7:27 pm

Lula released. :)

While Lula’s release is sure to electrify Brazilian politics, it may not shift the balance of power enough to seriously disrupt the government’s economic reform agenda.

“Since the 2018 election, the left-wing opposition in Congress does not have enough votes to block the agenda,” said Leonardo Barreto, a partner at the Capital Politico consultancy.

“And don’t forget, Lula is free to walk but he has not been acquitted so he cannot be a candidate,” added Barreto. “He is not an alternative for winning political power.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-braz ... SKBN1XI1YC
User avatar
alloneword
 
Posts: 902
Joined: Mon Jan 22, 2007 9:19 am
Location: UK
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby liminalOyster » Fri Nov 08, 2019 8:34 pm

It's a good day.
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby Jerky » Fri Nov 08, 2019 11:07 pm

Let's hope it's the first of many to come for Brazil, liminalOyster.

God only knows they could use it.

J
User avatar
Jerky
 
Posts: 2240
Joined: Fri Apr 22, 2005 6:28 pm
Location: Toronto, ON
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby cptmarginal » Sat Nov 09, 2019 10:48 pm

Soundtrack for this weekend:



End credits of a fantastic documentary.



It is funny that films like this or "News from a Personal War" (from 1999) are not really all that dated, despite the current insane situation. Things were already so bad. And for all the laudable portrayal of corruption in the Tropa de Elite series of action films, they still show the BOPE as some kind of heroes. What was that I remember from several years back, about them renting out their much-vaunted APCs to gangsters?
cptmarginal
 
Posts: 2741
Joined: Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:32 pm
Location: Gordita Beach
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Jan 22, 2020 9:59 pm

Glenn Greenwald on Brazil’s Charges Against Him
ISAAC CHOTINER JANUARY 22, 2020

On Tuesday, Brazilian prosecutors charged the journalist Glenn Greenwald with “cybercrimes” as part of what the government claims was his role in a “criminal organization.” They allege that Greenwald—who reported on wrongdoing in Brazil’s judicial establishment last year for the Intercept, the Web site he co-founded—participated in the hacking of cell phones, the content of which was later used in his stories. But the reporting itself is the reason much of the Brazilian government is furious with Greenwald. He has repeatedly antagonized the country’s new far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro, who rode into office amid a sprawling corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash, which brought down two former Presidents. Sérgio Moro, who led the operation, was later made Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and became the subject of much of the Intercept’s reporting. A number of leaders across the Brazilian political spectrum have criticized the charges against Greenwald, which were met with outrage by civil-liberties organizations around the world.

Greenwald, who is best known for covering Edward Snowden’s disclosures, lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband, David Miranda, a Brazilian congressman, and their children. We spoke by phone on Tuesday, after the charges were announced. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his life in Brazil since Bolsonaro’s election, the reasons the President has gone after him, and his different approaches to the rise of the far right in Brazil and the United States.

The case against you relies in part on the claim that you helped in “facilitating the commission of a crime.” Did you do anything to encourage the hacking of cell phones or other devices?

No. In fact, when the source first talked to me, he had already obtained all the material that he ended up providing us, making it logically impossible for me to have in any way participated in that act. And the federal police, just a few months ago, concluded that not only was there no evidence that I committed any crimes but much to the contrary, I conducted myself, in their words, with “extreme levels of professionalism and caution,” to make sure that I didn’t get ensnared in any criminal activity.

If that’s the case, how do you understand what has happened in the last couple of months, from the federal police determining that to the charges today?

I think that what a lot of people are not fully understanding about Brazil is that there are a lot of people in the government, beginning with the President himself, who explicitly want a resurrection of the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985. They are not joking about it. They are genuine authoritarians who don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in basic freedoms, and don’t believe in a free press. And all they know is brute force. They want a return to that military regime. The fact that the federal police said there was no evidence I committed a crime, and the fact that the Supreme Court barred them from investigating me, because the Court said it was an infringement on a free press for them to do so, doesn’t matter to them. They just concocted a theory to try and use brute force to criminalize what I was doing, probably to intimidate other journalists as much as to attack me and punish me for the reporting.

Do the federal prosecutors who charged you today answer more to the President than other branches of law enforcement?

