BRAZIL 2 BAK

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SEE BRAZIL 2 220

no merri

see bolsanaro

see deforestation see amazon

see marielle franco assassination lgbt

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LULA WINS BY 4MIL

Discussing the Brazilian election, Steve Bannon says "if we don't take action and back it down, it's happening next Tuesday here in this country"

MMA 1026

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FLAVIO RUNNING 7 26

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We can see all of this at play in the rise of the global far right over recent decades. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declared at his first inauguration that Brazil’s flag would never be red. Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, denounced his reformist opponent as a “radical left Marxist”.

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in 2024, the United States enjoyed a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil, meaning the U.S. is importing a lot more goods to Brazil than Brazil is importing to the U.S. But U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening Brazil with a 50 percent tariff — not for economic reasons, but because he claims that far-right former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is being treated unfairly.

Bolsonaro is on trial for what Brazilian prosecutors are describing as a coup attempt. In 2022, Bolsonaro was voted out of office and lost to left-wing now-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but he tried to stay in office nonetheless — not unlike Trump after he lost the United States' 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden and made false, repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud.

If Trump follows through with his 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods, all the coffee that Brazil imports to the U.S. could become a lot more expensive (as Frank Sinatra famously sang, "they've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil"). But according to The Guardian's Tom Phillips, Trump's threat is only making things worse — not better — for Bolsonaro.

"Bolsonaro could face up to 43 years in prison if found guilty of masterminding a botched coup attempt after losing the 2022 presidential election," Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in an article published on July 16. "He is expected to be convicted and sentenced by the (Brazilian) Supreme Court in the coming weeks…. The U.S. president apparently expected his intervention to improve the outlook for Bolsonaro, 70, who is already banned from running in next year's election. Bolsonaro's senator son, Flávio, urged Lula's administration to immediately cave in to Trump's ultimatum by offering his father an amnesty from prosecution…. But a week after Trump's tariff announcement, the ploy seems to be backfiring badly."

IFrame Content

Phillips continues, "The move has reinvigorated Bolsonaro's left-wing rivals, given Lula a bounce in the polls and prompted a wave of public anger, largely focused on the Bolsonaro clan who have spent years portraying themselves as flag-loving nationalists."

On Tuesday, July 15, Brazil's Estado de São Paulo — a conservative publication — slammed Bolsonaro as an opportunist, saying, "Jair Bolsonaro couldn't care less about Brazil. He's a phony patriot."

Lula is standing up to Trump. The photo published with Phillips' article shows him wearing a hat that reads, in all caps, "O BRASIL E DOS BRASILEIROS" — which, in Portuguese, means "Brazil is for Brazilians."

Silvana Marques, a Brazilian teacher and activist who is vehemently critical of Trump and Bolsonaro, is urging Brazilian officials not to cave in to "crazy" Trump and considers the Bolsonaros "a family of traitors."

Marques told The Guardian, "We cannot allow this to happen…. And the Americans must be thinking: Are we really going to have to pay 50 percent more for the things we import from Brazil just to defend this worn-out old horse?"

*Read Tom Phillips' full article for The Guardian at this link.

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MMA

### Charlie Kirk called for Trump to put tariffs on Brazil in response to the trial of Bolsonaro. Trump just did.

07/10/25

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After having its assets frozen, Elon Musk's Starlink is complying with a Brazilian court's order to block Musk's shrinking social network in Brazil "regardless" of the frozen assets.

Elon's screwing around with Twitter is impacting his other businesses. He may have to dump a bunch of Tesla to pay the piper when the time comes for X's bond payments; and now Starlink Brazil finds its assets frozen due to being a part of the same "economic group," i.e. Musk's ownership.

Starlink said in a statement posted on X that it will heed Justice Alexandre de Moraes' order despite him having frozen the company's assets. Previously, it informally told the telecommunications regulator that it would not comply until de Moraes reversed course.

"Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil," the company statement said. "We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre's recent order violate the Brazilian constitution."

AP

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/coup-shaped-hole-tucker-carlsons-new-film-about-brazil

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Former Brazilian President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) runs about on stage at the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo. He was there on August 22, 2022, speaking at a book launch featuring photographs by Ricardo Stuckert about Lula’s trips around the world when he was the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. Lula is a man with a great deal of energy. He recounts the story of when he was in Iran with his Foreign Minister Celso Amorim in 2010, trying to mediate and end the conflict imposed by the United States over Iran’s nuclear energy policy.Lula managed to secure a nuclear deal in 2010 that would have prevented the ongoing pressure campaign that Washington is conducting against Tehran. There was relief in the air. Then, Lula said, “Obama pissed outside the pot.” According to Lula, then-U.S. President Barack Obama did not accept the deal and crushed the hard work of the Brazilian leadership in bringing all sides to an agreement.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.]

Lula’s story puts two important points on the table: he was able to build on Brazil’s role in Latin America by offering leadership in far-off Iran during his previous tenure as president, and he is not afraid of expressing his antipathy for the way the United States is scuttling the possibility of peace and progress across the world for its own narrow interests.

The book release took place during Lula’s campaign for president against the current incumbent—and deeply unpopular—President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula is now in the lead in the polls ahead of the first round of Brazil’s presidential election to be held on October 2.

Fernando Haddad, who ran against Bolsonaro in 2018 and lost after receiving less than 45 percent of the vote, told me that this election remains “risky.” The polls might show that Lula is in the lead, but Bolsonaro is known to play dirty politics to secure his victory. The far right in Brazil, like the far right in many other countries, is fierce in the way it contests for state power. Bolsonaro, Haddad said, is willing to lie openly, saying offensive things to the far-right media and then when challenged about it by the mainstream media, he tends to feign ignorance.

“Fake news” seems to be Bolsonaro’s best defense each time he is attacked. The left is far more sincere in its political discourse; leftists are unwilling to lie and eager to bring the issues of hunger and unemployment, social despair and social advancement to the center of the political debate. But there is less interest in these issues and less noise about them in a media landscape that thrives on the theatrics of Bolsonaro and his followers. The old traditional right is as outflanked as the far right in Brazil, which is a space that is now commanded by Bolsonaro (the old traditional right, the men in dark suits who made decisions over cigars and cachaça, are unable to supplant Bolsonaro).

Both Bolsonaro and Lula face an electorate that either loves them or hates them. There is little room for ambiguity in this race. Bolsonaro represents not only the far right, whose opinions he openly champions, but he also represents large sections of the middle class, whose aspirations for wealth remain largely intact despite the reality that their economic situation has deteriorated over the past decade. The contrast between the behavior of Bolsonaro and Lula during their respective presidential campaigns has been stark: Bolsonaro has been boorish and vulgar, while Lula is refined and presidential. If the election goes to Lula, it is likely that he will get more votes from those who hate Bolsonaro than from those who love him.

Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is reflective on the way forward. She told me that Lula will likely prevail in the election because the country is fed up with Bolsonaro. His horrible management of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deterioration of the economic situation in the country mark Bolsonaro as an inefficient manager of the Brazilian state. However, Rousseff pointed out that about a month before the election, Bolsonaro’s government—and the regional governments—have been rolling out policies that have started to lighten the burden on the middle class, such as the lifting of taxation on gasoline. These policies could sway some people to vote for Bolsonaro, but even that is not likely. The political situation in Brazil remains fragile for the left, with the main blocs on the right (agro-business, religion and the military) willing to use any means to maintain their hold on power; it was this right-wing coalition that conducted a “legislative coup” against Rousseff in 2016 and used “lawfare,” the use of law for political motives, against Lula in 2018 to prevent him from running against Bolsonaro. These phrases (legislative coup and lawfare) are now part of the vocabulary of the Brazilian left, which understands clearly that the right bloc (what is called centrão) will not stop pursuing their interests if they feel threatened.

João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) is a close adviser to the Lula campaign. He told me that in the 2002 presidential election, Lula won against the incumbent Fernando Henrique Cardoso because of an immense hatred for the neoliberal policies that Cardoso had championed.The left was fragmented and demoralized at that time of the election. Lula’s time in office, however, helped the left mobilize and organize, although even during this period the focus of popular attention was more on Lula himself rather than the blocs that comprised the left. During Lula’s incarceration on corruption charges, which the left says are fraudulent, he became a figure that unified the left: Lula Livre, “Free Lula,” was the unifying slogan, and the letter L (for Lula) became a symbol (a symbol that continues to be used in the election campaign). While there are other candidates from Brazil’s left in the presidential race, there is no question for Rodrigues that Lula is the left’s standard-bearer and is the only hope for Brazil to oust the highly divisive and dangerous leadership of President Bolsonaro. One of the mechanisms to build the unity of popular forces around Lula’s campaign has been the creation of the Popular Committees (comités populares), which have been working to both unify the left and create an agenda for the Lula government (which will include agrarian reform and a more robust policy for the Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities).

The international conditions for a third Lula presidency are fortuitous, Rousseff told me. A wide range of center-left governments have come to power in Latin America (including in Chile and Colombia). While these are not socialist governments, they are nonetheless committed to building the sovereignty of their countries and to creating a dignified life for their citizens. Brazil, the third-largest country in the Americas (after Canada and the United States of America), can play a leadership role in guiding this new wave of left governments in the hemisphere, Rousseff said. Haddad told me that Brazil should lead a new regional project, which will include the creation of a regional currency (sur) that can not only be used for cross-border trade but also for holding reserves. Haddad is currently running to be the governor of São Paulo, whose main city is the financial capital of the country. Such a regional currency, Haddad believed, will settle conflicts in the hemisphere and build new trade linkages that need not rely on long supply chains that have been destabilized by the pandemic. “God willing, we will create a common currency in Latin America because we do not have to depend on the dollar,” said Lula in May 2022.

Rousseff is eager for Brazil to return to the world stage through the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and offer the kind of left leadership that Lula and she had given that platform a decade ago. The world, Rousseff said, needs such a platform to offer leadership that does not rely on threats, sanctions and war. Lula’s anecdote about the Iran deal is a telling one since it shows that a country like Brazil under the leadership of the left is more willing to settle conflicts rather than to exacerbate them, as the United States did. There is hope, Rousseff noted, for a Lula presidency to offer robust leadership for a world that seems to be crumbling due to the myriad challenges such as climate catastrophe, warfare and social toxicity.

Author Bio: Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

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in Brazil, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has been a scathing critic of environmentalism — not unlike his American ally, former U.S. President Donald Trump, and other MAGA Republicans — while encouraging the use of fossil fuels, including coal, over green energy. Bolsonaro has made no secret of the fact that he believes climate change is a myth, and he doesn’t view deforestation in the Amazon as a problem.

But journalist Terrence McCoy, in an in-depth article published by the Washington Post on August 30, lays out some reasons why the destruction of the Amazon is an environmental disaster that Bolsonaro’s policies have encouraged.

“The violent and lawless erasure of the Amazon is perhaps the world’s greatest environmental crime story,” McCoy explains. “Scientists warn that the forest, seen as vital to averting catastrophic global warming, is at a tipping point. But in Brazil, home to about 60 percent of the Amazon, nearly one-fifth has already been destroyed. And virtually no one, law enforcement officials say, has been held accountable.”

Bolsonaro, McCoy stresses, has treated deforesters in the Amazon “not as criminals, but as honest workers oppressed by authoritarian environmentalists.” And environmental inspector Ivan de Jesus Pereira de Araújo e Silva told the Post that under Bolsonaro, Brazil’s environmental agencies “have been shrunk so much.”

Bolsonaro is up for reelection in 2022, and his critics fear that his environmental policies will grow even worse if he wins a second term.

One of Bolsonaro’s left-wing critics in the United States is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In a column published on August 23, liberal Washington Post opinion writers Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman reported that Sanders had met with Brazilian activists who fear that even if he loses the 2022 presidential election in Brazil, Bolsonaro won’t accept defeat and will try to stage a coup d’état.

“Such fears have prompted Sanders and his staff to draft a resolution that would seek to get ahead of any such eventuality,” Sargent and Waldman reported. “It would express the view of the Senate that if Bolsonaro loses and refuses to step down, the United States will view it as an unacceptable outcome. The resolution — which we have viewed in draft form — declares that the United States will immediately recognize the election outcome that international monitors deem free and fair. And it warns that the United States will reevaluate its relationship with any government that assumes power through undemocratic means, including a military coup. It says this could imperil future U.S. aid.”

During an interview, Sanders told Sargent and Waldman, “It is absolutely imperative that the U.S. Senate make it clear, through a resolution, that we support democracy in Brazil. We look forward to a free and fair election.”

In mid-August, Brazilian pollster Datafolha found that Bolsonaro’s left-wing rival, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, had a 15 percent lead over him — and Sanders believes that Bolsonaro, like Trump and his MAGA allies in the U.S., is quite capable of trying to steal a presidential election.

Sanders told Sargent and Waldman, “What we are seeing all across the world are massive attacks and rollbacks to democracy…. where people are giving up on democracy and moving toward authoritarianism. We have groups that have done that right here in the United States.”

Activists and conservationists worldwide mourned Monday following news that a man believed to be the last of a remote Brazilian tribe was found dead after years of resisting all efforts by the outside world to contact or interfere with him.

Known by defenders of Indigenous rights as "Indian of the Hole" or "The Man of the Hole" (Índio do Buraco)—a name given due to pits he dug for shelter, concealment, and possibly hunting—he was the only inhabitant of Tanaru Indigenous Territory in Rondônia state, in the western Brazilian Amazon. First encountered 26 years ago, the man—believed to be approximately 60 years old at the time of his death—lived reclusively in the remote region after other members of his tribe were thought to have been poisoned by ranchers who wanted to develop the land where they lived.

OPI, the Observatory for the Human Rights of Uncontacted and Recently-Contacted Peoples, issued a statement (translated here into English) bemoaning that "another Indigenous person, the last representative of his people, has died."

"In the recent past," the group continued, "he was the victim of an atrocious extermination process, as a result of the installation of large state-sponsored farms. He witnessed the death of his people, lost his territory to pastures and was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a small portion of forest interdicted by justice, surrounded by large farms in the region of the Corumbiara River in Rondônia."

"For resisting with extreme determination to any endeavors of contact," OPI added, the man "died without letting know which ethnicity he belonged to, nor the motivations of the holes he dug inside his house."

As The Guardian reports, "Officials know very little about the man, but his determined independence and evident solace helped create a mystique around him that captured the attention of activists and media across Brazil and around the world."

Survival International, which advocates for Indigenous rights and autonomy in Brazil and elsewhere around the world, called the death of the man—whose remains were recently found in a state of decomposition in the Tanaru territory—a symbol of genocide against the Amazon's Indigenous peoples. The group called the region where he lived as "a small island of forest in a sea of vast cattle ranches, in one of the most violent regions in Brazil."

Fiona Watson, research and advocacy director for Survival International who visited the man's territory in 2004 with a government monitoring team, commented on the man's passing.

"No outsider knew this man's name, or even very much about his tribe—and with his death the genocide of his people is complete," said Watson. "For this was indeed a genocide—the deliberate wiping out of an entire people by cattle ranchers hungry for land and wealth."

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what the man symbolized, said Watson, was "both the appalling violence and cruelty inflicted on Indigenous peoples worldwide in the name of colonization and profit, but also their resistance. We can only imagine what horrors he had witnessed in his life, and the loneliness of his existence after the rest of his tribe were killed, but he determinedly resisted all attempts at contact, and made clear he just wanted to be left alone."

Watson also invoked the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who is notorious for his antagonism toward the Indigenous people of Brazil and his wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest by backing the logging, cattle, and mining interests who have sought massive profits from the region's land and natural resources.

"If President Bolsonaro and his agribusiness allies get their way," warned Watson, "this story will be repeated over and over again until all the country's Indigenous peoples are wiped out. The Indigenous movement in Brazil, and Survival, will do everything possible to ensure that doesn't happen."

According to government officials with Funai, which monitored the man from a distance, it appeared the man had prepared for his death and that neither foul play nor a violent end was suggested. A forensic doctor with the nation's federal police is expected to carry out an autopsy and anthropologists and other researchers are expected to try to learn more about how he lived.

Following the man's death, OPI renewed its called for the Tanaru reserve where he lived his final years to be permanently protected as a memorial to Indigenous genocide.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/record-deforestation-amazon-tipping-point/

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the Brazilian government published data Friday showing that more than 2,500 fire hotspots were recorded in the Amazon rainforest last month, the highest number for June since 2007—one of the worst years ever for the critical ecosystem.

The latest report from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research showed that the Brazilian Amazon has lost 1,450 square miles of jungle since the start of 2022.

Greenpeace Brazil said in response to the alarming figures that the far-right Bolsonaro government's systematic rampage against basic environmental protections is responsible for the surge in rainforest fires and overall deforestation, which have helped transform parts of the Amazon—long known as a key carbon "sink"—into sources of planet-warming greenhouse gas.

"Agribusiness is hitting new records for forest destruction as the dry season arrives in the Amazon," said Cristiane Mazzetti, a spokesperson for Greenpeace Brazil. "Illegal burnings and deforestation have accelerated over the last three years as a direct result of the Brazilian government's anti-environmental agenda that encourages the destruction of the forest."

"If this trend does not change," Mazzetti added, "we will approach the tipping point of no return in which the Amazon could fail as a rainforest."

