Film about Carlos Marighella, released in Berlin in 2019, only arrived in Brazil last month after government cancellations
The CIA considered him Che Guevara’s successor when it came to igniting new guerrilla movements in Latin America.
Brazil’s military dictatorship, whose security agents ambushed and killed him in São Paulo in 1969, called him public enemy No 1.
Continue reading...There are fears the decision will reverse the gains made by a successful vaccination campaign
The Brazilian government has been accused of seeking to turn the South American country into a haven for unvaccinated tourists after it shunned calls – including from its own health regulator – to demand proof of vaccination from visitors.
The decision – announced on Tuesday by the health minister, Marcelo Queiroga – sparked anger in a nation that has lost more than 615,000 lives to a Covid outbreak the president, Jair Bolsonaro, stands accused of catastrophically mishandling.
Continue reading...Carlos Arthur Nuzman, the head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee for more than two decades, has been sentenced to 30 years and 11 months in jail for allegedly buying votes for Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympics. The ruling by Judge Marcelo Bretas became public on Thursday.
Nuzman, who also headed the Rio 2016 organising committee, was found guilty of corruption, criminal organisation, money laundering and tax evasion. The 79-year-old will not be jailed until all his appeals are heard. He and his lawyer did not comment on the decision.
Continue reading...Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gets a fist bump from Olaf Scholz and an invitation to the presidential palace from Macron
It was a welcome fit for a president.
Republican Guards at the Élysée Palace. A standing ovation at the European Parliament. A front-page interview in Spain’s top newspaper in which the visiting dignitary was hailed as a “cyclone” of energy.
Continue reading...Hundreds of illegal goldmining dredges converge in search of metal as one activists describes it as a ‘free-for-all’
Environmentalists are demanding urgent action to halt an aquatic gold rush along one of the Amazon River’s largest tributaries, where hundreds of illegal goldmining dredges have converged in search of the precious metal.
The vast flotilla – so large one local website compared it to a floating neighbourhood – reportedly began forming on the Madeira River earlier this month after rumours that a large gold deposit had been found in the vicinity.
Continue reading...Survey also finds adults aged 18-24 and women more concerned about personal finances than other groups
Young people and women have taken the hardest psychological and financial hit from the pandemic, a YouGov survey has found – but few people anywhere are considering changing their lives as a result of it.
The annual YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project found that in many of the 27 countries surveyed, young people were consistently more likely than their elders to feel the Covid crisis had made their financial and mental health concerns worse.
Continue reading...Artists in the favela are starting to compete again after the Covid-19 pandemic curtailed public gatherings, a show that signals a return to normality for music lovers
Continue reading...Increase comes despite Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to show his government is taking environmental preservation seriously
Deforestation in Brazil‘s Amazon rainforest soared 22% in the past year to the highest level since 2006, the government’s annual report has shown, undercutting president Jair Bolsonaro’s assurances that the country is curbing illegal logging.
Brazil‘s space research agency, INPE, recorded 13,235sq km (5,110 square miles) of deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest in satellite data, the report showed on Thursday, an area nearly 17 times the size of New York City. The official deforestation data covers a period from August 2020 through to July 2021.
Continue reading...Tiny proportion of world’s land surface hosts carbon-rich forests and peatlands that would not recover before 2050 if lost
Detailed new mapping has pinpointed the carbon-rich forests and peatlands that humanity cannot afford to destroy if climate catastrophe is to be avoided.
The vast forests and peatlands of Russia, Canada and the US are vital, researchers found, as are tropical forests in the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia. Peat bogs in the UK and mangrove swamps and eucalyptus forests in Australia are also on the list.
Continue reading...Renowned singer Zeca Pagodinho is back performing after Covid-stricken nation carries out one of world’s largest vaccination drives
“If I want to smoke, I’ll smoke. If I want to drink, I’ll drink,” the legendary Brazilian singer Zeca Pagodinho proclaims in one of his best-known sambas.
Coronavirus robbed Zeca of an even greater pleasure: performing the songs that have made him one of Brazil’s most successful and universally adored stars.
Continue reading...The beef industry hopes a planned deforestation-free farming zone will tempt buyers back but many fear it will drive up illegal tree felling
For many, the overriding image of agriculture in the Amazon is one of environmental destruction. About 80% of deforestation in the region has been attributed to cattle ranching, tainting beef exports.
Brazil’s beef industry hopes to tempt buyers back to the Amazon region, which covers about 40% of the country’s total area, with a new deforestation-free pledge. But critics are concerned it could effectively legalise deforestation in the region.
Continue reading...Panel of 200 scientists tells Cop26 Indigenous people, business, governments and scientists must collaborate
The world’s approach to the Amazon rainforest must be transformed to avoid an irreversible, catastrophic tipping point, according to the most comprehensive study of the region ever carried out.
