Geography Archives: Brazil

Brazil’s extreme Bolsonaro government backed an attack on Venezuela in a plot to overthrow its elected president. The shocking terror operation has received no coverage in mainstream U.S. media.

This dossier is dedicated to offering an assessment of the moment we find ourselves in today. Part 1 provides a quick overview of planetary affairs; and Part 2 there are more detailed reports from our offices on their respective regions: South Africa, India, as well as the Caribbean and Latin America.

Fears and anxieties are used to create and diffuse fake news and manipulate the electorate. This is what happened at the last Brazilian election. A group of researchers studied the case in order to develop a method to deal with fake news.

Amazon researchers said the repaved road would trigger an explosion of deforestation in Amazonas, currently Brazil’s best preserved rainforest state precisely because it has few good roads.

The latest statistics released by the UN show that some 23,000 young Blacks die violently every year in Brazil, equivalent to one every 23 minutes.

Dark skies persist over coastal Brazil, where the country’s major population centres are to be found. This year, there have been 40,341 fires in the Amazon, the highest since 2010.

The far-right populist leader initially dismissed the hundreds of blazes and then questioned whether activist groups might have started the fires in an effort to damage the credibility of his government, which has called for looser environmental regulations in the world’s largest rainforest to spur development.

In Brazil recently, I gave an interview to Brasil de Fato, which was born in 2003 as the weekly magazine of the World Social Forum. It is now one of the most important windows into Brazil’s political world. The newsletter this week carries the text of most of the interview.

In an interview with Bob Fernandes, on TVE Bahia, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that the U.S. government “created the Lava Jato investigation to take our oil.”

Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has now been in prison since April 2018. More than four hundred Brazilian lawyers have signed a statement that expresses alarm at what they see as procedural irregularities in the case against him.

The destruction of the Amazon has serious consequences not only for Brazil, but for all of Latin America—and the world.

Brazilians took to social media following the news calling out Bolsonaro for “celebrating” the military dictatorship and its coup using the hashtag #DitaduraNuncaMais (No More Dictatorship).

Landless leader told Brasil de Fato that, despite threats, MST will not back off from social struggle.

“Reformed” captain Jair Bolsonaro already committed to the “market” the handover of all decisions in the economic area to large capital, under the hegemony of financial capital and foreign corporations (as personified in Paulo Guedes and his Chicago Boys, including Levy in the Brazilian Development Bank-BNDES).

Pedro Rocha de Oliveira considers the context of Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power in Brazil.

A former guerrilla and active member of the National Constituent Assembly talks with VA about the class struggle in the countryside and the looming menace of the ultra-right in Brazil.

The guardians of the status quo refused to learn the lesson of Trump’s election, and so it will be with Bolsonaro.

WhatsApp and fake news go hand-in-hand in both Brazil and India. And judging by the Facebook-owned messaging app’s effect on Brazil’s recent presidential election, India may be slated for some serious trouble next spring.

Many wonder how it is possible, following the democratic governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma Rousseff, that Brazilians have elected as President a shady federal deputy and die-hard defender of the military dictatorship that ruledthe country 1964-1985.

The catastrophe–expected and foreseeable–has happened. This immense country, with its 200 million inhabitants, is now in darkness. At best, it will take a decade or two to emerge.