Over people, including a school children in West Java, have been hospitalized from MBG meals. Billions of rupiah lie unspent. Kitchens mushroom faster than regulations can be written. What began as a symbol of social justice is quickly hardening into a cautionary tale about populism overtaking public administration.

The ambition is monumental. President Prabowo Subianto 171 trillion rupees ($10.2 billion) for MBG in 2025, with the intention of increasing it annually to feed people daily by December 2025. By May, just rupees ($184.6 million) had been spent, with fewer than four million recipients out of a target of 17 million.Ģż

The numbers reveal a system struggling to support its own ambitions: procurement bottlenecks, untrained employees and no mandatory presidential regulation to define accountability. Transparency International Indonesia of ā€œbillions in play without rules in placeā€. For a program feeding children, the margin for error is zero.

Fixing the program

Indonesia must rebuild MBG from the village up: anchor every kitchen to elected Food Safety Councils and to a national Nutrition Service Unit ( ā€” Satuan Pelayanan Pemenuhan Gizi), a hands-on hub that regularly tests, trains and deploys rapid remediation teams while publishing transparent results; ring-fence a nutrition guarantee and phase in local-procurement quotas that prioritize female farmers, create a safety fund for urgent equipment replacement and the mobilization of innovative finance.

This includes nutrition impact bonds and debt-for-nutrition swaps. QR codes and a simple mobile Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard ā€” allowing village deliberation, such as an independent agency (musyawarah), to drive menus and audits so that one safe plate a day becomes an act of citizenship, climate-smart development and long-term community resilience. can transform MBG from a top-down experiment into a community-anchored safety net.

Decentralization is no luxury here; it is the for quality control across 17,000 islands. Japanā€™s school-lunch model a paradigm: menus by dietitians, procurement handled locally under strict standards and the involvement of parents in taste-testing. Brazilā€™s National School Feeding Program (PNAE) that 30% of ingredients be purchased from local smallholders ā€” a policy that cut corruption and revived rural economies.

Increasing accountabilityĢż

Indonesia can achieve the same by empowering district governments and community cooperatives to run kitchens with trained nutritionists, public audits and implementing transparent digital reporting of spending and food safety checks.

Re-centring MBG around local accountability also Jakartaā€™s fiscal fears. A Center for Global Development (CGD) study that school-feeding programmes return 7 to 35 times their cost through better education and health outcomes. But only when communities feel ownership do those returns materialise.Ģż

±õ²Ō»å“Ē²Ō±š²õ¾±²¹ā€™s National Nutrition Agency should devolve monitoring responsibilities to provincial nutrition boards, which should be composed of teachers, midwives and representatives from civil society. Public dashboards could list kitchen audits and infection incidents in real time ā€” a transparency test that both the United Nations Childrenā€™s Fund (UNICEF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identify as best practice for rights-based feeding programs.

Preventing misinterpretation and corruptionĢż

Legal clarity is equally urgent. Without a Presidential Regulation the National Nutrition Agencyā€™s authority, every provincial office interprets MBG differently. Codifying the program into law ā€” as and did ā€” would shield it from political cycles and corruption.Ģż

Binding standards for menu composition, food procurement and staff training must precede further expansion. When UN agencies MBG as a ā€œcornerstone of ±õ²Ō»å“Ē²Ō±š²õ¾±²¹ā€™s nutrition strategy,ā€ they also imply a duty: must carry weight without cracking.

If Jakarta is concerned about halting momentum, a phased rollout can strike a between speed and safety. Prioritize stunting-prone districts, such as East Nusa Tenggara, Papua and sections of Sulawesi, where malnutrition rates remain above 30%.Ģż

Train local cooks through polytechnic and vocational programs, creating jobs and boosting standards. Link each kitchen to a local farmersā€™ collective, reducing food miles and stimulating rural income. Such approaches advance not only SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 3 (Good Health) but also SDG 13 (Climate Action), since locally sourced meals cut transport emissions and waste.

Critics believe that MBG will the education budget, while international evidence supports the opposite. In the EU, school-meal programs attendance and achievement, yielding a 7:1 economic return. Every well-fed child is a future worker, better educated and a citizen less dependent on health subsidies.

The World Food Program school feeding ā€œthe worldā€™s most extensive safety net,ā€ reaching 418 million children globally in 2025. Indonesia is right to join that movement. However, leadership means learning from othersā€™ mistakes instead of making the same ones.

Can the MBG move forward?

Ultimately, the MBG crisis tests ±õ²Ō»å“Ē²Ō±š²õ¾±²¹ā€™s political maturity. Can the country move from grand announcements to detailed delivery? Good local governance requires decentralized oversight, public participation and transparent measurements. 

According to the United Nations Right to , ā€œrights holders must participate in the creation and monitoring of policies that impact them.ā€ In Indonesia, this parents sampling meals, community leaders authorizing purchases and nutritionists with independent authority to close dangerous kitchens before catastrophe strikes.

If Jakarta embraces that ethos, could become what it was meant to be: a civic contract for dignity, not a headline of hubris. Feeding a nation is not about the numbers served, but about trust earned. For Indonesia, and for a region watching closely, the lesson is clear ā€”Ģż a program built on paper can fuel a campaign, but only a program built on good governance will feed a generation.Ģż

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Feeding ±õ²Ō»å“Ē²Ō±š²õ¾±²¹ā€™s Future, or Poisoning its Promise? appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Youā€™ll never know me, so my sincerity here could not be greater. Iā€™m from the country you recently tried to impose a barrier over, even though your nation has had a trade surplus over us , and this year, , reaching $1.7 billion. Iā€™m from Brazil, the fifth-largest country and the economy in the world. It wouldnā€™t surprise me if you donā€™t know anything about us, since your only visit here was for a in Rio, with your former wife Ivana, in 1989.

Iā€™m one of the millions of Brazilians who were historically seduced by the greatest soft power of your nation over the last decades. And you got huge profits from it. Brazil has the fourth most users of , the third of and fourth of . From 2004 to 2024, we jumped from the 11th to most frequent visitors of your country. Hollywood has earned an incalculable fortune with us. From 2009 to 2019, in Brazil was 77%, against 13% from national movies and only 1% from China. We are the second with the most subscribers of , the largest VOD market in Latin America and one of the biggest globally, reaching subscriptions by 2027.

Millions of us also felt your governmentā€™s hard power in different ways in recent history, like when the US supported the 1964 that led to 21 years of military dictatorship, secretly supporting opposition leaders and police training to overthrow the democratically elected president JoĆ£o Goulart during Brazilā€™s best attempt at deepening reforms, like the long-awaited agrarian reform. Ironically, the US provided support to the dictatorship through , which you recently . Over those two decades, we witnessed deaths, human rights abuses, censorship and political repression under the dictatorship your government supported. In fact, it resembles what we are watching in your streets now.

But the reason for this letter is to express my shock at how fast you are melting US soft power in all areas, except, maybe, sports. Diplomacy, science, arts, entertainment and political values were all pillars of soft power that the US was admired for by other nations and cultures for almost a century are going down the drain faster than the hair on your head.

And if you think about it, soft power is the only long-term power the US can rely on after World War II, which, by the way, was the last war your nation had won in traditional terms, followed by the loss of Vietnam war, the mess left in the Gulf War, the false pretext of Iraqā€™s possession of weapons of mass destruction that led to a new war and hundreds of thousands of since the 2003 invasion and the shameful withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

I know you love bombs just like Putin and your other role models in Doctor Strangelove. But deep down, you know you can never rely on nuclear weapons as hard power. Those weapons, tested by your government over civilians 80 years ago in Japan, triggered a worldwide race for the same device and initiated the Cold War, making the world a more dangerous place with weapons that can eliminate civilization in the hands of countries like North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and, of course, your own. No one can use it; otherwise, your golf club, hotels, mansions and family lifestyle will turn into dust.

And then there is China. The second-richest nation on Earth is learning to use soft power as fast as you melt yours. First, diplomacy: China has Israeli actions in Gaza and has a better relationship with Russia for a possible mediation over Ukraine. Although Beijing only stands on for peace, Xi Jinping uses diplomacy rather than blunting imposing tariffs or sabre-rattling with nuclear power to get his way.

Second, science. China has become a scientific superpower faster than any other country. , Changā€™E 6 returned soil samples from the far side of the moon for the first time; developed the first primitive-based vision processor with complementary pathways, the first optical storage device with petabit capacity; a new approach in helium-free cryogenic technology and a treatment with genetically engineered CAR T cells for refractory autoimmune diseases.

Third by arts and entertainment. Chinaā€™s domestic films are thriving. ā€˜ā€™ became the only movie in history to reach $1 billion at the box office in just one market and the only non-Hollywood film to cross $2 billion globally. Chinaā€™s music economy became the fifth-largest recorded music market in the world in 2023, with growth, making it the fastest in the world, with cultural policies emphasizing international competitiveness and developing talents by formal education and independent labels.

At last, there is social media. Since you got back to power, Chinese influencers flooded TikTok with very popular videos showing how fast and modern their cities became; one , with perfect English, has gone viral with a bold critique on how America killed its middle class and guys like you blame China; thereā€™s even , called Chinese Trump, with the exact same voice, showing the beauties of Chinese culture and habits.

We Brazilians will survive your random tariffs. We’ve been through worse with previous US administrations. As you read in the , itā€™s pointless to distortedly use the Magnitsky law over our Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes and cut his credit card as a veiled pretext to save your friend, former extreme-right president Jair Bolsonaro, now in house arrest for supposedly leading a coup after the 2022 presidential election.

After 44 years, and half my life researching cultural soft power, I found myself divorcing Mickey Mouse and flirting with pandas. Which, by the way, is a Chinese tool of diplomacy and wildlife conservation since 1941. Soft power.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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Following in November 2023 that French court authorities had issued an arrest warrant against the now-dethroned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to prosecute him in France for war crimes, Brazil reportedly announced its determination to support the cause of heads of state immunity. The warrant is noteworthy because it aligns with a March 13, 2001 by the French Cour de cassation, Franceā€™s highest criminal appellate court. The ruling seemed to acknowledge that a foreign head of state could be tried in France if the charge involved classic international crimes rather than just terrorism, for which the court recognized immunity at the time.

Debating immunity

There was no precedent for an effective international criminal tribunal before the ā€” the trials that prosecuted Nazi war criminals and vital leaders for their crimes in World War II ā€” which started in 1945. Heads of state had immunity from each otherā€™s national courts throughout that time. However, ongoing hostilities between nations occurred during that time, culminating in two World Wars that involved aggression, genocides, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was a period of instability in peaceful relations between states. It may be unnecessary to directly attribute the ā€” the resulting effect the trials had on international efforts to bring about justice ā€” to the relative advancements in global peace and security.

Now, the debate over official immunity has spread beyond the boundaries of the United States. International discussions, like the ICCā€™s for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, brought to light the broader of Head of State immunity in international law. The ICC issued the warrant against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024. Pre-Trial Chamber I established reasonable grounds on allegations of suspected war crimes and perpetrated in Gaza between October 8, 2023 and May 20, 2024.

As the first permanent court in history, the ICCā€™s goal is to bring an end to impunity for those who commit the most that the entire community finds problematic. The courtā€™s authority is restricted to crimes committed by citizens of a State Party or on its territory, and it people primarily for war crimes or crimes against humanity. The courtā€™s legal foundation comes from the Rome Statute, which was approved by the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on establishing an in 1998 and enacted in 2002. Currently, are States Parties to the Rome Statute.

Enforcing arrest warrants

Enforcing an arrest warrant member states to hold anyone who enters their territory and transport them to a detention facility in the Netherlands, where the court is located. The defendant must be for the trial to continue. Since the law applies to everyone equally, there is no in keeping with its mission to end impunity. According to Article 27 of the Rome Statute, a personā€™s official position as a head of state or government, a member of a government or parliament, an elected official or another official does not, in and of itself, absolve them of under the Rome Statute.

In a news issued on November 27, 2024, the French government, a member state, expressed worries about possible restrictions on this clause concerning non-member nations like Israel. Regarding the immunities of States not parties to the ICC, the statement emphasized that a state cannot be to behave in a way that goes against its duties under international law. Such protections to Netanyahu and other pertinent ministries. According to the Foreign Ministry, they must be considered should the ICC request their arrest and surrender.

Rejecting immunity: a tenet of international law

State Immunity, rooted in customary international law, protects current and previous heads of state from in specific circumstances. This is on the ideas of state sovereignty and interstate equality.

However, legal immunity point out that heads of state cannot assert immunity before the ICC, even if their countries have not ratified the treaty. The Palestinian territories have signed the convention using their position as a non-member observer state at the United Nations, notwithstanding Israelā€™s non-signatory status.

It should be emphasized that the rejection of immunity for even leaders of state accused of international crimes was one of the tenets of international law that emerged from the Nuremberg process. Heads of state would undoubtedly have believed, due to the Nuremberg effect, that the period of impunity for transnational crimes that endangered or disrupted global peace and security ended with World War II. To a young person, the idea that accountability for the same behavior represents a danger to peaceful ties between states may be incomprehensible.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post International Crimes Imbroglio: How Far Does Immunity Go? appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

In recent years, the Northeast Region of Brazil has become the center of the countryā€™s film production industry and has caught the attention of festivals worldwide, with some of the most important awards being given to Brazilian filmmakers over the last two decades. Is there a Northeast wave ready to make Brazilian cinema a new cultural soft power?

I spoke with some of the most important filmmakers in the region to get some answers.  Director Gabriel Mascaro told me,

At the end of last century, Northeast filmmakers got tired of aligning their work with the expectations of the Brazilian movie industry dominated by a carioca (Rio de Janeiro) look. That stimulated more independent and original productions, which connected with international filmographieā€™s expectations. Today, some TV and streaming companies have begun to wake up to this potential. Streaming bet on us and are getting good results.

Mascaro the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for his movie Neon Bull (2015), which also won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Neon Bull tells the story of Iremar, who works for a rodeo in northeastern Brazil. He lives in the truck that transports the rodeo animals, where he dreams of a future as a tailor in the region’s booming clothing industry.

Far from Rio

Brazilian audiovisual production has been historically concentrated in major southeastern cities like SĆ£o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Rio is where TV Globo operates, the TV company in Latin America and among the world’s five biggest commercial television stations. For the last four decades, TV Globo has been exporting telenovelas to almost one hundred nations, making it one of Brazilā€™s most successful exporters of cultural soft power. The drama Escrava Isaura (Isaura the Slave) was  in 104 countries and watched by around 1 billion viewers in China alone.

However, in Brazilian cinema, the Northeast Region generates the most award-winning films globally. ā€œThere has always been a tradition of cinema in the Northeast, since the silent cinema of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, of the 1920s. It also helps that great writers are from the region, like Gilberto Freyre. Itā€™s not a surprise that Northeast cinema would explode in the world someday. Northeast filmmakers make their films with local colors, local music, local accents and strong cultures that leverage comedies and dramas. The great inheritance of the New Cinema movement is the decision to take risks with an inventive and pulsating cinema,ā€ says .

Gomez won the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 for his film Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures and the Silver Q-Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival for Paloma (2022).

The 2005 film tells the story of two men who meet in Brazil’s arid northeastern backlands in 1942. One of the men is a German refugee who travels through cities as an aspirin salesman. The more recent 2022 film is the touching story of Paloma, a farmer who wants a traditional church wedding with her boyfriend ZĆ©, but is refused by local priests because she is a transgender woman.

Paloma, directed by Marcelo Gomes. Used with permission.

Big box offices

Half a century ago, the New Cinema movement put Brazilian cinema on the world map for the first time, with movies that emphasized social inequality and intellectualism. Influenced by Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, it helped Brazilian filmmakers win the most important international awards.

won the Fipresci Prize at the Cannes Film Festival with Entranced Earth (1967) and Best Director at Cannes for Antonio das Mortes (1969). won the Ocic Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Dry Lives (1964), based on the book by the Northeastern writer Graciliano Ramos. Lastly, won Best Film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for ²Ń²¹³¦³Ü²Ō²¹Ć­³¾²¹, a surreal comedy and social commentary about a lazy hero who leaves the backlands with his brothers.

However, none of these films from the New Cinema movement made waves with substantial audiences in Brazil. They were less popular because they were seen as too intellectual and superficial, unlike telenovelas.

ā€œThe explanation for this is exoticism. International festivals have a very reductant view about Brazil, like if we were zoo animals. Exoticism really matters. Stories about communities in the Northeast, indigenous, quilombolas (afro-Brazilian residents of quilombo settlements, first established by escaped slaves in Brazil) end up gaining great resonance. Thereā€™s also a certain historical guilt, a certain desire for reparation, for being colonialists for too long. There are also the stereotypes that we are less developed and very virulent. Movies with those aspects get more attention outside,ā€ says .

Muritiba won Best Film at the Venice Film Festival for Private Desert (2021), about a suspended police officer who goes to the Northeast to meet a mysterious woman and falls in love with her, but then discovers that she is transgender. 

Rio de Janeiro is still the source of some of Brazilā€™s most successful box office hits. (1998), nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Actress at the Academy Awards, was seen by 1.6 million people. (2002) received four Academy Award nominations and was seen by 3.4 million viewers. (2007) won the Golden Berlin Bear in the Berlin International Film Festival and was seen by 2.4 million viewers. The sequel, , was seen by 11 million in theaters. Recently, Walter Sallesā€™ (2024) reached 2 million viewers and is in the running for Academy Award nominations. It tells the story of a congressman who was kidnapped and murdered during Brazilā€™s military dictatorship. All of these films were produced and set in Rio de Janeiro.

However, the numbers show the Northeast is fighting back. The regionā€™s first phenomenon was (2000), based on a classic story by the northeastern writer Ariano Suassuna. It was a huge success as a TV show and a film, seen by 2.2 million people in theaters. On TV, productions located in and based on popular stories from the Northeast were distributed by TV Globo internationally.

(2005), nominated for best miniseries at the International Emmy Awards is one example. Another is , directed by Juliano Dornelles and Kleber MendonƧa Filho, it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, extremely violent and erotic, is about a city where strange things happen after the death of the cityā€™s matriarch. With clear similarities to New Cinema, but with commercial appeal, it was seen by almost eight hundred thousand in theaters. 

Recently, Prime Videoā€™s (2023), directed by Aly Muritiba and Fabio MendonƧa, became an . It was a Top 10 show in 49 countries, including 24 African countries, 9 Asian countries, Canada, Portugal and Brazil. It is one of the more recent shows produced in Brazil at this level of sophistication.

The show is a modern version of (1953), about a man who terrorizes poor villages in the Northeast of Brazil. It was renewed for a second season and won the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

A new cultural soft power?

Is the wave of Northeastern cinema a new Brazilian soft power? ā€œYes!ā€ says Halder Gomes, a comedy director based in the region. ā€œNortheast movies are desired and hoped for by international festival curators. They already know that the region is a hotbed of potent films. Northeast cinema is already a ā€˜commodity,ā€™ in a good way, in international festivals.ā€ Half a million viewers have seen the local in theaters and (2016) has been seen by over six hundred thousand in theaters.

Both productions generated sequels, spin-offs and TV versions for TV Globo and Netflix. ā€œBut I think there must have been a political will among the states of the region and the federal government to make the Northeast cinema a soft power. A will to expand, distribute, the same strategy the American government did with Hollywood in the 1940s and South Korea is doing today,ā€ Aly Muritiba reminds us.

That may be true. But not even political will can turn a cultural product into soft power without genuine artistic talent behind it. Today, the Northeast of Brazil is a hub for great filmmaking.

Besides the filmmakers above, the region also gave the world , winner of the Award of the Youth at the Cannes Film Festival with Lower City (2005); , winner of the CICAE Award at the Berlin International Film Festival with Mango Yellow (2005); and , whose TV version of her movie Ɠ pai, Ɠ was nominated for an international Emmy in 2009.

The regionā€™s , nominated for Berlinā€™s Golden Berlin with his Futuro Beach (2014) and Cannesā€™ Palme dā€™Or and Queer Palm for Motel Destino (2024), tells stories set in the northeast state of °ä±š²¹°łĆ” in both films.

Brazilā€™s cultural products have exerted soft power in the past. Bossa Nova seduced the ears and hearts of the world beginning in the 1950s. In the 2000s, funk and trap became the new move. Brazilā€™s Carnival festival is still one of the most celebrated events in the world, attracting millions of tourists from across the globe.

However, all these cultural phenomena have been centered around Rio de Janeiro. Maybe now is the time for the stories and artists of the Northeast to shine brighter and become a new center for Brazilā€™s cultural soft power.

[Joey T. McFadden edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post The Northeast Cinema Wave: A New Center of Soft Power for Brazil? appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

The BRICS countries argue that the US and its allies have weaponized the global financial system. The dominance of the dollar, and to a lesser extent the euro, in international trade and finance allows the West to impose sanctions that impact countries’ economies deeply. For instance, following Russiaā€™s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the US and its allies froze $282 billion of Russian assets held overseas and cut Russian banks off from SWIFT, a global system for cross-border payments. America also warned other countriesā€™ banks of potential ā€œsecondary sanctionsā€ if they supported Russia.

These actions have led several countries to reevaluate their reliance on the US dollar. Central banks around the world, especially in countries at odds with the US, are stockpiling gold and exploring alternatives to dollar-based transactions. BRICS members see this dependency on Western-controlled systems as risky and are eager to reduce it. China, in particular, views reliance on the dollar as a major security vulnerability.

The proposed solution: BRICS Bridge

To reduce dependency on Western financial systems, Russia proposed a new payment system called ā€œBRICS Bridge.ā€ This digital platform would allow BRICS countries to conduct cross-border payments through their central banks without relying on US-controlled networks like SWIFT. The concept borrows elements from a similar system, mBridge, which is partly overseen by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Switzerland, a prominent institution in the Western-led financial order. However, BRICS Bridge aims to challenge that order, offering a financial lifeline to countries facing Western sanctions and creating a more multipolar financial system.

Different visions of global influence

Russia and China are the main drivers behind the push for BRICS reforms, but their motivations differ. Russia seeks to create a sphere of influence that protects its interests and supports its allies through a flexible, transactional approach to international relations. This approach would allow countries to engage with Russia based on mutual benefits without subscribing to Western ā€œnormativeā€ values, which Russia sees as biased.

Chinaā€™s ambitions go further. Rather than just establishing an independent sphere, China wants to rewrite international rules, shaping a world order where multiple centers of power coexist, with China as a central authority. This would give China greater control over global trade, finance, and diplomacy, gradually replacing the US as the primary rulemaker.

Many countries in the Global South support BRICS because they see it as a pathway to a more flexible international environment where they can negotiate deals that directly benefit their economic growth. For example, India has reaped significant benefits from purchasing discounted Russian oil, prioritizing these economic gains despite the moral conflict posed by the ongoing war in Ukraine. In a multipolar world, countries in the Global South could avoid being tied down by Western rules and make independent decisions in their best interests.

However, this freedom comes with risks. Without a dominant Western power like the US to counterbalance rising powers, these smaller countries could find themselves vulnerable to regional giants, such as China, who may impose their will on them by force in the future.

The BRICS alliance reflects a growing dissatisfaction with the current global order. Critics argue that the US-led international system has become ineffective and no longer serves the interests of many countries, leading them to seek alternatives. However, BRICS itself has limitations. Despite its symbolic appeal, it has not achieved substantial progress on key issues like creating a global currency to rival the dollar or liberalizing global trade. The dollar remains dominant, and the influence of Western-led institutions persists.

Even if BRICS doesnā€™t have the power to immediately reshape the world, its existence signals a significant shift. Countries are increasingly interested in alternatives, showing that faith in the US-led system is waning. The BRICS alliance may lack the cohesion and power to fully realize its vision, but its popularity underscores a global desire for change.

[Anton Schauble wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post FOĀ° Exclusive: Make Sense of BRICS Summit in Russia appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

The courts of the northeastern Pernambuco state have seized the assets of various celebrity targets, including private planes and luxury vehicles. They have also blocked their financial assets, amounting to over three billion reais (approximately $600 million).

If the estimates of international studies and reports are confirmed, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Groups like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the United Nations estimate that 2%ā€“5% of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) comes from activities that attempt to legitimize illegal money. When applied to Brazil, the money laundered annually varies between 200 billion and 500 billion reais (over $35 billion and $88 billion, respectively). The rest of the report paints a picture of the rest of the iceberg ā€” the laundromat called Brazil.

The Brazilian bookie boom

The greed for easy, exorbitant profits found fertile ground in Brazil around 2018, when there was an explosion of bookies for gambling. Up until then, the Council for the Control of Financial Activities (COAF) ā€” the body responsible for preventing and combating money laundering and terrorist financing ā€” received around one million tips from institutions about suspicious operations. This number rose to 3.6 million in 2019 and hit a record high last year, at 7.6 million. The institution, which produced 3,178 financial intelligence reports (RIFs) a decade ago, quintupled that number in 2023, with 16,411 RIFs.

Starting in 2025, the government will enforce a that fixed-odds betting sites operating in the Brazilian market have a checking mechanism. The goal is to prevent the space from being used for financial crime.

The explosive combination of greed and betting sites stems from the fact that bets have almost qualified for the money laundering practices manual. The sites allow or facilitate frequent, fractionated deposits and withdrawals, which make it more difficult to trace the origin of funds; the use of false identities, which allows fraudsters to create multiple accounts and, above all, cryptocurrencies as payment, which guarantee anonymity. The complexity and high number of possible betting methods coupled with the huge volume of financial transactions makes it easy to reinsert dirty funds into the formal market.

ā€œIā€™m sure that more than half of the profits from illegal gambling take the route of digitalizing bets,ā€ said an anonymous IT executive who specializes in financial transactions.

The key figures in the web of legal and illegal gambling relationships and the main method of Brazilian money laundering are not Bezerra or Lima. Rather, two men, a father and son sharing the name Darwin Henrique da Silva Filho, led the seizure that triggered Operation Integration. In December 2022, police 180,000 reais (nearly $32,000) from the headquarters of da Silvaā€™s fatherā€™s company, Caminho da Sorte, in Pernambucoā€™s capital city of Recife. Since 1999, this company has been the biggest name in the illegal gambling game, jogo do bicho (ā€œanimal gameā€), in Recife. Along with the money, police collected a notebook containing, according to the police report, ā€œdaily notes of bets and prizes paid out from the game of bicho and soccer, betting slips with the letterhead of the Caminho da Sorte and Esportes da Sorte stalls, accounts from some physical stores.ā€ This ā€œdemonstrates the umbilical relationship between the two types of activity classified as criminal contraventions.ā€

The investigation also points to the digitalization of Brazilian financial laundries ā€” in this case, Filho, who was arrested in the same operation as Bezerra. His father comes from a time when the most common operation among fraudsters was the use of front companies, or companies posing as part of Brazilā€™s massive orange industry, to launder money raised through illegal means. Many bicheiros ā€” operators who run jogo do bicho games ā€” and owners of slot machines, bingos and illegal casinos used this tactic.

The trick was for them to become serial entrepreneurs, with several corporations operating regularly and a few trading companies with astronomically unrealistic turnover compared to the number of employees or services provided. If a tax audit were to be carried out, the business owner would have his seven or eight regular companies to show to make up for his own smoothness in ā€œbusiness,ā€ and any connection with a dubious one. Filho, for example, has seven companies registered in his name. One of them is Esportes da Sorte, a bookie opened in 2018 and based in the Caribbean tax haven of CuraƧao.

Legal loopholes

CuraƧao, along with Malta, is home to the vast majority of bookies. They remain the destination for most of the money from the Brazilian criminal market. Since the days when bicheiros and slot machine owners wore flashy gold chains under patterned, open-chested shirts, these have been the preferred locations for money laundering. Thatā€™s why the businesses which have passed down through the generations have always maintained legal bodies on the tax islands.

Lawyers with knowledge of all the minutiae and loopholes in local legislation had their paths mapped out when bookies opened their headquarters in the localities, through which the proceeds of illicit activities could enter Brazil. ā€œOutside Brazil, the financial systems are more rigid and nullify these paths,ā€ the IT executive said.

They began by following the path indicated by the central banks of the countries where bets are placed, such as Brazil. With the consolidation of a digital betting company, the counterfeit money is converted to digital with the purchase of cryptocurrencies on an exchange, which is the platform for buying, selling, trading and storing virtual money.

The money is generally bought from one of Brazilā€™s dozens of exchanges that operate on the fringes of regulation ā€” only 14 are legal here. The money travels untraceably to the tax haven where it is traded and becomes legal tender. ā€œIā€™d guess that around 80% of the bets have a bicheiro behind them. The ones that donā€™t are the ones established abroad before coming here, like Bet365, Betano and 1XBet,ā€ the IT executive stated.

This illegal market is extremely lucrative. Itā€™s worth an estimated 10 billion reais (over $1.7 billion) a year, occupied by around 60% slot machines, 35% gambling and the rest between bingos and casinos.

As for the other major loophole in digital legislation, crash games such as Aviator and Tigrinho ā€” which have players bet on a multiplier value that rapidly increases until the game crashes ā€” account for half of the online casino network and an estimated 35 billion reais (approximately $6.1 billion) in annual revenue. The operators export the technology here and import the profits. The owners of the brand offer white label use; interested parties register their own domain, use the game code and offer it to the public in exchange for sharing the revenue with the creators.

In order to operate by receiving deposits in pixels, interested parties must set up an account with a fintech or financial agent that accepts them. Thus, the fiscal responsibility falls on them and the brand can simply wash its hands of it, claiming no involvement with the practice. Despite this, crash games were legalized in Brazil in 2023 and are currently being implemented by bookies.

Bezerra and Limaā€™s cases

This affiliate system is similar to the one that recently splashed across the media with Bezerra and then Limaā€™s faces. Celebrities who convey an image of integrity are sought out by betting companies, offering to share profits based on the number of punters they attract. The same tactic has been used by other fraudsters in the governmentā€™s opening to digital betting companies interested in operating legally in the country from 2025.

One of the 113 that agreed to pay 30 million reais (over $5.2 million) to obtain a license is Zeroumbet, owned by Bezerra. It placed the deposit on August 20 with the intention of operating legitimately. A careful look at the list reveals several other common names in slot machines and bingo parlors, simply to give a veneer of legality to the dubious activities of their investors.

Another much more eye-catching way of reintegrating dirty money into the formal market is through the acquisition and sale of luxury goods. This is how the connection between Bezerra and Filho was presented in the media. The influencer bought a Lamborghini Urus from the businessman for 3.85 million reais (over $675,000), paid cash and raised suspicions of ā€œlaundering money from gambling and sports betting.ā€ The courts ordered that 34 million reais (over $5.9 million) be blocked from her bank accounts. Bezerra declared that she earns 1.5 million reais (over $263,000) per month.

In the case of Lima, Judge Andrea Calado da Cruz, who ordered his arrest, states that he gave ā€œharbored fugitivesā€ ā€” JosĆ© AndrĆ© da Rocha Neto and his wife, Aislla Rocha ā€” during a trip from the city of GoiĆ¢nia, Brazil to Greece on the singerā€™s private plane. This couple was investigated in the operation for being partners to lead bookie Vai de Bet. As heir to the real estate business, AndrĆ© has more than 30 companies to his name.

ā€œIt is imperative to point out that Nivaldo Batista Lima [Gusttavo Limaā€™s real name], by harboring fugitives, shows an alarming lack of consideration for justice. His intense financial relationship with these individuals, which includes suspicious transactions, raises serious questions about his own participation in criminal activities. His companyā€™s connection to the money laundering network suggests a commitment that cannot be ignored,ā€ the judge added.

The police also seized an airplane that belonged to Limaā€™s company, Balada Eventos e ProduƧƵes. The singerā€™s lawyer said the aircraft had been sold to another company owned by Vai de Bet, but the National Civil Aviation Agency claims Lima is still the owner. The bookie even sponsored Sport Club Corinthians Paulista in a now-broken contract, worth 360 million reais (over $63 million), for three seasons and support for Buteco, Brazilā€™s biggest country music festival. Through companies Balada Eventos e ProduƧƵes Ltda. and GSA Empreendimentos e ParticipaƧƵes Ltda, the artist has received around 49.4 million reais (over $8.7 million) since last year from Vai de Bet and Filhoā€™s Esportes da Sorte. His involvement doesnā€™t seem to be ending, as the singer acquired 25% of the latter on June 1.

A few hours before his (now ended) arrest on September 22, Lima appeared at Rock in Rio posing for photos with the music festivalā€™s creator, Roberto Medina. Before the decision was published, he traveled to Miami, Florida with his wife, where he owns property worth 65 million reais (over $11.3 million). From there, he phoned controversial SĆ£o Paulo mayoral candidate Pablo MarƧal, who reassured fans that his friend ā€œis fine.ā€

ā€œRegardless of their financial condition, no one can evade justice ā€¦ Wealth should not serve as a shield for impunity, nor as a means of escaping legal responsibilities. The application of the law must be equitable, ensuring that everyone, regardless of their social or economic position, is accountable for their actions. The attempt to escape legal consequences through financial connections is an affront to the fundamental principles of the rule of law and to the very notion of justice,ā€ the judge of Recifeā€™s 12th Criminal Court concludes. Hereā€™s a tip for punters.

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The support of the Brazilian militias and the Neo-Pentecostal churches may have guaranteed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaroā€™s victories as a federal deputy in Rio de Janeiro (1991ā€“2018), but they would not be enough to support him in a bid for the presidency. Even the support of the armed forces would be restricted to highly urbanized areas, only reaching as far as military families and retired personnel. So, to become president, Bolsonaro would need to extend his support base into the country.

In Brazil, of the population lives in only 6% of the cities, many of those state capitals. But the political contribution of smaller cities near rural production areas is significant; of municipalities have fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. These voters are crucial in electing representatives to state legislative chambers and both federal houses.

Before we return to Bolsonaro, let us take a look at the political development of Brazilā€™s countryside and small cities.

Brazilā€™s agriculture: powerful, unfair and built on historic slavery

Brazil has been an agricultural powerhouse for centuries. It has a unique potential of growing production, with the most arable land on the planet. It is the of 32 commodities, being the largest net exporter globally. is the main economic activity in the states of Mato Grosso, ParanƔ, Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais. GoiƔs, Mato Grosso do Sul and Santa Catarina have increased their production in the last decades.

The population of these states alone reaches over . Five million rural properties occupy of the national territory, with over agricultural workers. They are responsible for almost of the countryā€™s GDP. This powerful economic sector has always been crucial for Brazilā€™s political pathways.

Rural areas suffer from growing inequality. An estimated of the population is impoverished, resulting from a to amass in the hands of particular people groups. These issues are far from being solved.

Until 1850, land was not a commodity in Brazil. Settlers could toil and occupy the country, but property rights were given by monarchs ā€” first Portuguese kings, then Brazilian emperors ā€” to their children or godchildren, as a means of feeding the growing European mercantilist economy. Over of the production went to Europe.

To this end, those with the right of use to the land would create , enormous landed estates with primitive agriculture and labor, often in a state of partial servitude. These measured billions of square yards and were covered in monocultures. There were economic cycles based on Brazilwood, sugarcane, cotton, coffee and cattle. The workforce comprised peoples enslaved by the Portuguese. During the first economic cycle, the extractivism-based ā€œ,ā€ were captured and enslaved, sometimes traded by tribes allied to the Portuguese.

When the economy changed to a basis in agriculture, indigenous peoples lost their usefulness; they were not helpful to plantations, as they were unacquainted with cattle and plants brought from Asia and Africa. Over the next centuries, an estimated seven million people ā€” corresponding to 70% of the whole Transatlantic slave trade ā€” were from Portuguese strongholds in Africa, with the support of the general society and , and taken to Brazil to produce all the countryā€™s wealth. As German educator Ina von Binzen in the 1880s, ā€œthe white Brazilian just doesnā€™t work.ā€

How the 1850 Land Law changed Brazilian farmers and politics

The vastness of Brazilian territory was too enticing to not be turned into a commodity. In 1850, Emperor Pedro II, Brazilā€™s last emperor, signed Law 601, or the ā€œ,ā€ which established territorial property rights to individuals and turned all uncolonized areas within the countryā€™s borders into public land that could be purchased from the state. While had been applied in several countries since antiquity, guaranteeing the permanence of early settlers, this issue was never discussed in imperial Brazil. In fact, the 1850 Land Law resulted in the displacement of poorer early settlers and virtually property rights to recently freed African descendants.

After the abolition of slavery in 1888, 700,000 freed slaves were left to their own devices, unable to and having to to stay on their former ownersā€™ land. These practices persisted until the 20th century in a phenomenon known as ā€œ.ā€ This was especially the case in Northeast Brazil, which was still one of the main of cane sugar.

Under the Coronelist system, landed oligarchs were the behind the State ā€” they controlled politics and the economy, and they assassinated rivals. Most ā€œCoronelsā€ had, in fact, been part of military forces during the genocidal Paraguayan War (1864ā€“1870), the of 1889 or one of the many military coup attempts until the successful installation of the in 1930.

The 1889 of Pedro II by Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca came about largely because of the of slavery in 1888 and the lack of compensation to landed oligarchs. This was due to the intrinsic connection between the military and ±ō²¹³Ł¾±“ŚĆŗ²Ō»å¾±“Ē²õ.

With slavery abolished, the Brazilian government decided that, instead of educating or providing land to the Afro-Brazilian population, they should ā€œwhitenā€ Brazil by bringing over three million European and Asian . Many of those immigrants, however, ended up manning established monocultures owned by ā€œcoffee and rubber barons.ā€ They did not have resources to buy land and thus ended up living in conditions to slavery. Over the next decades, the impoverished, landless European settlers became the campesinos (ā€œpeasant farmersā€) fighting for , especially in the south of Brazil.

The Land Law fueled land conflicts in Brazil. Land-grabbing became the norm, especially as frontiers were pushed inland. Landowners would falsify property titles by sticking brand new documents into boxes with crickets, which would give them the appearance of old titles. This practice is known as (from grilo, meaning ā€œcricketā€), and it continues to this day. In fact, businessman is currently the largest grileiro (person who illicitly owns land through false property titles) in the Amazon, with 11 extensive farms in public lands from nine states ā€” this territory altogether is three times larger than the city of Sao Paulo.

The greed of land-grabbers led to conflicts that would be considered prolonged by the United Nations, such as that at , state of Pernambuco. With Bolsonaro in power and the retraction of policing operations in rural areas, land conflicts and involved almost one million people. Approximately of invaded territories officially belonged to indigenous peoples. Auxiliary military forces, such as the Military Police, are often involved in . They are the ostensive used by ruralistas (large landowners who now head the agribusiness in Brazil) to drive small family farmers off their desired areas.

On August 10, 2019, ruralistas supporting Bolsonaroā€™s caused the infamous (ā€œFire Dayā€), a coordinated arson effort that increased Amazon fires by 300% in just 24 hours. Despite prosecutors warning the federal government about the upcoming effort, Bolsonaro accused nongovernmental organizations of creating the disaster to ā€œbring the governmentā€™s .ā€ A year later, affected areas were already by cattle. The culprits are still on the .

When Brazilian President Luiz InĆ”cio Lula da Silva began his third term in 2023, environmental protection programs restarted. Brazilā€™s environmental and climate took a progressive turn, with promising . Favorable, albeit , results continued to Lulaā€™s annual review, and he created programs to reduce deforestation caused by . The problem of ±ō²¹³Ł¾±“Ś³Ü²Ō»å¾±Ć”°ł¾±“Ē²õ and land-grabbers trying to replace forests with pastures continues for one simple reason: Land is in the hands of an agrarian elite with political power that is all but the law.

The movement in Brazil, personified by Bolsonaroā€™s term in office, is supported by agribusiness, in the so-called ā€œā€ movement. Some authors blame a failure of the left for the rise of neofascism in Brazil. Others recognize that the land issue is historic and to the territorial conflict that has plagued Brazil since European occupation. They remind us of the behind agribusiness and highlight the between the agrarian elite and Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro, politics and the demand for land reform

Bolsonaro is currently banned from running for political office. However, for him began cropping up in wealthy cities in April 2024 and continues to this day, once again by the .

Brazil has been experiencing a in Amazon forest fires since last year, with dry conditions facilitating the spread. Agribusiness frontiers like the state of Roraima have been burning for a while, with fires threatening the Indigenous Territory of the . But it wasnā€™t until the smoke choked , Brazilā€™s richest city, that the to the devastating Dia do Fogo became clear. With uncontrolled fires blazing in at least Amazon municipalities and the smoke reaching , the government deployed nearly to the region. Federal prosecutors and environmental agencies warn that the pattern of fires could only come from . Meanwhile, TarcĆ­sio de Freitas, the governor of Sao Paulo state and an of Bolsonaro, insists that there was no coordinated criminal effort; the fires were the result of individual ā€œ.ā€

The far-right movement in Brazil is gathering force with the upcoming in October 2024. Sao Paulo is, according to Lula, the stage of a ā€œLula-Bolsonaro .ā€ In the countryside, agribusiness-founded rural militias supporting Bolsonaro kill and use violence against land reform settlers. This movement is called ā€œ.ā€ The alliance between military and paramilitary forces with large landowners in Brazil is an . The of armed forces and land oligarchs was also at the root of the 1964 coup dā€™Ć©tat.