I would say that the best way to understand who they are is that they are kind of equivalent to the Justice Department, and the federal police is equivalent to the F.B.I. It would be like if [the former F.B.I. director] Jim Comey stood in front of the cameras and said we were closing our investigation, there is no evidence of criminal activity, and then the Justice Department months later nonetheless indicted. So yes, they are part of the executive branch but are a little more independent, just like the Justice Department is. But the big difference is that unlike the Justice Department, which can just single-handedly indict you, these prosecutors can only issue charges that then have to be approved by a judge in order for you to actually become a criminal defendant. \

Is there anything about your reporting on Operation Car Wash that you regret or would have done differently?

Of course, with individual stories, there are things you wish you had done differently. There was one time in particular when we had promised a story, and we were anxious about it, and I published an excerpt, on Twitter, as a teaser, that hadn’t yet been fact-checked, and there was an error in there, and they used that against us to claim we were altering the chat. But in terms of how I dealt with my source, or the legal or criminal issues, I was incredibly meticulous, because not only did I go through this with the Snowden story, I obviously knew they were going to want to prosecute me. So before I did anything, I sat down with our huge team of lawyers and they said this is what you can do, this is what you can’t tdo. And I was incredibly careful to never cross that line.

Bolsonaro has singled you out several times. What might his dislike be about, beyond a number of possibilities, ranging from your reporting to the fact you are gay?

I actually wrote about Bolsonaro all the way back in 2014, in an article he hated, before anyone contemplated that he might be President. I was just trying to explain to people how someone this extreme was even a member of Congress. The title was, “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in the Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.” And then, in 2017, while he was setting up his Presidential run, I called him a fascist on Twitter, and he responded with an extremely crude and anti-gay epithet about anal sex that made news. And then, when my husband entered Congress as a left-wing member, in early 2019, replacing another L.G.B.T. congressman, who fled the country in fear of his life, largely due to Bolsonaro, David and he had a back-and-forth that went viral in Brazil. So he already hated me before we started this reporting.

And once we did this reporting, he said my marriage was a fraud and that we adopted Brazilian children as a fraud to avoid deportation. And then of course he has threatened I would be in prison over the reporting. So we have a long and contentious history.

What’s the state of independence of the Supreme Court currently?

It’s really interesting, because for a long time the Supreme Court was pretty much captive to the extreme popularity of Moro and Operation Car Wash. And, even when Moro did things that all legal experts agreed were highly dubious, it was very rare that they would impose limits on what he was doing, because everyone was afraid of Moro, because he was basically the national hero. His taking a position with the Bolsonaro government and our reporting have seriously diminished his stature. And as a result the Supreme Court is emboldened now, and they have issued a series of rulings against Bolsonaro, the government, and Moro and freed [former President] Lula, who was the crown jewel of Operation Car Wash. And so there is a lot of animosity. The Supreme Court has become much more independent, as evidenced by the fact that they barred Moro and these agencies from investigating me in retaliation for the reporting.

I should just add that, in the last few hours, there has been reporting from conservative journalists at large newspapers that several members of the Supreme Court have told them that they will not accept the charges against me and reject it if and when it gets to the Supreme Court.

Have your daily life or experiences changed much since Bolsonaro’s election? Do you feel any sense of fear?

Neither my husband, nor I, nor our children have left our house in the last year without armed security, armored vehicles, teams of security. We get death threats all the time. Our private lives have been dug through in the most invasive ways. Every one of our friends has been offered money to either reveal things about our private lives or make up lies about our private lives. There is a hugely powerful fake-news machine that supports the Bolsonaro movement that has churned out lies about our family and about our children and about our marriage. Obviously, the threats of imprisonment. It has been every single kind of threat imaginable, and it really goes back to 2018, when one of our best friends, Marielle Franco, the black L.G.B.T. city councilwoman, was savagely assassinated in a crime that the Bolsonaro family has subsequently become linked to. [Last March, two police officers were charged in the murder of Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes. Bolsonaro has denounced reporting that he has personal connections to the officers.] So there has been political violence and intimidation in the air for a long time, and we have become the main target of a lot of it.

Has any aspect of the government been paying for your security, or are you doing it independently?

There are some really good politicians who are opposed to the Bolsonaro government, including the center-right president of the Senate and center-right Speaker of the House. And the Speaker of the House vehemently denounced the charges today, even though he is conservative. And he approved twenty-four-hour around-the-clock armored security that most Congress members don’t have. Only a few who face particularly serious threats of violence do. And then my security is furnished by the Intercept, which has been incredibly supportive of the work all of us have been doing here.