Brazilian academics have warned in recent months that a Bolsonaro victory in the October presidential election would mean total demise for the Brazilian Amazon. Recent polling shows that Bolsonaro is trailing leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has vowed to pursue "net-zero deforestation" if elected.

"If Bolsonaro remains in the power of presidency, it's hopeless in terms of the environment," Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the São Paulo-based Climate Observatory, told HuffPost in April, a record-shattering month for Amazon deforestation.

"There will be more deforestation," said Astrini. "The Amazon will fast forward to its collapse point."

Environmental groups have voiced dismay at the Biden administration's failure to confront Bolsonaro on the international stage over his government's assault on the Amazon. The U.S. is Brazil's second-largest trading partner.

Last month, during the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Joe Biden went as far as to praise Bolsonaro for trying to "protect the Amazon."

"In addition to being divorced from reality, Biden's statement is remarkably tone-deaf," Maria Laura Canineu and Luciana Téllez Chávez of Human Rights Watch wrote on the final day of the summit, where the two leaders met for the first time. "Biden has shamefully squandered the opportunity to leverage his meeting with Bolsonaro to support the courageous defenders of the Amazon."

"These defenders are putting their lives on the line to protect the world's largest rainforest and a vital bulwark against climate change," they continued. "Biden should correct this mistake and press Bolsonaro to reverse his damaging policies, urging Bolsonaro to get Brazil back on track in fighting deforestation and protecting forest defenders from violence."

Diana Ruiz, the head of forests at Greenpeace USA, said in a statement Friday that "up to now, the Biden administration has only legitimized the Brazilian government's anti-Indigenous and anti-environmental agenda."

"The U.S. has a responsibility to act and stop making deals with President Bolsonaro, who continues to wage an assault against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders," Ruiz added.

https://newrepublic.com/article/166976/tucker-carlson-jair-bolsonaro-interview-brazil

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live From Brazil: A Clueless Tucker Carlson

Fox News’s chief wingnut has spent all week fawning over authoritarian President Jair Bolsonaro and making absurd, ignorant statements about the country.

Last year, Tucker Carlson traveled to Budapest to celebrate Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s aggressively illiberal and xenophobic prime minister, by filming a week of episodes that included “lessons” the United States could draw from his anti-democratic, immigration-restrictionist rule. In a sit-down interview, Carlson nodded approvingly as Orbán railed against “post-Christian, post-national societies” and their “very risky” mixture of Muslim and Christian communities. This week, Carlson visited another country undergoing an alarming democratic erosion and fawned over its far-right ruler: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Broadcasting from both Rio de Janeiro and the capital, Brasília, Carlson has been urging his viewers to pay attention to what’s happening there. This October, Brazilians will go to the polls either to reelect Bolsonaro or cast him out of office. Carlson was there to insist that Bolsonaro isn’t the villain he seems to be in much stateside coverage. “Guess what, this will shock you: Bolsonaro bears no resemblance whatsoever to the descriptions of Bolsonaro you have read in The New York Times—completely different person,” Carlson said in a teaser of his sit-down interview with Bolsonaro, which aired Thursday night. “Seen that before?”

Though he doesn’t explicitly say it, Carlson’s goal with these field trips is to rehabilitate the images of reactionary leaders who have rightfully earned international scorn. But by parachuting into Brazil without any apparent grasp of its politics and culture, Carlson ended up on a sort of confirmation-bias egg hunt: finding evidence everywhere that the real threats in global stability are coming from the liberal internationalist order.

Carlson clearly believes the press unfairly picks on anti-democratic leaders like Bolsonaro—and presumably guys like Orbán, Trump, and maybe even Putin—because of what they get right with the power in their hands rather than their misdeeds.According to Carlson, for example, the Hungarian prime minister “thinks families are more important than banks.He believes countries need borders. For saying these things out loud, Orbán has been vilified.” Bolsonaro, according to Carlson, has been the target of so much animus because he is at heart a nationalist, which places him at odds with the “globalist” agenda in general and China’s hegemonic aspirations in particular.

Highlighting the latter was Carlson’s putative aim in Brazil. In addition to his interviews with Bolsonaro and those close to him, Carlson was filming a documentary for Fox’s premium streaming service about Chinese encroachment on the Americas—he seems downright giddy about the prospect of a new cold war. “China is working hard to turn the developing world into a colony … and that’s particularly true in Brazil,” he stated this week, wildly speculating about Brazil serving as a launching pad for Chinese military incursions in the Western Hemisphere. As far as Carlson is concerned, the U.S. has an interest in a Bolsonaro victory because he is the only one in the region standing in the way of a hostile takeover by Xi Jinping.

In domestic terms, as Carlson put it in the interview that aired Thursday night, Bolsonaro faces “a coalition of billionaires, college professors, and CNN,” all of whom are supposedly eager to pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. In asking Bolsonaro how he plans to deal with this type of opposition, Carlson is grafting the image that U.S. conservatives have of the Democratic Party onto Brazilian politics, and it’s not even remotely accurate. For one thing, polls show that the supposedly populist Bolsonaro performs best among the wealthiest Brazilians. (To quote Carlson: Seen that before?) Furthermore, CNN launched in Brazil just two years ago. It is hardly the influential behemoth in Brazil that Fox anchors seem to think CNN is in the U.S.

If Carlson had followed Brazilian politics for even one month over the past five years, he would know the depths of animosity that the largest media outlets have toward Bolsonaro’s leading opponent.

“Why is there no Fox News in Brazil?” Carlson asked Bolsonaro in Thursday’s interview, suggesting that the president’s reputation might improve with a stronger media apparatus backing his agenda. Bolsonaro talked a bit about Jovem Pan, a trollish conservative radio and television empire that frequently traffics in homophobia, classism, and sexism—it’s the station on which journalist Glenn Greenwald got into a live scuffle with a right-wing journalist in 2019—but lamented the broader hostility of the press corps.

But if Carlson had followed Brazilian politics for even one month over the past five years, he would know the depths of animosity that the largest media outlets have toward Bolsonaro’s leading opponent, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former metalworker and union leader who governed the country for eight years and left office with an approval rating in the 80s before being targeted by a biased judge and imprisoned on flimsy corruption charges (he was freed by the Supreme Court in 2019). In fact, major newspapers, magazines, television channels, and radio stations were integral in fomenting the deeply reactionary wave that launched the relatively obscure Bolsonaro to national leadership in the first place. Brazil may not have Fox News, but its media landscape is hardly progressive.

Carlson is primed to castigate the mainstream press—how many Fox anchors have made a living doing just that?—but that political dynamic isn’t coded the same way in Brazil. If anything, the left is historically critical of major outlets, which, like elsewhere in Latin America, are concentrated in the hands of a few conservative families invested in the unequal status quo. Lula’s Workers’ Party has long proposed revisions to the legislation governing how large media companies operate in Brazil. But for Carlson, the mainstream media targets conservatives for special opprobrium in the U.S., so it must do the same in Brazil. Indeed, Carlson seems to have gone to Brazil expecting that what he’d find would align with the worldview he espouses nightly without serious contestation. As a result, he fit everything he heard and saw into a tidy preexisting framework that is digestible to his audience but does very little to teach them anything substantive about Brazilian politics today.

At one point, Carlson asked Bolsonaro about the stakes of October’s presidential election, lobbing the softest of softballs. Decrying identity politics and the divisive rhetoric of Brazilian progressives who have the nerve to be outraged by the country’s enduring injustices, Bolsonaro cast the election in dire terms. Describing his opponents as “atheists,” he insinuated that Lula would crack down on religious practice in Brazil, including by loosening limits on abortion (which is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape or serious risk to the mother’s health). Referring to his election as “almost a miracle,” Bolsonaro also asserted that if “the left wing” regains power, they will refuse to leave again, aligning Brazil with the authoritarian governments of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. This is the exact rhetorical playbook Bolsonaro drew from in 2018, and it’s one that will ring familiar to Fox viewers fed a steady diet of hysterical coverage of the Democrats’ supposed plots to shred the fabric of the U.S. Bolsonaro, in this rendering, is a kindred spirit waging a similar war four thousand miles away.

Whatever one thinks of heads of state like Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Trump, it is important to recognize that they operate within particular political contexts, with different oppositions, allies, strategies, and priorities. There may be similarities, but one cannot draw neat, satisfying conclusions about one place based on the developments of another. Carlson seems incapable of grasping this (or at least pretends not to).

Interviewing Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the president’s sons and also a politician, Carlson notes approvingly that Brazil has loosened its rigid gun restrictions since 2018. “What happened?” he asked rhetorically. “Did people go crazy? [Were there] more mass shootings? No, the country became a lot safer.” Last year, in fact, the murder rate dropped to the lowest rate in a decade, continuing a downward trend since 2019. Carlson cites this as evidence that civilian ownership of firearms makes even the most crime-ridden societies safer.

The obvious rejoinder is that Covid-19 struck Brazil in February 2020, just a year into Bolsonaro’s administration, forcing millions of people into the relative safety of their homes. Surely this had an effect on the crime rate. But sociologist Renato Sérgio de Lima, the director of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, offers an even more sophisticated rebuttal: In states where there were more guns in the hands of civilians as a result of Bolsonaro’s policy changes, crime did not go down by any consistent metric relative to those that saw a smaller increase in civilian gun ownership. In other words, the reduction in violent deaths simply cannot be attributed to Bolsonaro’s gun policies. It is all the more dubious to say Bolsonaro has eased concerns about violent crime considering that on his watch last year, there was a 5.8 percent increase in the number of Afro-Brazilians killed by security forces while the same number for white Brazilians declined by 31 percent.

Carlson did not hear about any of this—or if he did, he chose not to share it with his audience. After all, he didn’t come to Brazil to learn about the complexities of South America’s wealthiest, most populous country and how it is still riven by a history of slavery, inequality, and violence. He came to confirm his priors and to bask in the reflected villainy of another strongman promising to stand up to the liberal international order.

Andre Pagliarini @apagliar

Andre Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history at Hampden-Sydney College. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on twentieth-century Brazilian nationalism.

Read More: Politics, Brazil, The Soapbox, Media, Tucker Carlson, Jair Bolsonaro, Foreign Affairs, FOX News, Hungary, Viktor Orban, Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva

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Tucker Carlson: Allowing Brazil to become a colony of China would be a ...

4 days agoFox News host Tucker Carlson reveals why the American media and liberals despise the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, on Thursday's "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

https://www.bizpacreview.com › 2022 › 06 › 30 › why-tuckers-piece-on-brazilian-trump-president-bolsonaro-is-so-important-to-americans-1256134

Why Tucker's piece on 'Brazilian Trump' President Bolsonaro is so ...

5 days agoTucker Carlson previews his interview with Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro, teasing that he "bears no resemblance" to left-wing depictions.

https://www.businessinsider.com › tucker-carlson-interviews-brazil-bolsonaro-after-orban-fawning-2022-6?op=1

Tucker Carlson Interviews Brazil Far-Right Leader After Orbán Fawning

5 days agoTucker Carlson previewed an interview with Brazil's far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. Carlson said it showed Bolsonaro "bears no resemblance whatsoever" to how he is shown in Western media ...

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/why-blackwater-helping-train-brazils-world-cup-security/

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In news as shocking as it was unreported in the United States, the Brazilian press revealed earlier this week that Academi—the rebranded private militia once known as Blackwater—has been providing security training for the 2014 World Cup.The notorious company, responsible for the 2011 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq, has been training Brazilian security forces in North Carolina.

Hosting mega-events comes with astronomical costs. This summer’s World Cup in Brazil is the most expensive ever, with a tab so far of $11 billion to $13 billion. These costs promise to catapult even higher as unfinished projects linger long after the soccer fans have returned home, with some estimating the final price tag to crest at $15 billion. In addition to being the most expensive, the World Cup organizers plan to deploy more force than any previous tournament. More than 170,000 security personnel from the military, police and secret service will be on hand, 22 percent more than worked the previous World Cup in South Africa. Now we know that some of these forces will be trained by a private security firm with a dodgy history.

In Rio, the “pacification” of favelas is already hurtling ahead full throttle. Amnesty International described the Pacifying Police Unit’s recent incursion into the Maré complex of favelas as “a military occupation.” The suspicious disappearance of a young man named Amarildo Dias de Souza from his home favela of Rocinha sparked a public outburst and media-led investigation that spurred criminal charges against the neighborhood’s commanding officer and his minions. The security officials sit in prison awaiting trial, accused of torturing De Souza to death and discarding his corpse in the jungle. Not surprisingly, a recent national poll found that less than a quarter of Brazilians trust the police.

The conflation of terrorism and activism is also rampant. Lawmakers in Brazil are angling to use the state of exception that sports mega-events inevitably bring to pass drastic legislation. The Brazilian Congress is contemplating an antiterrorism bill that would impose hefty sentences—fifteen to thirty years in prison—for “causing or inciting widespread terror by threatening or trying to threaten the life, the physical integrity or the health or liberty of a person.” Human-rights groups have clamored that such proposals are overly broad and could be used to squelch all kinds of protest and actions during the World Cup.

For security mavens, Academi’s involvement training Brazilians at its company headquarters in North Carolina may come as no great surprise. After all, Wikileaks revealed in a 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Brasilia that the US government views the crises brought on by hosting sports mega-events as prime occasions to cash in.

After power outages rippled across Brazil in 2009, the US Mission wrote, “The newly heightened concerns about Brazil’s infrastructure as a result of this blackout, combined with the need to address infrastructure challenges in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, present the United States opportunities for engagement on infrastructure development as well critical infrastructure protection and possibly cyber security.” In short, Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.

The cable encouraged US government agencies like the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security “to explore these opportunities in the near-term.” With Academi’s involvement in Brazil, this type of “opportunity” is taking shape.

The indomitable critic Eduardo Galeano recently said of FIFA, the world’s governing body for football, “There are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It’s the most secret kingdom in the world.” People across Brazil concur—disgruntlement with Fifa’s arrogance and opacity is widespread. Earlier this month, a poll found, quite remarkably, that in the football-crazy country of Brazil only 48 percent of the population favors hosting this summer’s World Cup, plummeting from 78 percent support in 2008. Meanwhile, 41 percent actively oppose it, up from only 10 percent. Last summer, the 2013 Confederations Cup provided a prime-time dress rehearsal for principled dissent. Almost everyone expects cross-country protests at this summer’s Copa do Mundo.

Under intense public pressure, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes recently remarked, “We’re not going to build a Bird’s Nest [Stadium] in Rio de Janeiro. If you go to Beijing today, the Bird’s Nest has become a mausoleum to honor wasted public money. We are not going to do this here.” The mayor was right about the perils of white elephants. But another threat lingers: the intensified militarization of public space in the name of protecting the sports spectacle. Now it looks like private security firms like Academi are in on the deal, and that’s unsettling for anyone not under the spell of historical amnesia.

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Climate inaction leaves majority of young people believing humanity is 'doomed'

Julia Conley and Common Dreams September 15, 2021

Amidst a sharp increase in deadly wildfires and flooding, increasingly violent storms, and extreme heat, new research published Tuesday found that refusal by governments to act on the climate emergency is causing a widespread sense of hopelessness and eco-anxiety in teenagers and young adults worldwide.

The global advocacy group Avaaz joined researchers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and five other universities to survey 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25—the first large-scale eco-anxiety survey of its kind—and discovered that majorities of the respondents were fearful for the lives and livelihoods of their families and the future of the planet.

As Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old leader of the global Fridays for Future movement in Germany, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, while the climate extremes caused by the planetary emergency are frightening, inaction by world leaders "is too much to handle, too much to accept."

"Government is pushing us in front of a bus,"Neubauer told the outlet.

The mental health professionals who conducted the study spoke with young people in 10 countries including Nigeria, the Philippines, India, the U.K., and the U.S., finding that respondents in both wealthy countries and the Global South are facing "feelings of anger, fear, and powerlessness" as the climate crisis directly causes at least one famine, deadly flash flooding, and wildfires in multiple regions.

Nearly half of respondents said their worries about the climate crisis negatively affect their daily life and their ability to function, and more than half told the experts they feel humanity is "doomed."

Four in 10 said they would hesitate to have children in the future due to the state of the planet, while three-quarters of respondents described their futures as "frightening."

Avaaz reported that one of the most "shocking" findings was how respondents described their feelings about government inaction, including more than half who said they feel policymakers "are betraying them."

"If this isn't a wake up call for world leaders, what is?" asked Avaaz.

Young people in the cyclone-ravages Philippines andBrazil, where deforestation—driven by President Jair Bolsonaro's government—has become increasingly destructive in recent years, showed the most anxiety of the countries surveyed. More than nine in 10 respondents said they were frightened about the future. Caroline Hickman, lead author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Tuesday, cautioned adults against telling young people it is up to them to save the future of the planet. "Thinking the way to cure eco-anxiety is eco-action isn't right," Hickman told Thomson Reuters, adding that what will solve the climate crisis is decisive action by world governments.

The survey "shows eco-anxiety is not just for environmental destruction alone, but inextricably linked to government inaction on climate change. The young feel abandoned and betrayed by governments," Hickman told the BBC. "Governments need to listen to the science and not pathologize young people who feel anxious."

The survey results were released less than two months ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26), where policymakers will meet in Glasgow to discuss commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, provide climate mitigation support for frontline communities across the globe, and rapidly transition to an emissions-free energy system.