Since the 1950s, rural workers had been organizing themselves into political groups, demanding and an end to rural violence. President JĆ¢nio Quadros resigned in 1961, citing ā€œterrible .ā€ His vice president, JoĆ£o Goulart, succeeded him and took progressive steps regarding national resources, including nationalizing and discussing land distribution.

Not only was he violently ousted a mere two weeks later, but his efforts were in vain: The 1964 coup swiftly quashed the demands of rural workers and family farmers. The following two decades saw the of over 1,500 rural workers and 8,000 indigenous peoples, their lands stolen by the same wealthy families of centuries past; their descendents are now populating the and Senate. It was a against land rights.

In 1984, rural workers organized themselves into the Landless Workersā€™ Movement (), pressuring the new civilian government of JosĆ© Sarney to address land reform. Despite suffering a by the most powerful media of the country, the movement managed to converse with legislative representatives. Thus, the Land Reform was included in the 1988 Constitution. The new constitution also guaranteed for the first time in Brazilian history the of indigenous peoples to their land and sovereignty.

Nowadays, MST has over 1.5 million members and is the largest organic in Latin America, spreading agro-ecological methods of cultivation. As of Brazilā€™s food comes from family farms, training and legal advice offered by MST and other rural workersā€™ organizations are fundamental for the countryā€™s food chain.

As a reaction to the Landless Workersā€™ Movement, wealthy landowners and land-grabbers founded the Democratic Rural Union (UniĆ£o DemocrĆ”tica Ruralista, or ). This group was so politically influential that it took credit for frustrating any governmental attempt to apply land reform. UDR participated in the of several environmental activists, including the leader of the rubber tappers union and renowned environmentalist . UDR leader Ronaldo Caiado became a congressman heading the ruralista caucus and was elected governor of the state of GoiĆ”s in 2018, during the far-right wave that swept the country.Ģż

In 1995, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso started initiating land reform projects. He gave property rights to around families until 2001. The following president, Lula, settled a further between 2003 and 2010. The next, Dilma Rousseff, gave property rights to families from 2011 to 2015. After the soft coup to remove Dilma, her replacement, Michel Temer, drastically land reform projects. The next president in line, Bolsonaro, would go on to these. Further, he provided only provisional , gave property rights to , legalized the grilagem practice and stopped . This strangled small farmers.

The same scenario repeats with regard to indigenous lands, although land demarcation started earlier, in Sarneyā€™s government. Up to Dilmaā€™s term, all presidents for hundreds of ethnicities. This stopped under Bolsonaroā€™s regime, as he had promised during his presidential campaign to not give ā€œā€ of land to indigenous peoples or (Afro-Brazilian people dwelling in settlements established by escaped slaves).

Bolsonaro just implemented what powerful landowners always fought for, as Brazilian politics were increasingly taken by representatives of ±ō²¹³Ł¾±“Ś³Ü²Ō»å¾±Ć”°ł¾±“Ē²õ and those sympathetic to their cause. By 2012, the Federal Congress and Senate were filled with members of evangelical religions (the ā€œā€), (the ā€œā€) and the militias (the ā€œā€). Known as the ā€œ,ā€ they were a majority in the Congress when Dilma was and were responsible for the start of the of constitutional rights that peaked under Bolsonaro.ĢżĢż

Brazil still has a long way to go before it can stop those interests from interfering with the application of constitutional rights, especially regarding the environment and the rights of workers and indigenous peoples. The are still fighting for the interests of , with the help of morality agendas and organized crime.

Foreign exploitation and interference

Brazil started as a cash cow for the European mercantilist economy from the 1500s, and the sentiment of the most powerful Brazilians ā€” all of European descent ā€” was always one of detachment from the country. In his seminal , The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil, anthropologist and sociologist Darcy Ribeiro explains how this alienation from their own country created a cruel, perverted, fascistic, racist and misogynistic elite that Brazil and its poor inhabitants. The Brazilian elite is deeply , with a visceral hatred for the general population. In Ribeiroā€™s words, the elite sees the populace as nothing more than ā€œcoal to be ā€ for its own growth.

This hatred resulted in a peculiar modus operandi for the Brazilian wealthy: They exploit workers, extract as much wealth as possible from Brazil and send their money and children . Using some perverted logic, Brazilian elites also interfere as much as they can to keep Brazil poor and ; any effort by the people to end this situation faces ferocious resistance and threats of . This was revealed by the , which listed millions of dollars owned by right-wing politicians.

In his , A Elite do Atraso: Da EscravidĆ£o A Bolsonaro (which loosely translates to ā€œThe Backward Elite: From Slavery to Bolsonaroā€), sociologist JessĆ© Souza says that a significant portion of Brazilian elite is proto-fascist. It uses its technical knowledge to serve international capitalist systems at the expense of the populationā€™s poor majority. Simultaneously, it shamelessly uses racist, misogynistic and oppressive discourse. This is the part of society that has been in power in Brazil since 2016; its highest manifestation is in Bolsonaro.

Political analyst Tales Abā€™SĆ”ber goes further by affirming that Brazilian elites are so disgusted by the lower classes that they prefer to keep an authoritarian, aporophobic while losing money than allow for an increase in equality. This sentiment is clear in declarations such as those by Bolsonaroā€™s Minister of Finance, Paulo Guedes ā€” he in 2020 that the high prices of American dollars in relation to the Brazilian real were excellent because, during Lulaā€™s terms, ā€œ[It was] everyone going to Disneyland, maids going to Disneyland, a hell of a party.ā€ For the Brazilian elites, traveling abroad was and always will be a luxury exclusive to the higher classes.

The elitesā€™ detachment from the country and hatred of its population made them prone to accept or even ask for international interference in Brazilian economics and politics. Being such a resource-rich country, Brazil attracts the interest of transnational corporations and nations that seek to exploit those resources and take the profits , leaving behind . Such a mechanism became clearer during the Covid-19 pandemic, when wealth out of developing nations to the developed world, deepening the crisis in the former and leading to record profits in the latter.

International interference in Brazil with the ultimate goal of controlling its resources was not restricted to , and this has not stopped after , despite how it violates human rights. From of vast expanses of land to the countryā€™s water through grain exports, transnational corporations have been Brazilā€™s industrialization, resilience and independence, while paying to Brazilian companies and . Bribery has long been rampant among Brazilian companies, with key examples being construction leader and meatpacking giant . However, the judiciary did not have many obstacles to arrest and fine those responsible, and some of what was lost could be recovered. The problem is more insidious for Brazil when , which cannot be prosecuted in the country, are involved.

The most unfair expression of this trend is the political interference by international actors to force regime changes in Brazil. Itā€™s at its worst when democratically-elected governments do not allow to the developed world to continue, or the of a developed, industrialized country is threatened.

The 1964 coup dā€™Ć©tat to oust Goulart is to have been part of , with the excuse to eradicate communism in Latin America. However, scholars now believe that Goulartā€™s determination to the country, using nationalized oil royalties to cover costs and land reform to ensure food production for the workforce, may have been what actually triggered Americaā€™s will to depose the president. The organized the 1953 deposition of Iranian Prime Minister , after all, because he nationalized oil production there.

Similarly, America backed the 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, because of the nationā€™s economic independence through resource nationalization. Indeed, the CIA began violently removing developing nationsā€™ leaders when they began to foment true independence. This practice started in 1945 and only became less conspicuous after an American Senate in 1970, though more sophisticated actions continued to be used to force on all continents.

Brazil seemed to be juggling national and international interests well under Lulaā€™s first two terms. That changed in 2005, when the Petrobras oil company confirmed significant natural gas and oil deposits in the within Brazilā€™s territorial waters. Exploring these reserves no less than 2,000 m (over 6,500 ft) below the seafloor was expensive and complex, until Petrobras developed new technologies that cheapened the process and allowed profitable oil extraction in 2006. In 2009, Lula, with support from Congress, approved laws to give Petrobras priority for exploration. The laws also government shares of royalties coming from the fields, in case a private company won the bid to explore.

Although oil companies said they agreed with the move, oil giant Chevron promptly contacted JosĆ© Serra, Dilmaā€™s opponent in the 2014 presidential elections, to urge the opposition to change the rules in their favor. Serra promised to do so if he won, as shown in cables from the US Embassy. Dilma won the election and, by 2014, Petrobras was able to reach an even larger pre-salt oil deposit at 6,000 m (over 19,600 ft). This increased its yield fourfold, to over per day.

The 2014 elections saw Dilma re-elected to a second term. It also saw the most Congress and Senate since re-democratization, including the of Bolsonaro with almost 500,000 votes ā€” a ā€œdisquietingā€ record in that house. The massive success of right-wing and far-right candidates came after a series of protests in late 2012 and early 2013; these started as a student movement against high bus fare and were quickly co-opted by elite organizations such as patronal unions, bankers, religious media and agribusinessmen. A crucial element was the creation of , a multimedia campaign sponsored by the economic elite and international interests, which dealt the final blow to progressive politicians in all levels of government.

Scholars now discuss if the of anti-politics and far-right parties was gestated in these movements, which culminated with Dilmaā€™s impeachment, a loss of labor rights under Temer and Bolsonaroā€™s election in 2018. Documents leaked by revealed that heavy American was taking place during Dilmaā€™s term in 2013, and that America considered Brazil to be at risk of ā€œinstability.ā€ In fact, American were adamant to secure pre-salt oil deposits for themselves. Furthermore, Dilmaā€™s term in office became unsustainable in February 2014, when she declared that royalties from those reserves would be in Brazilian education and health projects. With Temer at the wheel, the country was set to reclaim its role as a source of international wealth.

Interference from foreign interests did not stop there, however. Land-grabbing by foreign powers, using caveats of the law that prohibit the of rural areas for investment by international agents, has affected land value and distribution. It has also influenced for centuries, to the of smallholders and family farmers who feed the country. With the help of friendly lawmakers, continue their deforestation to produce exports. The financialization of Brazilian agribusiness has become to secure foreign . The incompatibility of the Brazilian , foreign and is clear.

The historical formula that joins foreign interests, armed forces, religious leaders and land-grabbers has been established in Brazil for time enough to create a dangerous movement. They will use coordinated acts of violence to prevail. A strong movement for and redistribution is necessary to create the conditions to sort out territorial disputes and wealth evasion, and to curb against family farmers and indigenous peoples. Protecting the Amazon could be to Brazil in the long run, but agrarian elites and their do not seem to share the idea.

As with other issues Brazil has faced over its history, the country will perhaps need the initiative of the international market to stop these practices, as happened with the of slavery. The forces behind this rise of neofascism and the destruction it creates cannot be controlled by 1,500 firemen or 530 Brazilian lawmakers. It will need the cessation of international funding to its most notorious actors.
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SĆ£o Paulo, one of 10 states affected by smoke and soot from the Amazon by late August, found relief on Friday, August 23, when a cold front arrived. The temperature dropped by 12Ā°C, bringing some hope of cleaner air. That same morning, at 10:30 AM, IPAM (the Amazon Environmental Research Institute) satellites noticed an unusual rise in smoke columns. Within 90 minutes, the number of fire hotspots in the state had skyrocketed from 25 to 1,886, surpassing even the Amazon’s total. This sudden spike reflects a troubling year, as land clearing for agriculture drives most of the fires.

While authorities haven’t officially declared the fires to be arson, evidence strongly suggests it. Over half of the fires were in sugarcane fields, with 20% in pastures and 17% in other crops. Nearly 4,000 rural properties were affected across 144 municipalities, with 48 placed on high alert. SĆ£o Paulo saw a record number of fires this August ā€” seven times more than the same month in 2023. Experts donā€™t hesitate to attribute this to human activity. “Fires started in 50 municipalities at once. That means 99.9% of them were caused by people,” said National Civil Defense Secretary Wolnei Wolff. ā€œItā€™s unnatural to have so many fires break out in such a short time. Itā€™s like SĆ£o Pauloā€™s own ā€˜Fire Day,ā€™ā€ added Ane Alencar, IPAMā€™s Science Director.

Alencar compares August 23 to Brazilā€™s 2019 ā€œFire Day,ā€ when ranchers and land grabbers organized mass fires in the Amazon, burning 1,457 areas simultaneously. The fires prepared land for farming and cattle while also challenging environmental regulators under then-Minister Ricardo Salles. ā€œI monitor satellite images daily, and Iā€™ve rarely seen Brazil covered in smoke like this. Itā€™s almost impossible that these fires were natural,ā€ says Marcelo Seluchi, a climatologist at INPE. Alencar adds, ā€œFire remains a key tool in Brazilian agriculture, used to renew pastures and clear biomass from deforestation, making way for crops or grazing land.ā€

The fires tend to flare up between July and October, Brazilā€™s dry season, with 80% of fires occurring during this period. However, 2024 presents an extra threat. According to Brazilā€™s National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), the country is experiencing its longest drought in central regions in 44 years. Over 70% of municipalities are dealing with some level of drought.

The record-setting number of fires in SĆ£o Paulo is echoed in other states. Minas Gerais saw the highest fire activity in 13 years, while Mato Grosso experienced a 260% increase compared to 2023. Fires doubled in the Cerrado region. ā€œIā€™d say 95% of this is linked to human activity. Fires were once controlled for land preparation, but todayā€™s hotter and drier conditions make them harder to manage, even when not intended to spread,ā€ says JosĆ© Marengo, a CEMADEN researcher.

The Pantanal, one of the worldā€™s largest wetlands, saw a 3,316% rise in fires in August, with 3,758 fires compared to just 110 in 2023. In the Amazon, over 50,000 fires have been recorded since the start of the year. These fires send smoke across the country, creating a vast corridor of haze. During ā€œFire Dayā€ in 2019, SĆ£o Paulo turned dark in the middle of the afternoon as smoke blotted out the sun. In August 2024, the smoke tinted the skies shades of orange and red across Brazil.

Weak laws exacerbate Brazilā€™s situation

If investigations confirm the fires in SĆ£o Paulo were deliberate, the motives could range from defiance of environmental laws to political or economic messages. One thing is clear, though ā€” such acts continue because of the impunity surrounding them.

In August, Greenpeace Brazil released a report marking five years since the 2019 ā€œFire Day.ā€ They examined 478 properties linked to coordinated burns and found that 65% of the areas had been sanctioned for violations, but only 10% for illegal fires. Fines for these environmental crimes totaled around 1.3 billion reais ($232.2 million), yet only 41,000 reais ($7,300) had been paid. Some of these properties even received over 200 million reais ($35.7 million) in rural credit. Despite this, no one has been arrested in five years.

Spain offers a stark contrast. In 2006, after a rise in human-caused fires, Spain passed a law prohibiting the sale, reclassification, or use of burned land for 30 years. This led to a significant drop in arson driven by speculation. In Brazil, if banks stopped giving credit to rural properties involved in illegal burns, it could make a major difference.

Brazilā€™s laws on fires are weak. While burning is technically illegal in forests and native vegetation, there are exceptions. Fires can be authorized for ā€œspecific casesā€ by environmental agencies, and controlled burns for agriculture are allowed in ā€œexceptional cases.ā€ This loophole has resulted in 25% of the countryā€™s land ā€” an area larger than Mexico ā€” being destroyed by fire between 1985 and 2023. ā€œIn Brazil, we have two main laws for forest fires. The first punishes anyone who starts a fire with 2 to 4 years in prison, plus a fine, if itā€™s intentional, and 6 months to 1 year if itā€™s accidental,ā€ explains criminal lawyer Enzo Fachini. ā€œIf a fire is set in crops, pastures, or forests, the sentence can be 4 to 8 years.ā€

Despite these laws, little happens. “Weā€™ll assess the damage with rural unions and offer support. Agribusiness is crucial to the state,” said SĆ£o Paulo Governor TarcĆ­sio de Freitas on the second ā€œFire Day.ā€

The SĆ£o Paulo Department of Agriculture estimates losses at $1 billion reais ($178.6 million). Six people were arrested for suspected criminal actions, and two firefighters died fighting the flames. The smoke that blanketed much of the country led to a 60% rise in emergency medical visits due to poor air quality, mostly affecting children and the elderly.

Supreme Court Minister FlĆ”vio Dino ordered the Defense, Justice, and Environment Ministries to urgently mobilize resources to fight the fires in the Pantanal and Amazon. However, with a 78% rise in fires between January and August compared to 2023, the situation remains critical. ā€œWe havenā€™t even reached the worst part yet ā€” September,ā€ warned Alencar.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Out-of-Control Wildfires Have Brazil Gasping For Air appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

The Judiciary branch thus corrected the limbo that the Legislative branch created in 2006 when it established the National System of Public Policies on Drugs (). This law does not differentiate between users and traffickers. For 18 years, it was up to police officers and judges to differentiate, and punitive blunders like this were made chiefly in the lower courts. Few cases were lucky enough to go up to the Court of Justice or the Supreme Court.Ģż

That is, until the Supreme Court corrected the deficient law by decriminalizing the possession of up to 40 grams of narcotics for personal consumption. For the private use of narcotics, punishment takes place in the administrative sphere with warnings and educational measures. Trafficking remains criminal with a penalty of 5 to 20 years in prison. However, the National Congress has now started a campaign contradictory to the Supreme Court. Among parliamentarians, the Supreme Courtā€™s decision is seen as yet another attack on the Legislative by the Judiciary.

Congress sees this as a violation

The rapporteur in the House, deputy Ricardo Salles (PL-SP), criticized the Supreme Federal Courtā€™s (STF) vote, claiming the decision has violated the merits of Congress.  Salles has a point in his complaint. According to the principle of the separation of powers, the Supreme Court’s decision does not bind the Legislative Branch. This makes it possible for parliamentarians to pass legislation contrary to what was decided by the Court. On the other hand, there should be the understanding that the Supreme Court corrected a flaw in legislation rather than drafting legislation. The STF would have invaded the parliamentary arena if it had legalized the drug ā€“ which means passing a law that regulates and allows conduct ā€“ which did not happen. 

Senate president Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG) also criticized the STF’s decision. He repeated Salles almost ipsis litteris with the argument of “encroachment on the competence of the legislature.ā€ “I disagree with the Supreme Court,ā€ Pacheco said. ā€œThere is a legal, political and rational logic to this, which, in my opinion, cannot be broken by a judicial decision that singles out a certain narcotic substance, invading the technical competence of Anvisa and invading the legislative competence of the National Congress.ā€

President Luiz InĆ”cio Lula da Silva followed Pacheco’s reasoning: ” The Supreme Court doesn’t have to get involved in everything, it needs to take the most serious things about what concerns the Constitution, and become master of the situation, but it can’t take anything and start arguing, because then it starts to create a rivalry that is not good for democracy, nor for the Court, nor for the National Congress,” he said. “I think it’s noble to differentiate between the consumer, the user and the dealer. We need to have a decision on this, not in the Supreme Court, but in the National Congress, so that we can regulate it,” he added.

Congress is scrambling to regain control

The Supreme Court’s final deliberation has clearly created a conundrum for Congress. As a result, the House of Representatives is now debating the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution 45. Known as the Drugs PEC, the Senate created and approved the legislation last year. While the 2006 law criminalizes drugs, it does not stipulate the amount. The Drugs PEC establishes that the possession of of illegal drugs is a crime in an opinion diametrically opposed to that of the majority of Supreme Court justices. The public has since the Drugs PEC and called for new legislation. But after the well-deserved public beating he took when he promoted the urgent approval of the Anti-Abortion Bill, the Speaker of the House, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), would rather do anything than face a new Legislative agenda.

Even so, Lira ordered the creation of a special committee to deal with the PEC. According to the procedure, the parties must appoint representatives to the committee, which will have 34 members. The issue is unlikely to be dealt with until the October municipal elections in the House. However, Lira will have to do something sooner in order to please the large conservative caucus. He heavily depends on it to be reelected as the president of the House in February 2025. The committee has a minimum period of ten sessions to debate the PEC on Drugs before the issue is taken up in plenary. 

Relief for the prison system

The future application of the ruling will have consequences for the Brazilian prison system. The Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) found 42,631 out of the 852,000 inmates in the country fall under what the STF considers a violation of the principles of proportionality . The release of these prisoners would save the public coffers around R$1.3 billion, according to data from the Atlas of Violence 2024 drawn up by Ipea and the Brazilian Public Security Forum.Ģż According to the National Council of Justice, there are at least 6,345 suspended cases awaiting the outcome of the case.

The number of people out of jail and the savings would be even greater if the limit were 100 grams rather than the current limit of 25. “We estimate that the cost of imprisoning people who could be presumed to be drug users exceeds R$2 billion each year for the state, considering the combination of objective criteria in scenario B (100g of cannabis and 15g of cocaine),” the report states. The study also indicates that the resources currently channeled into public security would be better spent in the areas of education and health with prevention programs.

According to experts, the STF’s resolution should have a significant impact on the incarceration of people arrested or convicted of possessing small portions of drugs, especially marijuana. “The Supreme Court ruled that possession of drugs for personal use will remain an administrative offense. So it is possible to apply sanctions of an administrative nature, no longer criminal,” says Carlos Wehrs, a law professor at FGV Rio. For him, the decision was intended to tackle the systemic injustice that occurs when arrests are made, which almost always marginalize Black people and the poor. 

Data from Ipea reinforces this thesis: Black people are more likely to be arrested for drug trafficking in the case of police patrols. In a technical note published in October last year, Ipea analyzed the racial profile of defendants prosecuted for drug trafficking in state courts. It considered a sample of 5,121 defendants out of a total of 41,100 cases. These are cases whose sentences date from the first half of 2019. 

Of all the defendants, 46.2% are Black and 21.2% are white. “It is possible to affirm that the crimes of the 2006 Drug Law are responsible for the prosecution and incarceration of mostly black people,” the study points out. If we consider those arrested in the act, based on police approaches citing suspicious behavior, 51.3% are black and 20.3% white. In the case of flagrant arrests on public roads, 52.8% are black and 20% white. “This suggests that black people are more likely to be approached during overt street policing than white people,” says the note. The decriminalization of marijuana wonā€™t only be an economic save for the prison systems. It will also be a social ruling that tackles a prejudiced system.

Marijuana around the world

Brazil has much to learn about the decriminalization of marijuana from the wider world. According to the UN, Europe is the largest cannabis market in the world, since 23 countries have decriminalized both medicinal and recreational use. It is consumed by 8% of the European population. The global weed market is estimated at $61 billion USD, and projections indicate that the number should double by 2028. Brazil, since it decriminalized possession and not the drug itself, will not suffer an impact on the economy. However, it can still catch a glimpse of the effects the decision can have on its society and economy.

In Portugal, possession of up to 25 grams has not been a crime since 2001. The National Health Service pointed to a reduction in the prevalence of drug use and a greater awareness of the risks of marijuana. However, average use in Portugal is higher than in Europe: 9% compared to 8%, respectively. In Uruguay, where the entire cannabis chain was legalized in 2015, marijuana trafficking fell from 58% to 11%. Just as among the Portuguese, 14.6% of Uruguayans are users, an increase since 2011. Canada allowed recreational use in 2018, and issued a report in 2022 indicating a drop in consumption among teenagers. 

There are other examples in South America. Medical cannabis has been legal in the Argentinian provinces of Chubut and Santa Fe since 2016. In Chile, cultivation for medicinal purposes has been authorized for 10 years. The same goes forColombia since 2015. Ecuador allows possession of up to 10 grams for personal consumption.

In the USA, 23 of the 50 states allow recreational and medicinal use. As everything becomes a source of revenue there, the legal cannabis market was valued last year at between $27 billion USD and $30 billion USD. Growth is expected to reach 50% by the end of 2025.

Brazil has something to learn from these countries. From the prison systems to recreational use, decriminalizing marijuana will benefit the social and economic aspects of the country. However, that is only part of it. Until Congress and the STF can work together, Brazilians will continue to face a prejudiced system.

Postscript: How the Supreme Court voted

In favor

Gilmar Mendes

“To address the issue in the context of public health and not public security.”

Rosa Weber

“Chemical dependency and drug use are issues within the scope of public health and social reintegration policies.”

Alexandre de Moraes

“People who used to be classified as users are now classified as petty traffickers, who carry a longer sentence. There has been an increase in incarceration.”

LuĆ­s Roberto Barroso

“What we want is to avoid discrimination between rich and poor, between whites and blacks.”

Edson Fachin

“The addict is a victim and not a germinal criminal. The addicted user should be treated as a patient.”

Dias Toffoli

“I am convinced that treating the user as a drug addict is not the best public policy.”

CĆ”rmen LĆŗcia

“There is (today) unequal treatment by the state itself, which is obliged by the Constitution to promote equality.”

Against

Cristiano Zanin

“The decriminalization, even if partial, of drugs could contribute even more to the worsening of this health problem.”

Luiz Fux

“We are not elected judges. Brazil does not have a government of judges. In a democratic state, the highest body is Parliament.”

AndrƩ MendonƧa

“The legislator defined that carrying drugs is a crime. Turning this into an administrative offense is going beyond the will of the legislator.”

Kassio Nunes Marques

“The law today has an inhibitory factor. Brazilian society needs instruments to defend itself.”

And the heads of the government

Arthur Lira, President of Congress

“I don’t have an opinion. You don’t give an opinion on judicial decisions, you either appeal or you legislate. It’s not my job to comment on STF decisions.”

Rodrigo Pacheco, President of the Senate

“I disagree with the Supreme Court. (The decision) invades the legislative competence of the National Congress.”

Luiz InƔcio Lula da Silva, President

“It’s noble to differentiate between consumers, users and traffickers. A decision is needed, but not in the Supreme Court, it could be in the National Congress.”

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post For the First Time, Brazil Challenges Limited Marijuana Law appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Related Reading

The Secrets Behind Brazilā€™s Military and the January 8 Insurrection

It is no secret that Bolsonaro had his hand in criminal factions. In fact, his to the infamous Office of Crime , headed by Adriano da NĆ³brega, are still under . It is also no secret that Bolsonaro was a staunch supporter of violent militia. In a to the National Congress in 2003, he defended the idea that ā€œdeath squadsā€ were a perfect solution for Rio de Janeiroā€™s public security crisis. He had consistently used his position as a politician to support death squads and medals and jobs among well-known militia members, especially from Rio.

In 2008, Bolsonaro intended to find a way to militias as a part of the governmental apparatus against crime. It is clear that he bolstered the relation between paramilitary groups and organized crime. The Brazilian state has become unstable due to this rise in war as . Unfortunately, the ignorance did not start with him. The problem runs much deeper.

How criminal groups have become Rioā€™s political elite

In the state of Rio, paramilitary death squads were and ordered by army generals and police commanders to eliminate ā€œundesirables.ā€ This includes journalists, academics and those in the military who disagree with the regime. In fact, a new book about NĆ³brega reveals that three Rio de Janeiro politicians were by Brazilā€™s Office of Crime. Death squads are also responsible for the development of torture techniques and methods to dispose of bodies.

These infamous paramilitary groups first appeared in the late . They didnā€™t rise to power until the 1960s, when a Ku Klux Klan-inspired became legal and official after a military coup in 1964. Composed of low-ranking, retired and expelled military personnel, these militias acted much like the . They would sell ā€œprotectionā€ for businesses in violent, low-income communities while simultaneously acting as guns-for-hire to the political and economic elites.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these militias took of expanding favelas ā€” Brazilian slums ā€” in Rio and SĆ£o Paulo, disputing power with drugs and weapons. These groups often with criminal organizations. In some cases, paramilitaries would completely them. Their chokehold over such as Rio das Pedras went from offering protection and assassinations to controlling basic services and transit.

By the 1990s, militias had shifted their focus to . Militia members exchanged safety for votes and quickly became a large within both state and federal houses of representatives. The war over territories grew exponentially during this decade. The two largest , Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), gathered support from criminal organizations across the country. The subsequent conflict led to an exponential in the number of casualties and an escalation in weaponry. Militias into the territories under the guise of arresting or killing faction commanders. They were seen as agents of the state. Instead of ending the criminal activities, the militias became the kingpins of organized crime.

During the neoliberal governments of Fernando Collor de Melo and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which lasted from 1990 to 1992 and 1995 to 2003, respectively, organized crime and militias their distinction. The criminal activities of the militias brought on an enormous cash flow, which created a need to establish money laundering schemes. This was especially important as many militia members were, at this point, starting political careers that drew the eyes of the .

Business such as , motorcycle companies, shops and restaurants were all used by militias as laundering hubs. Many of these schemes were caught by the due to discrepancies in their books. However, one scheme in particular remains prevalent today: the phenomenon of narco-Pentecostalism.

Rioā€™s state religions are a political force

Around this time, a religious revolution was taking place. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has held a strong majority in Brazil. The Roman Catholic religion its priests to hold political offices. From the 1970s on, however, religion no longer remained separate from Brazilian politics. Neo-Pentecostal megachurches preaching the American-inspired started to spread their own political messages all over the country. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God () founded by bishop Edir Macedo became the most infamous of these religious-political sects. 

Macedo is a controversial character. He gave blatant political speeches in his temples, placed many of his in politics and funded political parties and candidates. Accused of charlatanism, money laundering and other crimes, Macedo was in 1992. By that time, he had already gained influential political power and escaped justice.

Macedoā€™s political power came from his absolute control over Brazilian media.  In 1989, Macedo anonymously put up a bid to purchase the television network for 45 million reais. He did this despite knowing that the transfer of broadcasting rights to the head of a multimillionaire church could be challenged by Article 19 of the 1988 Constitution. The 1988 Constitution established Brazil as a secular country, and clearly forbade any governmental connection to religious institutions on its . As all media in Brazil are public concessions, the article could be interpreted as a to the purchase of radio, television and printed media by churches. 

Despite the illegality, the network quickly gathered a significantly large audience. Macedo preached that his followers would be awarded riches in life only if they contributed to his church. Under the government of Itamar Franco, in 1993, Macedo managed to get a allowing him to become the sole owner of Record Group, which also included many radio stations. Macedo amassed extensive political power as a result of this approval from the federal government. The purchase was only formally in 2005.

By the end of the century, tax-exempt churches of various denominations followed Macedoā€™s lead and combined political messages with their religious ones. The Evangelical Parliamentary Front in the Brazilian Congress and Senate already 189 members, representing 80% of political parties. Half of those parties belong to neo-Pentecostal denominations.

Religions are also a criminal force

Neo-Pentecostal parties didnā€™t restrain themselves to the legal sector of politics, however. Many old kingpins of favelas, of African-derived religions, became of neo-Pentecostals under the guise of a fight against forces. With the growth of Neo-Pentecostal churches, African-derived religious temples and priests started suffering . Many were even from their homes as militias affiliated themselves to intolerant denominations.

The intolerance is a result of a centuries-old prejudice that is intermingled with racism since . Rioā€™s favelas had been historically populated by members of religions. Descendants of enslaved African peoples were left penniless and homeless after the of slavery in 1888, and moved to large port cities such as Rio to look for work. Historically-entrenched racism drives neo-Pentecostal affiliated militias to target the African diaspora in favelas heavily.

As recently as 2021, of religious intolerance attacks in Rio de Janeiro were aimed at African religions, and half of African-derived religious houses each suffered up to between 2020 and 2022. Their removal ā€” either by threats or assassinations ā€” quickly opened power vacuums that were promptly occupied by evangelical criminals. The new neo-Pentecostal kingpins pushed the population to vote for their candidates.

The rapid growth of the neo-Pentecostal denominations in favelas gave militias and organized crime a way to illegal earnings. As all churches are in Brazil, they can declare any amount of money they receive as tithes. Churches are able to invest in those earnings, legitimate or not, without legal obstacles. Thus, , and are tightly connected with neo-Pentecostal churches, as they can move money through temples without raising concerns from criminal investigators. The connection between these groups is illustrated by the dangerous campaign by the UCKG to the police force throughout Brazil. The mixing of religious indoctrination and security forces has been deemed ā€œā€ by some authors.

As a consequence of this tight-knit partnership, Brazil developed the very peculiar of neo-Pentecostal-narco-militias, or . The phenomenon quickly took over large swaths of territory in Brazilā€™s most important cities. Consequently, narco-Pentecostalism has become influential in politics, business and media. In certain localities, like the city of Rio and the states of SĆ£o Paulo and Minas Gerais, political candidates will not be unless they have the support of these groups. The political sector has been hijacked by crime.

The relationship between crime and politics has damaged Rio

Rio has witnessed between police forces, militias and organized crime for decades, especially in the metropolitan area. Since 1992, armed forces have been called upon many times to with Rioā€™s security issues. Yet it seemed like they could never successfully solve the problem of rampant crime. In fact, scholars believe many of these attempts ā€” such as the creation of Pacifying Police Units () in 2007 ā€” gave definite control over large territories to the militias.

In the past, the called-upon armed forces remained under state control. The 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution guarantees to Brazilian states, making them responsible for their own . There are instruments, however, that allow the federal government to intervene in states under certain circumstances. These conditions are established in . Operations using armed forces to restore order in states are called ā€œProvision of Law and Orderā€ (in Portuguese, Garantia da Lei e da Ordem, or ā€œ “Ē±č±š°ł²¹³Ł¾±“Ē²Ō²õā€).

It is important to emphasize that the application of GLO operations can only be triggered in circumstances, and exclusively under presidential order. However, it seemed like former Brazilian President Michel Temer chose to ignore the ā€œexceptional circumstancesā€ stipulation when he ordered the 2018 federal intervention into Rio.  

After the against former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, her right-wing vice-president Michel Temer took office. In his 2020 autobiographical , he wrote how the armed forces commanders disapproved of Dilmaā€™s attempt to modernize the syllabuses of military academies. A move to topple Dilma was welcome, Temer explained, and thus Dilma was out of the way on August 31, 2016. Temer later confirmed that he had several ā€œconversationsā€ with such as General Eduardo Villas-BĆ“as and General SĆ©rgio Etchegoyen ā€” the latter of whom was later rewarded with command of the Institutional Security Bureau (in Portuguese, Gabinete de SeguranƧa Institucional da PresidĆŖncia da RepĆŗblica, or GSI) ā€” from 2015 to 2016.

Temer promptly gave the military complete control over areas of the government. He ensured his austere did not affect the armed forces. In October 2017, Temer even signed a law military personnel working on a GLO operation from being taken to a civilian court in case of civilian deaths. This move virtually gave the armed forces free rein ā€” including their most feared auxiliary branch, the Military Police ā€” to kill with absolute impunity in case of military intervention.

The combination of Temerā€™s leniency toward the military and Rioā€™s neo-Pentecostal mayor proved fatal to Rioā€™s citizens. In January 2017, Marcel Crivella, nephew of Macedo, finally took office as mayor. He had received almost 60% of the cityā€™s votes ā€” over 1.7 million people ā€” in the second round against left-wing lawmaker . Freixo had been a sworn of militias for more than a decade. As a provocation, Crivellaā€™s last campaign rally was held in a tightly-controlled militia , as militia members had their support in his bid against Freixo. 

Any federal move in the city could only proceed with the support of the stateā€™s capital mayor, and Crivella was more than happy to provide that support. Thus, the state of Rio went under in February 2018. was applied due to ā€œgrave danger to public order,ā€ despite the fact that the crisis was connected more to the in public finances than any particular violent act. In fact, an increase of in the state, not the in poorer communities, became an excuse to remove the acting governorā€™s powers. This was the a GLO instrument took place since re-democratization.

Armed platoons invaded citizenā€™s houses and took over territories, yet militia-controlled areas. Community residents denounced soldiers and police agents for , and innocent civilians. Scholars to the intervention as a war against the poor. 95% of the operations happened in low-income communities, using , and shoot-outs as tools.

In the first months of the GLO, police killings increased while no reduction larger than 20% in crime was recorded. The most notorious violence of that period was the of Marielle Franco, Rioā€™s councilwoman. She had bravely denounced the intervention and brutal police tactics and pointed out the between state and militias. This defiance cost Franco her life.

Overall, the operation was highly ineffective. Anthropologist Jacqueline Muniz, a specialist on public security, described the overtake as ā€œthe economic policy of fear productionā€ from an authoritarian regime based on public unsafety. Many warned, even before the intervention, that strangling Rioā€™s poor communities would not end the problem. Militias still held complete in 15 states. The ten-month intervention actually militias, as they counted on the well-armed reinforcements sent for the GLO. It is obvious that militia members, armed forces and politicians share an relationship.

Sociologist JosĆ© ClĆ”udio Souza Alves of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro this when he stated that Rioā€™s criminal militias are not a State-like power, but are the State. The strengthening and spread of militias as a result of the intervention was also in Congress, where representatives denounced the operationā€™s outcomes.

Even before the end of the intervention, residents, police officers and soldiers agreed that the whole was ā€œineffective and full of lies.ā€ Those involved in the atrocities got off . did not push forward any procedures, either.

In the end, Temerā€™s intervention in Rio was nothing more than a mere taste of a . Yet violence and crime continued even after the intervention ended in December 2018.

Bolsonaro was already elected and awaiting office when the intervention ended. Rather than withdrawing the military, Bolsonaro sent troops to to ā€œimpose orderā€ in the state. He used the army for other interventions, such as the in the Federal District and rescue efforts after natural disasters in and the . He also gun laws and removed Brazilian troops from the UN .

Bolsonaroā€™s term also saw the continued growth of at the hands of state agents. In April 2019, armed forces were still working in the streets of Rio. Musician Evandro Rosa was returning home with his family when his car was ā€œmistakenlyā€ with over 80 bullets fired by an Army platoon doing police duty. 

Bolsonaro became a very convenient ā€” and ā€” scapegoat for the issues following the intervention. However, while it is true that his policies caused great harm, the problem goes deeper than bad politics. Federal military and violent militias are close cousins. Criminal organizations have found comfortable seats in the government. In the end, Michel Temerā€™s intervention in Rio de Janeiro was nothing but an amuse-bouche of a in the country. The intervention exacerbated that which Brazilian citizens have fought against for decades: far-right politicians have allowed for military police to gain a stronghold on federal law-making instances. 

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Crime, Churches and Corruption: The Case Behind Rioā€™s Surging Violence appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

These questions followed me since I began researching for my Poder Suave ā€” Soft Power, launched in Brazil in 2017. That following year, my book was a finalist in the Jabuti Awards, the most important literary award in Latin America under the creative economy category, which recognizes artistic contributions to economic growth. I focused my research on cultural soft power ā€” power that is seductive and that draws in viewers worldwide. Some examples include Hollywood and Bollywood movies, French fashion, Russian ballet, the British Invasion of the 1960s (bands like the Beatles) and Brazilian bossa nova, Carnaval and telenovelas.

A general conclusion from my research shows that what society deems as desirable, such as believing one actor is persuasive or buying into certain fashion choices, is built upon accepted trends. With corporate and governmental support, these manifestations of ā€œsoft powerā€ can reach new heights ā€” like how Russia used ballet as a diplomatic tool during the Soviet era. Cultural influence is not limited to wealthy countries. Indian film and Brazilian music, for example, both reach wide international audiences.

Via the author.

However, the importance of trends, while real, did not satisfy my curiosity. I pondered over why some underprivileged creatives emerge onto the global stage, whereas other artists never reach their potential, despite having numerous advantages. What is the secret behind their success or failure?

I investigated this unsolved mystery in my doctoral thesis on socio-cultural progress with the help of the Capes Foundation Scholarship (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education). After five years of research, my thesis and newest book Poder Cultural finally provides the answers.

First, cultural power is the ability to universally influence people into thinking a movie, work of art or related product is good. Cultural power can move other countriesā€™ economies, shape consumer habits and create new industries. Taylor Swiftā€™s Eras Tour, for instance, contributed $4.3 billion to the US GDP, to Bloomberg Economics. The tour largely boosted the hospitality industry, including hotels, local businesses and tourism revenues.

Even writers go through an audiovisual medium, such as movies, TV shows, telenovelas or social media, to make their books relevant. was an unknown writer until her video went viral on TikTok and promoted Shadow Work Journal to a bestseller.

Relevant politics in cultural power

Research has proven that artists with culturally relevant attitudes and products are more likely to become powerful. Emerald Fennel had never won an award as an actress, writer or director until her movie Promising Young Woman won the 2020 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Its violence, not unlike films such as First Blood, spoke to young media consumers who are sensitive to themes of female oppression and Eurocentrism.

Another example is Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, who is better known in India than Brad Pitt. How is that possible? Khan is an undoubtedly attractive man. This fact alone gets him attention in the movie industry. In the beginning, Khan, like Pitt, used his good looks to obtain roles, even cheap flicks that would only be watched once. After ascending to stardom, Khan was able to reinvent his image by selecting roles with more cultural relevance. Take Khan’s performance as the alcoholic in Devdas (2002), which brought awareness to the struggles of addiction. 

