Category Archives: Brazil

Coronavirus: Brazilians protesting against Bolsonaro bang pots and pans from windows – video

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People in São Paulo banged pots and pans in solidarity with healthcare staff as the city respects a 15-day lockdown to combat the spread of coronavirus. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has dropped in the ratings as he  downplayed the pandemic, berating governors of key states including Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, who have ordered residents to stay at home

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Bolsonaro says he ‘wouldn’t feel anything’ if infected with Covid-19 and attacks state lockdowns

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Brazil’s president uses national televised address to dismiss state-based health measures ‘scorched earth’ tactics

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has claimed he “wouldn’t feel anything” if infected with coronavirus and rubbished efforts to contain the illness with large-scale quarantines as his country’s two biggest cities went into shutdown in a desperate bid to save lives.

In a televised address to the nation on Tuesday night, Bolsonaro slammed what he branded the economically damaging “scorched earth” tactics being used to slow the advance of an illness that has now claimed about 15,000 lives around the world.

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Delay is deadly: what Covid-19 tells us about tackling the climate crisis | Jonathan Watts

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Rightwing governments have denied the problem and been slow to act. With coronavirus and the climate, this costs lives

• Coronavirus latest updates

• See all our coronavirus coverage

The coronavirus pandemic has brought urgency to the defining political question of our age: how to distribute risk. As with the climate crisis, neoliberal capitalism is proving particularly ill-suited to this.

Like global warming, but in close-up and fast-forward, the Covid-19 outbreak shows how lives are lost or saved depending on a government’s propensity to acknowledge risk, act rapidly to contain it, and share the consequences.

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The isolated tribes at risk of illness from Amazon missionaries

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As evangelical Christians use their influence with Brazil’s government to cast their net ever wider, indigenous people vulnerable to common diseases face a growing threat

A radical group of evangelical Christian missionaries set on converting every last tribe on Earth has raised fears that deadly diseases – and even the coronavirus – will spread in the Brazilian Amazon. The group has based its newly bought helicopter right beside a reserve with the world’s highest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, who have little resistance to common illnesses.

There are more than 100 isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, all highly vulnerable to common diseases such as measles and flu, and 16 of them live in the same reserve in the Javari Valley, a vast, remote area the size of Austria. Covid-19 could wipe out any of them.

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Brazilians protest over Bolsonaro’s muddled coronavirus response

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Citizens make anger known by hitting pots and pans from their windows and balconies

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is facing an intensifying public backlash after his muddled reaction to the coronavirus crisis sparked five successive nights of protests and predictions that his political authority had sustained a potentially fatal blow.

Brazil has recorded 1,128 coronavirus cases and 18 deaths, with the country’s health minister last week saying the public health system was likely to collapse by the end of April.

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Birth of wild tapir offers hope for Brazil’s endangered ecosystem

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Researchers believe the calf was born in January and a second may be on its way

Hopes for a recovery of Brazil’s most endangered ecosystem have been given a boost by the first birth of a wild tapir in Rio de Janeiro’s Atlantic Forest for more than a century.

Scientists said video clips of the baby tapir proved the initial success of a re-introduction strategy for the threatened mammal, which is often described as “a forest gardener” because it plays a vital role in the dispersal of seeds.

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‘Come back Monday, OK?’ Hundreds of prisoners escape in Brazil amid Covid-19 anger

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Holiday for minimum security prisoners is cancelled because of outbreak, so many simply run off

Hundreds of prisoners have escaped from four semi-open prisons in São Paulo state in the south-east of Brazil after Easter prison holidays were cancelled and restrictions on visitors tightened because of coronavirus.

Videos showed dozens of prisoners fleeing down a street near one coastal prison and flooding across a soccer pitch on a beach.

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Bolsonaro and Amlo slammed for snubbing coronavirus warnings

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The populist leaders of Brazil and Mexico have come under fire after publicly thumbing their noses at growing fears over the spread of the coronavirus.

Related: Trump 'offers large sums' for exclusive access to coronavirus vaccine

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‘Project of death’: alarm at Bolsonaro’s plan for Amazon-spanning bridge

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Residents of riverside communities in the state of Pará are unconvinced by the Bolsonaro government’s claims of jobs and other benefits that a dramatic extension of a trans-Amazon highway would bring

From the veranda of her wooden home, Joaci da Silva looked out across her garden towards the waters of the River Amazon, and shuddered as she considered the future.

“Today we live in a paradise,” she said.

