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.”
Continue reading...Environmentalists say Huon deal will make it harder to regulate local industry and is ‘truly bleak news’ for the state
Brazilian meat processing giant JBS has been cleared to take over Tasmanian salmon farmer Huon by the Foreign Investment Review Board in a move environmental groups fear will make it harder to regulate the local industry.
Huon Aquaculture received final approval on Monday when the FIRB confirmed it did not object to the $500m takeover bid.
Continue reading...‘Artivist’ Thiago Mundano used ash from Amazon fires to paint a towering monument to Brazil’s firefighters in São Paulo
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Russia to Yemen
Brazilian president savaged for ‘macabre’ and ‘slovenly’ response to pandemic and ‘deliberate neglect’ of indigenous people
Jair Bolsonaro should be charged with crimes against humanity and jailed for his “macabre” reaction to a Covid outbreak that has killed more than 600,000 Brazilians, including a disproportionate number of indigenous citizens, a congressional inquiry has found.
Two of the most dramatic accusations against the Brazilian president – murder and genocide of the country’s indigenous populations – were removed from a previous draft of the report on Tuesday night after talks between opposition senators serving on the inquiry.
Continue reading...Draft text says neglect, incompetence and opposition to science fueled ‘stratospheric’ death toll
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, should face murder charges for his role in the country’s “stratospheric” coronavirus death toll, a draft report from a senate inquiry into Brazil’s Covid crisis has recommended.
The 1,078-page document, published by Brazilian media on Tuesday afternoon, is not due to be voted on by the commission until next week and could yet be modified by senators.
Continue reading...Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depression
As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.
“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”
Continue reading...Jair Bolsonaro’s comments called ‘stupid and selfish’ in country where 600,000 people have died of Covid
More than 600,000 of his citizens have lost their lives to a Covid-19 outbreak he once pooh-poohed as a “little flu”, but Brazil’s science-denying president, Jair Bolsonaro, has announced he will decline to be vaccinated, saying “it makes no sense” for him to do so.
“With regard to the vaccine, I’ve decided not to have it any more,” the 66-year-old populist told a right-wing radio station on Tuesday. “I’ve been looking at new studies … Why would I get vaccinated?”. He said his antibody levels were already “sky high” because of a past infection. “It would be the same as betting 10 reais (£1.30) on the lottery to win two. It makes no sense.” Bolsonaro said he was not anti-vaccination, but did oppose what he called the vaccine-buying “frenzy”.
Continue reading...India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behind
Developing countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind.
While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, has said it will miss its target to distribute 2bn doses globally by the end of this year.
Continue reading...This gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950s Rio under suffocating family expectations – and sees what happens when they are defied
‘What do you want from life?” a husband drunkenly yells at his wife in Karim Aïnouz’s gorgeous and very moving melodrama set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The man’s wife is Euridice (Julia Stockler) and what she wants is to be a classical pianist. Her husband is angry and hurt: why can’t she just be happy in the kitchen? Adapted from a novel by Martha Batalha, this is the story of Euridice and her sister Guida (Carol Duarte): their inner conflicts and rebellion against the suffocating patriarchy of home.
The film beings a few years earlier: Euridice is 18 and applying to study music in Vienna. Her heart is broken when boy-mad Guida runs away with a no-good sailor to Greece, promising to write when she is married. Predictably, she returns with a baby bump and no wedding ring. There’s an appalling homecoming scene when their dad, a baker, violently shoves Guida out of the house; she’s nine months pregnant at the time (and the film never lets us forget that violence can be done to these women at any time of a man’s choosing). Unforgivably, Guida’s dad says that Euridice has left Rio and is living in Vienna. The truth is she’s up the road, married to an insightless oaf.
Continue reading...Campaigners say president’s veto is ‘absurd and inhumane’ in country where period poverty keeps one in four girls out of school
President Jair Bolsonaro’s decision to block a plan to distribute free sanitary pads and tampons to disadvantaged girls and women has been met with outrage in Brazil, where period poverty is estimated to keep one in four girls out of school.
Bolsonaro vetoed part of a bill that would have given sanitary products at no charge to groups including homeless people, prisoners and teenage girls at state schools. It was expected to benefit 5.6 million women and was part of a bigger package of laws to promote menstrual health, which has been approved by legislators.
Continue reading...A sandstorm made by powerful winds whipping up dust from the ground has engulfed Barretos and surrounding towns north of the city of São Paulo. The storms were triggered by the worst drought to hit Brazil in nine decades, which depleted hydroelectric reservoirs, forcing the grid operator to fire up more expensive thermoelectric plants and the government to implement a 'water scarcity' power rate.
Continue reading...Bolsonaro’s government plans to build a 1,00km railway to export soya beans despite warnings of a ‘catastrophe’ for indigenous people and the environment
The Final Countdown blared from speakers and the crowd broke into applause as one of Jair Bolsonaro’s top lieutenants strode into the Amazon auditorium with glad tidings of a railroad to the future.
“The ‘Grain Train’ is going to happen,” Brazil’s infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, told the hundreds of mostly male spectators who had flocked there in a caravan of high-end SUVs.
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