You have been extremely critical of Bolsonaro and also supportive of some of the politicians from the Workers’ Party, the main left or center-left party in Brazil. In contrast, you have angered a lot of liberals in America for going on Tucker Carlson’s show and becoming something of an anti-anti-Trump voice. Is there a discrepancy in the way you have responded to the rise of the far right in each country, even if Trump and Bolsonaro are not exactly equivalent?

Yeah, but I think the differences are important. As I said, it is a genuine, realistic objective of the Bolsonaro movement to usher in a military regime that ruled the country until quite recently. You compare that to Donald Trump, who doesn’t really have that kind of a movement that is trying to abolish U.S. democracy, and, even if they wanted to, U.S. institutions are way stronger than Brazilian institutions are, making it much more likely that Brazil could easily slip back into a dictatorship, largely due to the fragility and age of institutions. Lots of the population actually lived in the dictatorship, and they tend to romanticize and idealize it as a superior form of government. So I think the threats are very different.

But I also think it’s ironic, because, before this reporting began, the Intercept was not really beloved universally at all on the left, including by the Workers’ Party, because we have been critical of Lula and [former President] Dilma Rousseff and the Workers’ Party for being neoliberal and abandoning the principles the Party was founded to defend and support. I don’t see myself as an anti-anti-Trump voice. I am an independent journalist. I go on right-wing news shows in Brazil, including the worst one, in which I was assaulted a few months ago by a pro-Bolsonaro journalist, who called on a judge to investigate whether David and I were properly caring for our two adopted sons. And I went to confront him about these comments suggesting our children should be taken away from us, and he physically assaulted me. My behavior in Brazil and the U.S. is very consistent journalistically.

Right, but it seems like when you are on Tucker Carlson’s show it is more friendly. You talk about the importance of norms, and the justice system in Brazil, and the fact that the government “does not believe in basic press freedoms,” as the Intercept said in a statement. You talk passionately about Brazilian democracy. With America, you often talk about people who speak about these things as too establishment.

I think people have to be very careful about casually positing similarities between two very large, complex, complicated countries with extremely different political traditions, histories, cultures, and values, when, in reality, they are very, very different. Brazil is way more vulnerable. The institutions in the U.S. are much more vibrant and energetic and robust because they have been developed over two centuries rather than decades. I personally think that U.S. democracy has never been stronger than under Trump, because so many institutions that have been dormant under George W. Bush and Obama—the media, the Congress, the courts—are way more adversarial and oppositional. Whereas, I think Brazilian democracy has never been in greater peril. I think it is very tempting to posit crass and inaccurate comparisons between the two countries when the situations are radically different.

Does your experience in Brazil make you worry about things here in different ways? You mentioned the Department of Justice, the independence of which has been challenged in certain ways. Does it give you different long-term fears about the United States?

I do have a long-term fear about the United States, and I do have a short- and mid-term fear about the United States. I just don’t attribute those fears principally to Trump. I think he is making them worse and exacerbates those dangers, but I started writing about politics in 2005 because of my deep concerns about civil liberties and constitutional freedoms being eroded by the Bush-Cheney Administration, which continued under Obama and has gotten worse under Trump. It isn’t that I don’t believe basic core freedoms are imperilled in the U.S. I just see the trajectory and the causes of that differently.

What is your biggest fear about Brazil going forward?

Sometimes it is hard to convey to Western observers just how blunt and direct of a threat is being posed by the current government of Brazil to basic democratic freedoms. Bolsonaro’s son, in the past couple of months, has threatened to revive the worst dictatorship through decree and do things like shut down media outlets. I think my case is reflective of the sentiment that they just want to put journalists in prison. Brazil is an incredibly important country, environmentally and geo-strategically, and the President and the movement that supports him are fanatical in a way that is hard to overstate. And Brazil is the most influential country by far in Latin America, and what happens politically has immense ramifications not just for the hemisphere but for the world.

https://outline.com/WJq4K7
"It's not rocket surgery." - Elvis
User avatar
liminalOyster
 
Posts: 1873
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 10:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Fascism Crisis in Brazil, 2018-?

Postby JackRiddler » Sat May 23, 2020 6:54 pm

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Elihu and 58 guests