Both Khan and Pitt support international causes that positively shape their images: Pitt is involved with One Campaign, which fights against AIDS and poverty in poor countries; Khan is the ambassador of Pulse Polio, the National AIDS Control Organization and the Make-a-Wish Foundation in India. However, Khan has one notable advantage over his competitor. He has a greater command over social media, which he uses to mobilize his appeal to millions. Khan posts about his children and his long marriage to Gauri Chibber. His 42 million followers on Facebook, 30 million on Instagram and 42 million on Twitter eat up his family narrative. Days after his interview with David Letterman on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the television host named him ā€œthe greatest star of the world.ā€

Major components of disproportionate recognition

Both stars and politicians use social media to increase their power. In the music world, video clips are the most important audiovisual tool for singers to achieve cultural strength. Musicians Dua Lipa and Anitta must know this well. Their power extrapolates to music. In 2020, Dua Lipa posted a video for her 46 million followers on Instagram, criticizing the way the Israeli Defense Forces treat Palestinians. Israeli NGO Im Tirtzu opened a petition demanding that Dua Lipaā€™s songs be banned from the Israeli army radio, the most popular in the country, although her request was not granted. Likewise, Brazilian, far-right, former president Jair Bolsonaro criticized Anitta on his social media for supporting the legalization of marijuana. Bolsonaro also used this platform to denounce former candidate and then-elected president Lula in the 2022 election over her views on the use of the Brazilian flag. 

Dua Lipa and Anittaā€™s content share similarities regarding aesthetics, techniques and lyrics. However, what makes Dua Lipa more effective, despite Anitta launching twice as many videos, is another crucial aspect for cultural power: language. Dua Lipa has always sung in the most popular language in the world, English, which helped close publicity contracts for the singer.  She also developed her career in one of the worldā€™s fashion capitals, London. Located outside any ā€œEnglish centers,” Anitta invested in more English videos, like ā€œGirl from Rio,” ā€œDowntown,” ā€œFaking Love,” and ā€œBoys Donā€™t Cryā€ to be more widely noticed.

Are these aspects to obtain cultural power fair? Definitely not. Because of these constraints, many culturally significant artists are ignored.  Helena Solberg, for instance, was the only female director from Cinema Novo, the Brazilian New Cinema movement from the 1960ā€™s and the most important film movement of the southern hemisphere. Her movies discussed the roots of the underdevelopment situation in Latin America. She lived from 1971 to 1990 in the US and gained recognition with movies like The Brazilian Connection (1983), Home of the Brave (1986) and Carmen Miranda ā€” Bananas is My Business (1994).  However, none of her films infiltrated Hollywood since they were independent productions, giving her much less cultural power than expected. 

Another example of disproportionate, language-biased representation is the career of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye.  She was the mother of African cinema and the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film, Kaddu Beykat, released in 1975. Her movies were essential to understand the lives of women in African tribes, a genre which had not been explored. Yet, she was never given global recognition since her films were in languages like Serer and Wolof, African dialects that remain absent from Google. Fayeā€™s death in 2024 was mostly ignored by major news channels and cultural magazines in the Western world. The case of Safi Faye proves that what is available to Western viewers is very much regulated by Eurocentric cultural tastes.

The purpose of researching Poder Cultural was not only to understand the unspoken rules in achieving stardom, but mainly to show how the dice are rolled in arts and entertainment industries across countries of differing wealth and privilege. Exposing inequality and analyzing success are the most important steps to change the rules of the game and, therefore, make cultural power more accessible to all. 

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post What Gives an Artist Profitable Cultural Power in the World? appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

But a huge positive development has occurred: A network of spontaneous solidarity has arisen in Brazilā€™s other 25 states and the Federal District. They have formed the largest mobilization of donations and volunteerism in the countryā€™s history. In the month since the floods began, the Civil Defense has 2,000 tons of donations. The Services for the Underserved (S:US) volunteer bank has registered 70,000 records. These numbers showcase the virtuous circle of aid that has united the country.

Brazilians have proven to be generous in serious situations before. In the world solidarity ranking, the World Giving Index (2022), the country 18th out of 119 nations for their contributions to helping strangers, donating money and volunteering. The figure reflected a time when the world was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, a calamity that severely impacted Brazil. In the next year, 2023, political uncertainty and the populationā€™s impoverishment majorly reduced the countryā€™s giving; it to 89th place in the index.

ā€œThis contributed to a decrease in the populationā€™s participation in donations,ā€ said Paula Iabiani, CEO of Integrated Disbursement and Information System (IDIS). Her company represents the ranking. At the current rate of collaboration in recent days, it is likely that the country will return to the top positions in 2024.

ā€œWe are being profoundly impacted by the experiences of other human beings. Cognitive and also emotional impact, linked to our ability to let ourselves be sensitized by what others experience. It touches on our affections and unconscious identifications. This is the primordial impulse for solidarity action,ā€ psychoanalyst Maria Homem said.

As Brazilian President Luiz InĆ”cio Lula da Silva on X, this is the ā€œlargest movement of donations recorded in the historyā€ of Brazil. Further, the chain that formed is multidisciplinary and goes beyond the expected crisis professionals: doctors, firefighters, social workers and health professionals.

NGOs and volunteers show solidarity

One unexpected resource is SOS Rio Grande do Sul. This connects and updates the needs and availability of over 400 shelters across the state. A total of 1,300 volunteers work to meet the flood victimsā€™ demands. They update the day-to-day life of the shelters, provide care for the children and collect and distribute supplies.

ā€œThe first few days were focused on rescues. But everything changes very quickly,ā€ said Pedro Schanzer, a founder of the Porto Alegre-based operation. ā€œI was putting donations in trucks, rescuing people in the floods, until I noticed that at each point I arrived, the desperation was so great that there was no single coordination. We set up a team that has adapted our actions according to the needs of each day.ā€

For the roughly 100,000 children displaced by the floods, the treatment must be different. Many have not only lost their homes, but cherished belongings as well, like toys and pets. World Vision Brazil, a child care non-governmental (NGO) based in SĆ£o Paulo, has helped by putting together 15,000 ā€œtenderness kits.ā€ These kits aim to restore childrenā€™s emotional well-being by stimulating them with activities. They include a toy, coloring books, colored pencils and crayons, educational games, modeling clay, and snacks. The organization has also assembled food baskets, hygiene kits and basic necessities.

ā€œChildren are one of the most vulnerable groups in the midst of crises, and often have no idea of the magnitude of the events they are experiencing. They find themselves away from home, family and friends, and are likely to be psychologically impacted by this crisis,ā€ Thiago Crucciti, director of World Vision Brazil. ā€œWithout an appropriate intervention, these events could leave lasting scars. We must respond now to ensure that they get the support they desperately need.ā€

Brazilians created another group to provide care for a specific minority. In the Cristo Redentor neighborhood of Rio Grande do Sul, the Solidarity Kitchen prepares meals in a shelter for pregnant and postpartum women. The volunteers receive donations, buy supplies, assemble menus and organize the space. ā€œWe work with donations of food or by Pix [],ā€ said founder and publicist KakĆ” Cerutti.

In the city of Porto Alegre, the Homeless Workers Movement (), the Movement of People Affected by Dams () and Popular Youth collaboratively run the Azenha Solidarity Kitchen. Every day, 60 volunteers use 22 stoves to prepare and distribute around 3,000 meals.

Solidarity transcends geographical boundaries and socioeconomic conditions. The Rio-founded Central ƚnica das Favelas () organization proves it; it promotes integration and social inclusion in Brazilian communities, as well as 15 other countries. It mobilized a humanitarian operation that in two weeks 20,000 cleaning kits; 25,000 personal hygiene kits; 20,000 liters of water; five carts of food; 30,000 bath kits and 30,000 mattresses.

Individuals can make a difference, too. Firefighter Robinson Luiz Jobim Rosa did an extraordinary service; while his own house was flooded in SĆ£o Leopoldo, he evacuated 200 people stranded at the Canoas Emergency Hospital. ā€œSaving people in their time of need and distress is part of our routine. I keep working because thatā€™s our mission,ā€ he said.

Jobim Rosa still doesnā€™t know how heā€™ll recover from the floods. Fortunately, his three children and their mother were elsewhere when the water reached their home. ā€œThe only one at home at the time was my dog, who was rescued by a neighbor,ā€ he mentioned.

A similar story involved police officer Roberto Kaminski in Lajeado. When he saw the water rushing into his apartment on the second floor, he went to rescue an elderly couple on the third floor. With the help of a neighbor, he took what he could carry to two empty apartments on the fourth floor. ā€œI must have climbed about 150 times. By the end, I was exhausted. I didnā€™t manage to rescue everything I wanted in time,ā€ he explained.

In Santa Cruz do Sul, police officer Everton Toillier prioritized saving items belonging to his one-year-old daughter. When he heard a neighborā€™s call for help, he immediately swam out and rescued a lady who was clinging to a tree, and saved her dog as well. ā€œI managed to get them both to a boat and went back home to try and rescue my daughterā€™s belongings,ā€ he stated.

Many helpful volunteers started out with one mission and ended up on another, like Edu Leporo, founder of the NGO Moradores de Rua e Seus CĆ£es (). Based in SĆ£o Paulo, the photographer and activist traveled to the South to assist animals in the floods. ā€œYou see whole families on the streets, not knowing where to go. The problem will get worse when the water recedes and people want to go back to their homes and start again,ā€ he stated. ā€œWe went ahead: We bought a trailer, a truck, squeegees, brooms, shovels, detergent, disinfectant and floor cloths to help.ā€

In Porto Alegre, Leporo relies on the NGOā€™s volunteer veterinarian Audrei de Oliveira Souza. The assistance forces rescued 11,500 animals by midweek, including the symbol of the resistance: a horse named . ā€œThe rescue team is exhausted, tired and cold. Some are getting sick. But they remain tireless in their search for human and animal survivors,ā€ Leporo described.

Christian Kristensen, the coordinator of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS) Center for Studies and Research into Trauma and Stress, helped the rescuers. He identified several cases of burnout ā€” the physical and emotional exhaustion caused by work ā€” among them. ā€œSome because theyā€™ve been overworked, even physically, others because of the emotional overload in the face of so much suffering. Even compassion fatigue, a term we use for this moment,ā€ he explained.

Artists unite to help

Technological resources have helped mitigate the catastrophe. ā€œHow can the hyperconnection of mobility and communication be used favorably? How can we solve global problems with specific regional effects?ā€ Homem asked. ā€œThe awareness that we are one people and one species mobilizes us in an unprecedented way.ā€

Artists and public figures are some of the most adept at navigating networks and platforms. In the disasterā€™s first days, Lucas Silveira, lead singer of the Brazilian band Fresno, led his colleagues in a solidarity concert. He was born in °ä±š²¹°łĆ” but raised in Porto Alegre, so this tragedy is personal to him. He raised 2.5 million reais ($460,000) in just a few hours.

ā€œWhatā€™s happening is something of unprecedented proportions. I saw my neighborhood on TV and a guy passing in front of my house in a boat. Itā€™s mind-boggling,ā€ Silveira stated, considering the next steps. ā€œThereā€™s a task force thatā€™s going to get thousands of volunteers to clean the houses. Weā€™ve bought more than a hundred pressure washers at cost, which will be very useful for cleaning up when the water recedes.ā€

Other big names in music have announced plans to help. On July 7 and 9, ChitĆ£ozinho & XororĆ³, ZezĆ© Di Camargo & Luciano and Leonardo & LuĆ­sa Sonza will host their classes at Allianz Parque in SĆ£o Paulo. The proceeds will be put toward flood damage repair. ā€œHelping is urgent and meeting basic needs is the least we need right now. Today, regardless of where we are, we want to save the South,ā€ Sonza said.

Another benefit was held on May 22 at the Vivo Rio venue in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It brought together singers Paula Toller, Ney Matogrosso, RogĆ©rio Flausino, Milton Guedes, Fernanda Abreu, LĆ©o Jaime and Kleiton & Kledir, as well as the rock band BarĆ£o Vermelho.

During the first week of rain, comedian and presenter FĆ”bio Porchat started a collection campaign. He gathered tons of drinking water, bed and bath linen and warm clothes to distribute in the South. ā€œDonating should be the norm, not the exception,ā€ he told . ā€œItā€™s worth donating time, money, image, whatever. If we want a functioning community, we need to do our bit to help others.ā€

The mobilization to help the Brazilian South has crossed borders and reached some of the worldā€™s lead artists. BeyoncĆ©ā€™s foundation BeyGOOD, which some Brazilian initiatives, has stepped up its work to encourage collaboration. The band Metallica $100,000 (about 514,000 reais) to the victims. The band Guns Nā€™ Roses has been Brazil Foundā€™s Light Alliance Emergency Fund for donations.

The Brazilian government plans a solutionĢż

During the floodsā€™ second week, the people of Rio Grande do Sul received good news from the Brazilian capital of BrasĆ­lia. On his third visit to Porto Alegre, Lula announced the of the Ministry to Support the Reconstruction of Rio Grande do Sul. It will be headed by Paulo Pimenta, who was the Minister of the Social Communication Secretariat. The ministryā€™s mission will be to define the stateā€™s reconstruction plan, distribute tasks to other ministries and demand results.

The minister of the Civil House, Rui Costa, explained that the Brazilian government will expand the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (ā€œMy Home, My Lifeā€) ā€” which provides a swath of affordable housing units to Brazilians ā€” in the affected cities with the purchase of properties. The government will also direct properties that were set to be auctioned by the Caixa and Banco do Brasil banks to replace those that the floods destroy.

The National Confederation of Municipalities () estimates that 102,000 homes were affected by the floods: 93,000 damaged and 9,000 destroyed. Many families will need help to buy basic goods, such as a stove, fridge and bed. To this end, the government proposes financial aid of 5,000 reais ($920) for 100,000 families. The homeless who lost their income in the floods are to be included in the income transfer program, with average monthly aid of 672 reais ($123).

The stateā€™s debt to the federal government has been suspended for three years, which will generate savings of 23 billion reais ($4.2 billion), including monthly payments and interest for the period. The Porto Alegre city government plans to build a temporary city for homeless families close to the city center. Located in the Porto Seco neighborhood, it will have capacity for 10,000 people. It will include accommodations, a communal kitchen, toilets, garbage collection and a leisure area to receive people assisted in the current shelters. Canoas, GuaĆ­ba and SĆ£o Leopoldo will receive similar facilities.

The initiative draws inspiration from a recovery that helped the US state of Louisiana recover from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After the hurricane, the project managers hired consulting Alvarez & Marsal, which specializes in the reconstruction of damage caused by extreme events, to draw up an assistance plan. Former president Dilma Rousseff, who is from Minas Gerais but built her political career in Rio Grande do Sul, is currently in charge of the New Development Bank, known as the . She opened a 5.75-billion-real (over $1.1 billion) funding line for the stateā€™s reconstruction work.

Throughout the week, the plenary of the Federal Senate fast-tracked the approval of a bill that creates guidelines for forming climate change adaptation plans. The goal is to adopt measures to reduce environmental, social and economic vulnerability in episodes of climate upheaval. ā€œIn addition to actions and public policies that affect real life, we need to improve the mental health support network, because we are discovering that psychic life is just as important and can have just as many effects on reality as concrete life,ā€ Homem recalled. ā€œSolidarity is the most important good at this time and should be deepened if we want a fairer, more developed and interesting country.ā€

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Great Compassion Shines in Brazil Following Its Horrific Floods appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

There have been other occasions where re-democratization came within reach. In 2002, the massive demonstrations and failed brought it closer, as well as the oil and recall referendum that followed. Then in 2013, Henrique Capriles Radonski lost the presidential election by a slim margin ā€” allegedly, a number of caused this loss. Finally, in 2015, the government lost the National Assembly and the opposition coalition obtained a two-thirds majority, making it even more possible. All those cases brought opportunities for a transition.

But re-democratization was deterred by four main factors. The first was timing. In 2002-2003, the had momentum on its side, with a domestic followership majority and the beginning of the ā€” Latin Americaā€™s turn to left-wing governments. In 2015, while internal support had dwindled, the government still had strong organization, authority and control of other levers of power (judiciary, executive). Moreover, the opposition squandered the political capital gained.

The second factor was oil. During the three prior moments, high oil rents were crucial to delivering social goods: primary health care, expansion of government jobs and a long list of subsidies. The third was internal cohesion. In the prior situations, internal cohesion and strength were solid despite the purges of high-level bureaucrats such as Jorge Giordani and Rafael RamĆ­rez. The fourth was the opposition misreading the need to negotiate and come to a minimum understanding with the reality of forces ā€” followers of ChĆ”vez and his ideology ā€” on the ground. In all cases, there was little disposition on the part of the opposition to recognize the inevitable weight of Chavismo in the countryā€™s political life despite the brutal power asymmetry between the two sides.

This time, however, the circumstances for re-democratization are stronger. There has been economic collapse. ChĆ”vez, the founder of his self-proclaimed ā€œSocialism of the 21st Century,ā€ died in 2013. His successor, Maduro, inherited a very sick economy. Despite having experienced the largest windfall of oil revenues in its history, the economy collapsed due to the destruction of the state-owned PetrĆ³leos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA) oil company. Corruption ran amok, costing an estimated $68-350 trillion. Mismanagement of the economy and most state activities ā€” like electricity and water provision, and widespread nationalizations ā€” also contributed.

This all led to hyperinflation and a drastic drop in peopleā€™s access to food and medicine. This brought on a complex humanitarian crisis; most Venezuelans lost their normal livelihoods and started voting with their feet, abandoning the country in droves. Since around 2015, approximately 7 million additional Venezuelans have fled the country. Many have walked to neighboring countries like Colombia and Ecuador in freezing temperatures. Others have traveled the jungle and swampy region of the Darien between Colombia and Panama, before continuing their difficult trek to the United States Southern border.

Additionally, the nature of the regime has from a hybrid regime to an open dictatorship. This fundmental change brought many terrible consequences: the persecution and banning of political opponents, the politicization of justice, repression of peaceful demonstrations, torture of political prisoners and even assassinations. These have all been strongly documented by United Nations agencies, and lately the intervention of the International Criminal Court. The latter ratified its decision to the Venezuelan government for crimes against humanity.

Understandably, Chavismo as a political movement began shrinking, and its popular support is currently at its lowest. The latest purges, especially that of Tarek El Aissami (former Vice-President and CEO of PDVSA) rather than bringing greater coherence, have internally weakened the regime. It is also isolated in the international arena, with some of its primary allies in the region becoming critical of it or becoming weary of the regimeā€™s political posturing.

Historical accidents can be costly

Venezuelaā€™s dictatorship did not arise without a fight. In fact, ever since the new elite came to power, the opposition has tried almost every strategy to overturn it. Theyā€™ve used democratic means like normal elections and recall referenda, as well as mass mobilization, including military coup attempts.

The last attempt to unseat the Chavista government ended in resounding defeat. It involved a cumbersome combination of the appointment of an interim president supported by a wide international coalition, who would then isolate, pressure and sanction the government. However, the interim government and the coalition dispersed, leaving all democratic forces in disarray. All along the government and opposition have held conversations, but have failed to reach a working political agreement. Evidently, the government had little to gain from them.

A new situation began taking shape in October 2023, during a negotiation on the Caribbean Island of Barbados. Maduroā€™s government had been holding separate conversations with the Venezuelan opposition and the US, seeking gains in two areas. On the one side, it aimed to reduce or even eliminate drastic personal and financial sanctions, with the latter mainly affecting the oil business. On the other, it sought to regain political legitimacy and international recognition, which fell off a cliff in the last decade. Maduro and his allies believed the time was ripe for presidential elections to take place. The opposition, divided into moderates and radicals, could participate under better conditions, but the government would still have the upper hand. No one could have anticipated that the odds would turn out so differently.

The main point agreed upon in Barbados was allowing the opposition to select their candidate with no disturbances. This led the US to a swathe of sanctions regarding oil production and distribution. Beginning in 2023, the main segment of the opposition, organized under the Platform of the Democratic Union (PUD), decided to run open primaries to select a presidential candidate; anyone identified with rejecting Maduro could participate.

The National Commission for the Primaries ultimately decided to hold them on October 22, 2023, independently of the National Electoral Council (CNE). When these were first announced, Venezuelan morale for political participation was so low that the government felt confident the primaries would fail spectacularly for the opposition.

Everyone was in for a surprise. At her first opportunity, Marƭa Corina Machado, once the most radical and right-wing oriented of opposition leaders, to the top of the preferences. This began a cycle of mass mobilizations that has electrified the country ever since. Some opposition leaders, like Manuel Rosales, the moderate governor of the state of Zulia who previously against ChƔvez in the 2006 presidential election, opted not to run. Others, like two-time presidential candidate Capriles, initially participated but later abandoned the race. When the primaries date arrived, Machado earned roughly of the vote. She became the presidential nominee and the undisputed leader of the reinvigorated opposition overnight.

Despite claims that she would call for abstention when facing disqualification ā€” which occurred soon after ā€” Machado has shown resilience and clarity in garnering support to the cause of re-democratization. While becoming a beacon of real change, she slowly let go of the more radical postures without abandoning her central theme (ā€œUntil the End!ā€), showing high tact and maneuver capacity.

Problems seldom occur in isolation

Since Machado began leading the polls, things have gone awry for Miraflores ā€” Venezuelaā€™s presidential palace. Against all odds and many governmental maneuvers, the 2.4 million who voted in the primaries startled the governing coalition. To counter the impact, the government found the perfect excuse. Given a long-lasting dispute with neighboring Guyana over an important part of its territory, the government began a campaign rejecting any intervention by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). On December 3, 2023, it also organized a to gain internal legitimacy, while mobilizing troops and building infrastructure on the Venezuelan side of the border. 

The classic ruse of creating an international conflict to garner support at home was unsuccessful. Not only did the referendum end up failing, fewer than 1.5 million voters (results were never officially published), but the government became more internationally isolated than ever. Recently elected Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who was an unquestionable ally of Maduro, reacted against the Venezuelan claim. He even mobilized Brazilian troops to the northern border with the two neighboring countries. The US profited from the occasion to offer Guyana its support, conducting joint operations with its military shortly after.

Worse, even Cuba, Venezuelaā€™s staunchest regional ally, urged caution. Information from confidential Cuban sources indicates that Venezuelaā€™s international move was internally rejected and that those at the helm recommended Maduro keep it only as a rhetorical, contentious issue. , the Brazilian foreign service, pressed both Venezuela and Guyana to face-to-face in BrasĆ­lia on January 25, 2024.

Internally, things have not gone according to plan, either. Once the government Machado from running, it moved all its pawns to ensure that the final configuration, especially regarding who could run, would grant Maduro a guaranteed victory. According to most opinion polls, Machado would beat Maduro to 20%, and even a candidate chosen by her could beat him. So, when Machado chose as a surrogate Corina Yoris, a scholar who had participated as a member of the electoral commission for the primaries, the CNE the online mechanism to prevent her from registering.

Only candidates from the mainstream opposition were allowed to register. Governor Rosales stood as the only leader with a lower preference from the electorate than Maduro. Enrique MƔrquez, a former directive of the CNE, with a preference under 1%, was also allowed to run. Finally, Edmundo GonzƔlez Urrutia, a seasoned diplomat who had even served a few years under ChƔvez, ended up filling up the last slot. In the cumbersome Venezuelan electoral system, the latter played the role of caretaker of one of the three political parties duly registered, in case a different person was selected to run in his stead.

In the end, there was no consensus around Rosales ā€” he was perceived to be a weak candidate by most organizations, not to mention the electorate at large. Instead of choosing an alternate candidate, the PUD unanimously upon GonzĆ”lez Urrutia, a perfect stranger in Venezuelaā€™s politics. To everyoneā€™s shock, only a few days after being selected, GonzĆ”lez to the top of the electorateā€™s preferences.

Shuffling around potential scenarios

Transitions from authoritarian to democratic regimes are tricky business. They tend to follow very original scripts. In Venezuela, the chances for a democratic opening are only beginning to bear fruit. They seem to begin with whatever happens on the electionā€™s voting day: July 28.

Up to this point, Machado remains the main political force in the opposition. She and the PUD have continued campaigning with her at the helm, despite her not being a candidate. She instead calls constituents to vote for GonzƔlez Urrutia.

This odd circumstance responds to an odd election. Her displacements around the country have mobilized tens of thousands of diehard followers, whose cheers of support seem more akin to those of rockstar fans. But there is also organization behind the cheering. As Machado tours Venezuela, she stimulates the creation of local committees to support the coming activities on July 28, especially granting that the votes are duly processed despite government pressure.

With less than two months remaining before the final vote, the government is politically challenged. Electoral projections show no clear legal path for it to secure a win. It is also highly unlikely that Maduro will substantially increase his popularity among voters, which has created unease within the regime. However, there have been no conversations between the government and opposition to look ahead of election day. This is despite the fact that the Maduro-allied Colombian and Brazilian governments have formally running a special referendum, which would provide full security for the losing party.

So, what could the Venezuelan government do to avoid handing its foes an electoral victory? There are several options:

It could disqualify GonzĆ”lez Urrutiaā€™s candidacy or the participation of the party behind it. Until now, the regime has used the Electoral Court of the Supreme Justice Tribunal to arbitrarily intervene in political parties and subject them to the Executiveā€™s domination, or to disqualify candidates. Despite prior disqualifications, there seems to have been strong international pressure in the case of the oppositionā€™s candidate.

It could take drastic measures against opposition leaders to stifle their operations in the campaignā€™s final weeks. Machado could be accused of violating electoral laws by campaigning outside the legal time. Judging by what the government has done to her entourage ā€” several collaborators and forcing others to seek asylum ā€” those actions might have been a dry run of a more drastic action against her.

It could manipulate as many as 2,000 polling centers stationed in isolated places or locations from which government organizations operate. This could amount to massive to reduce the opposition candidateā€™s advantage. Alternatively, the government could manipulate the high number of people registered to vote but living abroad, producing fraud that way.

Finally, it could postpone the election due to a border incident with Guyana, likely related to oil exploitation in the disputed zone or any other reason. This would not eliminate the risk of losing the election, but it could buy the government time to find a new solution. It could as well use a combination of all of the above.

What if the opposition wins?

If the opposition wins this election, there will be a drastic change in current trends, opening the door for a potential transition out of dictatorial rule. For now, despite the apparent nervousness among the governing elite, there are no signs that it is willing to relinquish power.

Such stubbornness does not merely reflect the classic power addiction, or hubris, exacerbated in authoritarian regimes. It also involves the high exit costs for Maduro and his close allies were they to leave power. They would not only have to abandon access to myriad business deals and the privilege to impose their will on an entire country; they may face sanctions from the US and European countries. Even worse, some could risk prosecution from the International Criminal Court.

Losing the election would abruptly interrupt decades of them enjoying quasi-absolute power. At the same time, continuing in power is not devoid of costs. These include the responsibility to oversee an economically ravaged country; being isolated from those parts of the world where oil counts and being pressured to deliver to internal ā€” legal and illegal ā€” constituents, even if coffers are empty.

Regardless, there is a six-month gap between July 28 and Inauguration Day, which is for January 10, 2025. Even if GonzƔlez Urrutia is allowed to run and wins the election, there is a long period during which negotiations will take place as a matter of survival for both parties.

What could the rest of the year look like for Venezuela? Scenarios may vary depending on several factors. The vote totals obtained by GonzĆ”lez Urrutia and Maduro are crucial. If the difference between them is great, their respective leverage will vary. Naturally, this depends on the specific response by factions of the governing alliance, such as the military. On two prior occasions ā€” when ChĆ”vez the referendum in 2007 and after the opposition legislative landslide in 2015 ā€” the military forced the acceptance of both results. Assuming that the difference between the two political camps is important but not too large, hard negotiations will probably begin over how to grant governance in a divided country.

It is still too early to assess how things might evolve. But regarding a potential negotiation, some positives and negatives are apparent. There are at least three noteworthy positives. First, there is a negotiating mechanism: the Barbados Agreement team. Though not without its faults, it has allowed for continued conversations. A clue in the agreement is its from the opposition, Gerardo Blyde, a constitutional lawyer who is highly respected in the government.

Second, there is the sheer complexity of the domination exercised by the Chavista elite. It controls more than just the Executive; its tentacles reach the judiciary, the high command of the armed forces, the National Assembly and most governors and mayors. There have been hints at the local level that Venezuelaā€™s changing political mood is affecting the allegiance of public officials, judges, military officers etc. Allegedly, it is difficult for the regimeā€™s higher echelons to retain strict control of how most people will act.

Third, the role played by each segment of power differs. The president and his entourage of high-command officers might be actively in favor of retaining power. Meanwhile, other organs like judges or justices in the Supreme Justice Tribunal, as well as myriad state institutions, are more akin to blackmail victims. For example, in May 2024, CNE President Elvis Amoroso rejected the European Commissionā€™s decision to sanctions imposed on directives of the Electoral Council. He argued that it was an attempt to buy his conscience. Information leaked soon after that the passports of the CNE directives were invalidated.

There are two negatives. First, all levels of government are mired in unprecedented degrees of . The number of officials who have something to lose is probably massive. Second, if and when they abandon power, the likelihood of backlash and violence against them is also high. These factors seriously complicate negotiations. For these reasons, it makes sense why Colombian President Gustavo Petro suggested his aforementioned security referendum.

No matter what, we must wait for the final results on July 28, if the election does indeed take place on that date. One thing is clear: If the opposition wins and a transition to democracy begins taking place in Venezuela, it could affect the balance of authoritarianism vs democracy in the world. After all, ChĆ”vezā€™s in 1998 represented the emergence of what later became the typical hybrid regime, copied and pasted in every continent. Can Venezuela really transition to democracy?

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Can Venezuela Suddenly Transition to Democracy? Its People Hope So. appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

For the global audience, it looked like a hastily made copy of the of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The visibly crowd sported the shirts of Brazilā€™s national football team. Watching older men behaving in a disorderly and dangerous manner in the largely empty city was surreal.

On the surface, the insurrection looked like a spontaneous movement that a few months prior and got out of hand, again spontaneously, on that infamous Sunday afternoon. In reality, the January 8 riots marked the culmination of a decade-long process. The of the global far right and caused by drove this process. Also at work was the Brazilian armed forcesā€™ ambition to political power, stemming from Brazilā€™s of exploiting natural resources and human beings. These forces came together with the sole objective of public and natural assets for personal gain.

are still ongoing, with the Supreme Court starting trials of alleged in September. Until these are completed, we will not have the whole picture. However, we can examine the connections between these forces and pinpoint the main characters of the latest rebellion attempt in Brazil. That is what we will do in this and following articles.  

The isolated and privileged military caste

Since the dawn of the First Brazilian Republic in 1889, the armed forces have removed, or at least tried to remove, democratically elected governments several times. So, Brazil has a long history of suffering under military dictatorships.

The last military dictatorship (1964ā€“1985) was a regime. It created artificial economic ā€œgrowthā€ by putting the country deeply in . In the transition to democracy, instead of punishing those responsible ā€” like Argentina did with the and ā€” Brazil decided to give to the perpetrators, both for crimes against humanity and for sedition. This encouraged the armed forces to believe that they are .

The infamous torturer Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra ā€” to whom Bolsonaro his vote for the impeachment of one of Ustraā€™s victims, President Dilma Rousseff ā€” lived to enjoy his retirement peacefully until he in 2015, leaving a sizable pension to his daughters.

Consequently, the Brazilian armed forces enjoy unique powers and that no other military enjoys. Lawmakers trod very lightly around the subject, leaving those privileges after promulgating the 1988 Federal Constitution. The military justice system has over violent crimes committed by soldiers against civilians. The military has its own of labor and social security . Indeed, the military seems to have Brazilian democracy cowed into maintaining its anachronistic and excessive rights.

Aside from all these privileges, the military in Brazil lives in its own bubble, disconnected from civilian life. The children of officers study in the spread around the country. These schools serve over 15,000 students. The teachers are military officers and teach children ā€œ related to the military culture.ā€ The schools are governed by their own and curricula only need to be loosely equivalent to civilian education. They use the Marshall Trompowski Collection books, which teach that the 1964 military coup was a ā€œā€ necessary to protect Brazil from ā€œsubversive terrorists.ā€ The Brazilian Army offers a book blatantly in favor of the dictatorship on . Worryingly, Bolsonaro increased the number of ā€œmilitarizedā€ schools to , with a total budget of over 128 million reais ($26.4 million).

The situation gets more complicated at military colleges. To become a general in Brazil, one needs a degree at the Military Academy of Agulhas Negras (AMAN). AMANā€™s is ā€œHouse of Values ā€” Cradle of Traditions.ā€ It students that military personnel are serious, professional, mature, orderly and competent, while civilians (or paisanos) are unprofessional, incompetent, idle and infantile.

AMAN students are isolated from and go through a regimen of exercise, discipline and reading outdated or plain delusional books. The authors include infamous self-proclaimed philosopher and far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho, who believed that the left is destroying society with progressive ideas, and another by his disciple FlƔvio Gordon, in which he journalists, university professors, scientists and artists. Another book used in the institution teaches that the ended with the escape of the resistance fighters, omitting the arrest, torture and of over 60 of them.

Even more outrageous is a book by Colonel Carlos Menna Barreto, printed by the armyā€™s publishing company, entitled . The Yanomami are a group of indigenous people that live in the Amazon rainforest in the north of Brazil. Menna Barreto holds that the Yanomami do not exist and are rather part of a plot by NGOs to weaken Brazilian sovereignty in the Amazon. This conspiracy is widely believed in military circles and may be the inspiration for Bolsonaroā€™s against the Yanomami.

As most high-ranking officers come from military families, they come up through this system and are disconnected from civilian needs and struggles. General Eduardo Villas-BĆ“as, Commander of the Army from 2015 to 2019, that he only started socializing with civilians when he was 50 years old and that it was ā€œtoughā€ and ā€œan exercise in patience and intellectual flexibility.ā€ Villas-BĆ“as was responsible for a addressed to the Supreme Federal Court on April 3, 2018. The court was about to discuss the release of then-former president Luiz InĆ”cio Lula da Silva, then held at the federal police headquarters in Curitiba. The tweet subtly warned that Lulaā€™s release would not go unpunished by the armed forces. Mainstream media underreported the move.

Another infamous example of the disconnect between officers and the general population is General Eduardo Pazuello, Bolsonaroā€™s Minister of Health from September 2020 to March 2021, who after taking office that he did not know what the Brazilian Unified Health System was at all. The military has its own , with total medical, dental, and psychological coverage for personnel and their families. It has over 600 nationwide units, including 11 general hospitals, dozens of clinics and health schools ā€” all taxpayer-funded. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pazuello ineffective treatments like hydroxychloroquine and an oxygen shortage that led to hundreds of deaths in Manaus. He to the Congressional Inquiry Commission on COVID-19 in order to cover up Bolsonaroā€™s responsibility for the mishandling of the pandemic. Pazuello may yet be with crimes against public health, malfeasance and perjury.

The armed forces interfere in politics

Since 2002, active-duty military have been by law to opine on politics without authorization. Nevertheless, generals have been meddling with politics since at least the Rousseff administration.

In 2011, Rousseff, who had been during the dictatorship, installed the National Truth Commission to investigate human rights violations by military authorities. The 2,000-page , released in 2014, exposed damning evidence of crimes by more than 377 state agents. Rousseff presented the results during an emotional and personal speech. This seemed to be the first step toward healing Brazilā€™s decades-old wounds.

Some were not very impressed, however. One was General . The Etchegoyens are an old military family that has been involved in army since the 1920s, when Alcides and Nelson Etchegoyen attempted to prevent the inauguration of President Washington LuĆ­s.

SĆ©rgio Etchegoyen vehemently the inclusion of his father, a general who commanded a fourth of the whole Brazilian Army during the dictatorship, and his uncle, who participated in the 1964 coup, in the National Truth Commission report. He called the accusations ā€œfrivolous,ā€ despite abundant proof of criminal orders issued by the two men.

SĆ©rgio Etchegoyen and Villas-BĆ“as had with Vice President Michel Temer a year before the move to impeach Rousseff in 2016. They were also involved in during Temerā€™s term. In an interview with Celso Castro, Villas-BĆ“as that the military had wanted to remove the Lula and øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s Workersā€™ Party from power since 2008 and that øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment was part of a ā€œlong coupā€ to put the military back in power.

The military did not want to remove the leftists from power from the start. Lulaā€™s and øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s governments had in the military, renewing military equipment and infrastructure. They did not touch the relationship between civilian powers and the armed forces. However, the armed forces began plotting to topple the leftists because they planned to the military curriculum and civilian courts to try military police officers.

The military police is the de facto street policing force in Brazil. Military police have been involved in countless episodes of and thousands of across the country, but they rarely for crimes against civilians in civilian courts. Conversely, the of a military police officer can, in practice, send a civilian to prison. Rousseff threatened the military by discussing the of the police forces.

Another incident involved the Institutional Security Bureau of the Presidency of the Republic (GSI). The GSI is responsible for the personal security of the president and vice-president and their families and the of buildings and institutions of the presidency. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso made the GSI a federal ministry in 1999. In 2015, Rousseff dissolved the ministry and incorporated it into the Presidency Office, an action by the military establishment.

As soon as Rousseff was suspended, and before she was impeached, Temer the GSI as a ministry. He even put the whole Brazilian Intelligence System under ā€” with as minister. This effectively put Brazil back under .

Recent developments show how ill-advised this idea was. The armed forces hang like a over Brazil, just waiting to decapitate democracy, aware of any action they may see as threatening to their power, their or their .

The uncomfortable rise of Bolsonaro

In November 2014, Bolsonaro made a speech to graduating cadets of the Agulhas Negras military academy, where he was received with shouts of ā€œā€ He his bid to run for president in 2018 to ā€œbring this country to the rightā€ and reinforce the separation between civilians and the military.

Bolsonaro’s relationship with the armed forces is very complicated. After completing the preparatory army cadet course in 1972, he failed to join the Air Force Academy but managed to enroll at AMAN in 1973. There, he middling grades and stood out for his excellent athleticism, which earned him the nickname ā€œ.ā€ He finished the training to become a paratrooper but nearly died after of his parachute and hitting the side of a building in Rio de Janeiro. He broke both arms and legs.

In 1983, Bolsonaroā€™s superiors him as aggressive, ā€œexcessively ambitious and obsessed with personal financial gains.ā€ He admitted his desire to become ā€œa wealthy man.ā€

In 1986, while posted as a captain at the paratrooper battalion in Rio de Janeiro, he faced disciplinary action after publishing an op-ed without permission. Veja, the most popular magazine at the time, published the article. In it, he about the earnings of lower-ranking officers and enlisted personnel.

The following year, Veja Bolsonaro as the mastermind of a plot to plant bombs at army barracks to undermine Army Commander LeĆ“nidas Pires GonƧalves. The article contained detailed plans drawn by Bolsonaro. After a lengthy secret trial by the Supreme Military Court, Bolsonaro was not discharged. Nine of 13 justices voted in his favor. The evidence connecting him to the plans was ā€œinconclusive,ā€ the court decided. Later, federal police analysts Bolsonaroā€™s authorship of the plans.

Military dictator General Ernesto Geisel (1974ā€“1979) Bolsonaro in his autobiography, describing him as “completely out of the normalā€ and ā€œa bad military man.ā€ Many within the army command ā€” career officers with no interest in politics ā€” him as dangerous because his heroes were not moderate generals. Instead, Bolsonaro looked up to torturers like Ustra and bloody regimes like the worst phases of the dictatorship.

Bolsonaro left the army in 1988 as a captain. He ran a successful campaign for the City Council of Rio de Janeiro, boosted by his appearances in the press. with over 11,000 votes, he was surprised to learn that he got only seven votes at the polling station of the Military Village but got overwhelming support from paramilitary groups and militias. His City Council colleagues him as ā€œprivate and uncommunicative.ā€ Bolsonaro made only two speeches, both in favor of the armed forces.Ģż He presented projects to improve salaries and military privileges.

Bolsonaro did not complete his term, as he ran for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1990, winning the first of six terms. Though he began as a Christian Democratic Party candidate, he his political affiliation seven times. He always, however, joined right-wing parties.

Bolsonaroā€™s presence in the legislature was marked by outrageous , politically incorrect and even of the death squads and militias that terrorized the state of Rio de Janeiro for decades. He proposed 171 draft bills, including one to on official documents of the preferred names of transsexuals and transvestites. Most of Bolsonaroā€™s proposals were discarded for poor writing. Only two of his proposals became law: a for IT products and the of synthetic phosphoethanolamine, a compound falsely purported to be a cure for cancer. Upon advice from scientists and the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency, the Supreme Federal Court later the latter law.

The troublesome relationship between the armed forces and politics led them to despite his mediocre record. He their privileges, providing a less conspicuous path for the military to return as the actual rulers of the nation. Anthropologist Piero Leirner it a ā€œhybrid war to come back to power,ā€ using Bolsonaro as a faƧade.

While men in uniform were involved in all steps of Bolsonaroā€™s rise to power, the armed forces tried to themselves from their creation every time he overstepped the bounds of decency. Now that Bolsonaro is no longer president, they are still fighting to interfere in the newly elected Lula government and are to step down from politics.

Dictator Ernesto Geisel was right when he it was effortless for the armed forces to become a political force, but it is challenging to remove them from power. With Rousseff gone after the 2016 impeachment, the military used Bolsonaro to consolidate its power.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Brazilā€™s New President and Hope for a Democratic Revival

Who Will Win Argentinaā€™s Presidency After 28 Years Of Peronism?