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World’s biggest meat company linked to ‘brutal massacre’ in Amazon

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Investigation traces meat sold to JBS and rival Marfrig to farm owned by man implicated in Mato Grosso killings

A new investigation has linked the world’s biggest meat company JBS, and its rival Marfrig, to a farm whose owner is implicated in one of the most brutal Amazonian massacres in recent memory.

The report by Repórter Brasil comes as JBS faces growing pressure over transparency failings in its Amazon cattle supply chain.

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Outrage as Jair Bolsonaro appears to endorse Brazil anti-democracy protests

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  • Far-right demonstrations called for 15 March
  • Former president: ‘We must shout while we still have a voice’

Jair Bolsonaro’s apparent endorsement of protests designed to cow Brazil’s democratic institutions has sparked outrage across the political spectrum with one lawmaker warning of a return to the dark days of dictatorship if the demonstrations are not opposed.

Hardcore supporters of Brazil’s far-right president are planning nationwide protests on 15 March and have been flooding social media with propaganda videos and fliers attacking members of Congress – and even proposing a return to military rule under Bolsonaro.

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Evangelical Christians in Brazil resolve to ‘bring Jesus’ to carnival revelers

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The group played a key role in the election of the country’s far-right president and have become increasingly assertive

With drummers pounding out samba rhythms through the rain, this might almost have been just another one of the hundreds of street parties of Rio’s world-famous carnival.

But nobody at the I’m Full of Love Samba Street Party on Copacabana Beach was drunk or in costume, few bystanders were dancing – and the group on the sound truck was singing about Jesus.

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Rio carnival 2020 – in pictures

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Brazil’s famed carnival kicked off in earnest on Saturday as millions of revellers poured into the streets, some of whom took aim at the nation’s deeply polarised politics. Most partiers, though, were dressed in distinctly apolitical garb, ranging from mermaid to cowboy costumes, suggesting that during carnival, Brazilians are focused on revelry first, and politics second

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‘They wanted a better life’: the young Venezuelans escaping into Brazil alone

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After six years of economic crisis in their neighboring country, Brazilian officials say more and more unaccompanied minors are arriving

Jesús Pérez was 16 when he crossed into Brazil in June, fleeing a life of hunger on the streets of his disintegrating homeland.

In Pacaraima, the Brazilian border town that is the main entry point for fleeing Venezuelans, he told social workers he hoped for a fresh start.

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Brazil sends armed forces to north-east to quell violence from police strike

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  • Bolsonaro issued a warning: ‘it’s going to get ugly’
  • A local senator was shot after driving into a picket line

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has dispatched army and national guard troops to the north-eastern state of Ceará in an attempt to quell a brewing security crisis triggered by a police officers’ strike.

Related: Rio Carnival takes a stand against Bolsonaro's divisive rhetoric

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Bolsonaro attacks Pope Francis over pontiff’s plea to protect the Amazon

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  • Pope urged Catholics to ‘feel outrage’ over Amazon destruction
  • Bolsonaro: ‘What is Greenpeace? Nothing but rubbish’

Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonarohas lashed out at Pope Francis after the pontiff pleaded for the protection of the Amazon rainforest, and attacked the environmental group Greenpeace as “rubbish”.

“Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world’s, everyone’s,” said Bolsonaro, who has often railed against international criticism of his environmental policies as an attack on Brazilian sovereignty.

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Rio’s school for Samba – in pictures

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Such is the reputation of the Paraíso de Tuiuti samba school in Rio de Janeiro that dancers travel from as far afield as the UK, Russia and Japan to train in the ways of hip-swivelling and hot-stepping. During Rio’s world-famous carnival, members of the school will dance in front of 70,000 spectators and tens of millions of television viewers

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Trump puts Cuban doctors in firing line as heat turned up on island economy

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After US allies expel foreign health missions, Havana warns that patients will pay the highest price for campaign against its scheme

A Cuban medical programme that has helped some of the world’s poorest communities has become the latest target of the Trump administration’s escalating attempts to pressure Havana’s faltering economy.

Dubbed “Cuban doctors”, the celebrated – if controversial – humanitarian medical mission was founded more than half a century ago in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s revolution, in part to enhance the country’s international influence.

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Hitman linked to Marielle Franco’s murder killed by police

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Some suspect Adriano da Nóbrega was ‘key piece’ in discovering who ordered Franco’s killing

Friends and relatives of the murdered Brazilian politician Marielle Franco are demanding answers after Adriano da Nóbrega – a notorious hitman, whose gang of contract killers is suspected of involvement in her assassination – was gunned down by police in the north-east of the country.

Nóbrega, an ex-special forces police captain, also had close links to the family of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. Nóbrega was killed by police on Sunday in Bahia state where he had been on the run.

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