Brazil Watch Thread
Posted: Fri May 28, 2021 5:34 pm
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... krxFbYEFbASat 29 May 2021
Tens of thousands of protesters have poured on to the streets of Brazil’s largest cities to demand the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro over his catastrophic response to a coronavirus pandemic that has claimed nearly half a million Brazilian lives.
The demonstrators turned out in more than 200 cities and towns for what is the biggest anti-Bolsonaro mobilisation since Brazil’s Covid outbreak began
“Today is a decisive milestone in the battle to defeat Bolsonaro’s genocidal administration,” said Silvia de Mendonça, 55, a civil rights activist from Brazil’s Unified Black Movement as she led a column of protesters through Rio’s dilapidated city centre.
Osvaldo Bazani da Silva, a 48-year-old hairdresser who lost his younger brother to Covid-19, said: “We can’t lose any more Brazilian lives. We need to hit the streets every single day until this government falls.”
(THE INTERCEPT) TWENTY-THREE HOUSE Democrats want to know more about the U.S. Justice Department’s secretive role in the now-disgraced Operation Car Wash corruption investigations in Brazil. In a letter on Monday, the group sent Attorney General Merrick Garland a list of questions and expressed concern about the U.S. role in prosecutions “perceived by many in Brazil as a threat to democracy and rule of law.”
“It is imperative that Congress receive full and accurate answers regarding our government’s actions — particularly when those actions may have long-lasting effects beyond our shores,” said Rep. Susan Wild, D-Penn., in a statement to The Intercept.
Car Wash targeted a sprawling network of political corruption centered around the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras. U.S. and Brazilian prosecutors’ aggressive tactics greatly weakened Brazil’s once-powerful civil construction and petroleum sectors and led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, clearing the way for far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.
“Whether or not our DOJ was responsible for the wrongful imprisonment of President Silva and paved the way for Bolsonaro, a COVID-denying, climate change-denying, far-right nationalist, to take the presidency must be investigated to the fullest extent and those responsible held accountable,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., one of the congressional letter’s signatories, told The Intercept.
Here is another article on those same protests: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... ops-500000(Mother Jones) On the day Brazil recorded its 500,000th death from COVID-19, thousands of Brazilians took to the streets to protest the government’s disastrous response to the pandemic. This is the second round of large nationwide demonstrations in 20 days calling for the impeachment of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and for better vaccine rollout. Protests organized by grassroots movements, political parties, and unions are scheduled to take place in at least 400 cities across the country.
In Rio de Janeiro, it was hard to spot a single protester not wearing a mask. The crowd gathered next to a monument remembering the anti-slavery resistance leader Zumbi dos Palmares and marched along one of the main avenues of Rio’s historic Downtown neighborhood all the way to the Candelaria Church, the site of a 1993 massacre of children by the police. Mothers and fathers with their children joined the chorus of “Bolsonaro genocide.” An estimated 70,000 people attended the protest in Rio on Saturday.
A group of vaccinated octogenarians who fought against the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s once again hit the streets in the name of democracy. Student leaders held black and white pictures with the faces of people who disappeared during those years of repression. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has appointed several military officers to key positions in his government, has repeatedly glorified the dictatorship and praised a notorious torturer from that era. Protesters also remembered Marielle Franco, a Black councilwoman and human rights activist from Rio de Janeiro whose murder in 2018 remains unsolved, and voiced support for former President Lula in a potential run for the presidency in 2022.
Brazil registered the highest number of deaths and lowest number of births in the first six months of the year since comparable data was first compiled in 2003, the national association of notary offices said on Thursday.
Brazil has the second highest COVID-19 death toll in the world behind the United States, with 323,117 of the 528,540 total number of deaths from the disease being registered in the January-June period this year, according to the Health Ministry.
A survey by the National Association of Registrars (Arpen-Brasil) showed that registry offices in Brazil recorded 956,534 deaths from January to June, 67% above the historical average and 37% up on the first half of last year.
(Al Jazeera) A majority of Brazilians say they support impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, according to a poll released on Saturday, as the country’s far-right president faces allegations of corruption and mounting pressure over his handling of the coronavirus crisis.
The Datafolha survey showed 54 percent of Brazilians support a proposed move by the Brazilian lower house to open impeachment proceedings against Bolsonaro, compared to 42 percent who oppose it.
(The Guardian) The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, may be forced to undergo emergency surgery after he was rushed to hospital in the early hours of Wednesday complaining of abdominal pain.
Bolsonaro, 66, was reportedly admitted to a military hospital in the capital Brasília at about 4am, after being struck down by an unremitting bout of the hiccups which has lasted for more than 10 days.
On Wednesday afternoon the presidency announced that Brazil’s leader was being transferred to São Paulo after Antônio Luiz Macedo, the surgeon who operated on Bolsonaro after he was stabbed shortly before his 2018 election, diagnosed him with a bowel obstruction.
In a statement, the presidency said additional tests would be carried out in São Paulo, which is home to some of Brazil’s top medical centres, to determine whether Bolsonaro needed emergency surgery.
A photograph of a topless Bolsonaro lying on a hospital bed, with a man who appeared to be priest touching his right shoulder, was published on the president’s social media accounts alongside the message: “God willing, we’ll be back soon. Brazil is ours.” (see linked article for a view of the photo).