Brazil Watch Thread

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Brazil Watch Thread

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Time_Traveller
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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Tens of thousands of Brazilians march to demand Bolsonaro’s impeachment
Sat 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.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... krxFbYEFbA
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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caltrek
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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House Democrats Want Answers on U.S. Involvement in Disgraced Brazil Car Wash Probe

https://theintercept.com/2021/06/08/bra ... k-garland/

Intoduction:
(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.
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caltrek
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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“Impeachment or Death”: Scenes From Brazil’s Massive Protests Against Bolsonaro

https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2 ... bolsonaro/

Introduction:
(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.
Here is another article on those same protests: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... ops-500000
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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Deforestation soars 40% in Xingu River Basin in Brazilian Amazon

by Fernanda Wenzel on 2 July 2021

A hundred and ninety-six trees per minute. That’s how fast the forest was being cleared in Brazil’s Xingu River Basin between March and April this year. A total of 29,191 hectares (72,132 acres) of Amazon rainforest was lost, an area twice the size of New York City, according to a report published this week.

The area in question straddles the border between the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, and is the source of the mighty Xingu River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon River. The deforestation recorded in the March-April period is 40% higher than the same period last year.

https://news.mongabay.com/2021/07/defor ... nt-basins/


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R8Z
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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It's interesting how by reading or following a specific subset of newspapers/people foreigners get a strangely biased view of the country; in this case my country: Brazil.

Some interesting perspectives on Corona:

Foreigner: "Coronavirus is extremely deadly in Brazil and people are dying left and right"
Me: Well, maybe in some areas but in my region (state of Santa Catarina) it's been basically contained, cases have gone high in the past but people are fine and not scared anymore, it's wasn't even that deadly. No lockdowns have been put in place since the very beginning (Mar/Apr 2020) and unless you're old and cryptic, you've been back to normal life again since late 2020, with the exception of wearing a mask for groceries, shows and big events being closed, everything else is normal.

Foreigner: "The president isn't doing anything to vaccinate people"
Me: We've vaccinated more people than all of the other Latin America countries combined; also given out more doses than developed countries like Germany or the UK. For a piss-poor country like Brazil, it's actually doing quite fine.

Foreigner: "The Brazilian corona strain is crazy deadly! I am scared!"
Me: Are you more than 80 years old or you're HIV+ with a completely debilitated immune system? Ok, then you're correct in being scared, otherwise it's a huge nothing-burger (e.g. you have 99%+ chance of surviving this one; the anxiety/stress you have being scared from it is probably hurting you more in the long the run than what the virus could possibly do).

On Politics:

Foreigner: "Bolsonaro is a fascist!"
Me: No more than any other politician; all of them suck, some more, some less, but all of them are worse than nothing. Bolsonaro is just an elected clown that answers the conservative desires of the country. Only in paper, tho, as in practice he has acted just like all of the other ones before him (business as usual).

Foreigner: "Car wash was criminal coup"
Me: If you think jailing corrupt politicians (some literally carried bags of cash in their underwear) is a coup, than you can think like that.

Foreigner: "The US is intervening in Brazilian politics!"
Me: Well, haven't they always done that? It's basically a stupid statement given that our monetary reserves are in Dollar, making the BRL (national currency) pegged to the Dollar and any US decision that affects it. Any other thing is a silly thing given this fact.

As always, take these with a grain of salt as they're subjetive statements from someone living here which is tired of hearing the doom-day news that international news companies keep airing. I used to only hear these when I was living out of the country, it was funny talking to foreigners and explaining that the world wasn't ending at the southern hemisphere: the country just had a conservative president that the "big-guys" wanted out.
And, as always, bye bye.
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Yuli Ban
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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Brazil registers record deaths, lowest number of births for Jan-June period
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.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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caltrek
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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I wonder what R8Z makes of this reported poll result:

Majority of Brazilians support impeaching Bolsonaro: Poll
July 10, 2021

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/1 ... onaro-poll

Introduction:
(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.
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caltrek
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Re: Brazil Watch Thread

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Bolsonaro May Have Emergency Surgery After Hiccups Persist for Over Ten days
by Tom Phillips
July 14, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... al-hiccups

Introduction:
(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).
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