Young people are "doing everything we can" to push for climate action, Neubauer told Thomson Reuters, "but that won't be enough."

"We won't fix it" through the Fridays for Future movement, she added. "We need everyone there." no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-defeat-2648880103

White House has ordered agencies not to cooperate with Biden's presidential transition team, and President Donald Trump continues to refuse to accept defeat in the 2020 election, which means Biden cannot receive security briefings or access government funds for the transition. But while the standoff continues in the U.S., other countries are already preparing for a new administration. For more on how the historic U.S. election is playing out internationally, we speak with analysts from around the world, includingMaria Luísa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has not acknowledged Biden's victory. "The progressive movements in Brazil can also be inspired by that election here," says Mendonça. "I think that the U.S. can play a much more positive role in Latin America."

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As President Donald Trump continues to refuse to accept President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election, the White House has ordered agencies not to cooperate with Biden's presidential transition team. Joe Biden is not yet receiving daily intelligence briefings, five days after he was declared the winner. At this point after Trump's victory in 2016, Trump was receiving those daily briefings. The holdup hinges on the little-known-to-the-public General Services Administration, which officially begins the transition and has refused to sign the paperwork to do so. Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said Wednesday he will intervene if Biden is not receiving the briefings by Friday.

This comes as the State Department is refusing to pass on messages to Biden from world leaders, and Biden's transition team is coordinating Biden's calls without State Department support. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has refused to acknowledge Biden's win and said there would be a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration."

Today, we'll get response to the historic U.S. election from around the world, from Brazil to South Africa, from Turkey to United Kingdom. First, we go to Brazil, where staunch Trump ally President Jair Bolsonaro has not acknowledged Biden's victory. On Tuesday, as Brazil's COVID death toll passed 162,000, second only to the United States, Bolsonaro again downplayed the virus and attacked concerned Brazilians, using an offensive term for the LGBTQ community.

PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO: [translated] Everything now is the pandemic. We have to put a stop to that. I'm sorry for all those who have died. I'm sorry. All of us are going to die one day. Everyone is going to die. You are going to die one day. There is no point in escaping from that, escaping from reality. We have to stop being a country of sissies. I'm giving the press a full plate.

AMY GOODMAN: The word Bolsonaro actually used was far more derogatory than the one that we translated here.

Well, for more, we're joined by Maria Luísa Mendonça. She is director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil, a visiting scholar at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Maria Luísa, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about the significance of the Biden victory and the close relationship between Jair Bolsonaro and President Trump, what the ending of that alliance can mean, and what Jair Bolsonaro is doing right now in Brazil, especially when it comes to COVID?

MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Yes, that was a very important victory for Brazilians, because the progressive movements in Brazil can also be inspired by this election here. It's important to remember that the result of this election in the U.S. is because of the work of grassroots movements here that elected Biden.

And now Bolsonaro in Brazil is even more isolated. And I think that he also plays this game of a fake nationalism when he defends that there should be no regulation, no environmental regulation, and the environmental destruction in the Amazon, in the Brazilian savanna, is increasing. But that is a fake nationalism, because the fires and the destruction of the Amazon really benefits large multinational cooperations, mining, agribusiness, financial corporations.

So, I think that it's important also for the social movements in the U.S. to make sure that Biden will have a different foreign policy in relation to Latin America, because we have to remember that Bolsonaro is actually a result of a parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 that opened the space for this far-right government. So I think the U.S. can play a much more positive role in Latin America, and we need to hold the administration accountable now.

And I think — but, in general, there is a global far-right movement that Bolsonaro and Trump are part of. And I think that the election here in the U.S., the result of the election, will have a positive impact not just in the U.S., but in other parts of the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Maria —

MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: And then, in terms of the — yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, please, go ahead.

MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Yeah, in terms of the coronavirus response, Trump and Bolsonaro have very similar policies. They really don't believe in science. They don't promote any type of protection. They put the population at risk. They don't express any solidarity for the suffering of the millions of people who have been infected and so many people who have died.

So, also, Bolsonaro even has played down the vaccine. You know, he is doing everything he can to postpone a vaccine in Brazil. And Brazil actually has a very good infrastructure for mass vaccination. Historically, the country always had very mass vaccination campaigns. And Bolsonaro is even trying to avoid that, you know, the Brazilian science advance the implementation of the vaccine in Brazil.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Maria Luísa, can you talk a little bit more about that, the fact that Bolsonaro has just rejected a vaccine that Brazilian scientists — it's a vaccine from China, but Brazilian scientists have also been working on that vaccine. Why did Bolsonaro do that? I mean, it doesn't make any sense for Bolsonaro to be opposed to these vaccines, given especially the death toll in Brazil, second only to the U.S. Over 160,000 people have died now of COVID.

MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Yes, exactly. Brazil has very good scientists that have a lot of experience with mass vaccination. But that's all ideological. You know, the Bolsonaro position is based on xenophobia, racism and ignoring science. And that, in a way, is similar to Trump, as well. They both have promoted drugs that have no evidence of being effective for the treatment of coronavirus. And, you know, he's putting the Brazilian society at risk, because even ignoring the effects of a vaccine is something very extreme. And that's the result, of course, of the influence of the evangelical movement in his government. And so, this is not based on science. It's just based on far-right ideology.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Maria Luísa, could you say a little more about the relationship between Trump and Bolsonaro? I mean, not only has Bolsonaro not yet congratulated Biden, but his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, wore a hat with the logo "Trump 2020" leading up to the election. And in the days following the election, as the vote count was happening here in the U.S., he questioned publicly on social media how Biden's votes were going up so quickly. That's a highly extraordinary move for someone in a foreign — in another government to make about internal elections elsewhere.

MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Yeah, this is also a very big change in terms of the tradition of foreign policy in Brazil. Brazil has had a tradition of being independent, of not interfering in foreign affairs. So, you know, the Brazilian diplomacy has had this tradition historically, and now this position of Bolsonaro and his sons of basically allying with Trump and making Brazil be so dependent on whatever Trump talks about. They have the same discourse. And they also are part of this global organization that is — one of the leaders is Steve Bannon, for example. So, the discourse is very similar between Bolsonaro and Trump. The policies are very similar. So, of course, there is a coordinating effort that is global to advance those views. But that goes against the history of Brazilian foreign policy.

So, I think that now with a change in administration here in the U.S., that can even influence perhaps the position of mainstream media in Brazil, that plays a key role also in manipulating information. And so, you know, I think, hopefully, the decision here, whatever happens here, will have — with the Biden administration and if Biden really has a different type of policy for Latin America, that will have an impact and will advance progressive forces in Brazil, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Maria Luísa, I wanted to play one more clip of the Brazilian president indirectly swiping at Joe Biden during an event on Tuesday. Bolsonaro's comments come after Biden criticized the far-right leader's handling of deforestation in the Amazon.

PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO: [translated] I recently heard a presidential candidate from a country say that if I don't put out the fire in the Amazon, he is going to raise trade barriers against Brazil. How do we deal with all of that? Diplomacy is not enough. When there is no more saliva, then there must be gunpowder. But they have to know that we own the Amazon. That's what the world is like. Nobody has what we have.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that's Bolsonaro saying "there must be gunpowder." You know, as we watched in the western United States as the fires enveloped parts of California, Oregon and Washington, they're actually dwarfed by the fires in the Amazon, the lungs of the world. If you, in 30 seconds, can talk about what he is getting at, and what you think is most critical for Biden to do?

MARIA LUÍSA MENDONÇA: Yeah, I think it's very important for us to boycott four Brazilian commodities that are the main cause of deforestation and destruction — timber, sugar, soy and beef from Brazil — because these policies, the destruction of the Amazon, is really benefiting large agribusiness corporations, including U.S. agribusiness corporations. So, it's not about protecting the Brazilian society. It's protecting large agribusiness corporations, timber companies and mining companies. So, we need to have solidarity, you know, the environmental movements in Brazil and here. We need to build an international environmental movement and make sure that the world also can help Brazil by boycotting these four commodities.

AMY GOODMAN: Maria Luísa Mendonça, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/24/headlines/climate_crisis_drives_record_fires_in_brazil_western_united_states

brazil’s National Center for the Prevention of Forest Fires reports over 7 million acres of the world’s largest wetland have burned in unprecedented fires exacerbated by the climate crisis. The Pantanal fires have consumed 50% more land this year than have burned along the West Coast of the United States.

In California, the Creek Fire has become the largest single-source fire in state history, burning nearly 300,000 acres in Fresno and Madera counties. Five of California’s six largest fires in recorded history are still raging, including the record-shattering August Complex fire, which is now at 860,000 acres with 40% containment.

TOPICS:

ew mongabay 920

https://www.ecowatch.com/indigenous-women-protect-amazon-2647376402.html

https://www.ecowatch.com/brazil-amazon-wildlife-criminal-networks-2646841421.html

shillenberger revkin say no worries on brazil fires b/c worse in 80's

820

https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-rainforest-fire-brazil-2646869688.html

The number of forest fires in Brazil's Amazon rainforest increased 28% in July in comparison to last year, the country's National Institute for Space Research reported Saturday.

Brazil holds around 60% of the Amazon basin region and environmentalists say this area is vital to containing the impact of climate change.

The state agency recorded 6,803 fires in the Amazon last month, compared to 5,318 in the same month of 2019.

Environmentalists were alarmed by the figure, particularly because August traditionally marks the beginning of the fire season in the region. Many now fear that a repeat of the large surge in fires that devastated the area last August could occur this year again.

"More than 1,000 fires in a single day is a 15-year record and shows the government's strategy of media-spectacle operations is not working on the ground," Greenpeace spokesman Romulo Batista said in a statement.

The fires have been largely set to clear land illegally for farming, ranching and mining. Activists accuse Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro of encouraging the deforestation, as he has been in favor of opening up the rainforest to agriculture and industry.

The first six months of 2020 were already the worst on record for deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, with 3,069 square kilometers (1,185 square miles) cleared, according to INPE data, an area larger than the nation of Luxembourg.

Government Measures Not Enough

On July 16, the Brazilian government banned burning in the Pantanal wetlands and the Amazon forest for four months.

President Bolsonaro also issued an order in May for the military to coordinate environmental actions in the Amazon.

But experts say the fire numbers indicate the government's response has not been effective. The deforestation index also remained high this year until July, compared to the last couple of years, according to Carlos Nobre, a researcher at the Advanced Studies Institute in the State University of Sao Paulo.

"We can conclude, with data until the end of July, that the effectiveness of government actions to reduce fires and deforestation is low," he said.

Experts also say that this year's dry season will be even more prone to fires than last year. U.S. space agency NASA warned last month that warmer ocean surface temperatures in the North Atlantic have creating the conditions for a more extreme drought in the Amazon.

"Human-set fires used for agriculture and land clearing more prone to growing out of control and spreading," NASA warned. "Conditions are ripe."

At Least 500 Jaguars Lost Their Lives or Habitat in Amazon Fires ›

Amazon Rainforest Reaches Point of No Return - EcoWatch ›

Record Number of Fires Burning in Amazon Rainforest - EcoWatch ›

Amazon Rainforest Fire Season Starts With Outlook for Record Burn ... ›

The Brazilian Amazon is still burning. Who is responsible? - The ... ›

Amazon fires: What's the latest in Brazil? - BBC News

https://www.ecowatch.com/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-court-2646172097.html

Jun. 13, 2020

Ajit Niranjan DW

Civil society groups and public prosecutors in Brazil are taking President Jair Bolsonaro's government to court for failing to protect the Amazon rainforest, adding pressure to an administration already under fire for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic.

Lawsuits filed last week challenge the government on two fronts: reducing inspections of exported timber — while demoting the environment agency expert whose team advised against it — and freezing climate funds to preserve forests that other countries also rely on to offset their carbon emissions.

They are among a series of legal challenges that have been launched in Brazil after a tumultuous year-and-a-half of Bolsonaro rule. His administration has overseen a rise in deforestation, attacked the rights of people indigenous to the Amazon and relaxed rules to prevent illegal logging, ranching and mining.

Bolsonaro is a climate change denier who considers the environment to be a kind of enemy, said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of Brazil-based think tank Climate Observatory, which provided the legal analysis behind the lawsuits. "It's very hard to believe Bolsonaro will change his behavior or mindset. What we really need to do is neutralize the attacks on the environment."

In recent weeks, the Brazilian government has been rebuked by foreign governments, investors and businesses for enabling deforestation — and by courts and protestors at home for political interference and its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Brazil's supreme court ordered the government on Monday to resume publishing coronavirus statistics after it purged the health ministry website of COVID-19 case numbers and death tolls. The virus has killed more than 37,000 people in Brazil, which has the second-most coronavirus cases in the world behind only the U.S. "The manipulation of statistics is a maneuver of totalitarian regimes," said supreme court judge Gilmar Mendes. "The trick will not exempt responsibility for the eventual genocide."

Deforestation, meanwhile, had already last year hit its highest level since 2008. On Tuesday the country's space research agency INPE revised its estimates, saying it they were higher than previously thought. Using satellite data, the scientists calculated that year-on-year deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon rose by 34 percent between August 2018 and July 2019, felling an area of forest about as big as Jamaica.

Georg Witschel, Germany's ambassador to Brazil, told Brazilian news outlet G1 on Thursday that deforestation makes it "increasingly difficult" to ratify the free trade agreement between the EU and South American trade bloc Mercosur.

Coronavirus and Deforestation

Brazil's environmental and health crises are closely linked. The coronavirus pandemic had given fresh impetus to land grabbers razing swathes of forests as lockdowns have kept law enforcement officers at home.

Now, the fires that typically follow the felling of trees could further strain health systems.

Blazing wildfires, like the ones that devastated the Amazon last year, spout pollutants that lower air quality and work their way into people's lungs, exacerbating the same breathing diseases that leave people more vulnerable to the coronavirus. A joint peak in forest fires and COVID-19 cases could overwhelm hospitals without "incisive intervention by the State to curb illegal acts," according to a report published in May by INPE.

That could collapse health systems in several Amazonian states that are already operating at the limit, the authors wrote. "If the turning point of the epidemiological curve of COVID-19 does not occur immediately, in May 2020, there will certainly be an overlap of fires with the pandemic."

This could spell disaster for indigenous peoples and uncontacted tribes, said Sarah Shenker, a campaigner with Survival International. "In Brazil, there are more than 100 uncontacted tribes and they could be wiped out if invaders are not removed from their territory."

Even before the current coronavirus crisis, scientists warned that forest loss makes pandemics more likely by increasing the chance that diseases jump from animals to humans. A study published in the journal PNAS in October found that deforestation of the Amazon significantly increases transmission of malaria, a different type of disease.

Preserving the Climate

The Amazon rainforest — 60 percent of which lies in Brazil — is one of the world's great carbon sinks. Preserving its trees and plants is crucial to meeting international targets that limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Lawsuits that take years to complete are not going to produce results fast enough, said Ricardo Galvao, a former director of INPE who was fired by Bolsonaro in August.

To curb deforestation in the Amazon, said Galvao, the best tools are "positive actions that show [that] exploring the forest, rather than destroying it, gives economic returns." For instance, international organizations like the UN could certify products from sustainably managed forests and countries could lower import taxes on such "green-stamped" goods.

Brazil has a legal commitment to reduce deforestation in the Amazon to a rate equivalent to about 3,900 square kilometers per year from 2020 onwards. In 2012, measures to protect the Amazon had brought deforestation down to 4,600 square kilometers, close to the target, but by 2019, it had rebounded to 9,800 square kilometers.

The Brazilian government, which in May brought in the military to protect the forest, has disputed its image as an environmental pariah. "We are the country that most preserves the environment in the world," said Bolsonaro on World Environment Day last week. "Unjustly, [we are] the most attacked."

Data from Brazil's Institute of Socioeconomic Studies show government spending on forest inspection dropped from R$17.4 million (US$3.5 million, €3.1 million) to R$5.3 million from the first five months of 2019 to the same period in 2020, while funding for activities under Brazil's national climate change plan were cut from R$436 million last year to R$247 million this year.

Ibama, the Brazilian environment agency, did not respond to a request for comment.

Big tracts of the rainforest have no recorded owner, making it easier to illegally grab land, and a lack of law enforcement can even mean that farmers who comply with regulations struggle to compete with those who don't.

Working with sustainable farmers and fixing land ownership structures could help Brazil slow deforestation during the coronavirus pandemic and recession, said Monica De Los Rios, Brazil coordinator at the nonprofit Earth Innovation Institute. "This is the most critical moment in the history of the Amazon."

dn 7/30/20

Brazil Records Record Daily Coronavirus Toll as Deaths Top 90,000

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/us-corporations-a-driving-force-behind-unprecedented-wave-of-global-land-privatization-report/

a study released Tuesday by the Oakland Institute details an “unprecedented wave of privatization of natural resources that is underway around the world”—one that is largely being driven by the United States and its allies.

According to the progressive think tank’s report (pdf), “Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to Unlock the Economic Potential of Land,” governments around the world—particularly in developing countries—are often put under pressure by financial institutions and Western agencies to open up land for so-called “productive use” by miners, agribusiness interests, and other corporate entities intent on exploiting natural resources for profit.

The U.S. in particular, the report says, is a “key player in an unfettered offensive to privatize land around the world.”