Brazil Rejects Bolsonaroā€™s Anti-Politics

Is Brazil Headed for a Dictatorship?

The post The Secrets Behind Brazil’s Military and the January 8 Insurrection appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

This first wave of BRICS enlargement was riven with tensions. While China favored the diffusion of its influence through the enlargement of the group, Brazil and India had against enlargement. They were more interested in deepening coordination between the existing members.

Although diplomatic coordination was never easy within BRICS, the groupā€™s founding members used to share the objective of counterbalancing Western dominance. However, this shared objective has been shattered with the recent groupā€™s enlargement.

China in charge

The manner and selection of countries for the enlargement of BRICS made clear Chinaā€™s unchallenged ability to transform the group as an agent of an increasingly Chinese-led emerging global order. The selection of several autocracies as new members is telling of Chinaā€™s view of how the global order should be shaped: an ad-hoc multilateralism that aids its own global ambitions.

With this autocratic turn of BRICS, the groupā€™s previous rhetoric of reformism of global institutions is now replaced by a new narrative. China sees BRICS as a way to promote a global governance model that downplays liberal-democratic values and weakens the global rules-based order. As BRICS turns autocratic, the bloc is likely to start opposing US influence more emphatically, and Brazil and India will be isolated within the group.

Brazil and Indiaā€™s acquiescence to the enlargement of BRICS has been possible with Chinaā€™s support to the permanent membership of both countries in the . Brazil and India were never shy about their dream to permanently sit in the UN Security Council. However, neither country had imagined that Chinaā€™s support for their entry into the UNā€™s selective club would result in their diminished influence in BRICS.

Two democracies in an authoritarian club

Unlike their autocratic fellow members of BRICS (both old and new), Brazil and India have a natural inclination to embrace the principles of equality and liberty both domestically and internationally. These principles, or the lack thereof, determine how democratic or autocratic regimes govern their countries, and, as a result, how they shape their foreign policies.

BRICS until now lacked an ideological or political orientation. What seemed to hold these countries together, apart from being large and prosperous emerging economies, was the shared experience (except for Russia) of colonialism and economic dependence. This experience is no longer enough to keep BRICS united. Brazil and India have made democratic governance part of their development as nation-states. The road towards democratic development has been tortuous, but Brazil and India have both succeeded in embracing democratic methods to guide their domestic governance and their international behavior.

Under democracy, Brazil and India have prospered greatly, achieving of economic development. These countries increased their human capital with more educated populations and reduced poverty and inequality, although slowly, over the past decades. Indeed, democracy has given these countries the opportunity to shine globally.

The World Should Learn From Poverty Alleviation in India

As democratic reformers of the fragile liberal order, Brazil and India will continue their efforts to become more influential in international multilateral institutions. And if these institutions welcome both countries by giving them more relevance, Brazil and Indiaā€™s level of commitment to the now-autocratic BRICS will wane. In the meantime, BRICS will become the dream group of autocrats who want to find political and economic support in an increasingly chaotic international arena.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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This yearā€™s BRICS summit took place in South Africa from August 22ā€“24. The most important outcome of the summit was the decision to expand the group. will join on January 1, 2024: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Argentina, Iran and Ethiopia. The original membership has just been doubled and this is a transformative outcome.

Originally, the RIC group was a response to the emergence of a unipolar world following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Then, the BRIC nations, four economically rising powers from three continents, shared an agenda. All four wanted to make the global order more democratic and equitable. When BRICS emerged, these powers wanted a greater role of developing countries in the new world order. At least three of the powersā€”India, Brazil and South Africaā€”sought to reform the postwar UN system, including its political and financial institutions. These emerging powers wanted to make the UN the centerpiece of a reinvigorated multilateralism.

End of the unipolar moment

This multilateral approach is becoming all the more important as the world exits its unipolar moment. Although the US remains the worldā€™s leading political, military and economic power, it is no longer able to unilaterally dictate the rules of the international system. It failed to change the Middle Eastern balance of power in its favor by military intervention in the Iraq War or by indirect means during the Arab Spring. The disastrous end of its War on Terror, exemplified by the retreat from Afghanistan, has reduced its international primacy.

The US now sees the need to strengthen its alliances in Europe and Asia to retain its global preeminence. This includes the reinvigoration of NATO in Europe, as well as the alliances with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in Asia.

The US is pulling the team together as new tensionsā€”with potentially dire consequences for global peace and securityā€”have pitted it against both Russia and China. It has succeeded in getting its European partners to throw their into a common effort against Russia and that China is a systemic threat as well.

Furthermore, the US has used its to the hilt to isolate Russia and cause its economic collapse. Washington has also openly subscribed to the idea of regime change in Russia, a peer nuclear power. It is not only Russia but also China that lies in American crosshairs. The US now sees China as its principal longer-term adversary and is taking aggressive steps to thwart Chinaā€™s technological rise.

Tensions between great powers are straining the international system. Western sanctions on Russia have been draconian. In particular, the US has weaponized the dollar-based global financial system. The war in Ukraine has also had deeply disruptive effects on the supply of , and to developing countries. The equity of a global order based on rules set by the powerful is now in serious question. This order does not emanate from the collective will of the international community but is defined and determined by the West.

RIC, BRIC and then BRICS were all about multipolarity. These non-Western powers wanted a seat at the top table. Yet the dominant Western powers who champion human rights and democracy are not ready to cede control. In fact, the West imposes its agenda on these powers through championing supposedly ā€œuniversal valuesā€ and does not want to give up its traditional hegemony. Naturally, the BRICS nations oppose this hegemony and want a redistribution of global power.

The West has been locked in a confrontation with Russia and China. Both these powers are responding by expanding BRICS. Hence, they have added six new members to the group. Some of them, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Argentina have historic links with the US. Yet their joining BRICS demonstrates that they are willing to reduce their dependence on the West. These nations want a counterbalance to the US and seek a rebalancing of the global political and economic system, which does not have such punitive costs for transgression.

The inclusion of new members into the BRICS club is telling. Iran is already a of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and close not only to China but also Russia. Iran has long been at loggerheads with the US and is subject to strong . Ethiopia is wracked by and prolonged . Yet the country has made it to the club on the basis of its increasingly close relationship with China.

Clearly, the BRICS expansion sends a loud and clear signal. BRICS has welcomed powers that challenge the US and are close to China and Russia.

What were the criteria and what does BRICS expansion mean?

The entry of new members to the BRICS club raises a key question. What were the criteria?

Were they GDP size or growth prospects or population size or geographic location or regional influence or some combination of these factors? It turns out that, except for energy exporters Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the other new countries face serious economic problems. Egypt is the most populous Arab nation with the largest military in the region. Yet its economy is in an acute crisis. Argentina, the second-largest Latin American country, is in yet another . Their addition does not exactly strengthen the BRICS club economically.

Importantly, no East or South Asian country joined the BRICS club. Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE lie in Asia but are part of the Middle East. Indonesia its candidacy at the last moment. It seems to be betting instead on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). BRICS is a geographically dispersed club while ASEAN is a cohesive organization with shared interests. External pressure by the US might also have played a role in Indonesia staying away from BRICS.

When it comes to African countries, Nigeria would have been a more credible addition than Ethiopia. However, the country did not apply for membership. Neither did Mexico. Algeria applied for membership but to have gotten in.

Clearly, the expansion of BRICS has been lopsided. Ethiopia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran are clustered together geographically. Only Argentina seems to stand out.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa : ā€œWe have tasked our Foreign Ministers to further develop the BRICS partner country model and a list of prospective partner countries and report by the next Summit.ā€ Yet it is unclear what are the criteria for the expansion. It seems that new members have been admitted to the BRICS club on an ad hoc basis.

While expansion may boost multipolarity, it risks making the new BRICS+ club less cohesive. India and China have deep differences. Their militaries are in a at the border. Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran are not exactly the best of friends. Brazil and Argentina are rivals.

Furthermore, the commitment of various countries to BRICS+ is far from solid. Under Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil had less commitment to BRICS than current president Lula da Silva. Tellingly, South Africa Russian President Vladimir Putin because of its obligations to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ramaphosa might wax lyrical about BRICS+, but his government is still constrained by Western-made law of The Hague-based ICC.

It remains to be seen how BRICS+ shapes up but it is clear that the addition of new members and prospects of further expansion are an indication of a growing, if inchoate, trend towards multipolarity.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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But it was not to be. Instead, the Global South leaders were forced to sit and listen as their hosts announced their latest plans to tighten sanctions against Russia and further escalate the war by sending US-built F-16 warplanes to Ukraine. 

The G7 summit stands in stark contrast to efforts of leaders from around the world who are trying to end the conflict. In the past, the leaders of Turkey, Israel and Italy have stepped up to try to mediate. Their efforts were bearing fruit back in April 2022, but were by the West, particularly the US and UK, which did not want Ukraine to make an independent peace agreement with Russia. 

Now that the war has dragged on for over a year with no end in sight, other leaders have stepped forward to try to push both sides to the negotiating table. In an intriguing new development, Denmark, a NATO country, has stepped forward to offer to host peace talks. On May 22, just days after the G-7 meeting, Danish Foreign Minister Lokke Rasmussen that his country would be ready to host a peace summit in July if Russia and Ukraine agreed to talk. 

Many Peace Initiatives

ā€œWe need to put some effort into creating a global commitment to organize such a meeting,ā€ said Rasmussen, mentioning that this would require getting support from China, Brazil, India and other nations that have expressed interest in mediating peace talks. Having an EU and NATO member promoting negotiations may well reflect a shift in how Europeans view the path forward in Ukraine.

Also reflecting this shift is a by Seymour Hersh, citing US intelligence sources, that the leaders of Poland, Czechia, Hungary and the three Baltic states, all NATO members, are talking to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the need to end the war and start rebuilding Ukraine so that the five million refugees now living in their countries can start to return home. On May 23, right-wing Hungarian President Viktor Orban , ā€œLooking at the fact that NATO is not ready to send troops, itā€™s obvious that there is no victory for poor Ukrainians on the battlefield,ā€ and that the only way to end the conflict was for Washington to negotiate with Russia. 

Meanwhile, Chinaā€™s peace initiative has been progressing, despite US trepidation. Chinaā€™s special representative for Eurasian affairs and former ambassador to Russia, has Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelenskyy, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and other European leaders to move the dialogue forward. Given its position as both Russiaā€™s and Ukraineā€™s top trading partner, China is in a good position to engage with both sides.

Another initiative has come from Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is creating a ā€œā€ of countries from around the world to work together to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. He appointed renowned diplomat Celso Amorim as his peace envoy. Amorim was Brazilā€™s foreign minister from 2003 to 2010, and was named the ā€œworldā€™s best foreign ministerā€ in Foreign Affairs magazine. He also served as Brazilā€™s defense minister from 2011 to 2014, and is now President Lulaā€™s chief foreign policy advisor. Amorim has already had with Putin in Moscow and Zelenskyy in Kyiv, and was well received by both parties.

On May 16, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other African leaders stepped into the fray, reflecting just how seriously this war is affecting the global economy through rising prices for energy and food. Ramaphosa a high-level mission by six African presidents, led by President Macky Sall of Senegal. He served, until recently, as Chairman of the African Union and, in that capacity, spoke out forcefully for peace in Ukraine at the UN General Assembly in September 2022. 

The other members of the mission are Presidents Nguesso of Congo, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Musevini of Uganda and Hichilema of Zambia. The African leaders are calling for a ceasefire in Ukraine, to be followed by serious negotiations to arrive at ā€œa framework for lasting peace.ā€ UN Secretary-General Guterres has been on their plans and has ā€œwelcomed the initiative.ā€

Pope Francis and the Vatican are also to mediate the conflict. ā€œLet us not get used to conflict and violence. Let us not get used to war,ā€ the Pope . The Vatican has already helped facilitate successful prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine, and Ukraine has asked for the Popeā€™s help in reuniting families that have been separated by the conflict. A sign of the Popeā€™s commitment is his appointment of veteran negotiator Cardinal Matteo Zuppi as his peace envoy. Zuppi was instrumental in mediating talks that ended civil wars in Guatemala and Mozambique. 

Will any of these initiatives bear fruit? The possibility of getting Russia and Ukraine to talk depends on many factors, including their perceptions of potential gains from continued combat, their ability to maintain adequate supplies of weapons, and the growth of internal opposition. But it also depends on international pressure, and that is why these outside efforts are so critical and why US and NATO countriesā€™ opposition to talks must somehow be reversed.

The US rejection or dismissal of peace initiatives illustrates the disconnect between two diametrically opposed approaches to resolving international disputes: diplomacy vs. war. It also illustrates the disconnect between against the war and the determination of US policymakers to prolong it, including most Democrats and Republicans. 

Give Peace a Chance

A growing grassroots movement in the US is working to change that: 

• In May, foreign policy experts and grassroots activists put out paid advertisements in The and to urge the US government to be a force for peace. The Hill ad was endorsed by 100 organizations around the country, and community leaders organized in of congressional districts to deliver the ad to their representatives. 
• Faith-based leaders, over 1,000 of whom a letter to President Biden in December calling for a Christmas Truce, are showing their support for the Vaticanā€™s peace initiative.
• The US Conference of Mayors, an organization that represents about 1,400 cities throughout the country, unanimously a resolution calling on the President and Congress to ā€œmaximize diplomatic efforts to end the war as soon as possible by working with Ukraine and Russia to reach an immediate ceasefire and negotiate with mutual concessions in conformity with the United Nations Charter, knowing that the risks of wider war grow the longer the war continues.ā€

• Key US environmental leaders have recognized how disastrous this war is for the environment, including the possibility of a catastrophic nuclear war or an explosion in a nuclear power plant, and have sent a to President Biden and Congress urging a negotiated settlement. ā€‹ā€‹
• On June 10-11, US activists will join peacemakers from all over the world in Vienna, Austria, for an . 
• Some of the contenders running for president, on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, support a negotiated peace in Ukraine, including and . 

The initial decision of the United States and NATO member countries to try to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion had broad . However, promising peace negotiations and deliberately choosing to prolong the war as a chance to and Russia changed the nature of the war and the US role in it, making Western leaders active parties to a war in which they will not even put their own forces on the line.

Must our leaders wait until a murderous war of attrition has killed an entire generation of Ukrainians, and left Ukraine in a weaker negotiating position than it was in April 2022, before they respond to the international call for a return to the negotiating table? 

Or must our leaders take us to the brink of World War III, with all our lives on the line in an all-out , before they will permit a ceasefire and a negotiated peace? 

Rather than sleepwalking into World War III or silently watching this senseless loss of lives, we are building a global grassroots movement to support initiatives by leaders from around the world that will help to quickly end this war and usher in a stable and lasting peace. .

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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Nevertheless, my brilliant students also informed me that cosmetic surgery in general and nose jobs in particular were the rage in Iran. Like and , Iran is one of the great centers of cosmetic surgery. Rhinoplasty, the technical term for nasal surgery or ā€œnose job,ā€ is extremely popular in Iran. In fact, so fixated are many Iranians with this surgery that the has entered the surgical lexicon.

A culture obsessed with beauty

Iran, also known as Persia in the past, is a culture that has long prized sophistication, courtesy and beauty. In fact, tells us that Iran literally means the ā€œLand of the Aryansā€ and the country adopted this name in 1935. This ideal of Aryan beautyā€”large eyes, symmetrical faces and beautifully shaped nosesā€”runs strong in the culture.

Even though Iran is ruled by puritanical mullahs who do not allow women to reveal even their hair, the Iranian veneration for beauty continues. Those of us who grow up in India are sometimes indoctrinated from an early age about the legendary beauty of Iranian women. Shah Jahan, the Mughal emperor who ruled India from 1628 to 1658, built the Taj Mahal for Mumtaz Mahal. 

Like many high fliers in the Mughal court, Mumtaz came from a family of Iranian/Persian origins. Note that Persian (Farsi) was the official language of North India from 1192 to 1858 when the British finally replaced it with English. In the heyday of Mughal rule, the icons of beauty were Persians like Nur Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. Unsurprisingly, the Taj Mahal has been ā€œa marble tribute to a Persian princess.ā€ 

The Taj Mahal may be a thing of the past but Iranians still prize beauty. In 2013, on Iranā€™s beauty obsession that feeds its voracious cosmetic surgery industry. Apparently, ā€œa desire to gain a husband, western looks, or even clients are a few reasons why Iran has the world’s highest nose surgery rate.ā€ Even men are getting nose jobs and plastic surgery now.

In a nutshell, nose jobs and cosmetic surgery thrives in Iran because people want it. In Keynesian terms, there is demand for this sort of surgery.

A track record of surgical intervention

I grew up in India as the son of an eminent plastic and reconstructive surgeon. My father was in the Indian Army. His patients were often soldiers who had been shot or injured by shrapnel. He did the whole gamut of reconstructive work. He often told me that the sort of surgery he did was born on the battlefield.

Iran is no exception. The 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War kicked off the cosmetic surgery industry. Thousands of soldiers were wounded in those eight years of war. Iranian plastic and reconstructive surgeons stitched them up on a regular basis. With so much practice, many of them became stunningly good at their jobs.

When the war ended, many of these military surgeons transitioned to cosmetic work. Two pioneers are remembered to this day. Dr. Mohammad Esmail Akbari and Dr. Hamid Karimi blazed new paths that others follow to this day. Akbari developed new techniques in rhinoplasty (nose jobs) while Karimi focused on facial cosmetic surgery, including facelifts, eyelid surgery and brow lifts. Along with other military surgeons, they triggered the boom in cosmetic surgery that lasts to this day.

Since 1988, the Iranian cosmetic surgery industry has grown rapidly. In fact, Iran is one of the leading destinations for cosmetic surgery. Patients can get top-level surgical procedures at a fraction of the cost in richer economies like the US, the UK or Switzerland.

In a nutshell, Iran has the supply of skilled cosmetic surgeons to satisfy both internal and international demand. Sayā€™s lawā€”the law of the markets that holds that supply creates its own demand Ć  la iPhoneā€”applies as well.

Some key problems

Cosmetic surgery in Iran is not without its problems. There have been reports of botched surgeries. Some people have suffered from complications and even died. Some blame this on the lack of regulation. Iranā€™s mullahs are keen to regulate what their women wear but have largely turned a Nelsonā€™s eye to their decisions to go under the scalpel.

When foreigners who get their treatment in Iran suffer complications, they find themselves up a shit creek without a paddle. A simple cosmetic procedure leads to a lifetime of trouble. They cannot exactly sue for damages or go back to their surgeons for redressal.

Apart from these tangible issues, there is the deeper question about a cultural fixation with beauty and the social standardization of beauty. Just as the mullahs have imposed religious conformity on the country, so have arbitrary standards of beauty. Why is one type of nose superior to all others? Why is it so important to look a certain way? Are there racial prejudices that underpin Iranian ideals of beauty? Are women and, now even men, objectified in modern society? Is cosmetic surgery yet another rebellion against repressive mullah rule?

Iran and other modern societies will have to wrestle with questions like these. In 1820, the young British poet John Keats penned, ā€œBeauty is truth, truth (is) beauty. that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.ā€ Perhaps the time has come to think again as to what exactly is beauty itself.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Why Iranians Love Nose Jobs and Cosmetic Surgery appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Lula owes his triumph to the formation of a broad political front built during the election campaign to reverse the unpopular policies of Bolsonaroā€™s far-right government. The 60 million Brazilians that elected Lula hope that Brazil will be politically rejuvenated, marking the end of Bolsonaroā€™s effort to erode Brazilian democracy.

Lulaā€™s comeback

Lula  began his long political career as a trade union leader in the early 1980s. In 2003 he was the first leftist leader to be elected president in Brazil. After two terms in power, his government ended in 2011 with the highest popularity rating of any democratic government in Brazilā€™s history.

Will Brazil See Justice for the Mismanagement of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

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Lula cannot however dissociate himself from the scandal known as Operation Car Wash, a corruption probe that uncovered a web of money laundering schemes involving the Brazilian stateā€™s oil company. The unraveling of the judicial procedures that followed led to the jailing of the president in 2011. However, the Brazilian Supreme Court ultimately annulled all criminal convictions against Lula on the grounds of a series of judicial procedural errors by the prosecution.

In the  extremely polarized country that Brazil has become, Many Brazilians view Lula as the  leader who led Brazil to a brief period of prosperity. Lulaā€™s administrations may boast of a number of achievements, in particular, a considerable reduction of poverty and hunger in Brazil, an increase of Braziliansā€™ real income, the expansion of social programs and policies, sustainable economic growth, creation of a domestic regime for environmental preservation, and the strengthening of Brazilā€™s multilateral vision in global debates.

Despite Lulaā€™s many accomplishments as president, the corruption crisis involving Lula and his party provided the pretext for the rise of Bolsonaro to power as a far-right leader. In effect, Lulaā€™s disapproval rating among the electorate still stands at approximately 46% (according to two opinion polls, Datafolha and Ipec). What saved him in the election is the fact that Bolsonaroā€™s disapproval rating was even higher.

Brazil Rejects Bolsonaroā€™s Anti-Politics

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For an important percentage of citizens Lulaā€™s return to power has sparked great optimism for the future. 44% of Brazilians believe their lives will change for the better with Lula in the presidency, compared to 21% who believe their lives will improve if Bolsonaro were to continue as president (Datafolha).

Brazil and the Latin American ā€œpink tideā€

Lulaā€™s government will be confronted with strong opposition in the national congress. He will have to govern with a National Congress dominated by a majority of far-right senators and deputies, who will do everything in their power to block his political agenda.

The parties forming the pro-Lula alliance in the senate and the lower house do not have the numbers that will permit them to pass laws. Lula will have to negotiate with the pragmatic parties representing the center of the ideological political spectrum who are in the habit of trading their congressional support in exchange for political benefits (for example, political appointments in ministries).

Unlike other Latin American countries that have turned to the left in what analysts have called a “pink tide” in the region, there are doubts whether Lula has enough political strength to implement progressive policies. Lula won the elections with a narrow margin of 2 million votes, revealing a deeply divided country. In his victory speech, Lula focused on the urgent need to reconcile the country: ā€œThere arenā€™t two ā€œBrazils, he proclaimed. ā€œIt’s time to lay down our armsā€.

Brazilā€™s deep social divisions

The majority of Lulaā€™s votes +came from women, the poor, and Catholics. The poorest voters, those who earn up to two minimum wages (45% of the Brazilian electorate),  supported Lula, who received 61% of their vote intention, compared to 33% support for Bolsonaro. Also, Lula showed a great capacity for attracting female voters (53% of the electorate). In pre-election polls, around 52% of women declared they would vote for Lula. Only 41% expressed the intention to vote for Bolsonaro.

In recent years, there has been a marked politicization of Pentecostal churches in Brazil, the country that hosts the largest Catholic population in the world. Aligned behindBolsonaro, 62% of Evangelicals (27% of the electorate) declared their intention to vote for him, while only 32% intended to support Lula. In contrast, 55% of Catholics (52% of the electorate) showed a preference for Lula, whereas 39% declared their intention to vote for Bolsonaro.

Policy changes under Lula

The fight against hunger is urgent in a country that has experienced an increase in child malnutrition. 33 million Brazilians suffer from food insecurity. Lulaā€™s popularity among poor Brazilians derives from his policies aimed at combating poverty and hunger, such as the creation of the cash-transfer program, Bolsa FamĆ­lia, which lifted over 40 million Brazilians out of poverty. Many Brazilians expect that Lula will once again innovate in his social policies, in contrast with Bolsonaroā€™s failure to promote policies aimed at alleviating hunger.

Lula has a strong commitment to environmental preservation. One of his campaign promises concerned the creation of a ministry to deal with the interests of indigenous peoples. Lula also guaranteed the reactivation of existing institutions and legislation to combat environmental destruction. Currently, Brazil has one of its highest deforestation rates in decades and a significant increase in land conflicts culminating in record killings of environmentalists and indigenous people.

Beyond Latin Americaā€™s Lost Decade

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Brazil’s foreign policy will undergo a radical change as Lula will vigorously participate in global debates. Furthermore, Lula will bring Brazil closer to its Latin American neighbors, increase the weight of Brazil in the reform of international organizations, actively participate in the BRICSā€™ initiatives, and create cooperation mechanisms between Brazil and developing countries.

Challenges ahead

Since becoming president in 2018, Bolsonaro immersed Brazil in a permanent democratic crisis. In this yearā€™s elections, Bolsonaro used the tools of the state for political purposes to influence the electoral process. In recent months, the ministry of economy increased social benefits, granted special credit for the beneficiaries of social assistance, and decreased taxes to reduce the price of gasoline and electricity. In addition to electoral abuses, Bolsonaro attacked democratic institutions in an attempt to generate public mistrust in the election results in the case of his defeat. Bolsonaro until now has not explicitly conceded the election.

After four years of democratic setbacks, politics must now seek solutions to the real-life problems that afflict most Brazilians. Lula has committed to transforming Brazilā€™s harsh social reality while at the same time seeking a way of appeasing the followers of Bolsonaroā€™s ultra-right movement. This task seems particularly difficult so long as Bolsonaroā€™s anti-democratic extreme right movement remains present and active in the political landscape.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Brazil’s New President and Hope for a Democratic Revival appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

A number of these leaders are still in office. And Chileans may also wade into the wastewater if they elect right-wing populist Jose Antonio Kast, who received the most votes in the first round of presidential elections last month. But Chile notwithstanding, we might finally be seeing some light at the end of this particular sewage tunnel.

Will Brazil See Justice for the Mismanagement of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

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This week, Xiomara Castro scored a decisive victory in the presidential election in Honduras, putting an end to the disastrous 12-year reign of an anti-democratic, narcotrafficking regime allied to the United States. As an antidote to this lost decade, Castro offers an unabashedly socialist, feminist, anti-corruption agenda. She has also promised to create a government of national unity.

Building national unity is not going to be easy in one of the poorest countries in Latin America where a wealthy elite still controls all the levers of power. The coup that deposed left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya a dozen years ago divided Honduran society along yet another axis. Xiomara Castro is the wife of Zelaya, so itā€™s pretty clear which side of that schism sheā€™s on.

Before she can do anything else, however, Castro has to break the power of the drug traffickers who have turned Honduras into a highly efficient narco-state.

Drugs ā€˜Rā€™ Us

Last March, Juan Antonio Hernandez was sentenced in US court to life imprisonment plus 30 years for smuggling 185 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was also fined $158 million. Hernandez is the brother of the departing Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who did whatever he could, even hiring a Washington lobby firm for at least half a dollars, to get his brother acquitted.

This wasnā€™t just fraternal solidarity. It was naked self-interest. In The New Yorker, John Lee Anderson  the prosecutionā€™s case, which was ultimately successful. Juan Antonio Hernandez ā€œused millions of dollars from drug sales to finance his partyā€™s elections; on behalf of his brother the President, he had accepted a million-dollar bribe from JoaquĆ­n (El Chapo) GuzmĆ”n, the head of the Sinaloa cartel. The lead prosecutor called HernĆ”ndez a ā€˜uniquely bad character, who, along with his brother, is at the center of years of state-sponsored drug trafficking.ā€™ His criminal behavior, the prosecutor said, had left Honduras ā€˜one of the principal transshipment points for cocaine in the worldā€ and ā€œone of the most violent places in the world.ā€™ā€

The outgoing Honduran president has declared his own innocence, though that was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of evidence that his initials could be found in the financial documentation of the drug enterprise. As president, Hernandez had promised to cooperate with the United States in its war on drugs. Perhaps US officials should have clarified on which side the president was planning to fight ā€” the side of the US government or the side of US drug distributors.

Hernandez is not the only politician whoā€™s been accused of such collusion. Another candidate in the presidential race, Yani Rosenthal, served three years in US prison after guilty to money laundering for the Cachiros drug cartel. Former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo also worked hand in hand with the Cachiros clan, ultimately forcing the Biden administration to  a travel ban this summer against Lobo and his family. It was a particularly embarrassing moment for President Joe Biden, who had been vice-president when Barack Obama  Loboā€™s ā€œstrong commitment to democracyā€ when he prematurely welcomed Honduras back into the club of democratic nations.

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The Honduran government did fight a drug war, but only to the extent that the police eliminated drug lords that competed with the stateā€™s handpicked narcos. Loboā€™s police chief, nicknamed El Tigre, has been accused of multiple killings and faces a life behind bars if Honduras gets around to extraditing him to the United States.

Given its location between Colombia and Mexico, Honduras became a logical location for the trans-shipment of cocaine. At one point, an 80% of the cocaine bound for the US passed through the country. That traffic has diminished, but now Honduras is moving up the value-added supply chain by more of the raw coca into cocaine.

If Castro, as incoming president, can start ratcheting down the narcotics trade ā€” without getting herself killed or overthrown in a coup ā€” she can start to address the countryā€™s two other major woes: economic despair and the astounding outflow of migrants.

Roughly three out of four Hondurans live at or the poverty line. Only Guatemala has a worse record in Latin America. The rural population is especially hard hit, the Honduran middle class is minuscule and COVID-19 reversed the modest economic growth the country experienced in recent years.

Hondurans accounted for a disproportionate number of the Central American migrants flowing into Mexico between 2018 and 2021. On top of all those who have already departed, one in five Hondurans has  a desire to leave the country. Who can blame them? If they arenā€™t escaping extreme poverty or the extraordinary violence of the gangs and the government, Hondurans want to leave because of extreme weather exacerbated by climate change.

In 2020, the double shock of Hurricanes Eta and Iota killed 98 people and caused nearly $2 billion of damage. As one resident of a rural community  The Guardian, ā€œI have my suitcases packed, ready to go. We canā€™t live like this. Thereā€™s no future for us here.ā€

Hope Elsewhere in the Region

In the brown tide of reaction in Latin America, Jair Bolsonaro is the fatberg, a monstrous accumulation of personal excess, political corruption and environmental hazard. During his tenure as Brazilian president, Bolsonaro has presided over a tragic mishandling of COVID-19, the same kind of financial  he promised to eliminate the extraordinary destruction of the Amazon. Even as the Brazilian leader signed on to the deforestation pledge in Glasgow last month, he was delaying the of a report showing that the destruction of the Amazon increased by 22% over the past year.

But the good news is that Bolsonaroā€™s popularity has dropped precipitously. In a September poll, nearly 60% of  said they would not vote for him ā€œunder any circumstances.ā€ And Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former president and leftist stalwart, currently has a 20-point lead in the polling ahead of next Octoberā€™s election. Of course, a year is a long time, and every so often Bolsonaro flirtatiously  his trump card, namely a coup to stay in power.

Last year, Bolivia provided the region with an example of how to turn back a coup when the party of exiled leader Evo Morales won a landslide victory in the elections. Last spring, the interim president, Jeanine Anez and several of her ministers were  and charged with terrorism and leading a coup.

Ecuador shifted to the right in the elections last spring, as voters narrowly supported conservative candidate Guillermo Lasso. But the more important development, at least for the long-term future of the country, has been the success of the indigenous party Pachakutik, which won control of half of all the states on its way to becoming the second most powerful party in Congress. Pachakutik not only forcefully rejects the discrimination that the indigenous of Ecuador have experienced, but it also embraces a variety of progressive social reforms and has a robust environmental agenda that revolves Sumak Kawsay or ā€œliving well,ā€ which intersects with the ā€œbuen vivirā€ movement in the region as a whole.

Peru dodged a bullet earlier this year when voters narrowly rejected Keiko Fujimori, the right-wing daughter of disgraced leader Alberto Fujimori. The new president, Pedro Castillo, who comes from humble origins and rose through the ranks as a trade unionist, has put forward a  left platform of using the state to lift up marginalized communities. But Castillo is a social conservative ā€” he opposes abortion and same-sex marriage ā€” and has put together a politically mixed government, which may enable him to hold power for longer than his predecessors. He is, after all, Peruā€™s fifth president in five years.

Not all is rosy in the region. Through fraud and intimidation, Daniel Ortega has effectively made himself leader for life in Nicaragua. Nicolas Maduro continues to rule the failing state of Venezuela. Right-wingers are still in charge in Colombia, Guatemala and Paraguay.

But the victory of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, Pedro Castilloā€™s earlier win in Peru and the increased power of Pachakutik in Ecuador point to a different kind of future for Latin America, one that is less corrupt, more responsive to economic needs and environmental imperatives and more attune to the realities of indigenous communities. These new leaders have a lot of work to do to clean out the Augean stables where Latin Americaā€™s authoritarians and far-right populists have taken up residence and which have backed up with mountains of excreta. But the first step, which the voters of Honduras have just taken, is to stop overloading the waste management system.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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The Politics Behind the Coronavirus in Brazil

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The commission heard more than 100 witnesses during 66 sessions and examined some 20 million gigabytes of digital information to trace the causes and consequences of Bolsonaroā€™s decisions, such as his lax COVID-19 policies derived from the disastrous attempt to let the virus run its course in order to reach herd immunity. Last year, Bolsonaro downplayed the coronavirus as ā€œ,ā€ promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and other unproven medications as a cure, opposed the use of masks and, most critically, failed to secure adequate stocks of the COVID-19 vaccine for the federal program.

COVID-19 Crimes                                        

The PCI was in April, a month after the pandemic at over 89,000 infections and almost 4,000 deaths a day. The commissionā€™s final report is weighty, providing nearly 1,300 pages of robust evidence to indict Jair Bolsonaro on nine criminal charges, including crimes against public health and crimes against humanity. In addition to the president, , including three of his sons, two former and one current minister, as well as several close allies who are occupying key positions in public institutions, are on the indictment list.

The final report has been submitted to the general prosecutorā€™s office for further consideration. If Bolsonaro is formally charged, he might face between 21 and 79 years in prison.

The report will also be presented to the lower house of Brazilā€™s national congress. This could lead to an impeachment process for misconduct. Approval of the report by the lower house is unlikely, however, given it is controlled by Bolsonaro supporters. Formal would have to be issued by Brazilā€™s attorney general, Augusto Aras, who is the presidentā€™s political appointee. The senators who led the commission have of taking the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the likely scenario that the Brazilian justice system fails to prosecute Bolsonaro.

The turning point of the investigation was the uncovering of a inside the Ministry of Health to spend $300 million on 20 million doses of overpriced COVID-19 vaccines produced by the Indian company Bharat Biotech. The investigation revealed that the Ministry of Health reserved approximately $45 million to buy Covaxin, which has not undergone proper clinical trials and hasnā€™t been approved by any of the worldā€™s health regulatory agencies. 

The payment was to be deposited in an offshore account of an opaque Brazilian company, Precisa Medicamentos, which was brokering the deal and is facing several judicial probes into irregularities of public procurement contracts. A deputy in the lower house of congress and former minister of health who is a of Bolsonaro led the negotiations for the acquisition of the vaccine. Allegations from witness testimony indicate that the president was aware of the scheme. The attempt of the Bolsonaro administration to buy Covaxin is perplexing given that last year, it to buy the Pfizer vaccine even at a discounted rate.

Political and Social Consequences

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a lack of leadership across the country, turning a public health emergency into an economic and sociopolitical crisis. While there already were undisputed signs of a fast-approaching recession, with the rapid spread of the virus, the economic scenario deteriorated further. In 2020, Brazilā€™s economy was the second-most affected by the pandemic, after Spain. Last year, Brazil presented a negative GDP growth of .

Economic projections for 2021 suggest that the Brazilian economy will show only a modest expansion considering last yearā€™s economic debacle, with estimated GDP growth of . This comes in a context of worsening macroeconomic indications such as increasing inflation rates, devaluation of the currency and rising interest rates.

The pandemic has also deepened political tensions in Brazil, with Bolsonaro more isolated than ever. The pandemic made crystal clear the presidentā€™s ineptitude to lead, coordinate and articulate meaningful solutions to the crisis. It brought to the fore Bolsonaroā€™s belligerent personality and put him at odds with close aides. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Brazil had rotated four ministers of health, two of whom have left the government due to with the administrationā€™s policies.

Bolsonaro has also tried to shirk federal public health responsibilities to state and local authorities. This has the political conflict with state governors, which has greatly contributed to the disarticulation of coordinated pandemic response. Despite Bolsonaroā€™s obstructionist policies, state governments carried out their own vaccination programs. The state of SĆ£o Paulo began a large-scale vaccination drive after an agreement was signed with the Chinese company Sinovac Biotech to locally produce the Coronavac vaccine. As of last week, the state had a of 87% for those over the age of 18, compared to 53% for the rest of the country.

Electoral Prospects

Initially, Bolsonaro interpreted the pandemic as an opportunity to advance his narrow political interests, such as his controversial agenda of easing arms control, relaxing implementation of environmental legislation and combating anti-corruption laws and actions. Furthermore, the president used the pandemic as an to distribute financial assistance to the poor, a move that allowed him to enjoy high popular approval ratings during several months of the pandemic, from February to October 2020.

The indictment will have far-reaching consequences for Bolsonaroā€™s ambitions in next yearā€™s presidential election. Based on an opinion poll from October, if the election were held today, former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva would win with in the second round.

Lula, who is on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Bolsonaro, was on corruption charges, until the supreme court his conviction in April this year. Thus, despite current projections that give Lula a clear lead, Brazilā€™s 2022 presidential election will be a highly polarized affair with unpredictable results.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, since the launch of the senate inquiry, has dropped significantly. Between January and October this year, the number of those who describe Bolsonaroā€™s governance as ā€œbadā€ increased from 40% to 53%, while ā€œgoodā€ or ā€œexcellentā€ ratings have from 32% to just 22%, the lowest point since he took office in 2019. This is bad news for Bolsonaro, who will lose his presidential immunity from prosecution if he fails to win reelection.

In response, on October 20 ā€” the same day the results of the investigation were first made public ā€” the president announced that he would increase financial support to a major social assistance program, the ā€œ,ā€ designed to alleviate poverty. This populist welfare policy, which was announced for the sole purpose of bolstering the presidentā€™s reelection prospects, had a negative effect on the Brazilian financial markets.

The governmentā€™s is creating a record deficit, with the International Monetary Fund projecting public debt to reach 96% of the countryā€™s GDP. Under this fiscal deterioration, investors are concerned about Brazilā€™s capacity to further control its debt, leading to a sharp devaluation of the currency; since January 2020, the almost 40% of its value.

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Jair Bolsonaro thought the COVID-19 pandemic would help disguise his incompetence. Instead, the crisis has shown how lack of leadership kills ā€” at a shocking scale. The more than 607,000 Brazilian lives lost during the pandemic serve as a constant and grim reminder there is no place in Brazil for weak leadership.

While bringing those protected by immunity to justice will be an uphill struggle, the parliamentary inquiry has demonstrated that Brazil has strong democratic institutions that can not only effectively resist the by the executive but also hold the president accountable for fomenting what may be the in Brazilā€™s history.  

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Will Brazil See Justice for the Mismanagement of the COVID-19 Pandemic? appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

The planet faces enormous threats at the moment. The pandemic is still raging throughout the world. Climate change is an immediate risk. Wars continue to devastate Yemen, Ethiopia and Syria.

The Wicked Problem of Climate, Blah, Blah, Blah

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Given these crises, the United Nations is needed more than ever. And yet the body could not compel Bolsonaro to get vaccinated or risk the fallout of preventing him from speaking to the General Assembly.

This problem of rogue actors has long bedeviled the United Nations. But the rise of right-wing populists who insist on their sovereign (and often selfish) right to do whatever they please poses an additional challenge to the international community.

Vaccines

Nation-states frequently use the principle of sovereignty ā€” the exclusive authority to determine the rules within national boundaries ā€” as a justification for their actions. The COVID-19 pandemic is only the most recent example of the shortcomings of sovereignty. With little regard for the common good, the richest countries made sure to secure more than their fair share of vaccines. The World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank tried to ensure access to vaccines for poorer countries by setting up Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. It was supposed to distribute 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. So far, it has managed to distribute only 240 million.

The problem has largely been one of supply, given the huge purchases of vaccines by richer countries. But there is also the challenge of delivering doses to countries where medical infrastructure is weak. As a result, the reports that, as of September 21, just 3.31% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated with at least one dose, compared to 61.51% of people in high-income countries.

Letā€™s face it: The rich run the world and the United Nations just doesnā€™t have the power to change that.

Climate Change

Nor has the UN risen to the challenge of climate change. Here the problem is one of brokering effective compromises. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the body responsible for convening the Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting every year. In Paris, COP21 in 2015 did manage to produce a binding treaty on climate change. But the commitments made by all the parties to the agreement were not sufficient to reduce carbon emissions fast enough to prevent a catastrophic increase in global temperatures.

Moreover, the commitments were voluntary. The US delegation insisted on this because it feared that Congress would reject any binding pledges. Itā€™s no surprise, then, that carbon emissions are expected to rise this year by , the second-largest increase in history.

The fault here again lies mostly with the richest countries ā€” China, the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia ā€” that have been the biggest emitters of carbon. But rich countries have also refused to provide enough money to help poorer countries transition to cleaner energy. In 2009, rich countries promised to mobilize $100 billion by 2020 for this transition. A dozen years later, the fund is still  short.

