Category Archives: Brazil

‘That was the day I knew I had died … ’ José Mauro, the reborn genius of bossa nova

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The melancholic singer was a gem in Brazil’s musical history, but many thought he had been killed in a motorcycle accident. At 72, he is releasing his lost recordings and finally reclaiming his legacy

It was the summer of 1995 when José Mauro discovered he was dead. The Brazilian musician, then 46 years old, was living on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, teaching guitar, when a friend called from London saying he’d spotted a CD of Mauro’s long-deleted 1970 LP, Obnoxius, on sale in a London record shop.

“He called and explained about this CD, and about how it said I’d been killed in a motorcycle accident,” says Mauro today, now 72. “That was the day I knew I had died.”

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White House contacts Russia after hack of world’s largest meatpacking company

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The ransomware attack on JBS, probably by a Russia-based group, has disrupted meat production in North America and Australia

A ransomware attack against the world’s largest meatpacking company that has disrupted meat production in North America and Australia originated from a criminal organization probably based in Russia, the White House was informed on Tuesday.

The attack on Brazil’s JBS caused its Australian operations to shut down on Monday and has stopped livestock slaughter at its plants in several US states.

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‘Shameful’: Bolsonaro denounced for hosting Copa América amid pandemic

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  • Brazil president accused of mishandling Covid outbreak
  • Football tournament moved from Colombia and Argentina

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has sparked outrage after approving plans to hold South America’s answer to the European Championship in his Covid-stricken country despite warnings Brazil is steaming into a potentially calamitous third wave of infections.

The Copa América was originally due to be co-hosted by Colombia and Argentina, but their struggles with deadly street protests and coronavirus put paid to those plans.

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‘No to dictatorship’: thousands of Brazilians rally against Bolsonaro – video

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Brazilians staged protests against President Jair Bolsonaro's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in at least 200 cities and towns across the country on Saturday, carrying signs such as 'Out with Bolsonaro' and 'Impeachment now'.

Bolsonaro's popularity has plummeted during the coronavirus crisis, which has killed more than 450,000 Brazilians as the far-right leader played down its severity, dismissed mask wearing and cast doubt on the importance of vaccines.

Organised by leftist political parties, unions and student associations, Saturday's protests in the capital, Brasilia, and in Rio de Janeiro were peaceful but in the north-eastern city of Recife, police threw teargas and shot rubber bullets.

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Tens of thousands of Brazilians march to demand Bolsonaro’s impeachment

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Protests in over 200 cities and towns in Brazil sparked by president’s handling of the Covid pandemic

Tens of thousands of protesters have poured on to the streets of Brazil’s largest cities to demand the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro over his catastrophic response to a coronavirus pandemic that has claimed nearly half a million Brazilian lives.

The demonstrators turned out in more than 200 cities and towns for what is the biggest anti-Bolsonaro mobilisation since Brazil’s Covid outbreak began

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Brazil aerial photos show miners’ devastation of indigenous people’s land

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Impact of thousands of wildcat goldminers shown as president Jair Bolsonaro is accused of trying to promote their illegal work

Rare and disturbing aerial photographs have laid bare the devastation being inflicted on Brazil’s largest reserve for indigenous people by thousands of wildcat goldminers whose illegal activities have accelerated under the country’s far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro.

Activists believe as many as 20,000 garimpeiro prospectors are operating within the Yanomami reserve in northern Brazil using speedboats and light aircraft to penetrate the vast expanse of jungle near the border with Venezuela.

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Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro leads motorcade rally in Rio amid coronavirus surge – video

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Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has led a motorcade rally through Rio de Janeiro streets where thousands showed their support for the Brazilian leader, while COVID-19 infections surge and the death toll mounts across the South American country. Brazil has now registered 16 million cases since the pandemic began, and the official death toll stands at 448,208, according to ministry data

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Thousands rally at ‘obscene’ motorcade for Jair Bolsonaro

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After 450,000 Covid deaths, president parades through Rio in effort to reenergnise far right

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has led a raucous column of motorcycle enthusiasts through the streets of Rio in an attempt to reenergise his flagging far-right movement as public anger grows over his handling of the country’s Covid outbreak.

Thousands of flag-waving Bolsonaristas gathered outside the Olympic Park in west Rio on Sunday morning for the two-wheeled show of support before roaring east towards the southern beach districts and city centre, with Bolsonaro near the front.

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Children with Covid: why are some countries seeing more cases – and deaths?

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The perceived wisdom has been that children do not suffer severely from the virus. Yet they are now in Brazil, Indonesia and India

Emergency physician and leading epidemiologist in Brazil, Dr Fatima Marinho, is seeing symptoms of Covid-19 in children that starkly contrast with the message that has been relayed globally throughout the pandemic that children do not appear to suffer severely from the virus.

Severe muscle aches, diarrhoea, coughing, abdominal pain and hospitalisation – all of these are happening to children with Covid-19 in Brazil, Marinho says.

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Gaza damage and Glasgow raids: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Peru

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‘Brazil is a global pariah’: Lula on his plot to end reign of ‘psychopath’ Bolsonaro

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Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left no doubt he was planning a finale to a dramatic political career

Brazil can be rescued after being turned into a Covid-stricken global outcast by its “psychopath” president Jair Bolsonaro, the politician best placed to defeat him in next year’s presidential election has insisted.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who is widely tipped to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency after regaining his political rights – stopped short of explicitly confirming he would run. But Lula, who rose from rural poverty to become Brazil’s first working-class president, left no doubt he was plotting an extraordinary finale to one of the world’s most enduring and dramatic political careers.