With deforestation and fossil fuel extraction helping to fuel the climate crisis, governments are being pushed in a direction that’s “just the opposite of the drastic shift we need to win the struggle against climate change,” Frederic Mousseau, policy director of the Oakland Institute and lead author of the report, said in a statement.

“Most of the land on our planet, especially in the Global South, is public land or land held under customary tenure systems [and] is seen as an obstacle to exploitation and economic growth,” Mousseau said.

The Oakland Institute included in its report six case studies in Ukraine, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil, finding that global land privatization is often directly driven by U.S. interests.

[twt]

zambia has been affected by what the Institute calls a recent “surge of American and European startups attempting to apply blockchain technology to land registries,” referring to the digital ledger created for Bitcoin.

The Zambiangovernment is partnering with Medici Land Governance (MLG), a blockchain company and subsidiary of the U.S. online retailer Overstock.com, to assist with land registration and titling. According to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, the use of blockchain “will help unlock trillions of dollars in global mineral reserves that are inaccessible due to unclear land governance systems.”

In Sri Lanka, a U.S. government entity known as the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) approved a five-year compact for the country in 2019, offering the Sri Lankan government $480 million to map and digitize public lands in order to “promote land transactions that could stimulate investment and increase its use as an economic asset.”

“The proposed MCC compact would shift control of millions of hectares away from the state towards private interests,” the report says, and was proposed by a U.S. entity formed in 2002 by Congress with the stated goal of “reducing poverty through growth.”

“In practice, poverty alleviation has taken a back seat to promoting private sector growth,” the report continues. “This has translated to countries shifting their policies in adherence to a neoliberal economic framework—including the privatization and commodification of land—in exchange for substantial financial grants.”

MCC compacts throughout Africa have “allowed investors to acquire land at bargain prices to facilitate large-scale industrial agriculture at the expense of smallholder farmers,” the Oakland Institute added.

The study also points to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s aggressive push to assume control of Indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest, appointing a member of one the country’s most powerful agribusiness families to head the Ministry of Agriculture. Illegal land invasions and massive fires driven by agriculture and mining interests have threatened Indigenous people while contributing to deforestation and the climate crisis.

As the Institute published the report while the Covid-19 pandemic is upending the global economy, the report points out that “returning to normal is not an option.”

Instead, the economic crisis “must be used as a catalyst to address the systematic issues surrounding the rampant overexploitation of natural resources that has driven the climate crisis to its current state.”

Rather than erasing local governance and negating individual autonomy, governments must instead build systems that incorporate a diversity of ownership and tenure systems, and focus on a development path that serves the people instead of one that takes the land away from them for corporate profits.”

#2 behind US KIA

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/brazilian-president-bolsonaro-tests-positive-for-covid-19-after-months-of-downplaying-the-virus

Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been the leading coronavirus skeptic in Latin America, sounding downright Trumpian in his assertions that the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic is being exaggerated by liberal journalists, activists and politicians. And now, The Guardian is reporting that the 65-year-old Bolsonaro has tested positive for COVID-19.

On Brazilian television, Bolsonaro was seen on Tuesday, July 7 wearing a mask and confirming that his test “came back positive.”

Bolsonaro asserted, “There’s no reason for fear. That’s life. Life goes on. I thank God for my life and the role I’ve been given to decide the future of this great nation that is called Brazil.”

The Brazilian president has repeatedly downplayed the severity of COVID-19 and criticized social distancing, often echoing the type of rhetoric that far-right Trump supporters have espoused in the United States. But Brazil has the second highest COVID-19 death rate in the world. According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the pandemic has killed more than 65,400 people in Brazil.

covid 2x!

https://www.ecowatch.com/rainforest-deforestation-coronavirus-2646072407.html

As the COVID-19 virus was spreading around the world, deforestation in the world's rainforests rose at an alarming rate, the German arm of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said in a study published on Thursday.

The study, which analyzed satellite data of 18 countries compiled by the University of Maryland, found that deforestation rose by 150% this March compared 2017-2019 average for the same calendar month.

Around 6,500 square kilometers (2,510 square miles) of rainforest were felled in March alone — an area seven times the size of Berlin, the WWF said.

"This indicates that we're dealing with a coronavirus effect on the exploding rates of deforestation," Christoph Heinrich, the head of nature conservation with WWF Germany, said in a statement.

Indonesia Forests Hit Hardest

The forests most heavily hit by deforestation in March were in Indonesia, with more than 1,300 square kilometers lost.

The Democratic Republic of Congo saw the second-largest forest loss with 1,000 square kilometers followed by Brazil with 950 square kilometers.

The Brazilian non-profit research institute Imazon told news agency DPA that deforestation was up in April as well. The institute recorded a loss of 529 square kilometers in the Amazon in April, a rise of 171% compared to last year.

Tied to COVID-19

The WWF says there's ample evidence to suggest the boom in rainforest deforestation is being fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

With stay-at-home orders and strict lockdowns in place in countries around the world, authorities haven't been able to patrol nature preserves and indigenous territories as often — a situation that criminal organizations and illegal loggers have been using to their advantage.

The virus has also prompted massive job losses in many countries, leaving many newly-unemployed people increasingly desperate for sources of income.

The WWF noted that the legal timber trade is a substantial source of income for several African countries but is virtually on ice amid various coronavirus shutdowns. The broken supply chains have led to concerns that the forests are losing their value and forest conservation efforts are losing their foothold.

Along the Mekong River in southeast Asia, tourists have disappeared and with them a substantial source of income for local merchants selling forest products like honey, nuts or berries. Many have left the cities and returned to their home villages and are cutting down trees for firewood or a source of income.

The WWF said governments providing financial and technological support to locals could help reduce the rise in deforestation.

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/04/brazil-bolsonaro-military-coup/

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/07/coronavirus-vaccine-drug-company-monopolies-brazil/

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/27/headlines/brazils_justice_minister_resigns_after_president_bolsonaro_fires_federal_police_chief

Brazil’s powerful justice minister has resigned, accusing far-right President Jair Bolsonaro of illegally firing the federal police chief. Sérgio Moro becomes the eighth Cabinet member — and the most high-profile — to depart in the 15 months since Bolsonaro took office. Moro once oversaw a vast anti-corruption investigation known as “Operation Car Wash” and prosecuted former President Lula da Silva for alleged corruption — charges that Lula says were politically motivated and designed to keep him from running for the presidency again. Moro quit Friday just hours after Bolsonaro fired the federal police chief, who was investigating Bolsonaro’s political allies and two of his sons.

Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation for corruption and ties to mafia in Rio de Janeiro; another son, Carlos Bolsonaro, is charged with leading a “criminal fake news racket” that’s made threats against political opponents while spreading defamatory misinformation.

This all comes as President Bolsonaro faces widespread criticism for minimizing the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak. The death toll in Brazil has topped 4,000, and hospitals report being overwhelmed with sick patients.

TOPICS:

https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-brazil-gold-mining-2645732733.html

illegal

https://www.ecowatch.com/brazil-ashaninka-compensation-deforestation-2645751246.html

mongabay

Naira Hofmeister, Translated by Matt Rinaldi

An unprecedented court settlement guaranteed reparations to the Ashaninka people of the state of Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, whose lands were deforested in the 1980s to supply the European furniture industry. The logging company penalized was owned by the family of the current governor of Acre, Gladson Cameli.

The conflict was resolved through mediationfrom the Prosecutor General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, after thecase had circulated in the courts with no resolution for 20 years.

The indigenous people only agreed with the negotiation because it included an official apology and a recognition of their "enormous importance as guardians" of the Amazon.

Far from the Brazil nut trees that shape the landscape of the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve in the western tip of the state of Acre, the Ashaninka people realized their most important victory since the federal government first recognized their territory in 1992. On April 1, 2020, the Prosecutor General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, signed an unprecedented settlement that guaranteed reparations for crimes committed almost 40 years ago. The agreement gives this indigenous community the right to compensation of R$ 14 million (nearly US$ 3 million) with an official apology from the criminal offenders.

Their crime: cutting down of thousands of mahogany, cedar and other tree species to supply the European furniture industry from 1981 to 1987. The devastation struck a quarter of the area that currently comprises the indigenous reserve. Francisco Piyãko, the Ashaninka leader, was an adolescent at the time of the logging invasion. "What matters to us is what this agreement represents for the Ashaninka cause andhow it can have repercussions in affirming the rights and values of the indigenous peoples in a broader sense,"explained Piyãko to Mongabay.

A Two-Decade Dispute

The settlement marks the end of a legal dispute that started in 1996, when the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) brought a Public Civil Action against lumber companies owned by the powerful Cameli family. The same family as the current governor of Acre, Gladson Cameli, and his uncle, Orleir Cameli, who was also governor from 1994 to 1998.

The Ashaninka prevailed in their initial court case, in appeals courts and also in the Superior Court of Justice (the highest appellate court in Brazil for non-constitutional questions). But as soon the case reached the federal Supreme Court in 2011, it stalled.

At an impasse, an extrajudicial settlement was imposed, but it took a year of regular negotiations until both sides accepted the terms of the agreement."It was a great challenge for everyone, because the negotiation involved large sums and constitutional questions. It required a lot of study, partners and various public authorities to analyze each detail," observes Antônio Rodrigo, attorney for the Ashaninka.

"This is the first time in the history of Brazilian law that something like this happened. I'm so proud. It was hard, but wonderful," he summarizes.

According to a notification posted on the Federal Public Ministry's website, which qualified the result of the negotiation as "historic," Augusto Aras celebrated the enforcement of the constitution, "appreciating that the indigenous people have the guaranteed right to a decent life, to choose their own destiny and take part in political decisions."

"With this agreement, there is a feeling that we are building a new moment of peace, harmony and, above all, understanding that wounds exist to be healed, not perpetuated," Aras concludes.

One of the defendants in the case, Abrahão Cândido da Silva, was excluded from the settlement and still faces charges for the deforestation and invasion of the indigenous land. The case is on the federal Supreme Court docket for April. In this case, the Supreme Court ministers will decide not only whether to convict the remaining defendant, but also if there is a statute of limitations for claiming compensation for an environmental crime.

The federal Public Ministry maintains that this environmental damage is indefeasible, meaning it cannot be overturned, as it falls under the "right to life," and that determining a statute of limitations would deny future generations the right to fight for a healthy environment. That thesis was accepted by the Superior Court of Justice, and the Supreme Court review of their decision will take on a status of general repercussion — or, in other words, the ruling will apply to all cases from this point on.

"This definition will affect hundreds of thousands of cases. To give three recent examples of massive environmental crimes that took place in Brazil: we have Mariana, Brumadinho and, last year, the oil spill in Brazilian waters," asserts the attorney Rodrigo.

Acknowledgement of Guilt Was Decisive

The R$ 14 million will be paid to the indigenous people in installments over a period of five years. The ultimate beneficiaries of the compensation will be decided annually at an Ashaninka assembly, but it is required to be applied to projects "in defense of the community itself, the Amazon, the indigenous peoples and the peoples of the forest."....

ref many lnx grafs

uneaRTHED

INVESTIGATION

A tea plantation worker sprays pesticides at Tata's Periakanal estate in Kerala, India. Photo: Vivek M. / Greenpeace

Revealed: The pesticide giants making billions on toxic and bee-harming chemicals

Groundbreaking joint investigation reveals enormous sales of ‘highly hazardous pesticides’ by leading members of the CropLife International lobby group

The world’s five biggest pesticide manufacturers are making more than a third of their income from leading products selling chemicals that pose serious hazards to human health and the environment, a joint investigation by Unearthed and Public Eye has found.

Analysis of a huge database of 2018’s top-selling “crop protection products” has revealed the world’s leading agrochemical companies made more than 35% of their sales from pesticides classed as “highly hazardous” to people, animals or ecosystems.

The investigation identified billions of dollars of income for agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta from chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose health hazards like cancer or reproductive failure.

It also found more than a billion dollars of their sales came from chemicals – some now banned in European markets – that are highly toxic to bees. Over two thirds of these sales were made in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India.

By far the most valuable markets for the highly hazardous pesticides sold by these companies were the commodity crops soya and corn, grown in large part to provide animal feed for the meat industry.

Visualisations by Nadieh Bremer]

Industry database

The database, obtained from leading agribusiness intelligence firm Phillips McDougall, covers $23.3bn in pesticide sales across 43 different countries.These sales represent the leading products in the world’s highest-spending pesticide markets, and amount to around 40% of the global agrochemical market.

Unearthed and Public Eye, an NGO that investigates human rights abuses by Swiss companies, combed this dataset for sales of chemicals on the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) International list of highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs).

The investigation found that close to half (41%) of the leading products of the agrochemical giants BASF, Bayer, Corteva, FMC and Syngenta contained at least one HHP.

There is a huge disconnect between what those companies are saying and what they are actually doing

Between them these companies control close to two thirds of the global agrochemicals market, and comprise five out of six members of the influential lobby group CropLife International.

Of the $13.4bn of sales by the CropLife companies in the dataset, $4.8bn went on chemicals found by regulatory agencies to pose hazards like acute poisoning or chronic illness in people, or high toxicity to bees and other wildlife.

The group’s full annual income from these chemicals will be billions of dollars greater, because the data analysed covered less than half of total global sales.

The investigation’s key findings include that:

The CropLife members made 10% of their leading products income ($1.3bn) from chemicals classed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as highly toxic to bees.These include neonicotinoids produced by Germany’s Bayer and Switzerland-based Syngenta, which were permanently banned from outdoor use in the European Union in 2018. Brazil was their main market for these chemicals.

CropLife members made almost $3bn (22% of sales) from chemicals found by regulators to pose chronic health hazards. Among their top sellers were BASF’s weedkiller glufosinate and Corteva’s fungicide cyproconazole, both classed by EU regulators as damaging to fertility, sexual function or the unborn child. But by far CropLife’s biggest seller was glyphosate, classed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a “probable human carcinogen”. Glyphosate manufacturer Bayer and various regulators have rejected this classification.

CropLife members made $596m (4%) of sales from pesticides classed as highly toxic by the World Health Organisation (WHO) or as fatal if inhaled. Syngenta accounted for a large majority of these sales, with its top sellers including paraquat, a herbicide so toxic that a single sip can kill, which has long been banned in Europe and Switzerland.

The CropLife group made the majority of its highly hazardous pesticide sales in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India, where experts say the risks posed by using these chemicals are greatest.

These companies’ biggest markets for highly hazardous pesticides were the commodity crops soya and corn. These two crops alone accounted for around half of CropLife HHP sales.

These five companies alone accounted for almost half (48%) of all HHPs identified in the Phillips McDougall database.

Meriel Watts, a senior science and policy advisor to PAN, told Unearthed: “This investigation shows that there is a huge disconnect between what those companies are saying in the international policy arena and what they are actually doing.”

What is CropLife International?

CropLife International is an influential trade association and lobby group for the world’s major agrochemical and agricultural biotech companies.Its members Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, BASF, Corteva Agriscience, and FMC are the five biggest pesticide companies in the world by agrochemical turnover. CropLife’s sixth member is the Japanese company Sumitomo Chemical, the world’s 8th biggest pesticide company. Sumitomo is not included in this investigation.

In international negotiations on pesticide regulation, the CropLife International lobby group is a well-funded and influential voice. Its members include the five leading agrochemical companies by turnover, plus the Japanese company Sumitomo.

CropLife argues that HHPs are an “important tool to fight against crop losses” and should be used as a last resort to help farmers “produce enough food for a growing population”.

But the group says the majority of HHPs sold in developing countries are not manufactured by its members, and that its own members have “led by example” with measures like training millions of people in risk reduction techniques, such as wearing protective equipment.

Soya, corn and cotton make Brazil world leader for hazardous pesticides

However, Baskut Tuncak, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on toxic substances and human rights, rejected the idea that the risks posed by HHPs could be managed safely.

The impacts are unquestionable, but the system is rigged so that they are also unprovable

“There is nothing sustainable about the widespread use of highly hazardous pesticides for agriculture,” Tuncak told Unearthed. “Whether they poison workers, extinguish biodiversity, persist in the environment, or accumulate in a mother’s breast milk, these are unsustainable, cannot be used safely, and should have been phased out of use long ago.”

Unearthed and Public Eye’s investigation found that the CropLife companies made on average 27% of sales income from HHPs in high-income countries; but for low- and middle-income countries the proportion rose to 45%. In their most important LMIC markets, Brazil and India, HHPs made up 49% and 59% of sales respectively.

Tuncak commented: “We are in the midst of an invisible explosion of pesticide use in low-and middle-income countries that are ill-equipped to manage such hazards.

“Governments do not have enough capacity to monitor conditions on countless farms and plantations, analyse food and environmental samples, track the health of seasonal and migrant workers, investigate allegations of gross misconduct on farms and plantations, or verify the integrity of the information being provided by industry-funded scientists.

“From the testimonies of workers to the collapse of biodiversity, the impacts are unquestionable, but the system is rigged so that they are also unprovable.”

CropLife itself says that its members reviewed their entire portfolios between 2015 and 2016 and concluded that only 15% of their products were HHPs.

Further, they found that 10% were HHPs “that can be used safely and responsibly” and only 2.5% “required risk mitigation measures or were withdrawn from the market”.