Other Problems

Of course, many countries face another deadly scourge: war. Imagine how many lives would be saved, how much reconstruction could take place, and how waves of refugees could be reduced if the UN were able to conduct a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, establish an on-the-ground presence in Syria and separate warring parties in Tigray province in Ethiopia. Instead, the UN is relegated to the task of providing humanitarian assistance. Its program in Syria, with a target of $4.2 billion a year, is the largest in the world.

But humanitarian assistance is a never-ending drain in the absence of security on the ground. Most of the peacekeeping budget of the UN goes to the existing 13 missions. The Biden administration has  to pay down the over $1 billion peacekeeping bill it owes the UN, but the UN is going to need a lot more than that to play an effective role in bringing peace and security to the most conflict-torn areas of the world.

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For one thing, the UN doesnā€™t have the capability to respond quickly to emergencies around the world. An  could fill that gap. It has some support internationally and itā€™s even come up twice as bills in the US Congress. Without a permanent, professional corps of emergency responders, the UN will constantly be one step behind in dealing with crises around the world.

The Underfunded UN

This is not an easy time for the United Nations. It is underfunded. Proposals to reform its governance have largely gone nowhere. It has been forced to cobble together ad hoc responses to the worldā€™s biggest problems.

But perhaps the biggest challenge to the UN is the refusal of nation-states to delegate sufficient authority to international institutions. Right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro attacked ā€œglobalistsā€ on a daily basis. They have done as much as possible to destroy international agreements, but theyā€™re not alone. Russiaā€™s Vladimir Putin and Chinaā€™s Xi Jinping have insisted that they have the right to do whatever they want within their own national borders. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is resisting any ā€œinterferenceā€ in his drug war as part of an investigation into his governmentā€™s human rights abuses. Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua has similarly pushed back against UN criticism of his human rights record. Most strong-arm leaders eye the UN skeptically.

Without a lot of money or institutional credibility and facing a strong anti-internationalist philosophy, the United Nations has a great deal of difficulty compelling its members to protect human rights, the environment or the rule of law. Look how ineffectual it was in dealing with Jair Bolsonaro.

Without credible enforcement mechanisms, the UN will be incapable of making the Bolsonaros of the world behave responsibly. And unfortunately, the disease of Bolsonarism is spreading.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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In late April, Anitta released her most expensive video for her new song, ā€œ.ā€ She had one goal in mind: conquer the ears of the world. Her method was by reshaping a notorious Brazilian cultural soft power known as bossa nova.

The music video begins with clips of the singer dressed like a Hollywood star in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Surrounded by thin, mostly white men, Anitta sings an English adaptation of the internationally famous ā€œGirl From Ipanema,ā€ which was released in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. The video then shows viewers the real Rio de Janeiro. A trap beat drops and our eyes shift to black people dancing in Piscinao de Ramos (Ramosā€™ Pool), an artificial beach created by the government in 2000 in the suburbs of Rio.

Bolsonaro’s Conservative Brazil?

For two years, Anitta was heavily criticized by fans and artists for not taking a public stance over Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilā€™s far-right president. During the 2018 election campaign, she was questioned about her absence in the #EleNao (#NotHim) movement against Bolsonaro. At the time, she that she was only 25 years old and had zero political knowledge.

Bolsonaroā€™s nationalist policies aim to bring back the beauty and glory of Brazilā€™s past. But the truth is that he is more known for his , homophobic and declarations from his time in the Chamber of Deputies. Last year, one of his most trusted colleagues, Damares Alves, the minister of human rights, family and women, acted to stop a legal on a 10-year-old girl, who became pregnant after being raped by her own uncle.

With Bolsonaro in power, Brazilians are currently living under a conservative administration. This is particularly reflected in the federal governmentā€™s cultural decisions. Bolsonaroā€™s government monitors exhibitions, music, films and TV shows and assesses if they align with the stateā€™s view of family and religious values.

Anitta has finally posted statements on social media criticizing Bolsonaroā€™s administration. Yet none of her tweets are as powerful as the message her new video carries.

A Different Rio

ā€œHot girls, where Iā€™m from, we donā€™t look like models,ā€ she sings, with scantily clad women dancing on an artificial beach. The song puts an emphasis on women without silicone breasts showing off their bodies with cellulite. The video also shows black men putting cream on women to bleach their body hair, while others barbecue meat on the beach. Some couples even look like theyā€™re almost having sex in the sea. This is a completely different Brazil from the country Bolsonaro wants to portray to the world.

Anittaā€™s video presents clips of the Rio suburbā€™s poverty, but in a funny and sexy way. The video focuses on the nostalgic past of a white Rio de Janeiro that never really existed, but whose image was created with the help of the most popular Brazilian rhythm of all time, bossa nova. Translated as ā€œnew wave,ā€ this genre is a mix of jazz, African beats and samba.

In 1962, the historical debut at by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto helped bring bossa nova to the world stage. In the same year, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes released ā€œGarota de Ipanemaā€ (Girl From Ipanema), one of the most famous Brazilian songs of all time. The muse to inspire the composers was , a 17-year-old girl with blonde hair and blue eyes who walked every day on the beach.

As a successful singer whose fortune is estimated at at the age of 28, Anittaā€™s cultural power overseas is being built song by song. In the past four years, 24 of her 32 singles were to international markets. Giovanni Bianco, a Brazilian creative director, produced the ā€œGirl From Rioā€ video. He has worked several times with Madonna, who released the song ā€œā€ with Anitta in 2019.

Changing Bossa Nova

With bossa nova becoming more popular worldwide, the ā€œGirl From Rioā€ video cost at least $200,000. Anitta has already collaborated with international stars like Maluma, Major Lazer, Cardi B. and J. Balvin. The official launch party of the song took place at Strawberry Moon, a bar at The GoodTime Hotel in Miami whose partner is Pharrell Williams, an American singer and producer.

In May, ā€œGirl from Rioā€ was the 8th most-listened song on Spotify after its release, with 1 million plays in Brazil and 400,000 in other countries. Although Anitta featured on popular US shows with NBC and also on ā€œJimmy Kimmel Live,ā€ the song soon fell out of the top 100. With 54 million followers on Instagram, the singer’s fans accused Warner Music ā€” the label Anitta is associated with ā€” of not promoting the song worldwide.

In the video, the white images of the 1950s, carried by bossa novaā€™s soft pace and soft power, give way to the colorful scenes in ā€œGirl From Rio.ā€ With its trap beat and variation of funk, this is the Brazilian genre in the world today. With the help of her record label or not, Anitta wants to conquer the world with a Rio de Janeiro that is far from the one shown on postcards or holiday brochures ā€” and certainly not the one Bolsonaro wants to promote.

Anitta wants to focus on empowering black people, women and those with standard bodies, not with abs, breasts and butts like models. She definitely knows what sheā€™s doing.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post The Cultural Power of Anitta in Bolsonaroā€™s Brazil appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. Itā€™s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. Thatā€™s not exactly clickbait.

Because the absence of war doesnā€™t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has , the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isnā€™t newsworthy.

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The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House , for instance, is ā€œDemocracy Under Siege.ā€ The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, ā€œGlobal Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.ā€ The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also  a drop for the third year in a row.

If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But itā€™s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given historyā€™s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, letā€™s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

The Pandemic Recedes in America

Much of the reason for democracyā€™s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putinā€™s  changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trumpā€™s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever  in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Bidenā€™s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election  in 2024.

The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse  and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball  its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

These moves motivated Texas-based companies to  that stateā€™s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of  out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now  to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the  in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-presidentā€™s).

A failure to find ā€œ10 good Republicansā€ for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may  the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were  to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20^th century.

High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps itā€™s time for an ā€œAmerican Spring.ā€

Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively  the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EUā€™s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the blocā€™s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

But thereā€™s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgariaā€™s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has  to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass  by women throughout the country, and even ā€œPolish granniesā€ have  in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is  in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative fĆ¼r Deutschland has witnessed a significant  in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also  in popularity. Golden Dawn has  from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasnā€™t managed to rise much 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen  leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next yearā€™s election, while the Finns Party  by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are  throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. Bolsonaroā€™s approval rating has to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office,  to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular  in Colombian history. Politically, it doesnā€™t matter so much, since he canā€™t run again for president in next yearā€™s election. But the publicā€™s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modiā€™s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63%  rating.

Modiā€™s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi ā€”  in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador ā€” who promise to ā€œget the job doneā€ regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

The coups in Mali and Myanmar, Chinaā€™s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea ā€” these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus ā€” just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian presidentā€™s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, , ā€œNever did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.ā€

Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesnā€™t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. Iā€™d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move ā€” is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? ā€”  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesnā€™t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like  and , have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesnā€™t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Democracy Is Down but Not Out appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

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On March 24, after the health ministry confirmed 2,200 infections and 46 deaths in Brazil (these numbers have since ), Bolsonaro held a televised address and : ā€œOur lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept ā€¦ we must, yes, get back to normal.ā€ In the speech, he blamed the media for spreading panic around a ā€œfantasyā€ and a ā€œtrickā€ that he considers to be a ā€œlittle flu or a bit of a cold,ā€ in reference to COVID-19. 

Just days later in an unprecedented move, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram several messages posted on Bolsonaroā€™s official accounts. His posts contained fictitious and misleading information about the coronavirus as he called on citizens to take to the streets to protest against a lockdown.

Predictions for Brazil

Bolsonaroā€™s anti-quarantine policy could put Brazilians at risk. His indifference to human suffering and the loss of lives is now more blatant than ever. Bolsonaro has made countless throughout his political career defending torture and violent dictators, as well as encouraging murderous security policies against poor people and minorities in Brazil. But now in the face of this pandemic, his irresponsible ideas transcend mere rhetoric and now threaten millions of lives.

A study by the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London that without preventative measures against the coronavirus, more than 1 million people could die in Brazil. These estimates also predict that if the country adopts early quarantine measures throughout, then its number of deaths from COVID-19 could range from 44,000 to 529,000, depending on how prompt and rigid the lockdown is.

Bolsonaroā€™s incompetency and inhumanity are leading to his isolation and growing unpopularity among voters. In a miscalculation, the president interpreted the pandemic as an opportunity to advance his narrow political interests in two ways.

First, the Brazilian economy is showing signs of a fast-approaching recession as projections indicate GDP growth of around 1% this year. Aware of the risk a recession poses to the popularity and longevity of his already fragile government, Bolsonaro wants to blame the upcoming economic troubles on authorities who have imposed local quarantines.

Second, with the inevitable spread of the coronavirus in Brazil, Bolsonaro will also attempt to shirk his national duties. He will transfer responsibility to local authorities as chaos overwhelms the underfunded and crippled public health system when the pandemic reaches its peak. Selfish political strategies should have no place in the fight against the deadly coronavirus, but Bolsonaro simply doesnā€™t know how to rise above his own egotistical frame of mind.

Brazilā€™s Weak Public Health System

Brazilā€™s preparedness to fight the pandemic is questionable. The number of beds in intensive care units (ICU) has decreased since 2009, and today the country has approximately 55,000 ICU beds. Yet only half of these are for public health use, and they are across the country. According to , in the best-case scenario when adopting early quarantine measures, Brazil would need 57,000 ICU beds, but in the event of a last-minute lockdown being enforced, that figure would skyrocket to 460,000.

Brazilā€™s public health system is already under pressure as other diseases have hit the country hard in recent years. According to the , Brazil is among the worldā€™s top 30 high-burden countries regarding tuberculosis, a bacterial infection that makes victims more susceptible to complications from COVID-19.

To make matters worse, from 2015 to 2019 tropical diseases, such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya, have approximately 1.7 million people. In the first two months of 2020, some regions in Brazil experienced a 128% in dengue cases compared to the same period in 2019.

Both the coronavirus and Jair Bolsonaro are pushing Brazil to the edge of a cliff. In his 1842 short story, ā€œThe Masque of the Red Death,ā€ American writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote about Prince Prospero who ignores the existence of a deadly plague in his kingdom and organizes a masquerade ball in his castle for the noble class. During the party, he confronts a mysterious masked individual dressed in a red robe and asks the death-like figure, ā€œWho dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?ā€ Prospero dies immediately.

Like the fate of Poeā€™s prince, Bolsonaro will find his own political demise inescapable if he belatedly attempts to tackle COVID-19. Brazilians are fighting not only a virus, but also the leadership style of a president who ignores his duty to confront a public health crisis. The only good news in all of this is how the coronavirus is waking Brazilians up to the undeniable political reality that Bolsonaro deserves to be impeached.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post The Politics Behind the Coronavirus in Brazil appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Five centuries after the conquest of the New World, the website Market Views has spotted a unique for alert investors. In an article published in July, the authors state: ā€œLatin America has emerged as a mining-friendly jurisdiction with a wide range of international mining companies listed on Canadian, US, Australian and British stockmarkets [sic].ā€ 

This truly is unique and having a safe ā€œmining-friendly jurisdictionā€ couldnā€™t be more pertinent to the developed worldā€™s needs. After all, the region ā€œhas the planetā€™s largest reserves of copper, lithium and silver with plenty of gold to boot.ā€

Here is todayā€™s 3D definition:

Jurisdiction:

An area in which the local governments can be counted on to use their laws and military capabilities to protect the vital interests of outsiders seeking to make a profit from their resources

Contextual Note

The analysts divide the problem of the risk for investment in mining into two distinct categories: ā€œbelow groundā€ and ā€œabove groundā€ risk. The intuition of 16th-century Spaniards was correct when they saw the Americas as full of below ground potential. As the authors point out: ā€œThe best thing about Latin America for mining investors is that it is incredibly rich in base and precious metals.ā€ The Spanish at the time of were more interested in precious metals, but that was only because they were still waiting for the English to invent the Industrial Revolution two centuries later, creating a rich market for a range of base metals.

It turns out that in recent times, after the wane of European colonialism and the largely fitful US neocolonialism in South America that followed the , the above ground risks have been putting investors off. In the words of the authors: ā€œLatin America was blighted by political instability ever since independence with frequent periods of military rule and most countries only returning to democracy within the last 40 years.ā€ Whether they are justified in calling the majority of Latin American countries ā€” like Brazil, Chile and now Bolivia ā€” examples of democracy remains a matter of debate.

More realistically, the authors observe: ā€œThe political instability hindered mining investment in the region because you need a relatively stable and efficient state to create a fair mechanism for the ongoing transaction between the countryā€™s citizens ā€” the ultimate owners of the metal ā€” and the mining company.ā€

Do Western investors really acknowledge that the citizens are ā€œowners of the metal?ā€ In reality, they donā€™t care who claims to be the owner or in whose name local authorities sign away the exploitation rights. What investors care about is that the law of the land will be enforced by a government whose authority is respected, whether that respect is due to the democratic adhesion of the people or the loyalty of the military to the regime. They require the stability that will guarantee their persistent value of their investment.

The authors recognize one form of risk that the 16th-Spanish invaders never bothered to consider: ā€œIn many Latin American countries, the stateā€™s role as arbiter is complicated by the fact that strong indigenous populations have alternative concepts of land ownership, such as ancestral community territories.ā€

This has been the classic problem for capitalism everywhere in the world. When Western companies discovered the extent of Arabian oil reserves in the 1930s, the Americans and British had to convince the Saud family, among others, that their Bedouin culture had gotten everything wrong. Bedouins had maintained a traditional belief that the desert was everyoneā€™s home and no oneā€™s property. Western lawyers taught the nomads the value of claiming ownership of the land and everything that existed ā€œbelow ground.ā€ Once the notion of property was instilled, dominant families like the house of Saud could get on with their tribeā€™s lucrative arrangements with Western companies that had the technical, financial and commercial expertise that allowed them to turn oil into hard cash.

Indigenous tribes in Latin America have never had much say concerning the laws or the contracts established with Western companies. Mexico managed to nationalize its oil after its revolution. Venezuela did so much later and has been suffering from it ever since. In recent decades, one nation did make a point of respecting not just indigenous title to its mineral resources, but also made a strong gesture toward the core values of indigenous culture. That was Bolivia. The experiment lasted 14 years, until just weeks ago, when a right-wing, militant group that pitted Christian fundamentalism against indigenous culture staged a coup that was supported and encouraged by the US. It successfully overthrew the government of indigenous hero Evo Morales, who was forced to flee to Mexico. 

Morales had made just enough political mistakes to give the coup the credibility it needed to justify its claim of a ā€œ.ā€ But the issues that justified the coup were not necessarily only a concern for the respect of democratic processes. The article reminds potential investors that ā€œArgentina and Bolivia form part of the ā€˜lithium triangleā€™ with Chile,ā€ as well as the fact that lithium is essential for the growing market of batteries for electric vehicles.

The article wants its readers to understand that successful mining companies have begun to master effective ways of appeasing the locals by offering them some economic advantages and creature comforts. One mining executive explained: ā€œIf a miner just tries to exchange money for lands it is a big mistake. You need to create a long-term relationship based on generating employment for local workers and providing some social infrastructure such as drinking water, energy, sewerage and so on.ā€

This can appear to be either spontaneous generosity (of course, it isnā€™t) or a cynical calculation. Most likely, itā€™s a form of ideological adjustment to complete the plan of replacing a culture of sharing with a culture of self-interested lobbying in the name of maximum profit. That actually does sound cynical, but the ideology softens the impact of the criticism.

Everything seems to be evolving for the better: ā€œNot only are miners becoming more adept at handling these issues, there are also signs that most Latin American states are improving their ability to regulate this complex transaction between investors and the citizens.ā€ The Romans called it bread and circuses. This time itā€™s jobs and drinking water, at least for those who choose to congregate in the exploited areas where these advantages await those who are willing to drift away from their traditional culture.

Historical Note

The first paragraph of the Market View article correctly (though incompletely) summarizes the history behind European interest in South American mining: ā€œTales of BirĆŗ, a magical gold-laden land that we now know as Peru, were enough to convince Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro to lead a risky expedition against the Incas. In the short term, the mission was an outstanding success with Pizarro ransoming captured Inca emperor Atahualpa for 13,000 pounds (lbs) of gold and twice as much silver.ā€

Told in this way, the story presents Pizarro as a model of the good capitalist who knows how to convert ā€œa risky expeditionā€ into an ā€œoutstanding success.ā€ The authors even appear to approve of Pizarroā€™s move to capture the Inca ruler. Their account nevertheless neglects some of the crucial events in this glorious. When Atahualpa refused to convert to Christianity, instead of turning the other cheek to the insult, Pizarro naturally launched a war in which he captured the Inca ruler. He then demanded that the Incas turn over ā€œall of their gold and treasure for Atahualpaā€™s freedom. Despite the Inca giving them the riches, Pizarro still had Atahualpa killed in 1533.ā€ Not what you would call fair play. Lewis Carroll in ā€œThe Walrus and the Carpenterā€ ā€”- his poem summarizing British colonialism ā€” would have called killing the hostage after receiving the ransom ā€œa dismal thing to do.ā€

In the authorsā€™ telling, Pizzaro appears to be a clever businessman, evaluating the risk, executing his plan and pressing his advantage to obtain maximum profit. They didnā€™t bother to mention the small detail of killing the captive after obtaining the ransom or the fact that the ransom was nothing less than all the collected treasure of the Incas. But as a forward-looking businessman, Pizzaro knew that there were lucrative investments to be made. Had he also found the fountain of youth, he might have survived long enough to read the article and would undoubtedly be pleased to learn that there are even more lucrative investments to be made today in Latin America.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

The post Need Lithium and Other Metals? Time to Invest in Latin America appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

In all three cases, these leaders escalated their nationally destructive policies this summer in ways that have alienated even their erstwhile supporters. Once again, they have demonstrated that they have no interest in making America, Britain or Brazil great again. They are only interested in doing as much damage as they can before they are ultimately dragged out of office.  

Johnson Tries a Coup

Boris Johnson is a bumbling blowhard with but one current obsession: Brexit. He has promised to sever the UKā€™s relationship with the European Union by October 31 even if it means doing so without a deal that would mitigate the pain of separation. 

The Halloween deadline is grimly appropriate. A no-deal Brexit would make for a blood-curdling horror film. Just slap a Ghostface mask on the British prime minister, give him a knife to cut the umbilicus with Europe and voila: Scream 5.

Johnsonā€™s latest tactic to get what he wants is to suspend Parliament for five weeks this fall to limit debate on alternatives to his doomsday option. He hopes to make it impossible for parliament to pass even emergency legislation banning a no-deal Brexit. Believe it or not, the British system allows for such maneuvers ā€” so Queen Elizabeth had to give her blessing to the suspension. 

When Trump engages in anti-democratic activities, the Republican Party, by and large, indulges him. Not so in the UK, where even Conservatives are up in arms over Johnsonā€™s silent coup. After the prime ministerā€™s announcement of the suspension, the governmentā€™s whip in the House of Lords resigned, as did the head of the Scottish Conservative Party. Former Conservative Prime Minister John Major, meanwhile, has pilloried Johnson and  a legal challenge to the suspension.

This week, Johnson lost his one-vote majority in Parliament when Conservative member Philip Lee  to the Liberal Democrats even as the prime minister was addressing the chamber. 

Most parliamentary members, including quite a few Conservatives, oppose a no-deal exit. No matter: Johnson is following Trumpā€™s script by remaking the Conservative Party in his own image,  anyone who doesnā€™t follow his hard line. After losing a vote that will allow Parliament to introduce legislation to delay Brexit, Johnson  21 dissidents, including a number of former ministers and one grandson of Winston Churchill. 

Now Johnson is talking about holding a snap election in mid-October. The Conservatives are comfortably outpolling Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. However, if all the remain ā€” those who want the UK to stay in the EU ā€” forces , they could eke out a victory. But Johnson could also promise an election for October 14 and then, surprise,  until after Halloween, making Brexit a fait accompli. 

Johnson , ā€œBrexit means Brexit and we are going to make a titanic success of it.ā€ Determined to do the wrong thing even though he knows itā€™s wrong, Johnson is steering the United Kingdom straight into an iceberg. Nigel Farage is his chief navigator, and the rest of the country is clustered on the bow, bracing for impact. 

With a second referendum, wiser heads could wrest control of the helm and prevent disaster, but Johnson is doing everything he can to fast-track Brexit on the principle that it doesnā€™t matter where youā€™re going as long as you get there fast. 

Bolsonaro Fans the Flames

Idiocy loves company. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro styles himself as the Trump of the tropics. The comparison is apt. Some future poet, in describing the inferno of the present, will stuff Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson feet first into the mouth of Satan in the ninth circle. Having stoked the fires of climate change, Bolsonaro will richly deserve such an afterlife.

As  points out, Bolsonaro as a candidate ā€œpromised to end fines for violations of environmental law, shrink the protected areas that account for half of the Brazilian Amazon and fight NGOs, for which he has a visceral hatred. In office, his government has gutted the environment ministry and Ibama, the quasi-autonomous environmental agency. Six of the ten senior posts in the ministryā€™s department of forests and sustainable development are vacant, according to its website. The government talks of ā€œmonetizingā€ the Amazon but sabotaged a $1.3bn European fund that aims to give value to the standing forest.ā€

As a result of Bolsonaroā€™s hands-off policy, deforestation in the Amazon has been out of control this year. Emboldened by their presidentā€™s actions, Brazilian farmers organized a ā€œfire dayā€ to clear land for planting. ā€œWe need to show the president that we want to work and the only way is to knock (the forest) down. And to form and clean our pastures, it is with fire,ā€  one of the organizers of the fire day. The number of fires in the Amazon nearly  over the same period last year. 

Itā€™s not as if the world wasnā€™t warned. Time magazine put the burning Amazon on its cover exactly 30 . The  this time around is straight-forward. The Amazon is a huge carbon sink. Burn it up and global warming will accelerate. There will also be irreversible loss of biodiversity. And the upside? More soybeans, which Brazil can sell to China because the latter is no longer buying the harvests of US farmers. 

Oh, and more profits into the pockets of Bolsonaroā€™s friends in the industries that are paving the paradise of the Amazon and putting up a parking lot.

Trump Trashes the Planet

Donald Trump is a moth that canā€™t stop itself from flying directly at the flame of fame (or, more accurately, the inferno of infamy). He could stay off Twitter, but instead his tweets piss off one group of voters after another. He could stay away from the press, but his lies, gaffes and personal attacks are amplified throughout the media universe. Arguably, this is a strategy to solidify the base and reinforce Trumpā€™s reputation as an anti-establishment gadfly.

But thereā€™s no political strategy behind his trade war with China and his impulsive threats last month to  on Chinese goods. The sectoral damage to his base worries his political advisers: say goodbye to the farm vote, a good chunk of blue-collar voters thrown out of work, and a bunch of average consumers angry at shelling out more money for their holiday gifts. 

Worse would be a more general economic recession brought on by this needless trade war, which would doom the presidentā€™s reelection chances. Yes,  for a ā€œcorrection,ā€ particularly because of Trumpā€™s tax cuts and over-the-top spending. But if Trump played it safe, he could have probably postponed the recession until after the 2020 election. Instead, heā€™s doing everything he can to ensure that it makes landfall smack dab during the presidential race.

Trump isnā€™t just self-destructive. He continued over the last couple weeks to destroy US alliances, most recently by expressing interest in buying Greenland from Denmark. The land wasnā€™t on the market, as the Danish government reminded the president, which prompted Trump to cancel his trip to the country. 

Greenland? Really?! Perhaps Trump was making an indirect acknowledgment of the effects of climate change, attempting a land grab up north to secure a spot for Ivanka and Jaredā€™s summer palace.

Meanwhile, Trump is powering full speed ahead toward climate apocalypse. The administrationā€™s latest move is to remove restrictions on methane emissions, a more potent contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide. The effort is designed to reduce costs for oil and gas companies. But guess what? Even some of the top energy companies are opposed to Trumpā€™s move.

ā€œLast year we announced our support for the direct regulation of methane emissions for new and existing oil and gas facilities,ā€ Exxon Mobil spokesperson Scott Silvestri . ā€œThat hasnā€™t changed. We will continue to urge the EPA to retain the main features of the existing methane rule.ā€ After all, Exxon, BP and others are trying to position natural gas as part of the solution to climate change, and the Trump administration is busy undermining this argument.

The methane restrictions that Trump is trying to unravel date back to the Obama administration. But the current administration wants to tear up much older agreements as well. The Clinton administration protected Alaskaā€™s Tongass National Forest from logging and mining. But Trump wants to open up this 16.7 million-acre sanctuary to the usual suspects in the extractive industries. This is no small land parcel. It  half the worldā€™s temperate rainforest.  

Bolsonaro, at least, is only interested in trashing a rainforest (albeit a large one). Johnson is content to trash a country (albeit a rich one). Trump, with that ego of his, aspires to trash an entire planet. Yes, all three will eventually flame out. But not before theyā€™ve scorched the earth clean.

An environmentalist told journalist Alan Weisman before the 2016 elections that she was considering voting for Trump. ā€œThe way I see it,ā€ she , ā€œitā€™s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.ā€

The philosophy of ā€œthings have to get worse before they get betterā€ has sometimes worked out in the past. But thatā€™s the past. 

Unless we stop him, weā€™ll be rooting around in the post-Trump ashes in vain for the pieces. The house will be gone. And there will be nothing we can salvage to rebuild it.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observerā€™s editorial policy.

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Tropical about 7% of the world’s surface area and are estimated to be home to 50% of the planet’s biodiversity. Every year, fires break out in the Amazon, a practice allowed by Brazilian legislation. In a controlled way, of course. Or itā€™s supposed to be at least. The fires are meant to clear land for pastures and crops. But, this year, the number of fires has increased by to 2018.

So much so that, on August 19, the day in the middle of the afternoon and it rained a dark liquid in SĆ£o Paulo, the city where I live in. The straight-line distance from SĆ£o Paulo to Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, is almost 3,000 kilometers. This route was contaminated by the fire soot.

There are two issues to take into account when looking at the burning Amazon rainforest. First, the growth rate of deforestation in the Amazon this year was 80%. Historically, forests have been burned in dry conditions to transform them into pasture land.

Second, the Brazilian government has refused to accept any opinion that is contrary to the political discourse of development. When Ricardo GalvĆ£o, the director of the National Institute for Space Research that regulates deforestation control in the Amazon, warned less than two months ago that deforestation had grown at an alarming rate, the government fired him. Why? For disclosing information to the public before consulting his superiors.

When the black rain fell in SĆ£o Paulo, the media questioned the government about its responsibility to contain the fires. The answer was that government officials suspected criminal arson by disgruntled NGO workers undergoing cuts to their funding.

Only when the situation gained worldwide attention did the Brazilian government decide to show that it was doing something about it. Of course, this didnā€™t go without and anyone who dared to say that deforestation of the Amazon is a problem for the whole world.

The Lungs of the World

The Amazon rainforest is not the ā€œlungs of the world.ā€ In fact, it is kind of the opposite. Lungs capture oxygen from the atmosphere and transform it into carbon dioxide. The forest captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to perform photosynthesis. And between the uptake and emission of pure oxygen into the air, the bill is sort of balanced. What deserves credit for oxygen production is seaweed, which makes we breathe.

The Amazon rainforest is important for its biodiversity. Scientists that only 0.5% of the flora has been studied medicinally. Who knows what cures have yet to be discovered? Not to mention, of course, the richness of the local wildlife.

Each year, 7 trillion tons of water is produced in the evapotranspiration process, responsible for water and climate control in many regions of the world. The Amazon River discharges 20% of the planetā€™s fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean.

Let us not forget the ā€œinverted lungā€ effect, since the forest carbon stock is sufficient to justify the position of the world’s only conserved rainforest. Still preserved, it must be said.

The prediction is that if Amazon deforestation exceeds 20% of its area, it will threaten the rainforest and can start the process of transformation into other vegetation ā€” making it much less significant to the world. The deforestation account is at 15%, before the current fires. That is why it is so important for the international community to keep watch and protest against any process of local .

We have political issues and global issues. In Brazil, political issues often determine the strongest congressional seats. They almost always trump other issues, to tell the truth. Among the strongest political issues is agribusiness, and politicians support it over the Amazon. The core of agribusiness operations is the pasture area. So, it is not difficult to understand why the government tries to cover up deforestation growth.

But politicians come and go while the world stays. We are talking about a global issue. The Amazon rainforest is a global issue.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro followed through with his promise to turn the entire nation into a movie set for a remake of , where the good guys and the bad guys will be able to shoot it out to see who prevails, thanks to which the distinction between good and bad will be forever lost. ā€” as his fans on the extreme right like to call him ā€” signed a on May 7 that ā€œwould grant millions of citizens the right to carry loaded weapons in public.ā€

Here is todayā€™s 3D definition:Ģż

Loaded:

1: Concerning firearms: containing one or more bullets for the purpose of killing or causing injury

2: Applied to people: drunk, after having consumed an excessive amount of alcohol

3: Ready to strike, with or without provocation, or just for the fun of it

4: Extremely rich and, therefore, likely to act irresponsibly thanks to the power money confers

Contextual noteĢż

Brazil hasnā€™t yet capitulated to Bolsonaroā€™s plan to turn the nation into the dog-shoot-dog republic. On May 10, a supreme court judge backed an opposition partyā€™s complaint that the order is unconstitutional. Bolsonaro has five days to justify its compliance with the constitution. True to his nature ā€” that of a populist despot equally obsessed by applying the law as severely as possible and flouting ā€” the president plays it both ways. He first admitted that if the decree were shown to be unconstitutional, it would cease to exist. Then, hours later, he : “We are not retreating in front of those that since forever have said they are security experts.”

To justify liberating the sale and ownership of weapons and allowing a virtually unlimited supply of ammunition (5,000 cartridges per year), Bolsonaro refers to the Manichean ethical view familiar to adepts of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the US. “The life of a good citizen has no price,” Bolsonaro proudly asserts. And he knows who the ā€œgood citizensā€ are. Their skin tends to be pale and they generally own property that must be defended. ABC News quotes Robert Muggah, the research director of the Igarape Institute. As a result of this law, he ā€œa dramatic increase in the circulation of firearms in northern, northeastern and midwest Brazil,ā€ regions where currently raging are many disputes ā€œbetween landowners and indigenous communities.ā€

The fact that Ģżthe law of vengeance may put people at risk doesnā€™t seem to faze Bolsonaro. So long as the propertied class is sufficiently armed, the peasant, indigenous and criminal classes can be fended off.

But the real contradiction in the presidentā€™s claim to be protecting ā€œthe life of a good citizenā€ lies in the extensive evidence that exists of the Bolsonaro familyā€™s . His ability to distinguish the ā€œgoodā€ from the ā€œbadā€ may thus appear somewhat suspect.

Historical note

Like Donald Trump in the US, Bolsonaro to the religious right to win the election in October 2018. A Catholic married to an Evangelical, Bolsonaro appealed to the two dominant religious groups for support. ā€œ[H]e filled his stump speeches with religious rhetoric and made dozens of campaign videos meant to appeal to religious Christians,ā€ writer Catherine Osborn in Foreign Policy. The principal difference between Brazil and the US appears to be that Brazilian Christians are ready to judge Bolsonaro on results ā€” notably his promise to end corruption ā€” and appear ready to withdraw their support if he fails. They may have retained from their Biblical readings: ā€œBy their fruits you shall know themā€ (). In contrast, Evangelicals and the religious right in general have shown themselves to be to President Trumpā€™s moral and political failures. They appear to be with him till doomsday.

The key to Bolsonaroā€™s electoral success lay not just in the way the judicial system prevented the candidate who was the most popular and most likely to win ā€” former President Luiz InĆ”cio Lula da Silva ā€” from running, but by his repeated intent of engaging whatever tactics are necessary, however violent and undemocratic, to reduce the criminality that affected so many peopleā€™s lives. As Al Jazeera , BolsonaroĢżis someone ā€œwho swept to power in a highly divisive October election on a law-and-order platform that included easing restrictions on guns.ā€ He calls his executive order “another step towards freedom and individual rights in our nation”. Once again, this echoes the far-right ideology of the US that sees gun ownership as an inalienable right.

But, in yet another parallel with the US, Ilona Szabo de Carvalho, executive director of the Igarape Institute, quoted by Al Jazeera, points out that: “Nowhere in our constitution is it stated that we have a right to guns, it says we have a right to public security.”

This would actually be a correct reading of the US constitutionā€™s second amendment, which specifically authorizes the creation of state militias to ensure ā€œpublic security.ā€ Alas, the original formulation, to differentiate the population under the authority of state governments from the federal government, referred to this authorization of the states to organize their system of policing as the ā€œright of the people,ā€ which has now come to mean even in the eyes of the courts, the right of individuals to equip themselves to enforce the law by violent means.

At some point this week, we will have a better idea of Brazilā€™s capacity to avoid such misreadings of the law.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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In January every year, Davos in Switzerland hosts an assembly of the most high-powered decision-makers in the economic and political world. They converge among the purity of snowy landscapes with a twofold intent: To occupy their place on the international chessboard ā€” as observers know, itā€™s all really a game ā€” and to tune up their instruments to make the coming yearā€™s economic symphony sound a little less cacophonic to those rare members of the public believed to have a musically-trained ear: the media. Once the instruments are tuned, everyone can go back home and play in the key they prefer.

This year, the World Economic Forum has been graced by the presence of the newly-elected president of Brazil and aspiring dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, who in Davos, as , ā€œpainted himself as a global statesman seeking ā€˜a world of peace, liberty and democracy.ā€™ā€ He ā€œcommitted to changing our history,ā€ without explaining how. Given his extreme right-wing ideology, if he were to succeed it would most likely be in the direction of fascism.

Brian Winter, a political analyst, tweeted what he heard one say after listening to Bolsonaroā€™s rhetoric: ā€œDisaster. I wanted to like him but he said nothing. Why did he even come?ā€

Here is todayā€™s 3D definition:Ģż

Nothing:

What politicians strive to say most of the time but with the skill that makes it sound as if it just may be something

Contextual note

Emulating US President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro spoke to his sophisticated international audience as if they were the average ignorant Brazilian voters that make up his base, whose knowledge of the world came mainly through television, with little sense of history and none of economics. Bolsonaro : ā€œWe represent a turning point in the eyes of the Brazilian people ā€” a turning point in which ideological bias will no longer take place.ā€ This was presumably on the assumption that the elite capitalists in Davos donā€™t consider Bolsonaroā€™s blatant identification with extreme and outdated as an ideology.

He continued with, ā€œOur motto is ā€˜God above all things.ā€™ā€ If taken literally, this might make any thoughtful listener think that he may be recommending something resembling sharia banking, since even in the West ā€” until only a few centuries ago ā€” the Christian God had a very Islamic habit of castigating those who charged interest or were solely motivated by profit. The crowd at Davos learned long ago to leave God out of their balance sheets and economic planning. That may explain why the sympathizer cited by Winter concluded that Bolsonaro had said ā€œnothing.ā€Ģż

The New York Times summed it up: ā€œMr. Bolsonaro is in many ways the very antithesis of a ā€™Davos Man,ā€™ā€ who always knows how to sound serious and appear to be saying something of great significance and weight.

The nothingness of Bolsonaroā€™s discourse might have passed without comment if it had not been aggravated by the news that his son and presumably the president himself ā€” who claimed to be ā€œcleanā€ and promised to do away with corruption and crime ā€” had for some time entertained ā€œwith members of a Rio de Janeiro death squad called the EscritĆ³rio do Crime (The Crime Bureau).”

Historical and cultural note

Politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, who have mastered the art of hyperreality, succeed in getting elected by persuading their public to forget the reality of history. They do so by encouraging them to imagine an unrealizable future built on distorted memories of a more tranquil past when things were ordered, relationships were stable because people knew their place, traditions were respected and, most importantly, ideas kept in line, which usually translates as slogans that replace articulated thought.

Strongarm populist political hyperreality typically plays on the idea of going beyond the inefficiency of democracy and getting things done without asking too many questions ā€” as well as refusing to respond to those thinking people ask. If people are dissatisfied with the real world, build along simpler lines a less real but more sharply delineated world for them to believe in.

The hyperreal populists reduce to a simple contest of the strong versus the weak the subtle and often confusing power negotiation games that democracy inevitably generates as a response to the diversity of interests in the community. A democratic regime must respond to the complexity of reality with policies that hew as closely as possible to ethical principles ā€” rules and laws ā€” while balancing a plurality of points of view.

The dictators of democracies denounce such subtlety as ā€œideologyā€ and a recipe for inefficiency. They fixate on both the visible and the invisible: One day it may be a physical wall and the next, the will of a god ā€” or maybe the ā€” with the understanding that their rise to power has given them a special access to the deity. The wall and the will: two absolute barriers to dialogue and exchange. In both cases, the result is the elimination of meaning or, in other words, the achievement of nothing.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]Ģż

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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The Military Police Department of SĆ£o Paulo has a long history of brutality and racial profiling. An points out that in SĆ£o Paulo, ā€œserious human rights violations continue to be denounced, such as homicides committed by the police, as well as torture and mistreatment of people in custody. Young black men living in slums and poor areas on the outskirts of cities are more in danger.ā€

No other episode, however, was as shocking as the Carandiru Massacre that took place in a SĆ£o Paulo prison on October 2, 1992. On this now-infamous day, at least 111 inmates were slaughtered by police agents.

The bloodiest episode in Brazilian penitentiary history began at 10am when two inmates housed at the Carandiru prison started a fight during a football match in the prison yard. The brawl quickly escalated into a general rebellion. By 2pm, prisoners were burning mattresses and blocking entrances to the cellblocks. State authorities attempted negotiations for about an hour, after which police troops stormed the prison and, within half an hour, 111 inmates were deadā€”each was shot an average of five times, and not a single agent lost his life.

Symbol of Violence

This brutal massacre went onto not only become a symbol SĆ£o Pauloā€™s police violence, but also of impunity in Brazil. Twenty-four years after the massacre, not a single law enforcement agent has been arrested. Although 74 agents were convicted for murder and human rights violationsā€”with a combined sentence of nearly 700 years of imprisonmentā€”the verdict was appealed and the accused never served jail time. To make matters worse, SĆ£o Pauloā€™s State Court , which has brought the case against them back to square one.

One judge denied that the massacre took place, pushing for the dismissal of the charges. According to Judge Ivan Sartori, the event ā€œwasnā€™t a massacre, but self-defense.ā€ Letā€™s not forget the fact that the prisoners didnā€™t have firearms, and that many bodies were found with bullet holes in the back of their heads, classic execution style.

State judges based their decision on a technicality: According to the courtā€™s decision, it is illegal to convict the 74 law enforcement agents involved in the raid since no analysis was performed on the ballistics. It is impossible, the judges insist, to determine which officer killed which inmate. Because of this technicality, the judges maintain that the convictions of the agents were unsupported by evidence.

The brutality of the Carandiru Massacre was a defining moment of the 1990s Brazil. The episode served as material for musicians, such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and the director Hector Babenco, who directed the 2003 movie .