More than 200 scientists collaborated on the new report, which finds that more than a third of the world’s biggest tropical forest is degraded or deforested, rainfall is declining and dry seasons are growing longer.
Continue reading...Dutch-Portuguese war of 1645 split the Potiguara people but their leaders’ correspondence across battle lines has finally been translated from Tupi
In 1645, a bloody war raged between Dutch settlers and the Portuguese empire over the sugar plantations of north-east Brazil.
Trapped on either side of the conflict were the Potiguara, a powerful indigenous nation whose leaders penned a series of letters in the Tupi language, enticing their relatives to defect across enemy lines.
Continue reading...Witnesses say tents in forest in disputed area of Pará state set alight and residents beaten
A land defender from Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, said armed men attacked a forest community she defends while she was at the Cop26 talks in Glasgow.
Claudelice Silva dos Santos, a Cop26 delegate and nominee for the 2019 Sakharov prize, said she had received a phone call sounding the alarm after about 30 pickup trucks arrived at the São Vinicius camp at the Tinelli farm in Nova Ixipuna, home to about 80 families, at about 3pm local time on 3 November.
Continue reading...An impoverished teen seeks to escape the clutches of a human trafficker in Alexandre Moratto’s complex drama
Brazilian director Alexandre Moratto’s follow-up to his award-winning debut Socrates, 7 Prisoners delves into the subject of modern slavery through the eyes of 18-year-old Mateus (Christian Malheiros, excellent). In order to support his family, Mateus takes a job in the city, but finds himself imprisoned and working off a seemingly endless debt to his employer (Rodrigo Santoro). His initial reaction is desperation and anger, but Mateus is smart and negotiates with his captor on behalf of his fellow workers. The rather on-the-nose storytelling grows increasingly complex and interesting the further that the protagonist ventures into morally ambiguous territory.
In cinemas and on Netflix from 11 November
Continue reading...Marília Mendonça, one of Brazil’s biggest singers and a Latin Grammy winner, has been killed in a plane crash on her way to a concert. Her press office said their plane crashed between Mendonça’s home town of Goiânia and Caratinga, a small city 220 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. The aircraft was around seven miles from Caratinga, her destination for that evening’s gig.
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Hong Kong to Khartoum
Continue reading...Far-right Brazilian president given honorary citizenship by Anguillara Veneta
Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, was met with cheers and jeers as he visited a small Italian town on Monday to collect honorary citizenship.
Bolsonaro’s great-grandfather was born in Anguillara Veneta, a town of 4,200 people in the Veneto region. Tensions have been brewing since its far-right mayor, Alessandra Buoso, approved granting honorary citizenship to the far-right leader.
Continue reading...Congressman hails ‘historic clean-up’ after police raids on farmhouses in Minas Gerais
Police in Brazil have killed 25 suspects as part of what authorities called an unprecedented offensive against heavily armed bank robbers whose brazen heists have brought several major cities to a standstill.
The alleged criminals were gunned down in the early hours of Sunday in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais, where police claimed they had been poised to unleash an attack.
Continue reading...A congressional investigation has laid bare the disregard with which the Brazilian president treated the lives of his compatriots
To describe the Brazilian senate’s 1,180 page report on Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the Covid pandemic as damning would be inadequate. Formally approved on Tuesday by a cross-party committee, the report chronicles not just bad leadership but wilful, lethal acts of folly, carried out by a Donald Trump mini-me who sacrificed lives on the altar of his own unfounded presumptions. It recommends that President Bolsonaro face criminal indictments for a catalogue of actions and omissions that could have led to as many as 300,000 avoidable deaths.
As Mr Bolsonaro presided over a death toll which is now the second-highest in the world (after the United States), the report finds he deliberately sent his citizens over the top without defences in the battle against Covid. Other countries scrambled to buy up vaccines when they became available; the president delayed for half a year while ruthlessly pursuing a herd immunity strategy. He himself claims not to have yet been vaccinated. When Brazilians suffered a record rise in deaths during a 24-hour period last March, their president told them to “stop whining”. The wearing of masks and social distancing was treated by Mr Bolsonaro as a kind of weakness in the face of what he described as a “little flu”, and he trolled regional governments’ attempts to introduce Covid restrictions. By presidential decree he tried to keep businesses such as gyms and spas open at the height of the pandemic. Emulating his political hero in Washington, Mr Bolsonaro has disseminated misinformation online and recommended quack treatments for the virus, in the teeth of all scientific evidence. This week, Facebook and YouTube removed a video by him which falsely linked vaccines to the Aids virus. President Bolsonaro’s guiding philosophy during the pandemic is best summed up by the comment he made to journalists a year ago: “All of us are going to die one day … There is no point in escaping from that, in escaping from reality. We have to stop being a country of sissies.”
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