What are highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs)?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO) define HHPs as “pesticides that are acknowledged to present particularly high levels of acute or chronic hazards to health or the environment according to internationally accepted classification systems”. Environmental hazards include problems like water source contamination, or “disruption of ecosystem functions” like pollination. However, they have never produced a list of HHPs. To fill this gap Pesticide Action Network International produces the only consolidated list, which is based on classifications made by the WHO, the European Chemicals Agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the US EPA.

CropLife International declined to tell Unearthed which of its members’ products it classed as HHPs. However, its director of international regulatory affairs Christoph Neumann said their analysis had probably differed because they used different criteria to the Pesticide Action Network for defining HHPS.

In particular the group objects to the use of what it calls “environmental” criteria by PAN.

“The criteria cited by PAN are often environmental criteria that are not agreed or yet endorsed” by the FAO and the WHO, he explained.

Driven toward extinction

The only detailed classifications the UN agencies have so far agreed for HHPs concern effects on human health, like acute poisoning or cancer.

This has led pesticide companies to argue that there are in effect no globally agreed standards for classing a pesticide as highly hazardous on environmental grounds.

This argument may not last. A 2019 publication by the FAO and the WHO suggests there are strong grounds for classing neonicotinoid insecticides as highly hazardous.

We are losing wildlife, particularly insects. The crisis is driven by a combination of factors but there is no doubt that pesticides are harming pollinators

There is, it states, a “rapidly growing body of evidence” that “existing levels of environmental contamination” by neonicotinoids “are causing large-scale adverse effects on bees and other beneficial insects”.

“The need to severely restrict their use and prevent future registration is gaining a large consensus,” it continues. “The European Union has already issued a complete and permanent ban on all outdoor uses of the three most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides: clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam.”

Three quarters of the world’s food crops depend at least in part on pollinators, and a growing number of pollinator species worldwide are being “driven towards extinction”, according to a global 2016 study.

UN special rapporteur Baskut Tuncak told Unearthed that the threat neonicotinoid pesticides “present to our food security and our biodiversity is a human rights concern, in and of itself”.

A dead bee. There is growing evidence that the use of neonicotinoids is adversely affecting bees on a large scale. Photo: Greenpeace

The neonicotinoid thiamethoxam was Syngenta’s biggest selling HHP in 2018, our investigation found, accounting for 7% of the company’s sales ($242.5m). Similarly, imidacloprid was in Bayer’s top ten biggest selling HHPs, with sales of $101m. In both cases, the main market was Brazil – a country that hosts up to 20% of the world’s remaining biodiversity.

In addition to these neonicotinoids, Unearthed and Public Eye identified a further 37 chemicals sold by the CropLife companies that are classed as highly toxic to bees.

Among them were chlorfenapyr and fipronil – another chemical linked to mass bee deaths – manufactured by the German chemicals giant BASF.

Syngenta and BASF both declined to comment directly for this story. Syngenta – which was responsible for close to half (42%) of CropLife’s $1.3bn of bee-toxic pesticide sales – has recently argued that journalists are “overstating the science that clearly exists” on insect declines.

However, University of Sussex biology professor Dave Goulson told Unearthed: “There is overwhelming evidence that we are in the middle of a biodiversity crisis, with extinction roughly 1,000 times the natural rate.

“We are losing wildlife, particularly insects. The crisis is driven by a combination of factors but there is no doubt that pesticides are harming pollinators.”

amazonwatch 1219

We have been holding back industrial development and resource extraction in the Amazon all decade: from stopping the Tapajos mega-dam on the last free-flowing Amazon River tributary in Brazil, to backing Sarayaku's precedent-setting legal victory when the Inter-American Court ruled that Ecuador had violated their rights by allowing oil drilling on their land, to winning the historic $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron for deliberately polluting the Ecuadorian Amazon, to standing with the U’wa people of Colombia who successfully dismantled the Magallanes gas project on their sacred lands.

guk no lnx

Environmental activist murders double in 15 years

Death toll almost half that of US troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, data shows

Jonathan Watts

@jonathanwatts

Mon 5 Aug 2019 11.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 5 Aug 2019

Michelle Campos, whose father, grandfather and teacher were killed for opposing mining in Mindanao, the Philippines]

Michelle Campos, whose father, grandfather and teacher were killed in September 2015 for opposing mining in Mindanao, the Philippines. Photograph: Tulda Productions

Killings of environmental defenders have doubled over the past 15 years to reach levels usually associated with war zones, according to a study that reveals how murders of activists are concentrated in countries with the worst corruption and weakest laws.

At least 1,558 people in 50 states were killed between 2002 and 2017 while trying to protect their land, water or local wildlife, says the analysis, which calculates the death toll is almost half that of US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

The rate of deaths in this period increased from two to four a week, which the authors attributed to rising environmental stress as the global demand for resources pushes mining, farming and other extractive industries into ever more remote regions.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, attempts to identify the most important drivers for the murders of environmental and land defenders.

Philippines is deadliest country for defenders of environment

Monsanto wins $7.7b lawsuit in Brazil – but farmers’ fight to stop its ‘amoral’ royalty system will continue

Karine Eliane Peschard, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)

Farmers worldwide say Monsanto's policy of charging for every use of its genetically modified seeds violates their planting rights. But judges in these patent law cases aren't so sure.

Bring Brazil’s Bolsonaro to heel

Joe Conason / Creators SyndicateAugust 29, 2019

Democratic values and environmental sanity both will be well served by bringing Bolsonaro to heel. He has certainly earned it.

no lnx

Written by Joe Conason / Creators Syndicate August 29, 2019

The most predictable thing about authoritarian government is that it will eventually exceed our worst expectations. With Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, we didn’t have to wait long. Not only has the Brazilian president failed to protect the Amazon rainforest but he also seems madly determined to destroy that most vital planetary resource.

The only pertinent question now is what the rest of us will do about his ongoing depredations – and about him.

Amid the wave of extremists swept to power in recent years, Bolsonaro was among the most repellent even before this literal firestorm struck. He rose from obscurity by fomenting hatred against Brazil’s indigenous minorities, gay Brazilians and feminists. He despises democracy and speaks fondly of the military dictatorships that long oppressed his own country and its neighbors. Indeed, he openly admires their barbaric history of torture and mass murder.

So nobody should be surprised that this deformed character would oversee violent destruction in the Amazon basin. His presidential campaign emphasized the massive development of agribusiness in previously protected lands as well as the breaching of indigenous preserves –all to serve the interests of his rural political base. He threatened repeatedly to pull Brazil out of the Paris climate accord and appointed as foreign minister an eccentric bureaucrat who thinks climate change is a “conspiracy by cultural Marxists” to limit growth.

Bolsonaro’s own response to the record number of rainforest fires this year is appalling: He dismissed a space agency official who revealed the extent of the inferno; he repudiated data that proved increased burning as “lies”; and he accused nonprofit organizations of setting the Amazon fires to make him look bad. His record of paranoia and deception has won him the admiration of President Donald Trump, who praises him frequently.

Before Bolsonaro took office, Brazil had notched important achievements in protecting the Amazon, encouraging renewable energy and reducing its carbon emissions. Years of progressive policy initiatives had reduced deforestation by as much as 80 percent, while the Brazilian transportation and energy sectors increasingly relied on wind, solar and ethanol. But the new government appears determined to snuff out all such hopeful signs.

Over the past several months – well before intense conflagration engulfed the Amazon – European governments had sought to discourage Bolsonaro’s most destructive impulses by threatening to withhold aid and trade. His response has been defiant; he told the Norwegians to take their aid and “reforest Germany” with it.

That isn’t his worst idea — planting tens of billions of trees should be a top priority for every government – but it is also beside the point. Preserving the rainforests that remain is the only way to ensure an inhabitable planet.

With a fascistic thug holding Earth by the throat, it is tempting to imagine more forceful solutions. But a military incursion against Brazil’s sovereignty would undoubtedly polarize small and large nations and provoke cries of imperialism. Indeed, Bolsonaro complains incessantly about the “colonialism” supposedly imposed by environmental leaders, even as he invites major U.S. financial outfits like the Blackstone Group to profit from destructive development in the Amazon. Of course, it is the less developed countries that will suffer the most immediate consequences of climate change.

What can be done about this flashpoint of environmental crisis? Nations led by sane politicians – a category that sadly doesn’t include the United States today – should exert maximum diplomatic and economic pressure on Bolsonaro’s regime.Members of the European Union should continue to use the Mercosur trade agreement, which will include Brazil, to leverage his cooperation on dousing the fires.

Public sentiment in Europe and the United States is powerfully aroused by the footage of burned forest. Brazil can defy global opinion only at significant risk to its economy.

If the fate of future trade agreements is not enough to persuade Bolsonaro, then the threat of an international boycott may yet concentrate his tiny mind. The Brazilian president’s agribusiness allies already have confessed a deep fear of consumer action against their companies. They know that activists everywhere are urging people to shun Brazilian products. Now those capitalists should pull his leash very hard to put the fires out immediately and keep them extinguished.

Democratic values and environmental sanity both will be well served by bringing Bolsonaro to heel. He has certainly earned it.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-youtube-radicalized-brazil/

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How YouTube radicalized Brazil

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2019

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub have spent two years researching and reporting on the internet’s role as a force for radicalization. But as Fisher said on Twitter, nothing has disturbed him more than their recent story about how YouTube radicalized Brazil.

Most of us have been exposed to the fact that individuals like the El Paso shooter were engaged with white supremacists in online forums. We’ve heard about how people like Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to psychographically target young white men with racial messages. But Fisher and Taub decided to ask a different question.

Wherever we looked, the rate and consequences of online radicalization seemed far beyond what we’d anticipated, and were growing fast. So, in January, we decided to ask the question in a different way: Could the consequences of online radicalization go beyond a few extremists and, in ways that might be less obvious but perhaps just as consequential, radicalize large swaths of an entire society?

That is what led them to travel to Brazil.

Brazil’s politics have experienced a sudden, world-shaking shift, with Jair Bolsonaro, the once-fringe, far-right politician, becoming president this year. Years of political corruption crises had undoubtedly played a role. But something else was clearly happening there.

And Brazil is the second-largest market for YouTube, after the United States. YouTube has not received as much scrutiny as, say, Facebook. But experts say the platform has the power to radicalize people and communities in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Here is what they found that was so disturbing.

Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.

New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.

A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.

Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.

Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.

And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.

Renan Santos, the national coordinator of a group that used YouTube videos to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff, made a chilling statement: “Reality is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.”

On Monday I wrote about how tyranny takes hold via a process of malignant normalcy. Here is how Dr. John Gartner explained the process.

Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.

What Fisher and Taub found in Brazil is that social media platforms like YouTube can advance malignant normalcy in their quest to maximize watchtime (i.e. make money).

In the wake of the El Paso shooting, Beto O’Rourke wrote an opinion column for CNN titled, “It’s America’s Moment of Truth.” This is the portion that caught my eye.

When President Donald Trump describes Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “bringing crime,” or refers to undocumented immigrants as individuals who “infest our country” — he speaks not as America’s President but as an emissary of hate. And his vilification and fear-mongering connect with those who are open to receiving it.

The seeds of terror we saw that August day are transmitted day and night on Fox News, the most watched cable news channel in the country. They are amplified by right-wing websites like Breitbart, and in messages forced onto local news broadcasts by Sinclair Media.

They metastasize on Facebook. And they filter up from grotesque online havens for white supremacists who preach intolerance and worship violence.

What O’Rourke just described are the forces that have aligned to make a profit off of hate—gaining either political power or money, perhaps even both. As O’Rourke said, our moment of truth has arrived. Silence is complicity.

https://www.ecowatch.com/gold-miners-murder-indigenous-leader-amazon-2639458840.html

Gold Miners Murder Indigenous Leader, Force Villagers in Brazil’s Amazon to Flee

Olivia Rosane Jul. 29, 2019 01:57PM EST POLITICS

[A Waiapi man looks at a boy picking fruits from a Geninapo tree at the Waiapi indigenous reserve in Amapa state in Brazil on Oct. 13, 2017. APU GOMES / AFP / Getty Images]

Gold miners invaded indigenous territory in Brazil's Amazon, killing one leader and prompting villagers to flee for safety, The New York Times reported Saturday.

The violence confirms fears that right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro's promises to open protected lands to mining and other extractive industries will have devastating consequences for indigenous communities.

"The president is responsible for this death," opposition Sen. Rodolfe Rodrigues told The New York Times.

Rodrigues received an urgent voice message from leaders of the Wajãpi tribe, who live in the state of Amapá in Northern Brazil.

"They are armed with rifles and other weapons," community leader Jawaruwa Waiãpi said in the message. "We are in danger. You need to send the army to stop them."

Federal police arrived in the area Sunday, and both police and the federal prosecutors' office said they would investigate the incident, BBC News reported.

The murdered leader was identified as 68-year-old Emyra Wajãpi. His body was found with stab wounds in a river Wednesday, according to Brazil's indigenous rights agency Funai.

Reports of what happened next are mixed. Armed miners entered the village of Yvytotõ Friday, occupying a home and prompting the villagers to flee 40 minutes on foot to Mariry village, according to accounts from BBC News and Survival International. The Guardian reported that villagers fled Mariry to the larger village of Aramirã, where shots were fired on Saturday. BBC News reported that 10 to 15 miners invaded, while The Guardian and The New York Times put the number at dozens.

"The garimpeiros [miners] invaded the indigenous village and are there until today. They are heavily armed, they have machine guns. That is why we asking for help from the federal police," 26-year-old tribe member Kureni Waiãpi, who lives in Pedra Branca do Amapari, said, as The Guardian reported. "If nothing is done they will start to fight."

As the villagers sent their message pleading for help Saturday, Bolsonaro once again expressed his desire to open indigenous reserves to mining, speaking of the resources located in the Raposa Serra do Sol and Yanomami reserves, where mining invasions are common.

"I'm looking for the 'first world' to explore these areas in partnership and add value. That's the reason for my approximation with the United States. That's why I want a person of trust in the embassy in the USA," Bolsonaro said, according to the O Globo newspaper, as The Guardian reported. Bolsonaro has come under fire for his plan to appoint his son Eduardo as the U.S. ambassador.

Rodrigues said the weekend's incident was the first invasion of Waiãpi land in 30 years, according to BBC News.

Invasions like this one are "encouraged by the irresponsible, authoritarian and prejudiced stance of the current government — especially President Bolsonaro — and its attack on the rights of this country's first peoples," the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon said in a statement reported by Survival International.

The Waiãpi were first contacted in 1973 when Brazil's military dictatorship built a highway through part of their land, bringing miners and deadly diseases. Their territory was officially recognized in 1996. Today, around 1,500 Waiãpi live in the protected area, according to Survival International.

The Confederacy comes to Brazil

Brazil has a long, strange relationship with the United States Confederacy.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, ending slavery in the United States, some 8,000 to 10,000Southern soldiers and their families left the vanquished Confederacy and went to Brazil.

There, slavery was still legal. Roughly 40% of the nearly 11 million Africans forcibly brought across the Atlantic between 1517 and 1867 went to work on sugarcane plantations in Brazil. It was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to formally abolish slavery, in 1888 – 23 years after the United States.

Legal slavery may have been a draw for the Confederate soldiers who migrated to Brazil after abolition.

Brazilian political economist Célio Antonio Alcântara Silva analyzed letters sent to Brazilian consulates and vice-consulates in the United States at the end of the Civil War and found that 74% of Southerners inquiring about emigration were slaveowners.

At the time, 25% of white Southern households owned slaves. That means the people interested in moving to Brazil in the 1860s disproportionately represented a relatively small, slaveholding slice of the free Southern population.

Because the exact number of Confederate families that migrated to Brazil is unknown, it is impossible to state with certainty how many rejoined the slave trade upon arrival. Silva’s research finds records of 54 Confederate families that purchased, in total, 536 enslaved Africans in Brazil.

The Brazilian historian Luciana da Cruz Brito has also found evidence in the 150-year-old Confederado journals she dug up that slavery attracted white Southerners to Brazil.

In one, an American named Charles Gunter wrote about his desire to purchase enslaved people in Brazil at a lower price than he could in the U.S. Another Confederado, James Gaston, expressed disappointment that he couldn’t bring recently freed African Americans to Brazil.

...

no lnx twit

https://www.ecowatch.com/brazil-bolsonaro-pesticides-2636194015.html

JAIR BOLSONARO

Brazil's Bolsonaro Green-Lights 150+ Pesticides This Year

Mongabay May 03 POLITICS

Isac Nóbrega / PR / Flickr

By Sue Branford and Thais Borges

With the ruralist lobby now in control of key sectors of the federal government, Brazil is rapidly approving new pesticides for use, some of which critics say are either unnecessary or excessively toxic. During the first 100 days of the Jair Bolsonaro administration, the Agriculture Ministry authorized the registration of 152 pesticides, putting Brazil on course to authorize more pesticides this year than in any previous year. Brazil is already the world's largest user of pesticides.

The number of pesticides authorized each year has risen rapidly, from 139 in 2015 under the Dilma Rousseff administration, to 450 in 2018 under the Michel Temer government (see graph). An even higher number is expected to enter the Brazilian market this year, as the Agriculture Ministry considers registration of roughly another 1,300 pesticides. Most of these requests are coming from foreign multinational companies, mainly based in the U.S., Germany and China, which is increasingly becoming an important supplier.