Impunity Is The Norm

Even more disgraceful was the leniency displayed at the time toward state authorities. Colonel Ubiratan GuimarĆ£es, for example, who coordinated the blood bath, was elected to Congress in 2002. Candidates in Brazil are identified by numbers, and GuimarĆ£es chose a number that ended in 111ā€”a nasty reference to the number of inmates murdered. He was himself murdered in 2006 without ever facing formal punishment for his actions. Then-Governor Luiz AntĆ“nio Fleury Filho, to whom the Military Police answered, is currently a member of the PMDBā€™s (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement) National Committee, Brazilā€™s largest political party.

This flagrant disregard for justice ultimately encourages police brutality, according to Sandra Jardim, who prosecuted the officers involved in the Carandiru Massacre. According to Jardim, Judge Ivo Sartoriā€™s ruling ā€œtears down the Brazilian Constitutionā€ in choosing not to punish violent excesses in police actions. This is particularly disturbing if we recall the recent episodes of police violence directed toward black and low-income populations. A March shows outraging data on the practice.

In August 2015, two massacres took place in violent parts of the SĆ£o Paulo Metropolitan Area. It is believed that seven policemen and guards acted to avenge the death of a coworker, resulting in a bloodbath that killed 19 peopleā€”a 15-year-old among the victims.

Cases involving for the officers involved. This occurs even when victims have been shot from close range or execution-style. Impunity is the rule when it comes to murder cases, and not just for cases involving law enforcement officers. According to Amnesty International, only . Multiple factors contribute to this statistic, including flawed investigations and forensic work, as well as a slow-moving justice system.

Despite the arguments presented by those who defend ā€œvigorous actionā€ by the police, massacres donā€™t protect law-abiding citizens. The outcome of the Carandiru Massacre was instead the union of several criminal actions, which came together to form a major drug cartel called the Ģż(Primeiro Comando da Capital, PCC in Portuguese). Now, drug lords rule many state prisons in Brazil, and control organized crime both inside and outside of the penitentiary system.

The Structure of the Police Must Change

There are three main police forces in Brazil: Federal Police, Civil Police and Military Police. The first is our equivalent to the FBI, and it is attached to the Ministry of Justice. The remaining two are state forces. To simplify the distinction between them: the Civil Police are the detectives, and the Military Police function more like beat cops. The former investigates crimes, while the latter is supposed to prevent them from happening by monitoring specific areas. Not only does the Military Police fail greatly in crime prevention, but it are also thought to contribute to criminal activity: are attributed to these cops.

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The daily reality endured by policemen is not an easy one, either. Salaries are notoriously bad, especially for a job like theirs: They survive on under $600 a month. They also must work with outdated equipment, if they have it at all.

Many experts argue for the demilitarization of the police and a major overhaul of Brazilā€™s law enforcement structure. Defenders of the current system, however, maintain that the police militarization is specified by our Constitution. At least this was what the Brazilian government told the UN back in 2012. Sure, itā€™s constitutionalā€”but that doesnā€™t mean it should stay that way.

*[This article was originally published by.]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit:Ģż

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Since December 2015, whenĢżthe impeachment process against Dilma RousseffĢżfirst began, the debate in Brazil has centered on whether or not it was a coup. In her first speech after being ousted from the presidency, Rousseff said she is being replaced by a mob of crooked putschists.ĢżMichel Temer, on the other hand, said: ā€œThey are the putschists, as they donā€™t want the constitution to be followed.ā€

In South America, the word coup is often associated with tanks on the streets, soldiers dictating a curfew, political arrests and torture. None of that happened in Brazil. Yes, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff did disobey fiscal legislationā€”an offense punishable by the loss of the mandate. Yes, the ritual went as the constitution says it shouldā€”and it took eight long months to be concluded.

So, technically speaking, we canā€™t call it a coup. But if only things were that simple.

If we take a look at the Portuguese dictionary, the word golpe, or coup, can also be translated as the use of a ruse to accomplish something.

Opponents to the impeachment claim that the process, while legal, was anything but legitimate. It was initiated by a notoriously corrupt politician: former Speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha.

Allies of the new president, Michel Temer, were caught on tape saying that a change of government was in order to stop anti-corruption investigations from ā€œbleedingā€ the political class dry. And the crimes that led Rousseff to her political demiseā€”fiscal mismanagementā€”have all been committed in the past by Brazilian leaders since the arrival of the Portuguese on our shores.

So, was it a coup or not?

Rodrigo Augusto Prando, a Brazilian political scientist, likes to say that an impeachment process is like a plane crash: ā€œThere isnā€™t a single cause, but it is rather the effect of a plethora of mistakes leading to the disaster.ā€

In the case of Rousseff, he cites her difficult personality; the personal feud between herself and Cunha; the bad blood between the government and industrials; the awful economic results of her administration; and the fact that she was a woman in a sea of powerful men. Any of those reasons are not crimes punishable by impeachment, of course. So, does that reinforce the coup theory?

Not for historian Rosa Schwartz, a professor at the Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo. She says that although a conspiracy was certainly in motion, calling it a coup would be an exaggeration. The historian believes that we have indeed witnessed a political rupture, the result of a crisis that has deeply wounded the federal government, the Workersā€™ Party and the Brazilian left as a whole.

ā€œIt is hard to predict how this episode will be seen in the future, but my guess is that historians will say that nothing has really changed: Those who always held power in Brazil kept it. What changes is that the new government, unlike the precedent ones, doesnā€™t seem to care much for underprivileged populations,ā€ Schwartz says.

Since the 1980s, when Brazil returned to democracy, different administrations have, to different degrees, carried out policies to reduce the social disparities in Brazilian society and lower poverty. The first signals sent by President Temer and his crew are not along those lines, as he has slashed programs dedicated to assisting women and racial minorities.

Whether or not we have undergone a coup, the outlook of Brazilā€™s near future is somber. Wherever you look, there seems to be more doubt than certainty. Not even the entire implications of the impeachment vote of August 31 are yet known, as the senate made an unprecedented decision to not suspend øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s political rights.

ā€œThe Brazilian political system creates many distortions. Even in the best-case scenario, things are not likely to get better in the next few years,ā€ says Augusto Prando.

Since 2013, when political demonstrations erupted across the country, Brazilians have become more vocal about their disenchantment with the current status quo. Dissatisfaction tends to grow, as a large part of the Brazilian society now feels that their votes in the 2014 election were not respected.

ā€œIt will be hard to make people believe in politics, but they must realize that there is no alternative to politics,ā€ states Augusto Prando.

Schwartz holds a similar point of view: ā€œThe moment we are going through reminds me of May 1968, when the French youth rejected the two dominant models: the Soviet and the American way. Brazilians may not yet know exactly what they want, but they are sure about what they donā€™t want. Once the dust settles, they must organize themselves to make their voices heard.ā€

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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This week, the Olympics began in Rio de Janeiro with a spectacular ceremony as usual. This being Brazil, the games promise to be one hell of a party. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has prepared well. Apparently, the IOC hasĢż, thrice the amount it handed out in London. Some 3,000 ladies working in 70 bars are offering a ā€œā€ to Olympic athletes to apparently ensure that the condoms will be used.

Apart from condoms, money has flowed into stadiums, security and spectacles. Invariably, much of it has ended up in the hands of corrupt politicians and crooked contractors.ĢżMother JonesĢżestimates thatĢż. This spending on the Olympics is all the more outrageous given the fact that Brazil is going through a political, economic and social crisis that is tearing the country apart.

In an earlier edition ofĢż, this author agonized over the bleak future bedeviling Brazil. Already, 19 of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in Brazil. Things promise to get uglier as theĢż. In the first quarter, Brazilā€™s gross domestic product (GDP) shrunk by 5.4%. Unemployment is rising, wages are falling and prices are soaring.

To fund the Olympics,Ģż.ĢżHis state relies on oil revenue, which has slumped as prices have collapsed over the last two years. Its deficits are high and its debt ratings low. The political crisis that this author analyzed in May continues like an unending soap opera, exponentially exacerbating Brazilā€™s economic crisis. The social contact itself is stretched to breaking point with poverty, inequality and crime skyrocketing in 2016.

So grim is the situation that some like JosĆ© Ricardo Nogueira ofĢżUniversidade Federal de PernambucoĢżhave argued that Brazilā€™s social contract itself is an illusion. InĢż, Nogueira examined how the Brazilian state manages to tax heavily without redistributing generously so ā€œthat even the poorest 20% of the households are, on average, net contributors to the fiscal system.ā€ Brazil is blessed by the bounties of nature but is blighted by the avarice of its elites who have driven this land of samba into debt, destitution and desperation.

Given the circumstances, most people with a semblance of a conscience and a modicum of consciousness are understandably uneasy about the Rio Olympics. Spending so much money on a sporting spectacle simply does not seem right.

In any case, it turns out that Rio brings into focus a rather unsavory long-term trend. Bent Flyvbjerg, Allison Stewart and Alexander Budzier of the Said Business School at the University of Oxford have found that the Olympics over the past decade have cost $8.9 billion on average. TheirĢżĢżmakes chilling reading. At 156% in real terms, ā€œthe Olympics have the highest average cost overrun of any type of megaproject.ā€

The authors point out that the ā€œcost overrun and associated debt from the Athens 2004 Games weakened the Greek economy and contributed to the countryā€™s deep financial and economic crises.ā€ Both the Beijing and London Olympics cost an arm and a leg. However, China and the United Kingdom are rich countries that can afford rousing carousels.

In 2008, the Middle Kingdom was hell bent to prove that it had arrived as a great modern power. In 2012, the UK peddled bothĢżĢżfor a purpose. Both are symbols of this rainy islandā€™s cultural hegemony thatĢżĢżfrom Shanghai to San Francisco and allows the queen to love the Commonwealth that, in the memorable words of its current foreign secretary, ā€œ.ā€

Needless to say, Greece and Brazil cannot quite afford to act like China and the UK. Poor peasants are generally ill advised to ape the lavish manners of lords who live in castles. Besides, neither Greece nor Brazil has achieved anything by hosting the Olympics except spending money they did not have and bringing ruin upon themselves.

This brings us to a difficult issue. In modern times, what is the role of sports in general and of the Olympics in particular?

To answer that question, we have to acknowledge that humanity is hardwired to play and watch sport. Witnessing Usain Bolt run, Michael Phelps swim or Lionel Messi kick a ball can be sublime. Besides, as the ancient Greeks discovered early on, sports build character, forge teams and give valuable life lessons.

Yet sports have an ugly underbelly too. If winning is everything, defeat is disgrace. None other than Pindar,Ģż, spoke about the defeated slinking away even from their mothers ā€œsorely wounded by their mischance.ā€ This fixation with victory makes athletes, coaches and staff start believing that the ends justify the means. For prospects of glory and money, many make the Faustian pact with Mephistopheles. Some turn intoĢż. OthersĢż.

It is not just athletes who cheat. ManyĢż. Countries that equate national sporting success with an international projection of power institutionalize cheating. According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, Russia has operated aĢżĢżfor four years across the ā€œvast majorityā€ of summer and winter Olympic sports.

Even when countries do not cheat, they end up spending insane amounts on sports. A 2008 paper estimated theĢż. For the last 11 years, this size has kept growing. Many argue that this money is well spent. It creates a healthier society. But that might not be entirely true. Only a few people end up becoming sports professionals and theĢż.

Sporting spectacles have warts much uglier than cheating. As pointed out earlier, the Olympics cost a ridiculous sum. Besides, they marginalize the marginalized further. Beijing is still haunted by the ghosts of theĢżhutongsĢżthat were bulldozed to make way for a spectacular 2008 Olympics. The flipside of the Beijing extravaganza was best captured in what an old Chinese man said to Annette Langer ofĢżDer Spiegel: ā€œ.ā€

Brazil has emulated China dutifully. Jules Boykoff estimates thatĢżĢżto make way for the Olympics.Ģż, Sally Jenkins ofĢżThe Washington PostĢżpoints out the irony of IOC members enjoying prime seating and dining on $450 a day while those just 50 yards away live off $228 a month and cannot dream of a ticket to any Olympic event.

Jenkins goes on to write: ā€œThe extent to which the Olympic ā€˜movementā€™ has become a destructive force, driven by an officialdom whose signature is indifference, can be seen just outside the Olympic Park fences, and I mean just outside.ā€ In the article, she poignantly captures how a multi-generationalĢżfavelaĢżwas converted into an Olympic parking lot. Only 20 tiny utilitarian cottages remain for the stubborn families that refused to leave even when their homes were demolished. Delmo de Oliveira lost his home and hauntingly remarks, ā€œThe Olympics has nothing to do with our story.ā€

Ģżfor people like de Oliveira. Police has been gunning down suspects who tend to be young black menĢż. ForĢżfavelaĢżresidents and protesters, police violence is a feature of daily life that has got worse in the run up to the Olympics. The police have sprayed them wantonly with pepper spray and rubber bullets. History is repeating itself. Two years ago, when Brazil hosted the 2014 FIFA World Cup, police killings in Rio de Janeiro state shot up by 40%.

In some ways, the Rio Olympics is a metaphor forĢż. Television, YouTube, FacebookĢżet alĢżnow make videos of athletes available anywhere anytime on any device. Viewers from Shanghai to San Francisco can gasp at the superhuman performances of modern-day gladiators, products of miraculous sports science if not devious doping. The IOC officials, Brazilā€™s elites and corporate sponsors laugh all the way to the bank, while already suffering Brazilian taxpayers foot the bill for this modern-day, multibillion-dollar circus. Of course, some Brazilians end up losing their homes and getting shot on top so that the high and mighty can safely watch gladiatorial performances, sip fine Burgundies and savor caviar.

The Olympics and the IOC have always had a dark side. Pierre de FrĆ©dy, Baron de Coubertinā€™s focus on allowing only amateur athletes was upper class humbug. It discriminated against poor colored athletes like the legendary Jim Thorpe. To this day, the IOC has not modified its record and fully reinstated what the Smithsonian calls ā€œā€ because he played minor-league baseball in 1909-10.

Yet Coubertin was a romantic who idealized both British public schools and ancient Greece. He saw sports as a means to peace. As early as 1911, the fusty aristocrat was bemoaning ā€œthe often exaggerated expenses incurred for the most recent Olympiads.ā€ Today, the Olympics have become a monstrosity. Without reform, they will lose their relevance.

Finally, even the sordid Rio Olympics have a silver lining. Refugees have their own time for the first time in Olympic history. The United Nations say thatĢż. This figure isĢż. Many have survived great danger to escape. Yusra Mardini was in a dinghy in the Aegean Sea when the motor failed. Along with her sister and two others, she towed the tiny boat in chilling waters of a dangerous sea where many drown on a regular basis.Ģż, an inspirational and heartwarming story.

Like Jesse Owens in 1936 orĢż, refugees in Rio might leave an indelible mark on the sands of time. They may not mitigate the war, conflict, persecution and desperation that are driving millions away from their homes, but they have now placed the global refugee crisis firmly in the public eye.

*[You can receive ā€œThe World This Weekā€ directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visitĢżĢżand enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

Rio Olympics: Winds of Change or Tides of Turmoil?

Ā© adamkaz

CanĢżthe Olympic Games help Brazil through its economic problems?

As many sporting fans await the start of the Olympics, it is hardly an understatement that the host country, Brazil, faces a number of economic and political challenges. Some of the many problems include an ailing economy and an uncertain political situation. Other countries have also seen their share of problems leading up to the Olympics, from the Russian teamā€™s dopingĢżscandalĢżto Pakistanā€™s dire state of its sportingĢżfacilities. Yet, as Brazil lurches from oneĢżcrisisĢżto another, it remains to be seen if the Olympics will help the country overcome its problems.

The EconomistĢżnotes that Brazil enjoyed a period of economicĢżgrowthĢżof 2.2% year-on-year average from 2011 to 2014. Between 2002 and 2008, the country experienced an average GDP year-on-year growth rate of 3.5%. The article also noted that Brazilā€™s unemployment rate even dipped below 5% for most of 2014. This was reflected by the Nationalā€¦

Bringing Sustainable Healthcare to Rural India

Ā© BDphoto

AnĢżindependent project is increasing access to healthcare in rural India.

A good quality healthcare system and access to it by the impoverished is a widely-discussed issue, with governments across the world working toward resolving it. India, with its population of approximately 1.2 billion people, is seeing an improvement in public healthcare but, with a population set to be theĢżlargest in the world by 2028, there is still much to be done.

A nation with such a large and diverse population faces a multitude of problems, and the government simply does not have the ability to take care of everyone. Sometimes political differences between the center and the states and bureaucratic red tape cause inefficiencies at various levels. This makes the employment of independent organizations without political affiliations essential for the livelihood goals of the nationā€™s poor and underrepresented citizens.

When Dr. Padmini Balagopal spent six months doing a lifestyle modification training with the villagers of Karakhdiā€¦

Engaging Women to Help Combat Extremism

Ā© JanelleLugge

ItĢżis time to include women and marginalized groups in efforts to combat extremism.

In June, President Barack Obama joined over 1,200 promising entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from 78 countries at Stanford University for the annualĢżGlobal Entrepreneurship SummitĢż(GES) to discuss how entrepreneurship can build resilience to extremism.

Now in itsĢżseventh year, the summit works to support the development of newĢżpublic-private partnerships andĢżinnovation ecosystems. At a time in which the mediaā€™s eye has been heavily focused on the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and other radical groups, its fresh-faced focus on market growth and innovative technology as a means to combat extremism is a welcome approach.

In his remarks at the summit,ĢżUS Secretary of State John KerryĢżhighlighted the tie between economic opportunity and peace building. ā€œThere is an intimate connection between the creation of economic opportunity and the potential of political stability or peace ā€¦ between economic policy and foreign policyā€¦

Feeling the Bern in November Can Change the System

Ā© alancrosthwaite

Have an entrenched two-party system and an antiquated process of the electoral college skewed the meaning of universal suffrage in America?

Next November Democrats, Republicans and independents will collectively decide which of two undesirable, seriously flawed candidates will be the next president of the United States. None of these three groups is happy with the binary choice that has been offered them. July has seen the Republicans nominate a candidate who many consider not to be a true Republican. This left the Democrats freeĢżto finalize their choice of a preselected candidate who, as a pillar of the establishment, happens to appeal to mainstream Republicans.

The insurgentĢżwave of the Democratic Partyā€”led with stunning results throughout the primaries by Bernie Sandersā€”could paradoxically be better described as the old wave or even the ā€œtrue Democrats.ā€ Unlike the New Democrats of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the Sanders insurgentsā€™Ģżpolicies are modeled on Franklin Rooseveltā€™s New Dealā€¦

Misguided Tax Targeting Fosters Inequality in Mexico

Ā© blazic27

Mexico has one of the worst tax systems of all industrialized countries.

Juan Armando Hinojosa CantĆŗ, a Mexican construction contractor and business tycoon, is famous in Mexico for his alleged role in building a $7-million mansion for the first ladyā€”best known as the presidentā€™s ā€œWhite House.ā€ But the Panama Papers have quickly made him much more famous, for a much larger sum of money. The Panama Papers, the largest cybersecurity breach in history, uncovered that after the mansion scandal, Hinojosa moved around $100 million to offshore accounts with the help from Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian-based law firm from which the documents were leaked by an anonymous whistleblower.

As in many other countries, the Panama Papers leak has highlighted or exposed weak tax systems and government accountability in Mexico. The terabyte of information from Mossack Fonseca included 11.5 million documents with diverse mentions of offshore firms and accounts used to hide tax evasion and illicit transactionsā€¦

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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As many sporting fans await the start of the Olympics, it is hardly an understatement that the host country, Brazil, faces a number of economic and political challenges. Some of the many problems include an ailing economy and an uncertain political situation. Other countries have also seen their share of problems leading up to the Olympics, from the Russian teamā€™s dopingĢżĢżto Pakistanā€™s dire state of its sportingĢż. Yet, as Brazil lurches from oneĢżĢżto another, it remains to be seen if the Olympics will help the country overcome its problems.

notes that Brazil enjoyed a period of economicĢżgrowthĢżof 2.2% year-on-year average from 2011 to 2014. Between 2002-2008, the country experienced an average GDP year-on-year growth rate of 3.5%. The article also noted that Brazilā€™s unemployment rate even dipped below 5% for most of 2014. This was reflected by the National Index of Consumer Expectation as the statisticĢżremainedĢżabove 100 from 2008 until early 2015ā€”a number above 100 indicates increasing confidence. According to , the consumer expectation measure ā€œfocuses on consumerā€™s current financial situation and on expectations about inflation, unemployment, wages and major purchases for the next 6 months.ā€

Economic and Political Malaise

These statistics seem to paint a rosy picture. However, Brazil has faced a number of severe problems that have compounded over the past five years. The fall in the commodity markets isĢżespecially painful for Brazil, considering that its commodity exportsĢżĢżmore than 50% of total exports. From 2000 to 2013, China’s annualĢżĢżwith Brazil grew from $2 billion to $83 billion. Yet, as China grapples with its economic restructuring, Brazil suffered as commodity prices saw a sharp downturn.

These external problems were furthered by what John Lyons and Paul Kiernan of The New York Times haveĢżĢżas the ā€œresource curse.ā€ Countries with abundant resources will benefit from great booms, but will inevitably fall into a trap of economic mismanagement and overvalued currencies.ĢżThe ĢżsupportsĢżthis, notingĢżthat Brazil has structural weaknesses ranging from poor infrastructure to a considerable informal sector. Such structural problems inevitably weigh on the economy, with the Ģżby 3.8% in 2015.ĢżĢżhas now reached 8.84% in June year-on-yearā€”considerably higher than the government-set target of 4.5%. The high inflation has forced the Central Bank to keep itsĢżĢżinterest rates of 14.25%.

The Transparency International corruption perception index allocates a score of 100 to a ā€œcleanā€ country, while zero indicates the most corrupt. From 2014 to 2015, Brazil saw its scoreĢżfallĢżfrom 43 to 38.

With all these problems, Brazilā€™s credit rating has been reduced to junkĢżĢżby Moodyā€™s Investors Service, S&P and Fitch. With growing government debt and increasing interest payments, Brazilā€™s interim president, Michel Temer, will look toĢżĢżgovernment spending.

As Brazil tries to put its economy together, the country still faces political difficulties. High-profileĢżĢżclean-ups have implicated the oil giant, Petrobas, and several politicians. Suspended President Dilma Rousseff is currently undergoing an ĢżforĢżĢżthe budget in her favor. The Transparency International corruption perception index allocates a score of 100 to a ā€œcleanā€ country, while zero indicates the most corrupt. From 2014 to 2015, Brazil saw its scoreĢżĢżfrom 43 to 38.

Olympic Promise

With Brazilā€™s economy reeling, it is a wonder if the Olympics will be the boon that the country needs. Other than the sporting marvel that will come to Rio de Janeiro, the host city, there are some economic benefits. Around 350,000 tourists areĢżĢżto come and view both the Olympics and Paralympics, which means that there will be an increase in consumer spending. With an uptick in consumption of goods and services, this could translate to increased employment to serve the swell in tourism.

Kevin Daly, from Goldman Sachs,ĢżĢżabout the LondonĢż2012 Olympics that there are longer-term benefits ā€œsuch as the promotion of London and the UK as a tourist venues and as a potential location for investment.ā€ Within the same report, Daly also mentioned that London may not accrue as many longer-term promotional benefits from its time hosting the Olympics because it is already known for tourism. The same could be said forĢż.

The city could also benefit from increased investment that may not only boost the infrastructure for sporting events, but to also improve transportation and other venues. Indeed, Moodyā€™s hasĢżĢżthat there will be benefits from the $7.1 billion investment in the cityā€™s infrastructure such as metro advances.

Investments such as these could be utilized in the futureā€”lest they become ā€œwhite elephantsā€ā€”as Goldman Sachs economists Yu Song and Michael Buchanan stated in aĢżĢżon the Beijing Olympics that “more than 90% of the total investment for the games was in telecommunications, transportation and utilities ā€¦ and most of this has been fully utilized since.ā€ The positives from increased investments in Rio have also brought forth controversies through Ģżand the fact that the has already beenĢżexceededĢżby 51%.

Yet, there are other factors that cannot be measuredā€”from the promotion of the host countryā€™s culture to the pride that comes from hosting the Olympicsā€”as suggested by sports scientistĢż. Daly, Song and Buchanan mention other benefits of promoting sport as well as healthy lifestyles and even increased environmental awarenessā€”the final point specifically benefited Beijing.

Tim Toohey, researcher from Goldman Sachs,ĢżĢżthat ā€œdefining feature of whether the London Games provides a better economic return than the Sydney Games could well be the high degree of slack in the UK economy.ā€ĢżĢżrefers to the amount of resources, which includes labor and capital that are currently unemployed. Brazil does face an unemploymentĢżĢżof 11.2%. While labor and capital can be employed to help during the Olympicsā€”whether it would be transitional use or notā€”the structural problems still remain.

In order for Brazil to benefit from the Olympic potential, it will have to rein in corruption and get rid of the uncertainty in the political system. It should also reduce its dependency on commodity exports so as to not be susceptible to adverse changes in prices.ĢżWith so much uncertainty in the economic and political realms, it may be best to simply enjoy the sporting marvel that the Olympics promises to be.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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On August 3, 1992, a Petrel airplane crashed near the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) AirVenture fair. Two people died. According to the (NTSB) report, the cause of the accident was ā€œinadequate quality controlā€ of the tail boom as it was constructed with ā€œonly four of the six required carbon fiber laminate plies.ā€ The tail boom came assembled from the Petrel kit manufactured in Brazil by Scoda Aeronautica.

In July 2016, 24 years later at the same AirVenture fair, thousands of airplane aficionados and the aircraft homebuilt/experimental community were exchanging information about their new sets of wings, light sport aircraft (LSA) models and engines. LSAs are a wide variety of aircraft, including two-seat, ultra-light designs and powered parachutes, antiques and classics. But unlike in America, where even experimental manufacturers have to follow minimum security standards, in Brazil they easily fly over our heads but under the inspections radar.

Among them, promoting and selling airplanes to the American market, was a Brazilian company named Super Petrel USA. In 1992, the same company had a different name: Edra Aeronautica.

Edra Aeronautica, which changed its name to Scoda Aeronautica in 2015 and is now called Super Petrel USA, is only one of the many Brazilian aircraft manufacturers that endangers pilots and aircraft owners by offering poor quality products.

A deeper analysis reveals that the sources of these problems are not only the Brazilian companies that do not follow international aviation rules, but the Brazilian legislation itself, or rather the lack of it. The sectorā€™s regulation in Brazil is inadequately conducted by (ANAC), a regulatory agency similar to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in its duties, but quite different in its organization.

Investigating Accidents

In Brazil, the aeronautical authority for all aircraft accidents investigations (civilian or military) is CENIPAā€”the Brazilian Air Force department. On the other hand, the aeronautical authority for regulation and enforcement is the civilian ANAC. Due to this, the mixture of civil and military aviation authorities, the proper prevention and, eventually, investigation of aeronautical accidents do not work in harmony. CENIPA does not investigate experimental/homebuilt accidents as a rule, because these pilots fly over restricted areas at their own risk. For that reason alone the agency should be stricter toward the companies that manufacture them, but there is no data and for this segment of the aviation industry.

Because there are no official records, it is difficult to assess how many accidents involving experimental planes occur in Brazil. We only hear about the ones involving well-known people, like the one that killed Roger Agnelli and six members of his family in March of last year.

Moreover, the same experimental industries create ANAC regulations for the experimental/homebuilt segment. The are the aircraft owners, kit assemblers and importers, and plane producers like Edra/Scoda/Super Petrel USA.

This is just another proof of how chaotic Brazilā€™s experimental aircraft industry is. It starts with the regulation of LSAsā€”Aeronaves Leves Esportivas (ALE) in Brazil. To be a LSA, among other characteristics, you have to follow a set of rules set by (ASTM), but ANAC simply allows all Brazilian experimental manufacturers to certify themselves as ALE even though .

Because there are no official records, it is difficult to assess how many accidents involving experimental planes occur in Brazil. We only hear about the ones involving well-known people, like the one that killed Roger Agnelli and six members of his family in March of last year. Agnelli was the president of Vale, the worldā€™s . His experimental airplane, a Comp Air 9 turboprop monoplane, slammed into two residential homes minutes after taking off from an airport in the heart of SĆ£o Paulo, despite Brazilian air law experimental airplanes to fly over populated regions.

Preventable Tragedies

In January of 2015, Brazil faced another tragedy that could have been prevented had the system of regulations worked properly. An accident with a Super Petrel killed a 19- year-old pilotā€”one of the rare accidents with experimental airplanes that were investigated by CENIPA. Analysis of these items by certified mechanics and engineers revealed other problems concerning the Petrel/Super Petrel model and the Edra/Scoda quality control: its fuselage is not made of carbon fiber, as it is advertised; the aircraft has non-aeronautical components; Super Petrel does not have a fuel indicator for each of its three tanks, to name but a few.

Also, the legislation analysis revealed that the sources of these problems were related to the sectorā€™s regulation in Brazilā€”ANAC again.

A few months later, representing (Abrapavaa), the pilotā€™s father denounced ANAC at the Brazilian federal Senate, leading to changes in the experimental/homebuilt regulatory environment. The key step is the proposed ban on experimental aircraft sales to customers, as suggested by a special committee responsible for the initial hearings during the discussion of the new Brazilian Aeronautical Code law project.

The CENIPA official report also revealed information regarding the manufacturer of the aircraft: Although there was a mandatory ā€”the equivalent of a recallā€”warning that the company should replace the engineā€™s fuel hose and that the ā€œnon-compliance with these instructions could result in ā€¦ fatal injury.ā€ Edra/Scoda informed that the piece was replaced during aircraft production, but the report shows that it was not replaced, with the flight ending in anticipated fatality.

Next August, the Senate will start to discuss the reform of the . Before the politicians vote on the proposal, an expert commission with strong general aviation representation is going to propose an updated legal code governing the industry. It is more than obvious that the current, 30-year-old Code of Aviation (CBA) needs to reflect the new developments such as increased air passenger traffic and new technology such as drones.

But nothing will be more helpful to the Brazilian society than a good review of the prevention and regulation laws concerning accidents related to experimental or fake LSA aircraftā€”a problem that hangs over all of our heads.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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When Brazil hosted the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the country witnessed mass protests against billions of public money spent on new sporting venues and infrastructure around them instead of social projects. Now, as Rio de Janeiro is getting ready to host the 2016 Olympic Games, the problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, corruption and inequality remain stark, despite elaborate attempts to conceal them.

The benefits that have come with the World Cup and Olympic Games investment in the Brazilian economyā€”such as urban rejuvenation, improved public transportation and creation of public spaces like parks and museumsā€”have a dark side. In an attempt to airbrush the image of its second largest city, the authorities have forcefully removed over 77,000 people since 2009 to make space for luxury real estate developments and infrastructure projects associated with the sporting events.

Pushed behind walls that hide them from view, Rioā€™s poorest communities lead a life very different from the image the authorities are attempting to project, fighting to save their already-meagre existence from complete annihilation. When we talk about the advantages of the World Cup and the Olympics, we need to remember at what price it comes to the local poor and who really stands to benefit.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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Brazilā€”that is, Rioā€”is about to host what is perhaps the most important event of the multi-billion-dollar global industry that we call sports. You know, the Olympic Games, that exciting TV show that is broadcast every four years, and that always tries to encourage us to believe that sponsors like Coca-Cola and MasterCard are hoping for a multicultural and meritocratic world where everyone loves each other.

As aĢżnaive media celebration of a globalized, capitalistic and peaceful post-war world, the Olympics are clearly decaying. Apart from the professionals (most of them high on performance-enhancing drugs, as you are probably already aware) and those that will make money out of the event, Brazil doesnā€™t seem to be particularly excited.

Cultural Undercurrents

This is the upshot of many large-scale cultural undercurrents. The erosion of the idea of representation and the ubiquity of the media are two of them. When people still believed that a given sportsman somehow represented them (rather than a trainersā€™ brand), or had to watch the same TV channel due to the sheer lack of options, the Olympics could pass as the peak of the civilized nobility, an important and grandiose feat that brought the entire world together into a stadium. Now, Rio 2016, as was London 2012, will be another component of the irritating white noise which emerges from our infinitely mediatized realityā€”surely it is more visible than other elements, but it remains forgettable.

But it is not only that. There is something especially discomforting about the games this time around. The Olympics will take place in a country that appears ashamed to host them. Brazilians do not seem to want the scrutiny of the world, apparently afraid of what outsiders will see. Consider thisĢżĢżby a Brazilian writer. Instead of using official information, she decided to go for a stroll in Rio. The conclusion is depressing: ā€œThe Olympic Games in Rio are an unnatural disaster.ā€

There are so many problems. First, . Second, some of the construction jobs look shaky at best. Third, . And, finally, thereā€™s an attempt to ā€œclean upā€ the streets, which translates into expelling homeless populationsā€”which is impossible because there are too many homeless people in Rio.

Old News

This is not news, of course. Something similar happened during the 2014 World Cup when, on top of all the existing problems, there were violent street demonstrations against the event that were criminally repressed by policemen under the orders of then-president Dilma Rousseff. But, back then, the country seemed different. The protesters were widely seen as vandals that were supposedly destroying the countryā€™s image. Indeed, up to the moment of the surreal loss to Germany, things were not that bad, we thought. Brazil was going to win the championship, the economy was considered to be functioning well enough, and our democracy was in decent shape. Now, two years later, the public doesnā€™t even feel that protesting is a worthwhile pursuit. The national morale has disappeared under the acute economic ordeal, as well as the political polarization.

This is not to say that the games will be an actual disasterā€”at least if one understands ā€œdisasterā€ as something that will prevent them from taking place. Governments always make sure that some minimal control is established, at least over the course of the month of the games and within a tourist bubble. In a sense, these events are designed to succeed at a practical level. Too much money and corporate interests have been invested for them to fail. But itā€™s important to understand that, on a conceptual level, the The New York Times opinion piece is correct. When compared to everything that the games could be, the Olympics already are a disaster of a different, and more abstract, order.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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ā€œThere are three sides to every story: mine, yours and the truth,ā€ as my high school teacher used to say. But in the information age, the most important asset to public opinion is not the truth, but the ā€œnarrative.ā€ It doesnā€™t matter what the facts are, but what one publicizes as ā€œtruthā€ā€”in politics that means spreading an easier-to-believe version than your opponent.

The problem starts when that version of a fact is not only false, but is a rhetorical device created only in order to escape from justice. As an old propaganda master once said, ā€œTell a lieĢżoften enough and it will become the truth.ā€ This strategy is prevalent in Brazil today, and that is exactly what Dilma Rousseff has been doing since her presidential impeachment on May 12.

False Narrative

According to the law, she could return to office in 180 days. But it is doubtful even she believes that will happen. Vice-President Michel Temer has taken over the presidential office and begun to clean up the house. For instance, he has announced the elimination of useless cabinets (like the Ministry of Fishing), many of which were created only to accommodate the ruling Workersā€™ Party- (PT) affiliated members. The more members hired, the better, since the party charges 20% of their salary to back up party expenses.

Removed from Brazilā€™s presidency, Rousseff has declared herself ā€œthe victim of a coup dā€™Ć©tat.ā€ Her message is not only false, but immoral. Itā€™s a desperate cry from someone only interested in saving her own skin, even if that means dragging the countryā€™s image through the gutter and making Brazil look like a stereotypical banana republic.

The most painful effect of this speech is seeing serious media players around the world buying into this false narrative. To see Bolivarian leaders such as Venezuelaā€™s NicolĆ”s Maduro or RaĆŗl Castro backing øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s speech is nothing new. Brazil has been investing millions of dollars in these countriesā€™ infrastructures for years. It hurts to read texts such as the May 14 editorial from the British newspaper , saying that ā€œmale prejudice against a female leader certainly played their part in øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment.ā€ No facts, no quotes, and nothing that justifies the claims. Dilma Rousseff being a woman has never been an issue in Brazil. It only confirms the narrative being peddled by her.

Marketing Power

øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s downfall started with the man that handed her powerā€”ex-President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Although he was presented in the international media as a great and popular leader who took care of the poor, many Brazilians knew he was simply surfing the good wave from the financial revolution started by the success of Plano Realā€”the stabilization program created by ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1994. Lula was elected in 2003 and made Dilma Rousseff his successor in 2010.

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She was marketed to the Brazilian people as a ā€œgreat managerā€ā€”probably the biggest lie propagated by her government. You could mention dozens of facts that destroy this ā€œgreat managerā€ image, . Before becoming Lulaā€™s chief of staff and then president herself, Rousseff was minister of energy and president of the Petrobras Administrative Council. Petrobras is Brazilā€™s largest company and Dilma was President Lulaā€™s key person in matters pertaining to the multibillion-dollar oil industry.

In 2014, the so-called ā€œgreat managerā€ voted (as president of the Petrobras Administrative Council) in favor of a contract to buy 50% of a refinery in Pasadena, Texas, for $280 million from a Belgian company that had paid $43 million only one year earlier. The decision cost Petrobras $1.2 billionā€”in a single deal. Rousseff tried to justify the ā€œmistakeā€ by saying she did not have sufficient information and was not briefed correctly. One would have to be very naĆÆve to believe her ā€¦ letā€™s say ā€œnarrative.ā€

Today we know where most of the money had gone. The company announced last year it lost over $2 billion between 2004 and 2012. Thatā€™s an astounding . How many people can you buy with that much money?

Things have only worsened. In 2014, Petrobras announced losses of $7.2 billion in its first audit following the governmentā€™s . In 2015, losses were up to $9.6 billion.

ā€œPetrobrasā€™s problem isnā€™t about oil or finance, itā€™s about trust. The first thing the company needs to do is recover its credibility because today the market doesnā€™t believe it,ā€ , chief analyst at the consulting firm Gradual Investimentos, in a story run by Business Insider.

Clean Hands

The governmentā€™s ā€œnarrativeā€ā€”or fictionā€”tries to sell the idea that Rousseff has not committed any crimes. But that is only because she has not yet been charged. However, it was the ruling party and its coalition partners who appointed their own candidates to Petrobrasā€™s most important executive positions. Led by Paulo Roberto Costa, a former director who became a whistleblower after being , the executives diverted funds valued up to 3% of contracts to PT and its allies. Some of the . You read that right: The companyā€™s directors diverted more than $100 million each to Swiss bank accounts, while others bought paintings and sculptures. It must be comfortable having a position in the left-wing party while you buy art collections with the peopleā€™s money.

Is the Brazilian Congress that voted for her impeachment crowded with other corrupt politics? Yes, there is no doubt about that. Was the session that decided her impeachment a sad political circus that the country will want to forget as soon as possible? Definitely.

Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigated the Petrobras scandal, and has lead to at public companies such as Banco do Brasil and Eletrobras. Lead by Judge Sergio Moro, Operation Lava Jato was inspired by Mani Pulite (Clean Hands)ā€”an Italian operation that arrested hundreds of mafia criminals.

So far, Lava Jato has put more than 50 people in jail. Among them are powerful construction company owners and directors, as well as lobbyists and corrupt executives. And now that øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s cabinet has lost its legal shield, the number will probably increase. Will that number include some of Michel Temerā€™s allies? Probably. But the recent departure of Romero JucĆ”, minister of planning, shows that Temer will act as he has promisedā€”to not intervene in Moroā€™s work.

Yes, Brazilā€™s largest construction companies were part of the scheme, and that leads us back to Lula. The ex-president, once called ā€œThe Manā€ by Barack Obama, faces multiple criminal investigations. Itā€™s likely he received gifts such as a farm and a three-floor penthouse on a beach near Sao Paulo from construction companies. To obtain legal protection, Rousseff tried to name him chief of staff of her cabinet last March. But the real coup-to-be was a humiliating fail after a taped conversation between Lula and Rousseff was aired on a TV showā€”the police was folloeing Lula in other ongoing investigationsā€”and a . Due to the revelations from the scheme, .

Paying the Price

øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment aside, the truth is that her government was a tragedy for Brazil. Under Lulaā€™s presidency the country followed Fernando Henrique Cardosoā€™s economic policy and turned his successful stabilization plan into long-needed social welfare programs. But the long term revealed his policy to be a house of cards. Under the ā€œgreat manager,ā€ Brazil reverted back to its previous abysmal state.

Protests in SAO PAULO, BRAZIL, 2015 Ā© Shutterstock

has risen from 6% in 2014 to nearly 11% in 2015; from 6,41% in 2014 to 10,6% in 2015. to its lowest level in 25 years. Financial consultant firms fear this number will be even worse in 2016. According to the new presidentā€™s economic team, the .

On top of all that, the Zika virus threatens Brazil a mere three months before the Olympic Games begin in Rio de Janeiro. Both international and Brazilian companies have refrained from making additional investments since the beginning of the year, when øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s government lost all its credibility: Rousseff has been accused of manipulating government accounts in 2014, breaking , which ā€œestablishes public finance rules enforcing responsibility is fiscal management.ā€

Itā€™s important to note that øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s financial maneuvering took place before and during the 2014 presidential campaign, which means she deliberately masked her accounts to fool the voters who believed the national economy was doing fine and that the country was safe with a ā€œgreat managerā€ at its helm.