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Yanomami beset by violent land-grabs, hunger and disease in Brazil

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Indigenous people in the grip of a humanitarian crisis as Bolsonaro gives encouragement to wildcat miners with designs on their rainforest territory

A photograph of an emaciated Yanomami girl, huddled listlessly in a hammock beside an empty cooking pot over an unlit fire. Shaky footage of indigenous people screaming as they flee in panic to a soundtrack of gunfire.

Shocking images shared on Brazilian social media this week have cast a spotlight on a spiral of violence, malnutrition and disease that threatens fresh devastation for the Yanomami people and their ancestral territory in the Amazon state of Roraima.

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Brazilian police target indigenous leaders after government criticism

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Investigations into leaders closed after judges find no grounds for the cases and describe the situation as an ‘illegal embarrassment’

Human rights activists in Brazil have warned that the country’s authorities are targeting indigenous leaders after police launched investigations into two prominent critics of the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Sônia Guajajara, the head of Brazil’s largest indigenous organization, the Association of Indigenous Peoples (Apib), and Almir Suruí had been put under investigation last month over social media campaigns raising awareness of the threat that Covid-19 poses to Brazil’s indigenous population.

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Coronavirus live news: jabs like Pfizer and Moderna appear able to ‘neutralise’ Indian variant, says EMA

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European medicines watchdog says there is ‘promising evidence’ the vaccines work against variant first encountered in India

Greece is to lift its internal travel restrictions on 14 May, the day it’s tourism season opens, officials have said, whilst retaining health safeguards for the country’s more vulnerable islands.

AFP reports:

For the first time since a second Covid-19 lockdown was imposed in November, Greeks will no longer be required to notify authorities by SMS when leaving their homes. However, anyone travelling to Greek islands by sea or air must show a vaccination certificate or a negative test result, minister Akis Skertsos told reporters.

Officials aim to fully vaccinate at least 35% of island populations by the end of June. Greece is keen to attract crowds of holidaymakers back to its idyllic islands, which are some of its most popular travel destinations, with tourism bringing in as much as a quarter of Greece’s annual income

We now have confirmation that Norway will not resume the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine and has delayed a decision on whether to start using jabs made by Johnson & Johnson, following a press conference led by the country’s prime minister Erna Solberg.

It comes after a government-appointed commission recommended that both vaccines should be excluded from Norway’s vaccination programme due to a risk of rare but harmful side-effects.

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‘They came to kill’: Rio’s deadliest favela police raid sparks calls for change

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Rio’s favelas have suffered countless horrors since the drug conflict began to intensify in the 1980s and the carnage in Jacarezinho has caused a wave of protest

Shaken, shoeless and with a gaping bullet wound to one of his feet, the young man staggered through Flávia Luciana’s front door at around 8am last Thursday as Rio’s decades-long drug conflict plumbed horrifying new depths.

“Help me! For the love of God! Help!” she remembers him pleading as he sought shelter inside.

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At least 25 killed in Rio de Janeiro’s deadliest favela raid – video

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At least 25 people have been killed after heavily armed police stormed Jacarezinho, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, in pursuit of drug traffickers in what was the deadliest raid in the city’s history. About 200 members of Rio’s civil police launched the raid into Jacarezinho in the early hours despite a 2020 supreme court order outlawing such incursions during the coronavirus pandemic. While police hailed the raid a success, critics said it was a 'massacre'

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Rio de Janeiro: at least 25 killed in city’s deadliest police raid on favela

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  • Raid in violation of court order is city’s deadliest ever
  • Police hail blow against drug gangs but critics decry ‘massacre’

At least 25 people have been killed after heavily armed police stormed one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas in pursuit of drug traffickers, in what was the deadliest raid in the city’s history.

About 200 members of Rio’s civil police launched their incursion into Jacarezinho in the early hours of Thursday, sprinting into the vast redbrick community as a bullet-proof helicopter circled overhead with snipers poised on each side. By lunchtime at least 25 people were reported dead, among them André Frias, a drug squad officer who was shot in the head. Police and local media described the other victims as “suspects” but offered no immediate evidence for that claim.

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Bolsonaro ignored repeated warnings about Covid, ex-health minister says

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Luiz Henrique Mandetta tells senate inquiry president was aware his anti-scientific response risked ‘death on an enormous scale’

Jair Bolsonaro ignored repeated warnings that his anti-scientific response to Covid-19 was leading Brazil down an “extremely perilous path” and putting tens of thousands of lives at risk, the country’s former health minister has claimed.

Giving oral evidence to a senate inquiry into Brazil’s coronavirus calamity on Tuesday, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who led the health ministry at the start of the pandemic, said he believed the Brazilian president’s conduct had helped generate an unnecessarily large tragedy.

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‘Calamity of maternal deaths’: Covid concern grows for Brazil’s pregnant

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Following 803 pregnant and postpartum deaths, authorities have warned women to delay pregnancy as alarm rises

This month should have been one of the happiest in Letícia Aparecida Gomes’s life. The pregnant 23-year-old Brazilian had been due to marry before delivering her baby, Elloah, in August.

Instead, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept Gomes’s country claiming thousands of lives each day, she was taken to hospital having been infected herself.

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Political chaos and poverty leave South America at virus’s mercy

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President Jair Bolsonaro’s prediction that the crisis was nearing an end was misguided in Brazil and many of its neighbours

South America produced some of the most horrific episodes of the pandemic last year, with mass graves dug in the Brazilian Amazon and bodies dumped on pavements in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil. But at the end of 2020 there was some hope that with the onset of vaccination the worst might have passed. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, even claimed the crisis had reached its “tail-end” in December.

Such predictions have proved grotesquely misguided. Brazil’s death toll has since more than doubled to more than 400,000, after an explosion of infections caused a catastrophic healthcare collapse. At least 100,000 Brazilians have died in the last 36 days and 100,000 more are expected to lose their lives before July.

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