IBAMA / Mongabay]

An employee from Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources surveys a heap of emptied pesticide containers on a farm.]

Pro-Pesticide Government vs. Environmentalists

Despite the rapid rise in authorizations, Bolsonaro's agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina, said "there is no general liberation" of new pesticide registrations.According to her ministry, the products will merely give farmers a greater choice of existing pesticides, and access to new chemicals and there is no reason to be concerned: "The use [of pesticides] is completely safe, provided they are applied as instructed, within a context of good farming practice and with the use of individual protective equipment," said the government.

Events within Brazil seem to deny the truth of Cristina's claims. Brazil has a higher per capita consumption of pesticides than any other country in the world — 7.3 liters per year per person — and it is already facing a serious problem with pesticide intoxication.

According to Guilherme Franco Netto, an Environment, Health and Sustainability Specialist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, one of the world's top public health research institutions, about 100,000 cases of intoxication are recorded in Brazil each year. According to Alan Tygel, from the Permanent Campaign Against Pesticides and for Life, this figure seriously underestimates the real situation, as many rural workers fail to report pesticide intoxications.

Brazil: Pesticide Poisonings in Rural Areas

In July 2018, the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, published a report documenting acute intoxication at seven locations in Brazil, including indigenous communities, schools and quilombolas — communities of runaway slave descendants.

"Pesticides sprayed in large plantations intoxicate children in schoolrooms in many parts of Brazil," said Richard Pearshouse, assistant director of the environmental and human rights division of Human Rights Watch. But the report found that many local inhabitants were too frightened to speak out.

In five of the seven impacted communities, people said they were afraid of suffering reprisals if they complained. In 2010 a rural farmer was shot dead after putting pressure on local government to forbid aerial spraying of pesticides — a common application practice in Brazil, even though it allows wind-carried toxic sprays to settle far from crops in surrounding communities and natural areas.

New Formulations Raise Alarms

Many of the requests given the go-ahead this year are for new formulations of already authorized pesticides."Once the initial manufacturer loses its patent, other companies start requesting registration so they can use the [same] active ingredients to produce new agricultural products," said Murilo Souza, from the State University of Goiás.

Leonardo Melgarejo, vice-president of the Brazilian Association of Agroecology, believes that this practice is harmful as it will inevitably lead to a big increase in consumption nationwide. "We are approving several variations of the same pesticide," he said. "We're heading for a situation in which farmers will be able to 'self-medicate,' with two pesticide shops on every block." Little research has been done to see how hundreds of various pesticides might interact to become more damaging.

The torrent of new approvals is also making it easier for Brazil's farmers to gain access to toxic pesticides with which the global community has serious concern. One such case is that of 2,4-D, an active ingredient in controversial defoliant Agent Orange, used by the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and whose use is increasingly being controlled in other countries, after the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it in 2015 as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."

The latest wave of Agriculture Ministry authorizations seen on 10 April, gave the go-ahead to 31 products via an official federal decree — Act 24 — including three new formulations of 2,4-D requested by multinational pesticide makers and distributors. One request came from the Chinese company, Rainbow Defensivos Agrícolas, while the other two were initiated by Dow AgroSciences for formulations to be manufactured in South Africa and exported to Brazil.

These new Brazilian authorizations took place at a time when the Rio Grande do Sul Public Ministry, a group of independent public litigators, was carrying out an investigation into an allegation made by the Brazilian Wine Institute that last year the state lost almost a third of its grape harvest as a result of the aerial spraying of pesticides containing 2,4-D. Farmers spray this pesticide before they sow soy — also a time when grape, apple and olive trees are flowering, and when the spray can easily drift over neighboring farms.

"The data from our survey [that showed a loss of almost a third of the grape harvest] is a conservative figure, as it relied only on information spontaneously offered by farmers," said Helio Marchioro of Brazilian Wine Institute. In fact, grape farmers themselves are calling for a 2,4-D ban, even as the Bolsonaro administration approves new 2,4-D formulations.

Controversial Pesticides Approved for First Time in Brazil

Several of the pesticides authorized this year will be entirely new to Brazil. Some have already been classified by Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency as "extremely toxic." These include: mancozeb, a broad-spectrum fungicide used in agriculture and horticulture; the fungicide fluazinam; and the insecticide chlorpyrifos. In 2018 the Pest Management Regulatory Agency banned the use of mancozeb in Canada, except for foliar use on potatoes, due to "unacceptable risks to human health." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the use of chlorpyrifos in 2018 after its use had been associated with development disabilities in children.

One particularly controversial newly approved chemical is sulfoxaflor. This pesticide was one of several believed to have caused an outbreak in Brazil of colony collapse disorder — the catastrophic sudden disappearance of worker bees from a bee colony, leading to the death of hives. According to a survey carried out by Agência Pública and Repórter Brasil, half a billion bees were found dead in four Brazilian states in the first quarter of 2019 — a staggeringly large die off posing a threat to the pollination of fruits and vegetables and to native vegetation.

But at a press conference on April 9, Agriculture Minister Cristina seemed unaware that Brazil has already authorized sulfoxaflor. "The problem with the bees is that a product called sulfoxaflor was used. This [toxin] is not registered in Brazil," she said. "It probably entered Brazil illegally and is being used incorrectly and thus caused the death of the bees." In fact, sulfoxaflor was authorized at the end of last year by the Temer administration, though the official decree was only issued in January of this year under the Bolsonaro government.

Sulfoxaflor is classified by Brazil's National Health Surveillance Agency as "averagely toxic," but this evaluation is challenged abroad. Dow Chemical initially developed sulfoxaflor as a safer alternative to neonicotinoids, known to be harmful to bees. It was initially approved by the US EPA in 2013, a decision reversed in 2015 when studies found that sulfoxaflor was also dangerous to bees. Today sulfoxaflor can still be used in the U.S., but only in restricted circumstances.

Pesticide Deregulation in the Works

Environmental activist Alan Tygel believes that the rapid rise in the number of pesticide authorizations is directly linked to the growing power of the bancada ruralista agribusiness lobby in Congress. This lobby, he said, made its support for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 dependent on government backing for pro-agribusiness measures. "From then on, the counterweight that came from progressive sectors, from family farming and from agroecology, was lost, and today the ruralist agenda faces fewer obstacles in its drive to have more pesticides approved and to push through more permissive laws," Tygel said. The Bolsonaro presidential campaign greatly benefited from ruralist support, and it greatly helped sweep the former Army captain and legislator to victory last October.

The next goal of the ruralist agenda — more permissive laws — may well get a major boost this year with congressional approval of PL 6299/2002, dubbed as the "poison package" by critics. The legislation, which would greatly deregulate pesticides, was endorsed by a Chamber of Deputies commission in June 2018 and it now awaits plenary debate. The Temer government justified the bill, presented to Congress by then Agriculture Minister and dedicated ruralist, Blairo Maggi, claiming that the country desperately needed to simplify the complicated process of getting new pesticides authorized in order to help farmers.

But Castro Moreira, president of the prestigious Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science, representing more than 100 scientific societies, disagreed strongly. He said at the time that the bill, "could have very serious consequences for the health of the Brazilian population and the environment … Its approval would be a backward step, because it follows the logic of mechanized agriculture, with high investments in fertilizers and pesticides, which is an outmoded way of thinking, dating from the end of the Second World War."

Current Agriculture Minister Cristina is a strong proponent of PL 6299/2002, but there is bound to be opposition to the bill's approval, though it will likely be difficult for critics to block the measure. The ruralists have never had a stronger grip on both the legislative and executive branches, and they seem determined to press their agribusiness agenda.

As President Bolsonaro ended his first 100 days in office, his popularity was slipping fast, with 30 percent of the population already assessing his administration as "very bad" and the markets believing the government is becoming unstable. However, that very perception of growing uncertainty seems to have only caused the ruralists to move forward with greater urgency. Meanwhile, conservationists and food experts continue to warn of the national and global environmental and health repercussions of Brazil's deregulated pesticide use — permissiveness likely to soon outstrip that seen among other major agricultural nations.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Mongabay.

2017 was deadliest year for environmental activism: report

At least 207 activists were killed, with Brazil, the Philippines and Colombia named as the most dangerous countries.

arly four land and environmental activists were killed each week in 2017, making it the deadliest year on record, according to a new report by Global Witness.

In the report, published on Tuesday, the UK-based watchdog said 207 people lost their lives last year in their fight against companies and governments that seize land and harm the environment.

Latin America was once again the most dangerous region for environmental activism, accounting for nearly 60 percent of the total killings.

Brazil remained the country with most registered deaths, the report said.

At least 57 people were killed in 2017, marking the most deaths of land and environmental defenders ever registered in one year in any country.

Colombia's social leaders 'very scared' amid surge in murders

President Michel Temer and his predecessor Dilma Rousseff weakened laws and institutions designed to protect environmental defenders and made it easier for industries to proceed with projects without consent from affected communities.

Despite the country's constitution recognising the rights of indigenous people to their ancestral land, there has been a drastic decrease in demarcations. Under Rousseff, the average number shrank from 13 to three per year. There have been none since she was removed from office in August 2016, the report found.

John Knox, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, said Latin America's population and endemic corruption make it a particularly dangerous area for environmental activists.

"You see indigenous peoples who are still directly dependent on natural resources in forests or sometimes fisheries who are already discriminated against or marginalised," he said.

"When conflicts between the companies and governments that want to profit from natural resources and the people who depend upon them occur in countries or regions that have a weak rule of law, then they are much more likely to result in violence and killing," he told Al Jazeera.

Of the 10 most dangerous countries, seven are in Latin America [Thom Pierce/Guardian/Global Witness/UN Environment]

In Colombia, at least 24 environmental activists were killed in 2017, according to the report.

The 2016 peace agreement between the government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has led to a worsening situation for environmental activists as rival actors vie to fill the power vacuum in the countryside, competing for land and natural resources once controlled by the FARC, the report said.

According to the country's ombudsman's office, more than 300 rights defenders - including environmental, land and human rights activists - have been killed since the beginning of 2016.

Mexico saw the largest year on year increase in deaths, surging from three in 2016 to 15 in 2017. The attacks took place in a context of impunity, with increased violence against activists in areas where drug cartels operate, according to the report.

...

ThePhilippines recorded the highest number of killings ever seen in an Asian country, Global Witness said.

The combination of bountiful natural resources, a large indigenous population and high levels of corruption, as well as the residue of colonial-era land disputes, provide fertile ground for violence against activists in the island nation, the report said.

"The Philippines has traditionally been the worst-hit country in Asia but there's a clear worsening of the situation under President [Rodrigo] Duterte," said Ben Leather, a senior campaigner at Global Witness and the author of the report.

"His aggressively anti-human rights discourse and his use of martial law, which has put the army into areas which are resource-rich, have meant that a bad situation in the Philippines has got drastically worse under his rule," Leather told Al Jazeera.

In December 2017, more than 200 people were forced to flee a village near the southern town of Lake Sebu, after the military killed eight people and wounded five others in a dispute over the expansion of a coffee plantation, according to an investigation by human rights groups.

In his annual State of the Nation address on Monday, Rodrigo Duterte, who has come under heavy criticism over his human rights record and deadly anti-drug crackdown, hit back at critics, claiming his tactics were justified as they were saving lives.

Intimidation and murder: Brazilians fight unequal land ownership

"Your concern is human rights, mine is human lives," he said.

Culture of impunity

According to Global Witness, violence against activists is made possible due to impunity and corruption.

The report states that 92 percent of those responsible for these killings are never brought to justice.

Global Witness also found that that seven "massacres" - which it defines as any incident in which more than four people were killed at the same time - took place in 2017, more than ever before.

OPINION

Criminalising Standing Rock

by Frank Barat

"The fact that very few of the cases of past killings of defenders have ever been prosecuted gives would-be perpetrators the green light to attack without consequence, leading to increasingly flagrant attacks and massacres," Leather said.

"In many cases, governments and corrupt officials within them are colluding with big business to impose development projects and other business ventures onto communities without their consent.

"So, when those communities take a stand, both the interests of the business and the corrupt officials are threatened, which means there's less of an incentive for those governments to bring the killers to justice," he told Al Jazeera.

...

207

Environmental and land activists killed in 2017

60%

Of those killed were in Latin America

115

Killings linked to government security forces

25%

Of those killed were from indigenous groups

Killings linked to agribusiness

Activists killed in Brazil, the worst year on record for any country

92%

Of killings went unpunished

Source: Global Witness

https://www.alternet.org/world/bolsonaro-brazil-slayer-amazon

judge who jailed lula promoted

Roger Waters Is Using His Tour to Urge Voters to Oppose Far-Right Brazilian Presidential Candidate Jair Bolsonaro

Brazil: Protesters Take to Streets to Denounce Right-Wing Candidate Jair Bolsonaro

lost mod rt, went hard right

soft coup, hollow out norms and institutions?

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/20/dilma_rousseff_lulas_imprisonment_is_part

And what has happened? The coup mongers today do not have any political expression. They were condemned by the population. And so they don’t have a relevant situation for the upcoming elections in 2018. What they have done, actually, is to open up a Pandora’s box, a box of the monsters. And they took out of this box the extreme right, which today is represented by president candidate Captain Jair Bolsonaro, who on the day that my impeachment was voted on in the Lower House, he voted in favor of torture and a military dictatorship.

So what is the situation in Brazil? There is a strengthened far right, and the center right, in going along with the coup, has dissolved itself and has a minimal political expression today. They were our greatest adversaries in the last four presidential elections. Today, they’re no longer politically significant, because not only did they help carry out the coup, but they were also discovered to be involved in situations of corruption. The Workers’ Party and President Lula were to be destroyed. But they weren’t. President Lula, from the beginning of last year, in every opinion poll, has twice as many votes as the candidate Captain Jair Bolsonaro. Lula has more than 30 percent, and Bolsonaro has less than 16 percent support. And there is not a center. The center gets 5 percent, 4 percent, sometimes 6 percent, of the support in the polls.

So why have they convicted Lula? The political reason is because if a coup d’état is carried out, if a president who is legitimately elected is removed, if a set of illegalities are carried out, including the coup, one cannot not allow the election of Lula to be closed off. So what do they do? They removed Lula from the presidential campaign, accusing Lula, falsely, of having committed a crime of corruption.

What is the crime of which they accuse Lula? They accuse Lula of committing a crime of passive corruption, which entails a 280-square-meter apartment or a home with three floors. They say that he committed a crime in order to receive that house. Now, Lula is not the owner of that house. He does not have possession of the house. He doesn’t use the house. He has never been in that house....

lgbt assasination?

Investigators Find Slave Labor on Starbucks-Certified Brazil Coffee Plantation

By Daniela Penha and Roberto Cataldo, Translator

This story was produced via a co-publishing partnership between Mongabay and Repórter Brasil and can be read in Portuguese here.

At first sight, the Córrego das Almas farm in Piumhi, in rural Minas Gerais state, seems to be a model property. "No slave or forced labor is allowed," reads one of several signs that display international certifications—including one linked to the U.S. based company Starbucks corporation.

Investigation Exposes Animal Abuse at U.S. Supplier to World's Largest Meat Company

By Reynard Loki

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions and images of animal abuse.

In September of last year, two executives of JBS, the world's largest meat producer, based in Brazil, were arrested and charged with insider trading. In May 2017, the billionaire siblings—Wesley Batista, JBS's CEO, and his younger brother Joesley, the firm's former chairman—admitted to bribing more than 1,800 politicians and government officials, including meat inspectors, in an effort to avoid food safety checks.

...

https://www.ecowatch.com/brazilian-judge-orders-glyphosate-suspension-2593579666.html

Federal Judge Bans Use of Glyphosate in Brazil

A federal judge in Brazil ordered the suspension of products containing glyphosate until the government re-evaluates the chemical's toxicology, Reuters reported Monday, citing legal papers.

The decision prohibits the registration of new products containing the herbicide and suspends existing registrations within the next 30 days, the report said.

The ruling affects Monsanto, the maker of glyphosate-based weedkillers such as Roundup and "Roundup Ready" seeds that are genetically modified to resist the chemical. Brazil happens to be the world's largest soybean producer and exporter and plants Monsanto's herbicide-tolerant soybeans on a wide scale, Reuters noted.

"I think the judge is wrong and that the decision will be revoked somehow," Director Luiz Lourenço of agribusiness industry association Abag told the news service. "It is impossible to do agriculture without these products."

Glyphosate is the world's most popular herbicide and has been at the center of controversy since 2015, when the chemical was classified as a "probable human carcinogen" by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.

In the U.S., Monsanto is facing roughly 4,000 lawsuits from plaintiffs claiming that exposure to the herbicide caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The lawsuits also allege that the company suppressed scientific evidence related to the health risks of its weedkillers.

Monsanto, which was recently purchased by German pharmaceuticals giant Bayer for $62.5 billion, has adamantly defended the safety of its products.

In a statement given to Reuters, Monsanto said that glyphosate has been used for four decades in Brazil and that reviews worldwide have concluded the herbicide can be used safely. It also respects the procedures used by Anvisa, Brazil's national health authority, to ensure the chemical's safe use, the statement added

...