To explain it in simple words: If you break a law, itā€™s a crime. If itā€™s a crime, there is legal basis for impeachment. Itā€™s that simple. No conspiracy theories or complex narratives can change that. Is the Brazilian Congress that voted for her impeachment crowded with other corrupt politics? Yes, there is no doubt about that. Was the session that decided her impeachment a sad political circus that the country will want to forget as soon as possible? Definitely.

But thereā€™s also no doubt a coup dā€™Ć©tat did not happen in Brazil. The country suffered a coup in 1964, when tanks rolled through the streets, journalists were censored, thousands of people arrested and generals sat in the presidentā€™s chair. Brazilians know what a coup dā€™etat is. We even had the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello for corruption in 1992. After examining both events, itā€™s not very hard to picture how Dilma Rousseff will go down in history.

While the fault for øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment lies in part with the PT and Lula, it mainly pertains with her. Her inability to play the realpolitik game, her economic incompetence and her silence over flourishing corruption (assuming that it wasnā€™t a common occurrence inside her own office). The creators of øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s ā€œnarrativeā€ should have advised her to pay more attention to the famous political motto, ā€œItā€™s the economy, stupid.ā€ If they did, they should have also added, ā€œAnd donā€™t forget the politics, stupid.ā€

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Ģż/ Ģż

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On January 1, 2007, the Dilma Rousseff project was set into motion. That was the inauguration day of Luiz InĆ”cio Lula da Silvaā€™s second term as the president of Brazil. His minister of justice, the late MĆ”rcio Thomaz Bastosā€”the Workersā€™ Partyā€™s then-guru for legal matters and a man who enjoyed the absolute trust of Lulaā€”informed Rousseff, who at the time served as the presidentā€™s chief of staff, of the ā€œambitious projectā€ that their boss had in store for her. øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s first reaction was a big laugh.

She had her reasons for not believing it. She was not a leader within the Workersā€™ Party, having instead made her political career in the Democratic Labor Party and joined Lulaā€™s political family less than 10 years prior. She was perceived as an impatient technocrat with zero charisma, and had never run for office. Up to that point, Rousseff had never been tested electorally, not even for class representative.

But Lula, the sun around which the Workersā€™ Party has turned, was facing a dilemma. The two men he was considering as possible successors had both fallen, one after the other, to corruption accusations. JosĆ© Dirceu, his first chief of staff, had been impeached from his position as a representative after the prosecutor-general charged him for operating a bribing system in congress to assure the government would receive the votes it needed to pass certain pieces of legislation. Antonio Palocci, his first minister of finance, was accused of participating in clandestine meetings with lobbyists and prostitutes in a mansion in BrasĆ­liaā€”and accessed confidential bank data of the mansionā€™s keeperā€”while heading Brazilā€™s economy.

To avoid an internal battle during his second term for the candidate nomination, Lula decided to appoint his heir on his own. Even though Lula was betting on an unknown political figure, his reasoning was something along the lines of this: If the economy goes well, his prestige would be enough to elect his successor. As he often is, Lula was right in his reading of the political conjecture of that moment. Brazilā€™s first president to have come from the working class would choose Brazilā€™s first female president. Talk about symbolism.

The First Term

In her first year as president, Dilma Rousseff was forced to change seven ministers due to corruption allegations, including her first chief of staff. After the press published cases of bribing demands from public officers, she started firing members of her cabinet, thus giving her the nickname of ā€œMoral Cleaner.ā€ Her approval ratings were never higher among voters, but among other politicians, her reputation started to sink.

Whenever these decisions were contested, she would offer the same response: ā€œHave you had 55 million votes or have I?ā€

Rousseff wasnā€™t fond of the small gestures of ā€œgoodwillā€ so common in politics; she constantly refused to meet with party leaders and members of parliament who requested a word with the head of state. This is most obvious in the case of Senator Eduardo Suplicy, a Workersā€™ Party member, who sent her a grand total of 24 letters trying to request a meeting with the president to discuss his social welfare propositions. Suplicy represented more than 6 million voters in SĆ£o Paulo, Brazilā€™s richest state. And yet in four years, she never met with himā€”and he was one of her allies.

She also infuriated congressmen because of her lack of will to authorize amendments to budgetary laws. In Brazil, every congressman has a small quota of the budget, often used to privilege their constituency, but the money needs the green light of the president to be usedā€”and Rousseff would take her time in deciding whether or not it was a go.

As the president, Rousseff revealed her particular taste for micromanaging. She sponsored a project of surveillance cameras that allowed her to monitor federal projects in Brazil. From her cabinet, she started checking out the waiting lines in federal hospitals, even looking for leaks in public buildings.

She also revealed herself to be a hesitant decision maker. In 2013, she took six months to appoint a new Supreme Court justice after one of the courtā€™s member retired. The same lack of urgency happened two years ago, when she waited 10 months to replace another justice. The omission was labeled by other members of Brazilā€™s highest court as ā€œunreasonableā€ and ā€œabusive,ā€ as it left the court with an even number of judges, thus making it easier to have stalemates.

In terms of the economy, her presidency was a succession of errors. She insisted on placing Guido Mantega as finance ministerĢżdespite havingĢżno credibility among economic actors. Meanwhile, she intervened constantly in the economyā€™s direction, forcing interest rates to go down and controlling both energy and oil prices. Rousseff also empowered two men who became notable for their fiscal ā€œcreativityā€: former Secretary of the Treasury Arno Augustin and former Minister of Planning, Budget and Management Nelson Barbosaā€”who would become the architects of Brazilā€™s economic crisis. The government began to employ measures meant to mask a growing deficit, all in the name of reelection.

The 2014 Campaign

If Dilma Rousseff was already not a favorite among politicians, her reelection campaign marked the decisive moment when she burned all possible bridges. Her campaign heavily used the ā€œus versus themā€ discourse, according to which her fellow contestants would cut social benefits and put austerity measures in placeā€”not caring if Brazilians had food on their table or not. And the television ad war that followed between the opponents was really something.

She also wanted to sabotage the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), the party which was also on her presidential ballot with Vice President Michel Temer. Instead, her administration helped other intermediate parties to diminish the PMDBā€™s number of seats in congress. Like many of her political strategies, it didnā€™t work. The PMDB received the most house seats (13%) instead. Plus, with that strategy, the government created a sworn enemy with Eduardo Cunha, the man who would become house speaker and later set øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment in motion.

Ā© Shutterstock

During her three months of campaigning, Dilma Rousseff insisted that the crisis was a reflection of the ailing international economy, stressing that everything was fine in Brazil, that no changes were necessary. Pessimistic citizens were simply cast as ā€œantipatriotic.ā€ In her victory speech, as well as in her inauguration speech, Rousseff did not even mention her opposing candidates. And right after securing four more years at the helm, she announced the name of a conservative minister of finance and planned to pass austerity measures.

But the government never shouldered the responsibility for taking those measures, instead allowing congress to take the blame for deciding on the harsh, and always unpopular, economic decisions. Thinking of their political future, congressmen started vetoing her proposals one after another. Not even her Workersā€™ Party backed her suggestions. The crisis was there for real, and she wasnā€™t able to approve what needed to be done.

The Implosion of the Dilma Administration

In 2013, the first demonstrations against corruption of public officers started to appear in Brazil. One of them finished with protesters seizing congress, throwing Molotov cocktails into the Foreign Affairs Ministry and threatening to take the Presidential Palace. Rousseff addressed the nation, promising a project meant to reform the political systemā€”something that never went further than mere words.

With Operation Car Wash, public indignation started climbing to record levels. People were doing the math, saying to themselves: ā€œWe have terrible public service in Brazil, and politicians are syphoning money into their pockets.ā€ And those things were not disconnected. Operation Car Wash investigations reached further and further into the corruption of publicly held companies, but Rousseff continued to live in denial. She was confident that nothing would get back to her office.

Politicians at the heart of her administration began to be targets of accusations, among them her campaign treasurer. But the government was always certain that, once the economy would get back on track, her approval ratings would return to positive levels. Another mistake.

But no strategic error was greater and more determining to her fate than her miscalculation of how to handle former House Speaker Eduardo Cunha. A man proven to be corrupt, Cunha is also extremely dangerous, controlling more than a hundred votes in the houseā€”and occupying parliamentā€™s most powerful position. He was the one who could ignite impeachment proceedings against the President.

The government had no means to destroy him, nor the means to seduce him. Until the very end, high-profile members of the Rousseff administration attempted negotiations with Cunha, but he remained determined to destroy her government and receive a pardon from the one that would follow. Once the impeachment was set in motion, øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s solution was to secure 172 votesā€”i.e. one-third of the houseā€”to end the proceeding.

That process is the most telling of the presidentā€™s political ineptitude. On the eve of the April 17 impeachment vote in the house, Rousseff and Lula received congressmen at the presidential residence and tried to persuade them into refusing her removal from office. Some left offended by the fact that, after five years in office, she didnā€™t even know them by name.

One day later, the house overwhelmingly approved the continuation of øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment, with an astonishing 367 congressmen (out of 513) voting against her.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Ģż/ /Ģż

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For many in the world, Brazil is the land of PelĆ© and , or the beautiful game, as Brazilians call football. It is also home to the Amazonian rainforests, providential natural resources, carnival, samba and hauntingly melodious music. To outsiders, the worldā€™s fifth largest country, both by area and population, seems sensuous, joyous and glamorous. Yet not all is well in paradise.

In the late 1930s, Stefan Zweig visited Brazil and called it the ā€œ.ā€ Writing from war torn Europe, Zweig had high hopes for the future of this multiracial land. His hopes have since been repeatedly dashed. As per the Center for Public Security and Criminal Justice, . Unemployment has , wages are falling . In 2015, , vying with Russia as the worst performing major economy of the year.

Political turmoil has accompanied economic meltdown in the South American giant. Both houses of Brazilā€™s National Congress have voted to begin , who is now suspended from the presidency for the next 180 days whilst the trial lasts. She is accused of illegally manipulating government accounts in 2014 before her reelection. Apparently, loans from public banks to the treasury artificially enhanced the budget surplus.

Vice President Michel Temer has taken over. He is a wily constitutional lawyer ā€œ.ā€ The 75-year-oldā€™s rather sensual book of verses, , is supposedly inspired by his third wife, who is 43 years younger than him and a former beauty queen. This youngest of eight children of Maronite Lebanese immigrants heads the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) that had an alliance with øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s Workersā€™ Party (PT). Now, Temer has thrown Rousseff under the bus and appointed Brazilā€™s first since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.

In , Jonathan Watts describes how Temer has plotted to oust Rousseff. Many see the wily lawyer as ā€œthe Captain of the Coupā€ and for good reason. In December, that began dramatically with a Latin proverb: Verba volant, scripta manent, ā€œWords fly, writings remain.ā€ This supposedly confidential letter was conveniently leaked to the public, ratcheting the pressure on Rousseff and preparing the path for her impeachment. In April, he followed this letter with a WhatsApp recording of a speech outlining Brazilā€™s need of a ā€œ.ā€

Brazil Ā© Marcos Queiroz

Temer has proved to be a real-life . The only difference is that Temer is far more colorful, both in his political machinations and luscious love life. For two decades, he has been kingmaker in a system characterized by . As Watts writes, Temer has been ā€œdescribed as the ā€˜godfatherā€™ who secured the appointments of key figures in the ongoing Petrobras scandal.ā€ Temer and his party, PMDB, have . They have chased patronage, prestige and bribes with aplomb.

Temer is a fitting leader of a country where the political elite has a reputation for rapaciously robbing its people. Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times called . This legislator named Grumpy , the highest in the country. Fellow members of Grumpyā€™s circus include aging football stars, suspects accused of murder and drug trafficking, and some bearded men who purportedly lead a womenā€™s movement. To add insult to injury, one of the members of the Party of the Brazilian Woman was accused of sexually abusing his young niece.

Eduardo Cunha, the previous speaker of the lower house, a PMDB politician and øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s bitter rival, did better. An evangelical Christian radio commentator with a penchant for tweeting biblical verses, because of charges that he had siphoned off millions to Swiss bank accounts. Brazilā€™s circus is far more entertaining than House of Cards. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Many emerging economies and poorer countries have problems similar to Brazilā€™s. In these countries graft is a way of life. People vote but do not participate in running the county. They fail to come together to create and administer public goods such as schools, hospitals, roads et al. The taxes they pay are stolen by corrupt elites. Because taxes are stolen, most evade taxes. This in turn enables tax collectors to extort bribes from citizens. Voters with little trust are often trapped between elitist reactionaries and power-hungry populists.

It is little surprise that states are failing and flailing in many parts of the world. In Brazilā€”as in India or Nigeriaā€”the state barely functions because it is too diverse and disconnected from peopleā€™s lives. Like many other societies, Brazilians sip deeply from the poisoned chalice of the past. This is a former Portuguese colony where white settlers slaughtered natives, helped themselves to gold, silver, timber et al, and imported slaves from Africa to work on sugar plantations.

Brazilians repeatedly point out that they are a multiracial and multicultural society. Indeed, the story of PelĆ© would not be possible in lily white Argentina where many still hark back to their European roots and look down on people with more melanin in their skin. In Brazil, class and wealth instead of race and religion matter more, but it turns out that those at the top of the food chain tend to be disproportionately white. It is for this reason that Watts says, ā€œBrazilā€™s image as a socially liberal, multi-ethnic democracy may always have been more myth than reality.ā€

While Brazil did castoff the colonial yoke of Portugal by 1825, it never attained the political stability of English colonies like Australia, Canada and the United States. Turmoil has plagued it to this day. Some smart alecks from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) . They point out that it lacks the harbors, rivers and topography that allow for easy transportation of goods. The Grand Escarpment comes right down to the ocean, forcing cities to develop on small enclaves of relatively flat land. Tropical jungles and cerrado, a vast tropical savannah with acidic soils, do not help. Hence, as per this argument, Brazil still lacks a decent system of roads and railways. Throw in Max Weberā€™s ideas and you can blame Catholicism with its papal infallibility as a cultural barrier to economic dynamism and even democracy.

Whilst the gentlemen of the CIA might have a point, their agency has hurt Brazil perhaps more grievously than geography. In 1964, the CIA was terrified by the specter of spreading communism. Cuba had fallen. Vietnam was troubling and would soon consume resources. The US had to save Brazil from . The CIA came up with . Killings, kidnappings, torture, imprisonment and brutal repression by South American military dictatorships were seen as messy means to the noble end of combating communism. One of those who was during these days was Rousseff herself.

Only in 1985 did Brazil become a democracy. By 1992, it had impeached a president. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, first as finance minister and then as president, at a time when the post-Soviet globalization was starting to take off. Cardosoā€™s measures increased consumption and created stability. At the same time, the Chinese economy grew stunningly throughout the 1990s and 2000s. As this author pointed out last year, between 2000 and 2012, a rise of 2,550%. As China has sneezed, Brazil has caught a cold.

During the boom years, interest rates were low, credit was easy and consumption based on monthly instalments for cars, refrigerators, cellphones and even good clothes de rigueur. In 2012, The Economist reported that . During the global recession, policymakers slashed taxes and interest rates to boost demand. Neither Rousseff nor her predecessor and mentor, Luiz InƔcio Lula da Silva, were good stewards of the economy. Like grasshoppers and unlike ants, and Brazil is now drowning in debt.

Rousseff and Lula had won elections thanks to the support of the poor and focused on distributing largesse. They lacked vision, competence and, according to some, . Lula was affected by the MensalĆ£o scandal. Monthly payments were apparently made to legislators to back the government. Operation Car Wash investigation during the Rousseff era revealed that Petrobas, a state-owned oil giant, overpaid construction companies who passed off some of that money to executives and politicians.

Many accuse of Lula and Rousseff of becoming too greedy after remaining in power too long. They are certainly guilty of populism and of sacrificing long-term interests for short-term gains. Yet they did make Brazilian politics a bit more democratic, plural and plebian. During their time, the made cash transfers to the poorest sections of society, helping reduce poverty as well as improving the health and education of children.

Like many other leaders around the world, Lula and Rousseff made terrible decisions regarding the Brazilian economy. Temer is no knight in shining armor though. He evokes terrifying ghosts from the past. With Temerā€™s rise to the throne, . Already, ultra-conservative lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro has dedicated his impeachment vote to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dictatorship-era torturer-in-chief. and are right to point out that Brazilā€™s democracy itself is under threat as ruthless robbers take over the countryā€™s safes.

*[You can receive ā€œThe World This Weekā€ directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visitĢżĢżand enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

The Media and the Fate of American Liberalism

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IfĢżthe rich and powerful get a voice and the rest of us do not, which direction is the nation likely to head in?

In spite of Bernie Sandersā€™ wins in Indiana and West Virginia, Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be the Democratic Partyā€™s presidential nominee. This being the case, it may seem pointless to write about the media coverage of the election at this late stage. The biases run so deep and so clear that they have become yet another political reality that we simply take for granted. There may be some value, however, in discussing the possible results of this bias in the medium-to-long term, especially from the perspective of the Democratic race. What will it mean for American society in the future? What does it say about American society today?

In order to have this discussion, we should first lay some of the media bias out on the table. In debates, in newspapers and acrossā€¦

Reflections on Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life

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TheĢżinternet fulfills its promise to bring together diverse groups and encourage debate.

The World Wide Web is an opportunity for many different people and groups to find a public voice. But this diversity has had some unintended consequences. Faced with thousands of options for information and debate online, we often seek out like-minded people. The process is often aided by automated processes that recognize our preferences, online pages and services that we visit, and then suggest similar or related content to us. Cass Sunstein coined the phrase ā€œthe daily meā€ to describe how the web allows people to personalize their experience of information finding to such a degree that opposing or challenging ideas and identities become invisible to them.

Education is about exposing people to different life experiences, opinions and beliefs. A new type of online education offers the potential to do just that: using online platforms to explore differences of opinion and experience, without generating defensivenessā€¦

Caste Politics Overshadow Sanitation Issues in India

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InĢżIndia, traditional social structures impede development.

In his short treatiseĢżSanitation in IndiaĢżpublished in 1912, Alexander Hubbard laid out suggestions to ā€œbrighten up [the] little worldā€ of the Indian native which was drowned in ā€œfilth and squalor.ā€ The treatise, while best described as patronising in its suggestions, partially succeeded in articulating a socio-cultural reasoning behind the poor sanitary conditions in India. It recognized that for sanitary reforms to succeed one needs to be aware of the ā€œprejudices and superstitionsā€ that afflict large parts of the native population. The British by the beginning of the 20^thĢżcentury had begun to view the problem of sanitation largely as a social issue. They were no longer concerned with theĢżhealth of the soldiersĢżalone, and the general good health of the public was seen as essential for the smooth functioning of the empire.

Despite having recognized the root of the problem, the government of India was unsure of theā€¦

America the Great is Only Months Away

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Both Clinton and Trump promise a continuation of the notion that America can kill its way to a better world.

OK world, it is time for a wake-up call. It sure looks like ā€œthe greatest nation on Earthā€ is going to be led in the coming four years by either Hillary Clinton orĢżDonald Trump.ĢżThis will be good news for those in the greatest nation on Earth who drink the ā€œgreatnessā€ Kool-Aid because that greatness is about the only thing the two of them agree upon.ĢżFor those not living in the greatest nation on Earth, watch out.ĢżEach of these candidates has a plan for you, and neither plan includes asking you what you think about all of this.

So let me help out a bit.ĢżLetā€™s take Hillary first because she is easier to understand and has a long history of meddling in the affairs of other nations.ĢżShe also sounds better when she saysā€¦

Can Moldova Unite Against Corruption?

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Growing dissatisfaction with the government unites Moldovan society.

On April 24, protesters in Chisinauā€™s main square carried posters with slogans of ā€œFreedomā€ and ā€œDown with Capitalism.ā€ Unhappy with the current rulers and ongoing political crisis, over 5,000 people joined an anti-government rally in Moldovaā€™s capital. Although critical of the elite, the demonstrators seemed to have polarizing views on where Moldova should be headed.

Protesters soon moved to the residence of Vlad Plahotniuc, Moldovaā€™s richest oligarch and politicianā€”nicknamed puppeteer for his influence over the government. His opponents accuse him of bribing deputies and affecting major political decisions in the country. As the protesters surrounded his house, hundreds of policemen (some armed) arrived to protect him.ĢżSix people were hospitalized after civilians clashed with law enforcement.

The latest protest is the continuation of other large-scale demonstrations that have shaken the country since 2015. A civil movement, known as Dignity and Truth, and a party of the same name leadā€¦

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Eduardo Girao / Marcos Queiroz

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The post The World This Week: Dilma Ousted as Bleak Future Bedevils Brazil appeared first on 51³Ō¹Ļ.

Itā€™s one thing to steer a government when things are going well. But what happens when the path becomes less clear? What happens when a country faces that fork in the road?

The Crossroads video series from the Bertelsmann Foundationā€™s Global Economic Dynamics (GED) team focuses on these decisive moments for emerging markets.

Sometimes countries face economic turmoil. Sometimes countries face political crises. From time to time, countries must address social tumult. Brazil, a country so recently on the rise, faces all three at once.

The latest episode of The Crossroads features commentary from Joaquim Levy, Arminio Fraga, Otaviano Canuto and many more, while GEDā€™s Samuel George takes us to the heart of a country at the crossroads.

Itā€™s decision time. Which way will Brazil go?

*[This article was originally published by the .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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In Brazil, the Rousseff administration has lost its signs of life. It cannot pass anything in Congress, and it doesnā€™t do much to stop the crisis it creates. It is a paralyzed government. Politically, however, President Dilma Rousseff is not giving up. With fellow members of the Workersā€™ Party, she talks with a level of aggressiveness that exposes how wounded she and her government actually are.

These actions, , give us a glance into what the reaction of her allies would be to a hypothetical removal from office. But everyone realizes, even within the government, that the time bomb is already ticking.

ā€œDilma øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s government is like an ice cream cone under the sunā€”its meltdown is only a matter of time,ā€ says JosĆ© Eduardo Faria, a professor at the University of SĆ£o Paulo.

Rousseff, the Workersā€™ Party and its biggest leader, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, are trying to create a narrative to save themselves. They call the impeachment process an illegal coup by the elites and the media, something upon which even historical allies have disagreed (on the merit and tone theyā€™ve employed). History will decide which version of the facts is more consistent. But the truth is that public opinion doesnā€™t seem to care about øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s side. The streets, the polls and the majority are all anti-government. Congressmen are, of course, sensitive to that.

We cannot yet predict what a hypothetical post-Rousseff era would look like because itā€™s too soon. But the current scenario agitates the citizens, pundits, politicians and investors who want to anticipate the future.

Enter the VP

If the president is impeached by Congress, then her vice president, Michel Temer, gets the nod. And then what? Would this move turn the storm into a clear blue sky? Would the crisis end and the economy get back on track?

In politics, trying to predict the future is an effort as uncertain as it is potentially useless. But there are some things we can speculate upon. Temer would take office against his administration, the entire Workersā€™ Party apparatusā€”unions, social movements and corporations that flourished under Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. The new president would have an opposition capable of mobilization, with deep knowledge of public administration and theĢżquid pro quosĢżof politics. At the very least, they would be a big nuisance.

Besides, Temer would start his government under the deep influence of Operation Car Wash. It is not likely that Federal Judge SĆ©rgio Moro and the federal prosecutors involved in this investigation would tread lightly with the new government. The investigators seem to be acting strategically, adapting their efforts to the current political reality, but that doesnā€™t mean they would become less strict. A gesture of amnesty is not in the style of these agents. It would demoralize the entire investigation and the careers of each individual involved.

Dilma Rousseff Ā© Shutterstock

We can be as critical of the Workersā€™ Party as we want, but it would be naive, ignorant or even flat-out dishonest to imagine that a substitution for Temerā€™s Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) would moralize our political establishment in any way. Both parties are proof of a deeper problem: The existence of an ā€œillegal and illegitimate system of campaign funding,ā€ according to a statement from Odebrecht, a company involved in the car wash scandal. Odebrecht knows what it is talking about, because aĢż.

It does not seem at all probable that the people who took to the streets on March 13 asking for øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s impeachment would do the same to go against the Workersā€™ Party opposition to Temer. Even less because Temer would have to kick off his government with deep austerity measuresā€”something that would cause an even worse short-term recession and be highly unpopular with the public.

These factors indicate that there might be no solution for Temer either. The current crisis could grow worse and be dragged out longer, and a way out of this labyrinth has yet to be pointed out. But there is a window of opportunity for Temer: the economy.

If the PMDB brings no moral relief compared to the Workersā€™ Party, it is true that the party is more gifted at making the public machine run smoothly. The party can easily operate in Congress, especially after an impeachment, which would give them a myriad of state-run companies to offer in exchange of parliamentary support. Profiting from the opportunism of his allies, Temer could approve a minimal agenda to awaken the optimism of the markets: new taxes, pension reforms, austerity measures.

It would be a ā€œshock of expectations,ā€ which would rapidly increase the value of Brazilian companies and the Brazilian real, the countryā€™s currency. AĢżfeel-goodĢżsensation would be there, even if it is artificial. A few long-term projects to create a better business environment, attack infrastructure problems and productivity issues could also create euphoria. With this logic, we can anticipate a wide plan of privatization.

Is This Enough?

All of this (or only this) may not be enough. Controlling inflation, increasing the average revenue of people and especially decreasing the unemployment rate are all more vital and urgent problems than the stock market. Social assistance, our health system, public safety and education are also more important. But there is no fiscal space for these issues. And that means that the new government would be tested not only on its ability to run a massive state, but to negotiate with different sectors and convince them to accept inevitable losses. Communication and persuasion will be more necessary than ever.

However, this all depends on a Congress that is just not willing to take political hits. That is especially true during an election year like 2016, since every party will try to capture as many mayoral offices as possible. Also, two of Temerā€™s allies, House Speaker Eduardo Cunha and Senate President Renan Calheiros, may not be in office due to corruption charges. With the political system we have, it is hard to create the economy we need.

The fall of the Workersā€™ Party may give some breathing room to our political establishment. But its dysfunctions are evident and apparently irredeemable. To be able to run an economy adapted to Brazilā€™s needs, Temer will have to do exactly what Dilma Rousseff has refused to: battle the establishment and push for political reform.

Temer is a master of this systemā€”and a result of it. Will he have the grandeur, will and courage to do that? He would kick off his administration with the opposition of everyone who supports the current government, but if he refuses to change the system himself, he may face the fury of the millions who asked for the head of President Rousseffā€”who might be even more infuriated by theĢż.

The vice president is already acting like a future incumbent. Will he be able to unify the country and act against the very system that put him in his current position? Only history will tell.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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ā€œWow, youā€™re Brazilian! Brazilians are so cool, so nice, so generous! Iā€™ve never met people so open as Brazilians.ā€

I have heard this response many times after introducing myself abroad. And Iā€™ve heard this in places as different as , France and Lebanonā€”and from people ranging from students and diplomats to janitors, from the young to the old, from men to women.

Even if this is a generalization, living outside of makes one see things in theirĢżown country from different perspectives. Especially in a moment such as this when news headlines in Europe are focused on the .

Mixed Origin in Brazil

Brazil is a melting pot not only because of its origins as a Portuguese colony, its indigenous people and the African slaves who were brought to the country centuries ago. Historically, Brazil has also had a remarkable record on hosting people from all over the world, like the Italian, Japanese and Lebanese migrants who disembarked in SĆ£o Paulo at the beginning of the 20^th century, looking for a place to build a new life.

The result? Together with the United States, Canada and Argentina, Brazil has received one of the largest numbers of immigrants in the Western Hemisphere. Statistics from the first census conducted in 1982 until another completed in the year 2000 show that Brazil has received at least 6 million immigrants.

The number of refugees currently recognized in the country is around 7,700. Still a small number when compared to countries like Pakistan, which hosts 1.8 million refugees, but the number in Brazil has been growing exponentially due to the ā€œhumanitarian visasā€ granted to Syrians escaping the war. Limited housing and public services, as well as restricted access to documents and jobs, are big challenges facing refugees and migrants in Brazil, especially in the midst of an economic crisis. Nevertheless, in 2015, the Brazilian government authorized the permanent residency of more than 40,000 Haitians and, so far in 2016, of nearly another 10,000 African migrants.

In practical terms this means that nowadays in Brazil, everyone has mixed origin. Last names can look German or Syrian, and Brazilians have never paid much attention to this. But while hosting migrants and refugees seems to be the nightmare of the century for Europe, one can cherish the solidarity with foreigners in places like Brazil.

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It is alarming that refugees and migrants have become a ā€œcrisisā€ for Europe when Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkeyā€”the countries neighboring Syriaā€”are hosting more than 4.8 million refugees. And in Syria itself, there are currently more than 7.6 million people displaced from their homes by the conflict that is in its fifth year. The solutions that Europe is creating to deal with the influx of migrants are concerning because they are primarily geared toward security. The economics of migration and the human potential of migration are being dramatically undervalued.

EU Deal With Turkey

In September 2015, the European Union (EU) agreed to resettle 160,000 refugees disembarking in Italy and Greece over a period of two years. Enormous debates between member states took place over which ā€œmeasure, quota or burdenā€ of refugees they would take in. The relocation scheme, however, did not work out and in January, only 272 asylum-seekers had been relocated, according to the EU Migration Commission. To make matters worse, Macedonia and other countries in the Balkans have decided to close their borders, leaving thousands of refugees stranded in Greece.

On March 17, European Union (EU) representatives met in Brussels to look for solutions, and Turkey proposed to accept all the ā€œirregular migrants.ā€ For ā€œeach Syrian brought back, another would be resettled in Europe.ā€ There are two important issues to consider: It is hard to believe that this could work, and forcibly displacing people is against international law. And a bigger issue: Migrants and refugees do not want to stay in Greece or Turkey, so they would probably look for alternative routes to Europe.

Furthermore, Turkey is basing its proposal on ā€œhumanitarian purposesā€ when, in January, the international medical organization MĆ©decins Sans FrontiĆØres (MSF)Ģż. ā€œNot only did the European Union and European governments collectively fail to address the crisis, but their focus on policies of deterrence along with their chaotic response to the humanitarian needs of those who flee actively worsened the conditions of thousands of vulnerable men, women and children,ā€ said Brice de le Vingne, director of operations for MSF.

During a ,Ģżrepresentatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) also stressed that the lack of cooperation between European countries was propelling the migration crisis. For these organizations, the future involves strong political leadership committed toward protecting refugees and migrantsā€”Chancellor Angela Merkelā€™s open position to accepting refugees in Germany has been quoted as a model for Europeā€”and creating a dialogue for reaching pragmatic solutions preserved in legal mechanisms like the Refugee Convention.

What should be done is the big question, and a major part of the answer lies in rethinking how to host and protect people. This question does not only concern Europe, as in 2015 the world reached a record number of 60 million displaced people.

It means globally that one out of every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum. Migrants comprise 244 million people, or 3.3% of the worldā€™s population living outside their country of origin, according to the United Nations.

Historically, countries neighboring sites of war and disaster, like Iran and Kenya, have hosted more refugees than any others. Refugees are mostly found in underdeveloped countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, according to the UNHCR.

Refugees and Migrants Are Seen As Numbers

Brazil and Latin America are responding with creativity and by strengthening their hosting traditions to foreigners. Actions vary fromĢż for Colombian refugees, to student visas for Syrians in Mexico and bold regional agreements, like theĢż by Latin American and Caribbean countriesĢżto address new displacement trends and end statelessness within the next decade. Meanwhile in North America, Canada is investing on remarkableĢż by private organizations and individuals.

ā€œWe need to put men back in the center of the problem. It is the only solution. Today, refugees and migrants are foreigners, numbers,ā€ a North African migrant told me during a phone call.

He has been detained for three months in a Center of Identification and Expulsion (CIE) in Sicilyā€”a type of center that local nongovernmental organizations are asking to be closed down because of their precarious conditions, and where migrants and asylum-seekers are detained straight after arriving in Italy.

When opportunity is given instead of limitations, people adapt and flourish, like a migrant teenager from Gambia who I interviewed in Sicily. He traveled to Europe alone crossing the sea in a boat that almost drowned, after having been arrested for four months in Libya. Thanks to an Italian family who hosted him, he learned Italian, had his documents and could join soccer training in a local club. His biggest dream: to become a professional football player.

ā€œYouā€™re Brazilian! Great! So you also love football, you can understand me,ā€ he told me.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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This week, the rather colorless European Central Bank (ECB) took center stage. On March 10, ECB President Mario Draghi announced . The ECB cut its main interest rate from 0.05% to 0%. It also cut its bank deposit rate, from -0.30% to -0.40%. Starting April, the ECB will expand its program from ā‚¬60 billion to ā‚¬80 billion month. In a historic first, the ECB will buy corporate bonds under its QE program, releasing credit directly to businesses. It is also starting a bold new bank lending program.

Stocks rose when news of the stimulus broke. Yet this optimism was short lived. Draghi, an Italian who is often called Super Mario, appeared before news media to downplay the likelihood of further rate cuts. when they heard what Draghi had to say. The FTSE ended up 1.8% lower, Paris closed 1.7% lower and Frankfurt fell by 2.3%. The euro that had initially fallen by 1.6% against the US dollar to $1.0822 rose to $1.1218 by the end of the day.

The rollercoaster market reaction is telling. Markets are banking on continued QE to keep the party going. They assume that QE will keep releasing increasing amounts of money into the economy. This will pump up asset prices and lower cost of capital for businesses. In theory, QE will restore confidence and encourage economic activity. In reality, as this author pointed out in 2015, those who own all the way to the bank.

Those who do not own assets and live by selling their labor, or what Karl Marx called labor power, are not doing so well. Inequality is soaring and central banks have long been . Draghi has decided to throw the kitchen sink of all sorts of monetary measures to stave off recession. But his unwillingness to declare that he will keep has caused markets to panic. Draghi, who once worked for Goldman Sachs, is no longer Super Mario anymore.

The Italian has come head to head with a simple problem. His big bazooka is no longer working. In January, this author pointed out that many believe that . Merely printing ever more quantities of cash is not enough to get the economy going. Neil Irwin of The New York Times rightly observes that a protracted period of negative rates could cause people to withdraw of banks into chaos. After all, why would you pay banks to keep your cash if you could safely lock it up in a vault for less or for free?

It is little surprise that Barry Eichengreen, a rather famous economist, believes that of the banking system. He proposes instead. Sadly, that too has its limits as the demonstrates. The world is already . Much of it as in the case of Greece cannot be repaid. Besides, building more roads in China or paying public sector workers for doing little in France might not work for too long.

It is important to remember that public spending can work when leaders act wisely. In times when confidence ebbs, societies need direction from leaders who possess judgment. The world has little leadership today because political leaders act in the modern managerial style of Harvard Business School and McKinsey. Ideas are distrusted and processes are prized. Expediency and conformity are the name of the game. Received wisdom and opinion polls dominate. To borrow a phrase from Lee Kuan Yew, political leaders today are .

Eichengreen is right in arguing for greater investment in research, education and infrastructure. Both he and this author have taught at the University of California, Berkeley. This university has now been gutted. The Californian public education system was once the envy of the world. Today it is severely underfunded. Yet more money alone will not solve the universityā€™s problems.

Eichengreenā€™s university has pottered too far along what Friedrich von Hayek called ā€œthe road to serfdom.ā€ Its bureaucracy is like a boa constrictor, careerists outnumber those who love the life of the mind and teaching is often terrible. Money is misallocated terribly and the waste is gargantuan. Putting more money into the university without reforming it will only benefit entrenched interest groups. It may improve research, but it will fail to deliver better education to its thousands of neglected students. Besides, many will argue that the money ought to go to struggling high schools instead of a university that is packing off its best minds to Facebook.

Berkeley epitomizes the problems of the new global economy. There are no silver bullets left. Individuals are confused, societies are divided and governments have become sclerotic. Public spending might be the need of the hour, but it has been hijacked by special interests. The US is infamous for and . Not only Washington, DC, but also state capitals like Sacramento and Richmond are now far too removed from the lives of the people. Elected representatives fight for the narrow interests of their core supporters and to please their donors because these are the two core groups that determine their re-election.

Those who enter government to reform it find the system eventually wears them down. This author has a well-meaning friend in the US Congress. Every two years, he faces elections in a swing seat. Hence, the poor fellow is always fundraising if not campaigning. The average amount a congressman spent in was over $1.5 million and the most expensive campaign cost more than $21 million. This certainly causes conflicts of interest if not outright corruption. Furthermore, few congressmen manage to find time to do their real jobs such as legislating or scrutinizing the actions of the executive.

Over time, institutions often decline. Short-term thinking and private interests start subordinating long-term public interest. This is certainly the case in Washington, DC today. If the worthies in the US Congress were to heed Eichengreen and increase public spending, they are likely to shower their benefactors with goodies. Even money ostensibly going to rebuild the woeful and crumbling infrastructure of the US might end up funding projects like the ā€œ.ā€

Truth be told, the US and all modern democracies face two big challenges. First, how do societies fund elections? Second, how do elected representatives spend taxpayer money? In the US, the crowdfunded Bernie Sanders and the self-funded Donald Trump provide two answers different to the status quo. Both are reactions to the Bushes and Clintons. When members of these two dynasties were in power, they appointed former CEOs of Goldman Sachs as big bosses of the US Treasury. People fear more of the same. Not without justification, many believe that appointing the fox to guard the hen house may not be such a good idea.

Brazil is also struggling with the same challenges. Luƭz InƔcio Lula da Silva, a former president, is in trouble. On March 4, the police detained him for questioning. He has fallen prey to the long-running that is causing massive upheaval in Brazilian politics.

At its core, the scandal is straightforward. Petrobas is a state-owned oil company. It overpaid construction companies. These companies then transferred some of the money to company executives and to politicians of various parties, including Lulaā€™s Workersā€™ Party. This money financed political parties and their campaigns. Some of it also ended up in politiciansā€™ private coffers. It is little surprise then that fiscal policy in Brazil does not quite work.

Brazilian prosecutors are for putting their fingers in the cookie jar. Lulaā€™s former chief of staff is in the dock and so is the treasurer of his party. Even President Dilma Rousseff, Lulaā€™s successor, is under a cloud. The opposition has not fared much better. Prosecutors accuse Eduardo Cunha, øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s fiercest rival, of pocketing bribes worth $40 million, and the police have raided his house. Dozens of lawmakers have been arrested.

Just like the US, Brazil has not managed to come up with a half decent way to fund elections. This former Portuguese colony was under military dictatorship until 1985. It remains deeply divided along economic and racial lines. Deep inequities persist and favelas proliferate. Brazilā€™s laws are infernally complex and its political structure is fiendishly complicated. The and the Petrobas scandal does not help. Neither fiscal nor monetary policy will solve Brazilā€™s problems. Like the US, the country needs fundamental institutional reforms.

*[You can receive ā€œThe World This Weekā€ directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visitĢżĢżand enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

Access to Safe Drinking Water: Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Global Health

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InĢżdeveloping countries, women and girls spend an estimated 40 billion hours a year collecting water.

Since humans established permanent settlements and systems of agriculture, efforts to develop water supplies and waste management for the successful maintenance and growth of societies have been apparent. Archaeologists have found evidence of ancient wells, water pipes and both public and private bathing and toilet facilities in the Bronze Age. In ancient Greece and Rome, the importance of water for publicĢżhealthĢżwas recognized, and inequalities of access according to wealth and status must have been present.

In Europe, in more recent times, links between betterĢżwater and waste management systems and improved public health were recognized in 1854, from the work of the physician John Snow in Londonā€™s Soho district during the cholera outbreak of the time. Snowā€™s communication with residents and careful observations traced the source of the cholera outbreak to a public water pump. The pump drew water fromā€¦

Money, Not Justice, Matters Most to South Koreans

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With nearly 1.1 million unemployed youth, is the burying of ā€œhistorical hatchetsā€ a way of distracting locals from domestic economic woes?

A fervent disciple of the capitalist system, where social admiration revolves around material gain, modern South Korea has become a victim of its own success. In a country where it has become commonplace for every child to aspire to work for prestigious conglomerates like Samsung or Hyundai, the rat race for jobs is what really concerns Korean citizens. Despite all the media attention, historical atrocities and ā€œlandmarkā€ arrangementsā€”such as the comfort woman deal with Japan ofĢżDecember 2015ā€”remain secondary concerns.

With poor economic returns expected, both Presidents Park Guen-hye and Lee Myung-bak (Parkā€™s predecessor) have responded to South Koreaā€™s meager performance byĢżcalling for the countryā€™s employment culture to undergo ā€œmajor surgeryā€ā€”in essenceĢżtrying to reign in of an insatiable appetite for college credentials. Statistics, though rarely reliable just by themselves, are noticeable inā€¦

Education is the First Step to Ending Poverty

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Eliminating extreme poverty may seem like a challenge, but Goal 4 of the SDGs provides an achievable vision for the future.

In the era preceding theĢżMillennium Development GoalsĢż(MDG), securing a seat in the classroom itself was a daunting task. During the 15-year timeframe mandated by the goal of achieving primaryĢżeducationĢżfor all children by 2015, the MDGs succeeded inĢżreducing the number of out-of-school childrenĢżfrom 100 million to 57 million, and increasing the primary school net enrollment rate from 83% to 91%.

Following the success of the MDGs in accomplishing basic benchmarks, the world stands at a crossroads. The minimum expectation for education is no longer based on solely increasing access to seats in a classroom. Instead, the successor of the MDGs, theĢżSustainable Development GoalsĢż(SDG), which were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, is to ensure ā€œquality educationā€ and, in the process, reduce extreme poverty.ĢżGoal 4Ģżofā€¦

A Lesson in Democracy From Syria

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There are two visions of a stateless society emerging from the crucible of civil war in Syriaā€”one seeks to enslave the world, the other to free it.

Despite what its name suggests, the objective of the ā€œIslamic Stateā€ (IS) is the creation of a stateless society, a global caliphate that effaces all borders and unifies humanity under a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. In the terrorist groupā€™s eyes, this means freedom, a release fromĢżthe bounds of secular law and the moral corruption of a secular society.

That IS would replace this with a regime of merciless brutality for any non-conformistā€”be they homosexual, apostate or unbelieverā€”should not, however, be taken to mean that all visions of a stateless society are equally abhorrent.

Growing up alongside ISā€™ monstrous worldview, like an antidote to its poison, is another vision of a stateless society that is the opposite of the Islamic Stateā€™s in every way. The KurdishĢżexperimentā€¦

Is the Snooperā€™s Charter as Bad as You Think?

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Security services lack the resources to randomly spy on people.

On March 1, UK Home Secretary Theresa May announced that the redrafting of theĢżInvestigatory Powers BillĢżwas complete, following a call for the written evidence on the original draft in November 2015.

The purpose of the bill is to clarify what activity theĢżBritishĢżsecurity services and law enforcement can engage in online, either by restating existing practice or by introducing new powers. The ability to seek a yearā€™s worth ofĢżInternet browsing historyĢżhas attracted a good deal of publicity and given rise to public concern. The issue is pressing as existing legislation wasĢżruled unlawful, following a challenge from Members of Parliament Tom Watson and David Davis, and is set to expire on March 31, 2016.

David Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation,ĢżrecommendsĢżthat the so-called ā€œSnooperā€™s Charterā€ā€”the billā€™s unofficial nameā€”strikes a balance between freedom and security. Such a positive statementā€¦

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Ģż/Ģż

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Brazil receives international praise for its gorgeous women. In fact, itā€™s often the first thing people associate with the countryā€”maybe only second to football. What the world doesnā€™t know, however, is that much of this praise is earned by a tiny region in the extreme south.

Located on the border of Argentina, Horizontina is to Brazil what Brazil is to the world in terms of beautiful people. Its 19,000 inhabitants wouldnā€™t fill the Madison Square Garden for an NBA game, and yet itā€™s nearly impossible to read a fashion magazine without seeing at least one top model from the region. It is a true ā€œTop Model Land.ā€

Its most famous native is none other than catwalk legend (and wife of NFL star Tom Brady) Gisele BĆ¼ndchen. But BĆ¼ndchen, the highest-paid top model in the worldā€”who made ā€”is only the biggest name in a series of beauty legends coming from Horizontina. While this region represents less than 1% of Brazilā€™s vast territory, it accounts for 40% of Brazilian international top models.

Such is the case for Alessandra AmbrĆ³sio, the worldā€™s eighth highest-paid model. Born in Erechim, a mere three-hour ride from Horizontina, AmbrĆ³sio was discovered by an agent at the age of 11. Now, she is one of the major faces of Armani, Ralph Lauren and Victoriaā€™s Secret. In 2015, her earnings totaled $5 million between catwalks and ad campaigns.

Yet Top Model Landā€™s tradition of launching some of the worldā€™s most gorgeous women didnā€™t begin with BĆ¼ndchen or AmbrĆ³sio. Also coming from the region is Brazilā€™s first-ever international top model, Shirley Mallmann. Discovered as a teen while working in a shoe factory in the mid-1990s, Mallmann quickly became a worldwide sensation. She has lent her image to campaigns including Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino, Dior and Prada. In 1999, her silhouette was immortalized in Jean-Paul Gaultierā€™sĢżClassiqueĢżperfume bottle.

You might be wondering how such a tiny region can produce so many top models. Something in the water, perhaps? The man who discovered most of Top Model Landā€™s fashion stars, Dilson Stein, has a theory: ā€œThe deep miscegenation we have in Brazil gives us the worldā€™s most beautiful people.ā€

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In fact, beginning in the early 1800s, Top Model Land experienced large waves of immigration from European countries, especially Germany, Italy and Poland. Combine that heritage with Brazilā€™s African and Portuguese population, and the results are BĆ¼ndchen, AmbrĆ³sio and Caroline Trentini, another model discovered by Stein.

The 28-year-old was born in Panamabi, 144 kilometers from Horizontina, and Stein spotted her while she was crossing the street. With her European and Brazilian traits, Trentini was one of Versaceā€™s biggest stars on the launch of last winterā€™s collection.

Yet these beauties are not the only fashion discoveries credited to Stein. In fact, he claims to have launched the careers of over 5,000 models during his 30 years in the business. His company operates in 23 of Brazilā€™s 27 states.

But most tellingly, his headquarters are not located in SĆ£o Paulo, the countryā€™s economic heart, or in Rio, its most emblematic city. Stein remains in his hometown of Horizontina, in the heart of Top Model Land. You can guess why.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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In , two cars drive on a highway in opposite directions. When crossing each other, one of the drivers frantically flashes the headlights. This is a scenario that nearly every will understand: It means that police are ahead. The message is something along the lines of: ā€œIn the next few minutes, it is imperative that you do not exceed the speed limit.ā€ The general feeling is that the police are not there to ensure everyoneā€™s safety, but rather serve as a nuisance.

On social media, I interact with roughly 6,000 friends and followersā€”whatever that means. Itā€™s a way for me to observe the variety of social archetypes in the world. Intolerance and fury are abundant. Social media users serve as virtual watchdogs, monitoring the scandals of the current government. In principle, such harshness toward corruption is a good thing. But I try to invite them to reflect on their own behavior. Do they flash their headlights on the highway?

There is also a group of people who argue that if other governments and parties have done their share of wrong, then everything done by the current administration should be pardoned. If nobody was punished before, why start now? They want the same harshnessā€”or lack thereofā€”but they forget that time doesnā€™t go backward. Their line of reasoning makes no sense either. One cannot justify a murder, for example, because Jack the Ripper came before them. In this profound relativism of wrongdoing lies an undeniable confession of guilt.

Where Does Corruption Stem From?

In the first document produced in Brazil, PĆŖro Vaz de Caminha, a Portuguese knight, announced to King Manuel I of Portugal the discovery of new land. He seized the opportunity to address the monarch and asked for a pardon of his son-in-law, who had been banished to Africa. Political patronage was present from the very beginning of Brazilian history. It came from the colonizing country. There was also strong corporatism, giving more participation in decision-making to certain interest groups than to others.

But historic fatalism cannot explain or justify the levels of corruption we see in Brazil. Unfortunately, corruption has become a much more complex phenomenon, and public indignation could grow. It is also much less acceptable than moral relativists would like everyone to believe. There are, of course, cultural roots that help explain corruption in Brazil. However, nowadays these reasons are mixed with deep structural issues.

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First, it is necessary to understand the vicious cycle that rules our society: People do not trust Brazilian institutions, and without that trust, institutions match citizensā€™ worst expectations. There is nothing to improve when there is no hope of improvement. Cruel intentions and general inefficiency become the rule rather than the exception.

In his book,Ģż, Norwegian social and political theorist Jon Elster once said: ā€œInstitutions keep society from falling apart, provided that there is something to keep institutions from falling apart.ā€ In Brazil, there is little to keep institutions from falling apart.

On the highway, one driver warns another about the police because he doesnā€™t trust law enforcement, and there are legitimate reasons not to. Facing the inevitable interaction with the policemen ahead, the other driver has already internalized the strong possibility of having to bribe the officers. It is as natural as perverse. Corruption becomes an element of daily life, and nobody seems to realize how it contributes to broader problems.

Although not a general rule, corruption on an individual level is generally more tolerated even when people despise corruption in others. Itā€™s as if those corruption cases reported by media were the only kind to exist, but theyā€™re not. As for the policeman, why would he act in another way if the ā€œsystemā€ is already like thatā€”especially if heā€™s labeled a corrupt officer anyway? And if the people above him do the same thing, then why are his actions so bad?

In a way, this is what has happened to our political system. Of course, there are honorable people who work in Brazilian politics. But as time has gone by, political patronage has become a natural part of it. When the special assembly wrote a new constitution in the 1980s, politicians established what we refer to as the ā€œSaint Francis logicā€ā€”for it is giving that we receive. The relationship between the government and congress became just that.

In every political system, it is admitted that the use of some ā€œgreaseā€ is needed to lubricate the engines of power. But in Brazil, the system has a destructive appetite. And the excess of that ā€œgreaseā€ threatens to make the system completely collapse. The incorporation of political patronage gave birth to a perverse order where clientelism is the rule and all kinds of schemes are admitted, affecting Brazilian society as a whole.

The Ruling Party

To accept that ā€œit has always been like thisā€ is ultimately admitting that ā€œit will always be like this.ā€ It is a mistake to share that atavistic belief, because believing this defines how politics works and how the economy is managed. Over the past decade, this is exactly what has happened in Brazil.

The Workerā€™s Party did not invent corruption, but it has incorporated it in some aspects of governance. It is regrettable that party members have built on corruption to the point of perfection. The distribution of executive jobs in state-owned companies and the corruption of public bid processes were treated as natural. There is no ideological program anymore, if there ever was one. RealpolitikĢżhas become natural.

But there is a limit to everything. After all, the excessive use of a product can damage it. We cannot say with precision what really happened in terms of corruption in past administrations. When itā€™s carried out well, corruption is not particularly noticeable. But it does beg the question: Why did the Workerā€™s Party not investigate and punish the crimes its predecessors committed? After 14 years in office, the ruling party has exhausted both itself and the system. It has not done anything to reinforce the limits of what we can call ā€œacceptableā€ā€”it has actually surpassed them.

The biggest mistake the party made was letting itself become engulfed by the idea that corruption is a natural nuisance. It did not push for much-needed reforms that could have led to the cultural transformation the party always called for. If the Workerā€™s Party was once the moralist of Brazilian politics, it now claims to be a victim of false moralists. The whip its leaders once held now seems too harsh to endure.

The removal of President Dilma Rousseff and her party from office would not put an end to corruption in Brazil. We must stop looking at corruption as something natural. That deafening demand becomes harder and harder to ignore. Neither radicalization, nor relativism can contribute to cultural change. We must have new, reformistĢżleaders. The problem is that those leaders have not yet appeared. But maybe theyā€™re out there, not knowing why other drivers are flashing their headlights.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: Ģż/ Ģż/

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Since October 2015, nearly 4,000 babies in Brazil have been born with microcephaly, an incurable disease that causes brain damage and is suspectedā€”but not provedā€”to be linked to the .

The disease is named after the Zika Forest in Uganda, where it was first isolated in 1947. Usually innocuous, it causes very mild symptoms similar to a cold in adults. This latest outbreak that has affected mostly Latin America has reported cases of microcephaly among infants.

An estimated 1.5 million Brazilians have been infected with the mosquito-borne disease, which has spread to at least 24 countries. The first case of Zika in the US has just been reported in Texas and is said to have been sexually transmitted. Some governments have issued controversial calls on women to delay planned pregnancies for at least two years.

Channel 4 News travels to Recife, the epicenter of the epidemic, where a state of emergency has been declared.

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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In the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Germany not only ousted Brazil from the semifinals. It gave the legendary team a drubbingā€”7 goals to 1. For most of the match, Brazil faced a shutout. Only in the last minute did Brazilian striker Oscar manage to put the ball in the net.

The staggering loss was all the more painful because it took place in Brazil, which was hosting the World Cup. Brazilā€™s national football team hadnā€™t lost at home in 62 matches going back to 1975. It was a very public humiliation that took place before heads of state and millions of people watching the televised match.

The World Cup was supposed to be a crowning achievement, the proof that Brazil had made it to the club of advanced nations. It was an opportunity for the world to acknowledge all that Brazil had achieved in the previous 15 years.

Not only had the Brazilian economy grown at a rapid pace in the first decade of the 21^stcenturyā€”averaging between 4-5%ā€”but it had dramatically reduced its inequality. The policies of President Lula da Silva, the charismatic leader and former trade unionist, hadĢż. TheĢżBolsa Familiaā€”the family allowance of direct cash payments to the poorā€”helped to swell the middle-classĢż, a truly remarkable development in a country of 200 million people.

The Brazilian model didnā€™t just offer hope for other countries facing underdevelopment and economic inequality.

Along with the other BRICSā€”Russia, India, China and South Africaā€”Brazil was leading the ā€œrise of the restā€ that would dethrone the United States and usher in a truly multipolar world. Lula, the left-winger turned powerbroker, epitomized this new post-post-Cold War world, negotiating deals with bothĢżĢżandĢż, GermanyĢżandĢżChina, the mandarins of the international financial systemĢżandĢżthe poorest inhabitants of the urban slums. He had turned a country best known for carnival, samba and beaches into a serious global competitor.

Lulaā€™s successor, Dilma Rousseff, took over in 2011. Going into 2014, the Brazilian economy wasnā€™t performing at quite the same levels as in the Lula years, but it was stillĢż. RousseffĢżĢżand polled a still-respectable 40% at the end of 2014.

All of that has changed. Today, øé“Ē³Ü²õ²õ±š“Ś“Śā€™s approval rating has nearly bottomed outĢż, and the Brazilian economy is set to shrink by nearly 3% this year. Anti-government demonstrations brought several hundred thousand protestors into the streets ofĢżĢżin March and August to demand that Rousseff step down. In the economic equivalent of the 2014 World Cup loss, Standard & Poorā€™s recentlyĢżĢżBrazilā€™s bonds from investment-grade to ā€œjunk.ā€

Critics have taken aim at the Rousseff administration for its corruption and mismanagement. Analysts blame the collapse of the commodities market and the slowdown in Chinese imports. Still others identify Brazilā€™s persistent poverty and inequality as the culprits.

Brazil was heading into the semifinals of world development as an odds-on favorite. How did the country go from world-class performer to global embarrassment in what seems like the blink of an eye?

There Will Be Blood

The most violent cities in the world are not in the war zones of the Middle East. Nor are they, by and large, in the poorest parts of Africa.

In theĢżĢżon global homicide figures, Africa was overtaken by a surprise entrant: Latin America. One-third of the worldā€™s homicides take place in a region that contains only 8% of the global population. And of the top 50 most dangerous cities, in terms of homicide, an astoundingĢż.

In the US, Detroit has the worst murder rate: 44.9 murders per 100,000 people. For the Brazilian city of Ananindeua,Ģż: 125.7. The murder rate overall in Brazil is 29, making it even more dangerous than Mexico.ĢżĢżwrites inĢżThe New York Review of Books:Ģżā€œFour Brazilian cities had a murder rate of over 100 per 100,000 residents. Between 5 percent and 8 percent of Brazilian homicides are solved ā€” as compared to 65 percent of U.S. murders and 90 percent of British murders. Most of the victims are male and poor, between fifteen and just shy of thirty. The homicide rate has shaved seven years off the life expectancy in the Rio favelas (slums).ā€

Prior to the 1980s, Brazil was not an especially dangerous country. But the rise of the drug trade, the involvement of organized crime and the spread of gangs all contributed to the spiraling violence. Itā€™s also been increasingly dangerous to write about Brazilā€™s dangers. As John Otis of the Committee to Protect JournalistsĢż, ā€œat least seven Brazilian journalist were killed in direct relation to their work between January 2011 and November 2012, making the nation one of the worldā€™s deadliest for the press.ā€

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Brazilians might take some comfort from the fact that, as a whole, their country comes out pretty well in theĢż. In 2015, Brazil ranked 103 out of 162ā€”not great, but better than Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Itā€™s also a far cry from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, the worst performers on the list. Brazil isnā€™t that far off from the US, ranked 94, either.

On second thought, these ratings are only good news in the sense that Brazil is better off than countries at war and states on the verge of failing altogether.

After all, these relative rankings donā€™t really convey the atmosphere of pervasive violence in the country, even during the Lula years, when the economy was expanding and the poorer population was getting more of a share of the pie. During Lulaā€™s first term, for instance, rural violence actually increased as disputes over landĢż. Despite his commitment to greater income equality, Lula failed to address the enormous concentration of land in the hands of large farmers and landowners. He did try to reduce the deforestation that was eating away at the Amazon and other parts of the country, but that trend reversed after 2012.

Meanwhile, police brutality has reached epidemic proportions. In 2013, police in the US killedĢżĢż(and 1,100 in 2014). In Brazil, with two-thirds the population, the police killedĢżĢżin 2013. Extra-judicial killings escalated during the lead-up to the World Cup, as the military police and affiliated death squadsĢżĢżsurrounding the stadiums.

As in the US, people of African descent face a much greater chance of dying in Brazilā€”at the hands of police or in homicidesā€”than white people. This summer, a version of the Black Lives Matter movement,Ģż, began to gather steam in Brazil. It was about time. For a country that was the last in the Americas to give up slavery, that importedĢżĢżfrom Africa than the US did, and where Afro-Brazilians make up more than half the population, Brazil has long beenĢżĢżabout its structural racism.

There Will Be Corruption

Itā€™s a safe bet that where thereā€™s oil, thereā€™s corruption. Even in Norway, which generally gets reasonably high marks from Transparency International, the countryā€™s oil company Statoil has been embroiled in aĢżĢżaround its dealings in Angola.

Brazilā€™s government-controlled energy company, Petrobras, is involved in a set of scandals of much greater magnitude and impact. The company, beginning in 2004, orchestrated a series of kickbacks in which contractors colluded in overcharging for services and then shared the proceeds in the form of, essentially, bribes. A handful of Petrobras employees enjoyed huge windfalls, as did a cadre of officials from the ruling Workersā€™ Party.

TheĢż: $3 billion. In comparison, the much more widely publicized corruption in FIFA, the international football federation, has reached onlyĢż.

Petrobrasā€™ self-inflicted wound coincides with a significant drop in world oil prices. Since the company represents an astonishing 10% of Brazilā€™s gross domestic product (GDP), the fact that it lost half its value in the last year has had a disproportionate effect on the countryā€™s economy.

Unlike many oil-exporting countries, Brazil isnā€™t dependent entirely on the market for crude. It has a rather diverse portfolio of goods that it sells to other countriesā€”from soybeans to iron ore. But it did develop a dependence on oneĢżcountryĢżto buy those goods: China. Between 2000 and 2013, Brazilian exports to China roseĢż, andĢżĢżbegan to flow to that country. A drop in commodity prices in the spring followed by Beijingā€™s devaluation of theĢżyuanā€”which made Brazilā€™s exports more expensiveā€”was a devastating one-two punch.

Widespread violence, structural racism, endemic corruption and a set of external economic shocks have all contributed to Brazilā€™s fall from grace. Can the country recover from such a public embarrassment?

Lulaā€™s Legacy

When asked about Brazilā€™s current travails, former President LulaĢżĢżthat ā€œthe poor helped save Brazil. And today I say that to take care of the poor is the solution.ā€

TheĢżBolsa FamiliaĢżwill likely continue, since itĢż. Itā€™s not just a handout. Payments to mothersĢżĢżon children going to school, getting proper meals and receiving adequate health care. Itā€™s an early-intervention program that works.

But the larger legacy of Lula remains at risk: For instance, the nature of the stateā€™s involvement in the economy. Ideally, the state can play an important role in stimulating the economy, putting resources into such sectors as sustainable energy, and providing a measure of stability to counteract market volatility. But that assumes a ā€œcleanā€ state. TheĢżBolsa FamiliaĢżhas been a critically important program, but whatā€™s the point of redistributing wealth to the poor while at the same time redistributing wealth to the wealthy through corrupt practices?

And whatā€™s the Brazilian state currently planning to do to pull the country out of recession? The Rousseff administration would like to reintroduce the financial transactions tax that was rescinded in 2007, but that proposalĢżĢżin the legislature. So instead, the government isĢż, a recipe for more corruption and impoverishment of the populace.

Even an uncorrupt state invested in oil and gas is likely to make policy decisions slanted toward Big Energy. If the state has a vested interest in fossil fuel companies, like Petrobras, it may be less willing to forgo profits by putting more investment in renewable energy sources. Indeed, despite an impressive record of expanding electricity use without acquiring the carbon footprint of comparable countries its size, Brazil has also witnessed aĢżĢżin its energy portfolio. Oil and natural gas are powerful drugs, and the Brazilian state is hooked on them.

Finally, the BRICS model, includingĢż, sounds like something new and different. But in reality, the BRICS basically just want to change the nameplates on the existing international financial system. This isnā€™t South-South cooperation as imagined in the New International Economic Order of the 1970sā€”Ģżrather than just a few leading players. When push came to shove, Brazil under Lula engaged in theĢżĢżin Africa that the US, China and other powers have engaged in for years.

Itā€™s not too late, of course, for Brazil to make a major, mid-course correction. The Petrobras scandal is already prompting a major anti-corruption drive. Chinaā€™s economic slowdown is pushing the country to seek a more diverse set of trading partners. And in response to the omnipresent violence in society, various civic initiatives are addressing the nexus of police, gangs, and poverty. Still unknown is whether Brazil can pull this altogether as a credible development alternative, which can then perhaps influence the trajectory of the BRICS.

A poor performance in front of a global audience can have long-term psychological impact. But fortunately, in life as in sports, countries get second chances. Brazil has all the right ingredients to be a world-class performer. It just has to clean house first and come up with a different strategy.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: /

We bring you perspectives from around the world. Help us to inform and educate. YourĢżĢżis tax-deductible. Join over 400 people to become a donor or you could choose to be aĢż.

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Few remember that John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, worked for the British East India Company from 1823 to 1858. Mill refused to subscribe to the of the Church of England that were concocted after much turmoil under Elizabeth I. As a result, Mill could not study at Oxford or Cambridge and had to attend University College London instead. Yet even this nonconformist who waged war for liberty and womenā€™s rights suffered from cognitive dissonance when it came to and the colonies.

The company that paid Millā€™s wages was ruling India to rob it. Millā€™s employers taxed Indians extortionately and forced them to grow cash crops like opium. This was exported to China and, when the Chinese objected, the Royal Navy invaded the Middle Kingdom to uphold the principle of free trade. Millā€™s paymasters brought famine to India and addiction to . Yet Mill had the cheek to argue for ā€œbenevolent despotismā€ because only ā€œhuman beings in the of their facultiesā€ deserved liberty.

Echoes of Mill can be heard across cities in Europe and the United States. The rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the prerogatives of advanced peoples. who are under the thrall of the Islamist Hamas movement and the corrupt Fatah party are not ā€œin the maturity of their faculties.ā€ Therefore, they have to be supervised by the Israeli military, robbed of their land by settlers and ignored by much of the affluent world that is terrified of the rise of radical Islam personified by the (IS).

This week, an arson attack occurred on a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus. Israeli settlers are suspected to be the attackers. The parents and their 4-year old child have survived, but their 18-month-old sonā€”Ali Saad Dawabshehā€”was burned alive. Even Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister have condemned the attack, calling it an act of terrorism.

Yet this attack is merely part of the ongoing violence that Israel and Jewish settlers unleash on Palestinians on a daily basis. Since 2004, Israeli settlers have conducted more than attacks against Palestinians. The has documented attacks in the West Bank in 2015 alone.

The dispossession of Palestinian land has . After centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe, Arthur Balfour promised Jews their homeland in the former Ottoman territory of Palestine. He paid little heed to the local inhabitants or to the promises that Lawrence of Arabia was making while inciting the Arabs to revolt against the Ottomans. The creation of Israel led to what Palestinians call the Nakba, an Arabic word that means catastrophe. Even as Arab nations attacked Israel, 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes, which were taken over by Jewish families fleeing Europe after the Holocaust.

Since its smashing victory in 1967, Israel has been the dominant power in the Middle East. Since 1991, the influx of Russian Jews who arrived from the former Soviet Union has shifted Israeli politics to the right. New settlements continue unabated despite being under international law. In fact, Netanyahu has been the worst of all Israeli leaders. Despite the desperate entreaties of his allies in Washington DC and London, the Israeli prime minister has executed a relentless and ruthless of building and expanding settlements. The death of Dawabsheh is just a bitter fruit of the toxic seeds that Netanyahu is sowing. He might do well to remember that those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.

Turkish President would also do well to remember the same point. Turkeyā€™s new ā€œsultanā€ has long wanted to restore the country to its cultural roots and its rightful place in the world. After years of turning the Nelsonā€™s eye toward the Islamic State, Erdogan has finally ordered his troops into action against a barbaric terrorist organization that is destroying the cultural, social, economic and political fabric of the Middle East. However, he has unnecessarily opened a second front against the Kurds, who have been leading the fight against IS.

For decades, the have wanted their own state. Long before Erdogan, the Turkish state discriminated against the Kurds and conducted ferocious military operations against them. Hafez al-Assadā€™s Syria and Saddam Husseinā€™s Iraq murdered thousands of Kurds with impunity. They have enjoyed relative peace under Erdogan, but that has now ended. A brilliant in Der Spiegel examines how Turkey might be on the brink of a civil war thanks to the megalomania of a sultan who wants to cling onto power at all costs.

Even as violence continues in the Middle East, the Brazilian economy is in trouble. ā€™s Central Bank has raised interest rates from 13.75% to 14.25% to curb inflation that reached 9.3% recently. Fiscal contraction and falling demand have caused a crisis of confidence. Inflation and monetary contraction are causing further pain. On July 28, Standard & Poorā€™s Ratings Services downgraded Brazilā€™s outlook to negative from stable. This will raise borrowing costs for Brazil, and its economy is expected to contract by 3% by the end of the year.

Chinaā€™s economy is also in turmoil. This week, Chinese stocks tumbled again. Many explanations have been proffered, including the increase in the price of pork. Yet the fundamental problem is straightforward. The Chinese financial system is . Debt-fueled investment in both real estate and stock markets has created bubbles that have finally burst. Chinese authorities are pumping money through a fire hose into the stock market to stave off a collapse. Yet it is clear that the party is over. China is lucky that its citizens have not gambled like the Americans of the 1920s in the stock market. Hence, the effect of the stock market collapse will not be catastrophic. However, there is no reason for authorities to waste more money to keep the bubble going. Recognizing and writing off bad debts is the wiser course of action.

The great breakthrough this week is the news of a vaccine against . It has proved to be 100% successful in its trials and demonstrates two things. First, humanity has become incredibly successful in fighting diseases. Epidemics like small pox or plague seem a distant memory. Second, modern vaccine development has come a long way from the days of Louis Pasteur. The Ebola vaccine was originally developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada that sold it to Merck to conduct tests, which were funded by the World Health Organization.

The whole project raises important questions. The most important of which is: Will taxpayers end up with costs while Merck shareholders end up with profits?

*[You can receive ā€œThe World This Weekā€ directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visitĢżĢżand enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

[seperator style=”style1″]The Kurdish Elephant in the Middle East[/seperator]

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In their latest deal to fight IS, the US and Turkey are treating the Middle Eastā€™s largest stateless minority like pawns.

Letā€™s mix some metaphors in the Middle East, all of them involving elephants.

In the crisis zone that encompasses Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, the Kurds are the elephant in the room. They are the ā€œproblemā€ that no one really wants to talk about.

Because it would be stitched together from bits and pieces of their territory, the countries of the region oppose an independent Kurdistan. Outside actors, meanwhile, feel varying degrees of guilt for abandoning Kurds over the years: for not paying attention to human rights abuses visited on the minority; for ignoring the promises of self-determination (going back to Woodrow Wilsonā€™s 14 Points); and for using the Kurds as pawns in myriad geopolitical games. Sovereign sensitivities and outsider guilt combine to drape a cloak of invisibility over the Kurds.

But the Kurdish problem is another kind of elephant as wellā€¦

[seperator style=”style1″]How Puerto Rico Could Emerge From a Default[/seperator]

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With Puerto Rico likely to default on its debt, protection under US bankruptcy laws could help contain the resulting chaos.

As Puerto Rico braces for a debt default on August 1 and is being dubbed as ā€œAmericaā€™s Greece,ā€ it is also staring at a long list of all that went wrong over the last 40 years or more. Best known for its tourism attractions of beaches, waterfalls and rain forests, the Caribbean island finds itself paying for decades of ill-designed labor laws and ineffective institutional mechanisms, among other constraints. Puerto Rico badly needs bankruptcy protection to contain the chaos that its default could bring about, along with longer-term structural reforms on multiple fronts, experts say.

Employers find Puerto Ricoā€™s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour uncompetitive, which discourages job creation in the formal sector. Liberal welfare programs also discourage people from taking jobs in the formal sector. Instead, they seek employment within the informal sector, where workers stay below the radar of laborā€¦

[seperator style=”style1″]Turkey Bombs Islamic State, But Are Kurds the Real Target?[/seperator]

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Critics say the Turkish governmentā€™s real goal is to limit the influence of Kurdish groups like the PKK and YPG.

In response to a suicide bombing on July 20 at a cultural center in Suruc in southeastern Turkey and the subsequent shooting of a Turkish soldier, the Turkish military has for the first time struck Islamic State (IS) targets in Syria. In another policy U-turn, Turkey granted the anti-IS coalition access to the Incirlik air base, which is strategically located near the Syrian border. The Turkish foreign ministry described IS as ā€œa primary national security threat for Turkey.ā€ There are now reports that the United States and Turkey are in talks about creating an IS-free zone in northern Syria.

But the airstrikes on July 31 were not limited to hitting the Islamic Stateā€™s capabilities. The Turkish air force also extensively targeted the Kurdistan Workersā€™ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. These attacks, which were followed by more days of airstrikes, marked the first major escalationā€¦

[seperator style=”style1″]Learning Lessons From the Iranian Nuclear Problem[/seperator]

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The Iran deal presents an opportunity to celebrate the contribution of the NPT to international peace and security, says former British Ambassador Peter Jenkins.

The journey to a comprehensive agreement offering the US and its European allies an opportunity to feel more confident about the peaceful nature of Iranā€™s nuclear program has been a long one. It began in the summer of 2003, following Iranā€™s admission of secret contacts with the A.Q. Khan nuclear supply network, and of covert development of dual-use (civil and military) nuclear technology: uranium enrichment.

Can one make unashamed use of hindsight to identify lessons that may come in useful if the West is ever again confronted with a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) hiding nuclear activities?

The question is worth asking because in the Iranian case, the US and Europe have ended up taking a diplomatic sledgehammer to crack a nut. The deal that emerged in Vienna on July 14 is remarkably similar in itsā€¦

[seperator style=”style1″]Half the Worldā€™s Refugees Come From Three Countries[/seperator]

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An equivalent of a small-city population flees war and conflict every day.

The world over, people are fleeing war, ethnic conflict and natural disasters. The numbers are staggering. Some 59.5 million people were forcibly displaced in 2014 alone, up from 37.5 million in 2005. With nearly 14 million newly displaced peopleā€”11 million within their own countryā€”this is the highest figure on record.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in 2010, 10,900 people fled violence every day. By 2013, this number had tripled, to 32,200, reaching 42,500 in 2014. According to these estimates, one person in every 122 in the world is displaced. Half the worldā€™s refugees come from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. More than 50% are under the age of 18.

With numbers of refugees increasing exponentially, international aid organizations no longer have the resources to pick up the pieces. With the burden to host the displaced falling on neighboring countries, new solutions are neededā€¦

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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It is ironic that trade and investment flows within BRICS countriesā€”Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africaā€”continue to disappoint, even though economics was the primary reason for the formation of the grouping.

Nine years after BRICS came into existence, none of its member states figure high on the list of export destinations of other BRICS countries. ā€™s trade data exemplifies this poor record. Provisional data for 2014-15 (April-March) shows Indiaā€™s merchandise exports to other BRICS countries totaled only $25.1 billion, a paltry 8.1% of the total export of $309 billion.ĢżAmong all the export destinations for India, was fourth (with exports of $11.9 billion), Brazil at 13^th ($5.9 billion), South Africa at 18^th ($5.3 billion) and Russia at 38^th ($2.1 billion).ĢżThe situation is similar for all the other BRICS countries.

At the same time, the five member countries do need meeting points beyond trade and capital flows if BRICS is to build greater cohesion and propagate an alternative development doctrine. Culture and education can be the necessary cement to enhance cooperation and coordination, and the New Development Bank (NDB) can play a significant role in this task.

The NDB, popularly known as the BRICS Bank and created during the sixth BRICS Summit in 2014, is expected to provide a development financing model that is different from the template used by the or the (IMF). It will be headquartered in Shanghai, and the five BRICS countries will be its major shareholders.

Culture

Culture is a particularly opportune area because most BRICS countries have historical or even ancient ties with one another. For example, the Chinese scholar Xuanzang Ģżjourneyed through India for 17 years between 600-700 AD. The famous Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian, which was built to honor Xuanzang, is where Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May.

Many other BRICS members boast of traditional and historical links. For instance, India, China and Russia were all connected by the ancient Silk Route, which was a corridor not only for trade, but also for religions and philosophies. Brazil and India were linked 500 years ago by Portuguese marine expansion.

More recently. BRICS countries have participated in cultural exchange programs through reciprocal visits by performing artists or exchanges of art works. Often, however, these exchanges are burdened by an ā€œexoticaā€ tag and tend to target only the cognoscenti. At times, they also get lost in the procession of routine exchanges with non-BRICS members. In other words, there is no special focus or flavor to cultural exchanges specifically between BRICS countries.

At the BRICS Academic Forum in May, one of the suggestions put forth was to improve the access of translated literature from various BRICS territories. All of these are certainly necessary, but they are not sufficient conditions.

Instead, the focus can shift to one of the most enduring forms of cultural exchanges: people-to-people contact. In a fast-globalizing world, widespread tourism can be a way to increase contact between the citizens of BRICS countries.

Promoting tourism with determination will help to intensify already-existing tourist flows. For this, BRICS must make a few catalytic decisions, and one of the necessary steps is already being implemented: Some BRICS countries are relaxing visa requirements and the results are showing. Brazil and Russia introduced a visa waiver program in 2010. Consequently, the number of Brazilians visiting Russia almost from 15,000 in 2010 to 30,000 in 2013.ĢżA similar agreement between Brazil and South Africa has also yielded positive results. In 2013, China Brazilian and Russian passport holders to spend 72 hours in Beijing or Shanghai without a visa.

New DelhiĢżdoes not have similar agreements with BRICS partners yet, though India has provided an e-visa since November 2014Ģżto Brazilian and Russian tourists, and Modi announced the e-facility for Chinese tourists during his visit to China.

At the same time, the number of outbound tourists from India is increasing every year. In 2013, 677,000 Indians visited China and 106,000 went to South Africa. Indians were ranked 16th among arriving foreign tourists in Russia that year. These developments have now prompted South Africa to ease visa norms for Indians.

With BRICS countries constituting around 40% of the worldā€™s population, the potential for intra-BRICS flows of people is tremendous. But to realize this promise, investments are necessary in policy-level initiatives as well as physical infrastructure.

Some policy measures have already been taken. The ā€œIncredible Indiaā€ programā€”an international marketing campaign launched by the Indian government in 2002 to project India as a tourist destinationā€”covers various types of tourism, including medical, sports, adventure and wellness.

However, only and China figured among the top 15 countries of the foreign tourist arrivals of 7.7 million in 2014. Although this total figure represents a growth of 10.6% over 2013,ĢżIndia can do a lot more to attract BRICS tourists, starting with easing visa regulations and cutting down on the delays in issuing visas.

China and Russia have also introduced policy interventions. For example, in 2013, the Chinese government published a tourism strategy titledĢżThe Outline for National Tourism and Leisure (2013-2020).ĢżThe study focuses on increasing foreign tourist arrivals in China, which grew only marginally from 55.66 million in 2000 to 55.68 million in 2013, through higher investment in infrastructure and better regulation.

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Russia developed a new federal tourism development program in 2011 to improve its image as a tourist destination and to stimulate foreign investment in tourism infrastructure.ĢżInitial results look promising: 30.7 million trips were made in 2013, compared with 22.2 million in 2010, showing double-digit growth.

The New Development Bank has a definite role here. Numerous tourist destinations need investment in infrastructureā€”roads to drive, facilities like hotels and motels, and rail Ģżand aviation infrastructure linking the multiple BRICS centers. Given that the NDB is expected to devise new paradigms of project appraisal and risk assessment and mitigation, it should also include finance for developing tourism infrastructure and funding for restoration and preservation of heritage sites.

Two economic reasonsā€”apart from bringing BRICS nations closerā€”will justify the NDBā€™s focus on tourism financing. First, the existing multilateral agencies do not pay much attention to such financing, thereby leaving a gap for institutions like the NDB.ĢżSecond, given the proven link between rising tourism revenues and economic growth, the NDB must pursue tourism financing as a part of its program of fostering sustainable economic growth.

Focusing on Education

Education is another potential area of enhanced cooperation within the grouping. BRICS countries account for one in three students in the world.ĢżBut the major challenge for all BRICS nations is not only providing education for all, but providing high-quality education for all.

Although most member countries have plans to overhaul their education systems to meet the growing demand, most outbound students from BRICS enroll in universities in the West. This is unlikely to change soon. In 2014, the US was the main destination for 210,000 Chinese students, 97,000 Indian students and 9,000 Brazilian students.ĢżOther key destinations include Britain, Japan, Australia and Germany.

Over the past decade, BRICS nations have also emerged as an important destination for foreign students: Russia leads with 174,000 students, followed by China with 89,000, South Africa with 70,000, India 31,000 and Brazil 14,000.

Recognizing the need to cooperate on education, the July 2014 communiquĆ© issued at theĢżBRICS Summit stated:

ā€œWe reaffirm our commitment to accelerating progress in attaining the Education for All goals and education-related Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and stress that the development agenda beyond 2015 should build on these goals to ensure equitable, inclusive and quality education and lifelong learning for all. We are willing to strengthen intra-BRICS cooperation in the area ā€¦ We intend to continue cooperation with relevant international organizations. We encourage the initiative to establish the BRICS Network University.ā€Ģż

In a similar vein, a report of a round-table meeting of BRICS education ministers in Paris, in November 2013, convened by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), stated: ā€œThe diversity of their policy experiences implies that BRICS can learn from one another: policies that have proven successful in one country could be adopted in another. In particular, the five countries would gain from cooperating in areas where they face common challenges, such as organizing and financing skills development, and positioning their higher education and research institutions on the global stage.ā€

Participants at the UNESCO meeting agreed that BRICS would gain by encouraging student mobility within member nations. In keeping with this view, the proposed BRICS Network University aims to attract students from fellow BRICS nations and further strengthen people-to-people contact.ĢżThe Network University will enable universities in the group to collaborate on the development and teaching of courses; it will also enable mutual recognition of qualifications and the transfer of credits between participating institutions.

But before establishing a university, BRICS countries must first outline a strategy on cooperation in education and clarify what the university will work to achieve. The South Asian University, which was initiated in 2010 South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), has not been very successful in attracting students from SAARC countries. This failure should be examined before embarking on a similar endeavor.

Meanwhile, BRICS countries can exchange notes and experiences about how equity and quality in publicly-funded schools can be increased through better governance and financing mechanisms. There have also been demands to increase cooperation in technical and vocational training.

Over time, the NDB can be used to not only deepen education initiatives within each BRICS country and assist in cross-pollination, but to also use BRICSā€™ institutional knowledge and best practices for improving the education infrastructure in non-BRICS countries.ĢżThe UNESCO report endorses this potential: ā€œBRICS are also increasingly engaged in development cooperation with low and middle income countries. Sharing experiences in providing technical assistance and funding projects in other countries could help each BRICS country to improve the effectiveness of its cooperation programmes and deepen their impact.ā€

Since few Western multilateral institutions finance educational institutions in poor countries, the NDB could also develop a model for financing the development of a robust educational model within BRICS and other developing and least developed countries. The repayment schedule, the responsibility for repayment and the guarantee conditions (preferably by a sovereign) for the loan can be the distinctive features of the NDB model.

Nine years have after the first meeting of BRICS foreign ministers in 2006, and despite structured discussions and periodic meetings between different levels of the decision-making apparatus, a lot remains to be done.

First, the trade and investment flows between BRICS countries must be accelerated. Trade and finance ministers from the five countries have already agreed on the draft of the ā€œBRICS Economic Cooperation Strategyā€ and are working on a road-map to implement the proposals.

Second, the NDB must adapt an alternative financial architecture that takes cognizance of non-conventional development models, such as local livelihood projects, informal marketplaces and the rightful place of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

Expedited economic engagement through trade and capital flows, combined with cultural and educational cooperation, all energized and accelerated by the NDB, can help bring BRICS countries closer and strengthen their resolve to create a new development paradigm.

*[This article was originally published by ā€™s content partner, .]

The views expressed in this article are the authorā€™s own and do not necessarily reflect 51³Ō¹Ļā€™s editorial policy.

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