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/7/headlines/brazils_workers_party_nominates_lula_as_presidential_candidate

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/6/brazils_popular_ex_president_lula_ordered

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/19/exclusive_brazilian_presidential_candidate_lula_on

cont

conversation with former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the highly popular former union leader who is running for president in this year’s election even as he is facing a possible prison term on what many believe to be trumped-up corruption charges tied to the sprawling probe known as “Operation Car Wash.” Lula was convicted of accepting a beachside apartment from an engineering firm vying for contracts at the state oil company Petrobras. But many of Lula’s supporters say the conviction was politically motivated. President Lula responds to the charges against him. “We’re awaiting for the accusers to show at least some piece of evidence that indicates that I committed any crime,” he notes.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue our exclusive, a conversation with Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula. The highly popular former union leader is running for president in this year’s election but is facing a possible prison term on what many believe to be trumped-up corruption charges tied to a sprawling probe known as “Operation Car Wash.” Lula was convicted of accepting a beachside apartment from an engineering firm vying for contracts at the state oil company Petrobras, but many of Lula’s supporters say the conviction was politically motivated.

The Intercept recently reported, quote, “The indictment against Lula is rife with problems. The apartment’s title was never transferred to Lula or his associates; he and his wife never used the property; the prosecution could not identify an explicit quid pro quo or benefit related to Petrobras; no official or internal documentation linking Lula to the apartment was produced; and the case rests almost entirely on the testimony of the executive who hoped to gain sentencing leniency for his cooperation,” unquote.

During the interview on Friday, President Lula responded to the charges and conviction against him.

LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] I was not accused of corruption. I was accused because of a lie in a police investigation, a lie in an indictment by the Office of the Attorney General, and in the judgment of Judge Moro, because there is only one evidence, of my innocence, in this entire trial, which my defense counsel explained in a magisterial manner. We are awaiting the accusers, for the accusers to show at least some piece of evidence that indicates that I committed any crime during the period that I was in the presidency.

Now, what is behind that is the attempt to criminalize my political party. What is behind that is the interest in a part of the political elite in Brazil, together with a part of the press, reinforced by the role of the judiciary, in preventing Lula from becoming a candidate in the 2018 elections. And I continue challenging the federal police, the Office of the Attorney General. I continue challenging Judge Moro and the appellate court to show the world and to show Brazil a single piece of evidence of a crime committed by me. The behavior of the judiciary in this instance is a political form of behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Mr. President, last year, the ousted President Dilma Rousseff said, “The first chapter of the coup was my impeachment. But there’s a second chapter, and that is stopping President Lula from becoming a candidate for next year’s elections.” Do you see it the same way, that this is the final chapter of the coup, if your conviction is upheld, that you will be prevented from running in the October elections?

LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] Amy, the Workers’ Party, in 12 years in the government, at the helm of the government in Brazil, was able to do many things that had never been done at any time in the 20th century. In this country, in 12 years, we brought 40 million people into the middle class. We drew 36 million people out of poverty. While Europe was shedding 62 million jobs as of the 2000 date, we created 20 million jobs in the formal sector in this country. For 12 years, all Brazilian workers were able to overcome inflation. It was the time of the greatest economic growth in the history of Brazil. It was the most distribution of income in the history of Brazil. To give you an idea, in 12 years, 70 million people began to use the banking system who had never walked into a bank.

And when they got rid of Dilma, they did want Lula to come back, because they know that the relationship between the Brazilian people and President Lula was the strongest relationship that the people of Brazil had ever had with a president in the entire history of the country. And even more important, they know I am absolutely certain that the best way to ensure economic recovery in Brazil is to lift up the working people of this country. They know that I know how to do that. Now that the poor people had jobs, had a salary, were studying, were eating better, were living—had better housing, when that happens, the economy grows again, and we can become the most optimistic country in the world and the happiest people in the world. And, Amy, that is why I want to be candidate for the presidency of Brazil, to show that a mechanic who doesn’t have a university degree knows better how to take care of the Brazilian people than the Brazilian elite, who never looked after the welfare of the Brazilian people.

AMY GOODMAN: President Lula, why did you decide to run for president again?

LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] The truth is, I have still not decided, Amy. The ones who are deciding are the Brazilian people. Look, all of the public opinion polls in Brazil, month after month—and there are several of them—in all of them, I’m in first place. And so, I’m beginning to be the candidate who has the lowest negatives and the possibility of becoming a candidate and winning on the first round, and this is making my adversaries very uncomfortable. And I am sure, Amy, that at the Supreme Court I will be acquitted and that I will be candidate, and Brazil could once again be a protagonist in international policy, the economy could grow again, create jobs and improve the quality of life of the people. This is something I know how to do very well.

AMY GOODMAN: If the case does not go well for you in the Supreme Court, would you consider stepping aside?

LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] First of all, Amy, I’m very optimistic, very optimistic. Now, if that were to happen and I was not able—were not able to be a candidate, if my name is not on the ballot, I think that the party would call a convention and discuss what to do. I am going to require that and call for justice to be done in the country.

Now, if my innocence is proven, then Judge Moro should be removed from his position, because you can’t have a judge who is lying in the judgment and pronouncing as guilty someone who he knows is innocent. He knows that it’s not my apartment. He knows that I didn’t buy it. He knows that I didn’t pay anything. He knows that I never went there. He knows that I don’t have money from Petrobras. The thing is that because he subordinated himself to the media, I said, in the first hearing with him, “You are not in a position to acquit me, because the lies have gone too far.” And the disgrace is that the one who does the first lie continues lying and lying and lying to justify the first lie. And I am going to prove that he has been lying.

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2013/0307/Chavez-vs-Lula-Two-distinct-approaches-to-poverty-reduction-in-Latin-America

— For those with merely a passing interest in Latin American politics, just 10 years ago it was easy to see Brazil and Venezuela as identical tropical states with charismatic presidents leading their countries toward socialism.

The reality, however, is much different, and goes way beyond the rivalries of Portuguese vs. Spanish, samba vs. salsa, or soccer vs. baseball.

Both Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva in Brazil dramatically reshaped their societies, reducing inequality to its lowest level in decades. But to many observers, the differences in their approach may have long-lasting implications: While Chávez boosted the poor at the expense of the economy and the country’s democratic institutions, they argue, Lula took a more moderate and potentially sustainable route.

...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil-obesity-nestle.html

inequality

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/just-as-u-s-media-does-with-mlk-brazils-media-now-trying-to-whitewash-and-exploit-marielle-francos-political-radicalism/

https://www.alternet.org/environment/global-firms-accused-importing-timber-linked-amazon-massacre

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/11/lee_fang_on_how_a_little

A new investigation published by The Intercept exposes how a libertarian think tank called the Atlas Network is remaking Latin American politics with the help of powerful conservative institutions and funders in the United States, some of whom you may recognize, such as the Koch brothers. The Intercept reports the Atlas Network is behind dozens of prominent groups that have supported right-wing forces in the anti-government movement in Venezuela, as well as those who ousted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We are joined by The Intercept’s Lee Fong, who covers the intersection of money and politics. His new piece is tilted, Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics.

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FOR ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN, the gathering this spring at the Brick Hotel in Buenos Aires was as much a homecoming as it was a victory lap. Chafuen, a lanky Argentine-American, had spent his adult life working to undermine left-wing social movements and governments in South and Central America, and boost a business-friendly version of libertarianism instead.

It was a lonely battle for decades, but not lately. Chafuen was among friends at the 2017 Latin America Liberty Forum. The international meeting of libertarian activists was sponsored by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a leadership-training nonprofit now known simply as theAtlas Network, which Chafuen has led since 1991. At the Brick Hotel, Chafuen was reveling in recent victories; his years of work were starting to pay off, thanks to political and economic circumstances — but also because of the network of activists Chafuen has been working for so long to cultivate.

Over the past 10 years, leftist governments have used “money to buy votes, to redistribute,” said Chafuen, seated comfortably in the lobby. But the recent drop in commodity prices, coupled with corruption scandals, has given an opportunity for Atlas Network groups to spring into action. “When there is an opening, you have a crisis, and there is some demand for change, you have people who are trained to push for certain policies,” Chafuen noted, paraphrasing the late Milton Friedman. “And in our case, we tend to favor to private solutions to public problems.”

Chafuen pointed to numerous Atlas-affiliated leaders now in the spotlight: ministers in the new conservative government in Argentina, senators in Bolivia, and the leaders of the Free Brazil Movement that took down Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, where Chafuen’s network sprang to life before his very eyes.

“In Brazil, I have been in the street demonstrations, and I’m like, ‘Hey, this guy I met when he was 17, 18 — he is up there on the bus leading this. This is crazy!’” Chafuen said, excitedly. Those in Atlas’s orbit were no less excited to run into Chafuen in Buenos Aires. Activists from various countries stopped Chafuen intermittently to sing his praises as he walked through the hotel. For many, Chafuen, from his perch at Atlas, has served as a mentor, fiscal sponsor, and guiding beacon for a new political paradigm in their country.

Ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, left, looks down inside a car on his way to the airport where he will board a flight to Nicaragua on the outskirts of San Jose, Sunday, June 28, 2009. Soldiers seized Honduras' national palace and sent the President Zelaya into exile in Costa Rica on Sunday, hours before a disputed constitutional referendum. Zelaya, an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, said he was victim of a coup. Honduras' Congress sworn in Sunday congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as the country's new President. (AP Photo/Kent Gilbert)

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, left, looks down inside a car on the outskirts of San Jose on his way to the airport to board a flight to Nicaragua, June 28, 2009. Photo: Kent Gilbert/AP

A RIGHTWARD SHIFT is afoot in Latin American politics. Triumphant socialist governments had once swept the region for much of the 21st century – from Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to land reform populist Manuel Zelaya in Honduras– championing new programs for the poor, nationalizing businesses, and challenging U.S. dominance in hemispheric affairs.

In recent years, however, leftist leaders have fallen one after another, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Zelaya was led from the presidential palace in his pajamas in a military coup; in Argentina, a real-estate baron swept to the presidency and Kirchner was indicted for corruption; and in Brazil, the ruling Workers’ Party, facing a growing corruption scandal and a mass protest movement, was swept out of office via impeachment over charges of budget chicanery.

This shift might appear as part of a larger regional rebalancing, merely economic circumstances taking hold. And yet the Atlas Network seems ever-present, a common thread nudging political developments along.

The story of the Atlas Network and its profound impact on ideology and political power has never been fully told. But business filings and records from three continents, along with interviews with libertarian leaders across the hemisphere, reveal the scope of its influential history. The libertarian network, which has reshaped political power in country after country, has also operated as a quiet extension of U.S. foreign policy, with Atlas-associated think tanks receiving quiet funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a critical arm of American soft power.

Though recent investigations have shed light on the role of powerful conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers, in developing a business-friendly version of libertarian thought, the Atlas Network, which receives funding from Koch foundations, has recreated methods honed in the Western world for developing countries.

The network is expansive, currently boasting loose partnerships with 450 think tanks around the world. Atlas says it dispensed over $5 million to its partners in 2016 alone.

Over the years, Atlas and its affiliated charitable foundations have provided hundreds of grants to conservative and free-market think tanks in Latin America, including the libertarian network that supported the Free Brazil Movement and organizations behind a libertarian push in Argentina, including Fundación Pensar, the Atlas think tank that merged with the political party formed by Mauricio Macri, a businessman who now leads the country. The leaders of the Free Brazil Movement and the founder of Fundación Eléutera in Honduras, an influential post-coup neoliberal think tank, have received financial support from Atlas, and are among the next generation of political operatives that have gone through Atlas’s training seminars.

The Atlas Network spans dozens of other think tanks across the region, including prominent groups supporting right-wing forces behind the unfolding anti-government movement in Venezuela and the campaign of Sebastián Piñera, the right-of-center candidate leading the polls for this year’s presidential election in Chile.

FILE - In this Dec. 2, 2015 file photo, people demonstrate against the government as they take part in protest in favor of impeaching Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, in front of the National Congress, in Brasilia, Brazil. The country has seen a vicious circle of ballooning crises over the past year. Major scandals, some of which are connected to Rousseff, have combined with tanking commodity prices to deliver blows to the powerhouse economy, including credit-rating downgrades, a sharp currency devaluation and 10-percent annual inflation. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

People demonstrate in favor of impeaching Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff in front of the National Congress in Brasilia, Brazil, Dec. 2, 2015. Photo: Eraldo Peres/AP

NOWHERE HAS THE Atlas method been better encapsulated than in anewly formed network of Brazilian free-market think tanks. Recently formed institutes worked together to foment anger at socialist policies, with some cultivating academic centers, while others work to train activists and maintain a constant war in the Brazilian media against leftist ideas.

The effort to focus anger solely at the left paid dividends last year for the Brazilian right. The millennial activists of the Free Brazil Movement, many of them trained in political organizing in the U.S., led a mass movement to channel public anger over a vast corruption scandal against Dilma, the left-of-center president popularly known by her first name. The scandal, nicknamed Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, is a still-unfolding tale of bribery involving leading politicians from all of Brazil’s major political parties, including the right-wing and center-right parties. But the social media-savvy Free Brazil Movement, known by its Portuguese initials, MBL, managed to direct the bulk of outrage squarely at Dilma, demanding her ousting and an end to the welfare-centric policies of her Workers’ Party.

The uprising, which has drawn comparisons to the tea party movement, especially considering the quiet support from local industrial conglomerates and a new conspiracy-minded network of far-right media voices, ended 13 years of rule by the Workers’ Party by removing Dilma from office through impeachment in 2016.

The landscape that MBL sprang from is a new development in Brazil. There were perhaps three active libertarian think tanks 10 years ago, said Helio Beltrão, a former hedge fund executive who now leads Instituto Mises, a nonprofit named after the libertarian philosopher, Ludwig von Mises. Now, he said, with the support of Atlas, there are close to 30 such institutes active in Brazil, all working collaboratively, along with groups, such as Students for Liberty and MBL.

“It’s like a soccer team. Defense is the academia. The forward guys are the politicians. We’ve scored a few goals,” he said, referring to Dilma’s impeachment. The midfield, he said, are the “cultural guys” that shape public opinion.

Beltrão explained that the think tank network is hoping to privatize the national post office in Brazil, calling it “low-hanging fruit” that could lead to a larger wave of free-market reforms. Many of the conservative parties in Brazil embraced libertarian campaigners when they showed they could mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to protest against Dilma, but haven’t yet adopted the fundamentals of supply-side theory.

Fernando Schüler, an academic and columnist associated with Instituto Millenium, another Atlas think tank in Brazil, made the case another way.

“Brazil has 17,000 unions paid by public money, one day of salary per year goes to unions, completely controlled by the left,” said Schüler. The only way to reverse the socialist trend has been to out-maneuver them. “With technology, people could by themselves participate, organize at low cost — WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, using networks, a kind of public manifestation,” he continued, explaining the way libertarian organizers mobilized a protest movement against left-leaning politicians.

Organizers against Dilma had created a daily barrage of YouTube videos mocking the Worker’s Party government, along with an interactive scoreboard to encourage citizens to lobby their legislators to support impeachment.

Schüler noted that the Free Brazil Movement and his own think tank receive financial support from local industrial trade groups, but the movement had succeeded in part because it is not identified with the incumbent political parties, most of which the general public views with suspicion. He argued that the only way to radically reshape society and reverse popular sentiment in support of the welfare state was to wage a permanent cultural war to confront left intellectuals and the media.

ONE OF THE founders of Schüler’s Instituto Millenium think tank, Brazilian blogger Rodrigo Constantino, has polarized Brazilian politics with hyperpartisan rhetoric.Constantino, who has been called the “Breitbart of Brazil” for his conspiratorial views and acidic right-wing commentary, chairs yet another Atlas think tank, Instituto Liberal. He sees the Brazilian left’s every move as a veiled attempt at subverting democracy, from the use of the color red in the country’s World Cup logo to the Bolsa Família cash assistance program to poor families.

Constantino is credited with popularizing a narrative that Worker’s Party supporters are limousine liberals, wealthy hypocrites that flock to socialism to claim the moral high ground while snubbing the working classes they claim to represent.

The Breitbartization of public discourse is but one of the many ways the Atlas network has subtly influenced political debate.

“It’s a very paternalistic state. It’s crazy. It’s a lot of state control, and that’s the long-term challenge,” said Schüler, adding that despite recent victories, libertarians had a long way to go in Brazil. He hoped to copy the model of Margaret Thatcher, who relied on a network of libertarian think tanks to push unpopular reforms. “This pension system is absurd. I would privatize all education,” Schüler, rattling off a litany of changes he would make to society, from defunding labor unions to repealing the law that makes voting compulsory.

Yet the only way to make all that possible, he added, would be to build a network of politically active nonprofits all waging separate battles to push the same libertarian goals. The existing model — the constellation of right-wing think tanks in Washington, D.C., supported by powerful endowments — is the only path forward for Brazil, Schüler said.

Atlas, for its part, is busy doing just that. It gives grants for new think tanks, provides courses on political management and public relations, sponsors networking events around the world, and, in recent years, has devoted special resources to prodding libertarians to influence public opinion through social media and online videos.

An annual competition encourages Atlas’s network to produce viral YouTube videos promoting laissez-faire ideas and ridiculing proponents of the welfare state. James O’Keefe, the provocateur famous for needling Democrats with his undercover videos, has appeared before Atlas to explain his methods. Producers from a Wisconsin group that worked to create online videos to discredit teacher protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s law busting public sector unions have also provided instructions for Atlas’s training sessions.

Crowd members burn a puppet of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at Plaza Altamira in protest against the government. Photo: Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images

AMONG ITS OTHER exploits of late, Atlas has played a role in a Latin American nation roiled by the region’s most acute political and humanitarian crisis: Venezuela.Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by author and activist Eva Golinger, as well as State Department cables disclosed by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, reveal U.S. policymakers’ sophisticated effort to use Atlas think tanks in a long-running campaign to destabilize the reign of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez.

As early as 1998, Cedice Libertad, Atlas’s flagship think tank in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, received regular financial support from the Center for International Private Enterprise. In one grant letter, NED funds marked for Cedice are listed to help advocate “a change in government.” The director of Cedice was among the signatories of the controversy “Carmona Decree” supporting the short-lived military coup against Chávez in 2002.

A 2006 cable laid out a strategy from U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield for funding politically active nonprofits in Venezuela: “1) Strengthening democratic institutions, 2) penetrating Chávez’s political base, 3) dividing Chavismo, 4) protecting vital U.S. business, and 5) isolating Chávez internationally.”

In Venezula’s current crisis, Cedice has promoted the recent spate of protests against President Nicholás Maduro, Chávez’s embattled successor. Cedice is closely affiliated with opposition figure María Corina Machado, one of the leaders of the massive anti-government street demonstrations in recent months. Machado has publicly recognized Atlas for its work. In a videotape message delivered to the group in 2014, she said, “Thank you to the Atlas Network, to all freedom fighters.”

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has recognized Atlas for its work: “Thank you to the Atlas Network, to all freedom fighters,” she said in 2014.

AT THE ATLAS Network’s Latin American Liberty Forum in Buenos Aires, young leaders buzzed back and forth, sharing ideas on how to defeat socialism at every level, from pitched battles on college campuses to mobilizing an entire country to embrace impeachment.

Think tank “entrepreneurs” from Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras competed in a format along the lines of “Shark Tank,” an America reality show where start-up businesses pitch to a panel of wealthy, ruthless investors. Instead of seeking investments from a panel of venture capitalists, however, the think tank leaders pitched policy marketing ideas for a contest that awarded $5,000. In another session, strategies were debated for attracting industry support to back economic reforms. In another room, political operatives debated arguments “lovers of liberty” can use to respond to the global rise of populism to “redirect the sense of injustice many feel” toward free-market goals.

One young leader from CADAL, a think tank in Buenos Aires, presented on an idea to rank each Argentine province using what he called an “economic liberty index,” which would use the level of taxation and regulation as the main criteria to generate buzz for free-market reforms. The idea is consciously modeled on similar strategies from the U.S., including the Heritage Foundation’s “Index of Economic Freedom,” which measures countries based on criteria that includes tax policies and regulatory barriers to business formation.

Think tanks are traditionally associated with independent institutes formed to develop unconventional solutions. But the Atlas model focuses less on developing genuinely new policy proposals, and more on establishing political organizations that carry the credibility of academic institutions, making them an effective organ for winning hearts and minds.

Free-market ideas — such as slashing taxes on the wealthy; whittling down the public sector and placing it under the control of private operators; and liberalized trade rules and restrictions on labor unions — have always struggled with a perception problem. Proponents of this vision have found that voters tend to view such ideas as a vehicle for serving society’s upper crust. Rebranding economic libertarianism as a public interest ideology has required elaborate strategies for mass persuasion.

But the Atlas model now spreading rapidly through Latin America is based on a method perfected by decades of struggle in the U.S. and the U.K., as libertarians worked to stem the tide of the surging post-war welfare state.

Map of Atlas group locations in South America. Map of Atlas group locations in South America. Map: The Intercept

ANTONY FISHER, A BRITISH entrepreneur and the founder of the Atlas Network, pioneered the sale of libertarian economics to the broader public. The tack was simple: Fisher made it his mission to, in the words of an associate, “litter the world with free-market think tanks.”

The basis for Fisher’s ideals came from Friedrich Hayek, a forbearer of modern thought on limited government. In 1946, after reading the Reader’s Digest version of Hayek’s seminal book, “The Road to Serfdom,” Fisher sought a meeting with the Austrian economist in London. As recounted by his close colleague John Blundell, Fisher suggested Hayek enter politics. But Hayek demurred, replying that a bottom-up focus on shifting the public discourse could better shape society.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., another free-market ideologue, Leonard Read, was entertaining similar notions after leading the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Los Angeles branch into bruising battles with organized labor. To counter the growth of the welfare state, a more elaborate response would be necessary to share popular debates around the direction of society, without the visible link to corporate interests.

Fisher was propelled forward by a fateful visit to Read’s newly formed nonprofit, the Foundation for Economic Education, in New York, which was founded to help sponsor and promote the ideas of free-market intellectuals. There, libertarian economist F.A. Harper, at the time working at FEE, advised Fisher on methods for creating his own nonprofit in the U.K.

During the trip, Fisher also traveled with Harper to Cornell University to observe the latest animal industry breakthrough of battery cages, marveling at the sight of 15,000 chickens housed in a single building. Fisher was inspired to bring the innovation home with him. His factory, Buxted Chickens, grew rapidly and made Fisher a substantial fortune in the process. Some of those profits went into the other goal fostered during his New York trip: In 1955, Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs.

IEA helped popularize the once-obscure set of economists loosely affiliated with Hayek’s ideas. The institute was a place to showcase opposition to British society’s growing welfare state, connecting journalists to free-market academics and disseminating critiques on a regular basis through opinion columns, radio interviews, and conferences.

Businesses provided the bulk of funding to IEA, as leading British industrial and banking giants — from Barclays to BP — pitched in with annual contributions. According to “Making Thatcher’s Britain,” by historians Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, one shipping magnate remarked that, since universities were providing ammunition for the unions, the IEA was an important source of bullets for business.

As the economic slowdown and rising inflation of the 1970s shook the foundations of British society, Tory politicians gravitated more and more to the IEA to provide an alternative vision — and IEA obliged with accessible issue briefs and talking points politicians could use to bring free-market concepts to the public. The Atlas Network proudly proclaims that the IEA “laid the intellectual groundwork for what later became the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s.” IEA staff provided speechwriting for Margaret Thatcher; supplemented her campaign with policy papers on topics as varied as labor unions and price controls; and provided a response to her critics in the mass media. In a letter to Fisher after her 1979 victory, Thatcher wrote that the IEA created “the climate of opinion which made our victory possible.”

“There’s no doubt there’s been enormous progress in Britain, the Institute of Economic Affairs, which Antony Fisher set up, made an enormous difference,” Milton Friedman once said. “It made possible Margaret Thatcher. It made possible not her election as prime minister but the policies that she was able to follow. And the same thing in this country, the developing thought along these lines made possible Ronald Reagan and the policies he was able to follow.”

IEA had come full circle. Hayek set up an invitation-only group of free-market economists called the Mont Pelerin Society. One of its members, Ed Feulner, helped found the conservative Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, drawing on IEA’s work for inspiration. Another Mont Pelerin member, Ed Crane, founded the Cato Institute, the most prominent libertarian think tank in the U.S.

Austrian-British economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899 - 1992) with a class of students at the London School of Economics, 1948. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images) Austrian-British economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek with a class of students at the London School of Economics, 1948. Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

IN 1981, FISHER, who had settled in San Francisco, set out to develop the Atlas Economic Research Foundation at the urging of Hayek.Fisher had used his success with IEA to court corporate donors to help establish a string of smaller, sometimes regional think tanks in New York, Canada, California, and Texas, among other places. With Atlas, though, the scale for Fisher’s free-market think tank project would now be global: a nonprofit dedicated to continuing his work of establishing libertarian beachheads in every country of the world. “The more institutes established throughout the world,” Fisher declared, “the more opportunity to tackle diverse problems begging for resolution.”

Fisher began to fundraise, pitching corporate donors with the help of letters from Hayek, Thatcher, and Friedman, including an urgent call for donors to help reproduce the success of IEA through Atlas. Hayek wrote that the IEA model “ought to be used to create similar institutes all over the world.” He added, “It would be money well spent if large sums could be made available for such a concerted effort.”

The proposal was sent to a list of high-level executives and soon, money began pouring in from corporate coffers and Republican mega-donors, including Richard Mellon Scaife. Companies, such as Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and Shell, all gave to Atlas. But their influence would need to remain cloaked for the project to work, Fisher contended. “To influence public opinion, it is necessary to avoid any suggestion of vested interest or intent to indoctrinate,” Fisher noted in a proposal outlining the purpose of Atlas. Fisher added that IEA’s success hinged on the perception that it was academic and impartial.

Atlas grew rapidly. By 1985, the network featured 27 institutions in 17 countries, including nonprofits in Italy, Mexico, Australia, and Peru.

And the timing could not have been better: Atlas’s international expansion came just as the Reagan administration was doubling down on an aggressive foreign policy, hoping to beat back leftist governments abroad.

While in public, Atlas declared that it received no government funding (Fisher belittled foreign aid as just another “bribe” used to distort market forces), records show the network quietly worked to channel government money to its growing list of international partners.

In one 1982 letter from the International Communication Agency, a small federal agency devoted to promote U.S. interests overseas, a bureaucrat at the Office of Private Sector Programs wrote to Fisher, in response to an inquiry about acquiring federal grants. The bureaucrat said he was barred from giving “directly to foreign organizations,” but could cosponsor “conferences or exchanges with organizations” hosted by groups like Atlas. He encouraged Fisher to send over a proposal. The letter, sent one year after Atlas’s founding, was the first indication that the network would become a covert partner to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Memos and other records from Fisher show that, by 1986, Atlas had helped schedule meetings with business executives to direct U.S. funds to its network of think tanks. In one instance, an official from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the principal foreign aid arm of the federal government, recommended that the head of Coca-Cola’s subsidiary in Panama work with Atlas to set up an IEA-style affiliate think tank there. Atlas’ partners also drew funding from the coffers of the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-charted nonprofit, founded in 1983, that is funded largely by the State Department and USAID to build U.S.-friendly political institutions in the developing world.

Alejandro Chafuen, of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, back right, shakes hands with Rafael Alonzo, of Venezuela's Freedom Center for Economic Studies, CEDICE, left, as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa applauds during the opening of the "Freedom and Democracy" international forum in Caracas, Thursday, May 28, 2009.(AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Alejandro Chafuen, of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, back right, shakes hands with Rafael Alonzo, of Venezuela’s Freedom Center for Economic Studies, CEDICE, left, as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa applauds during the opening of the “Freedom and Democracy” international forum in Caracas, May 28, 2009. Photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP

WITH CORPORATE AND U.S. government funding pouring in, Atlas took another fortuitous turn in 1985 with the arrival of Alejandro Chafuen. Linda Whetstone, Fisher’s daughter, remembered in a tribute that, in 1985, a young Chafuen, then living in Oakland, showed up to Atlas’s San Francisco office “and was willing to work for nothing.”

The Buenos Aires-born Chafuen hailed from what he described as “an anti-Peronist family.” They were wealthy and, though raised in an era of incredible turmoil in Argentina, Chafuen lived a life of relative privilege. He spent his teenage years playing tennis, dreaming of becoming a professional athlete.

Chafuen credits his youthful ideological path to his appetite for devouring libertarian texts, from Ayn Rand to booklets published by FEE, the Leonard Read group that had originally inspired Fisher. After studying at Grove City College, a deeply conservative Christian liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, where he served as the president of the student libertarian club, Chafuen returned to his home country. The military had stepped in, claiming a threat from communist revolutionaries. Thousands of students and activists would be tortured and killed in the crackdown on left-wing dissent following the coup d’etat.

Chafuen remembers the time in a mostly positive light, later writing that the military had acted out of necessity to prevent a communist “takeover of the country.” While pursuing a teaching career, Chafuen encountered “totalitarians of every style” within academic life. After the military coup, he wrote that he noticed that his professors became “gentler,” despite their differences with him.

In other Latin American countries, too, libertarianism was finding a receptive audience among military governments. In Chile, after the military swept out the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Mont Pelerin Society economists quickly flocked to the country, setting the stage for widespread libertarian reforms, including the privatization of industry and the country’s pension system. Throughout the region, under the watch of right-wing military leaders that had seized power, libertarian economic policies began to take root.

For his part, Chafuen’s ideological zeal was on display as early as 1979, when he published an essay for FEE titled “War Without End.” He described the horrors of leftist terror, “like the Charles Manson family, or in regimental strength, like the guerilla troops in the Middle East, Africa, and South America.” There was a need, he wrote, for the “forces of individual freedom and private property” to fight back.

His enthusiasm garnered attention. In 1980, at age 26, Chafuen was invited to become the youngest member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He traveled to Stanford, an opportunity that put him in direct contact with Read, Hayek, and other leading libertarians. Within five years, Chafuen had married an American and was living in Oakland. He began reaching out to Mont Pelerin members in the Bay Area, including Fisher.

Throughout the region, under the watch of right-wing military leaders that had seized power, libertarian economic policies began to take root.

According to Atlas’s board meeting notes, Fisher told his colleagues he had made a $500 ex gratia Christmas payment that year to Chafuen, and hoped to hire the young economist full-time to develop Atlas think tanks in Latin America. The following year, Chafuen organized the first Atlas summit of Latin American think tanks in Jamaica.

CHAFUEN UNDERSTOOD THE Atlas model well and worked diligently to expand the network, helping to launch think tanks in Africa and Europe, though focusing his efforts in Latin America. Describing how to attract donors, Chafuen once noted in a lecture that donors cannot appear to pay for public surveys because the polls would lose credibility. “Pfizer Inc. would not sponsor surveys on health issues nor would Exxon pay for surveys on environmental issues,” Chafuen noted. Libertarian think tanks, such as the ones in Atlas’s network, however, could not only present the same survey with more credibility, but do so in a way that garnered coverage in the local media.

“Journalists are very much attracted by whatever is new and easy to report,” Chafuen said. The press is less interested in quoting libertarian philosophers, he contended, but when a think tank produced a survey people would listen. “And donors also see this,” he added.

In 1991, three years after Fisher died, Chafuen took the helm of Atlas and would have the opportunity to speak to donors with authority about Atlas’s work. He quickly began to rack up corporate sponsors to push company-specific goals through the network. Philip Morris contributed regular grants to Atlas, including a $50,000 contribution to the group in 1994, which was disclosed years later through litigation. Records show that the tobacco giant viewed Atlas as an ally for working on international litigation issues.

Journalists in Chile, however, found out that Atlas-backed think tanks had worked to quietly lobby against smoking regulations without disclosing their funding from tobacco companies, a strategy similar think tanks repeated across the globe.

Corporate giants, such as ExxonMobil and MasterCard, were among Atlas’s donors. But the group also attracted leading figures in libertarianism, such as the foundations associated with investor John Templeton and the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which lavished Atlas and its affiliates with regular contributions.

Chafuen’s fundraising prowess extended to the growing number of wealthy conservative foundations that were beginning to flourish. He was a founding member of Donors Trust, a secretive donor-advised fund that has doled out over $400 million to libertarian nonprofits, including members of the Atlas Network. He also serves as a trustee to the Chase Foundation of Virginia, which was founded by a Mont Pelerin Society member and similarly sends cash to Atlas think tanks.

Another wellspring of money came from the American government. Initially, the National Endowment for Democracy encountered difficulty setting up U.S.-friendly political nonprofits. Gerardo Bongiovanni, the president of Fundación Libertad, an Atlas think tank in Rosario, Argentina, noted during a lecture with Chafuen that the early seed money from NED’s grant partner, the Center for International Private Enterprise, totaled $1 million between 1985 and 1987. The think tanks that received those initial grants quickly folded, Bongiovanni said, citing lack of management training.

Atlas, however, managed to turn U.S. taxpayer money coming through the NED and Center for International Private Enterprise into an important source of funding for its growing network. The funding vehicles provided money to help boost Atlas think tanks in Eastern Europe, following the fall of the Soviet Union, and, later, to promote U.S. interests in the Middle East. Among the recipients of the Center for International Private Enterprise’s cash is Cedice Libertad, the group thanked by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 09: White House Deputy Assistant To The President Sebastian Gorka participates in a television interview outside the White House West Wing June 9, 2017 in Washington, DC. A former national security editor for Breitbart, Gorka has hard-line stands on Islam and terrorism and past involvement in right-wing Hungarian politics. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Sebastian Gorka, White House deputy assistant to the president, participates in a television interview outside the West Wing on June 9, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

AT THE BRICK HOTEL in Buenos Aires, Chafuen reflected on the last three decades. Fisher “would be overall pleased, and he would not believe how much our network grew,” Chafuen said, noting that perhaps the Atlas founder would not have expected the level of direct political engagement the group is involved in.

Chafuen lit up when U.S. President DonaldTrump came up, offering praise for the president’s appointees. And why not? The Trump administration is littered with alumni of Atlas-related groups and friends of the network.Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s Islamophobic counterterrorism adviser, once led an Atlas-backed think tank in Hungary. Vice President Mike Pence has attended an Atlas event and spoken highly of the group. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Chafuen were close through their leadership roles at the Acton Institute, a Michigan think tank that develops religious arguments in favor of libertarian policies — which now maintains an affiliate in Brazil, the Centro Interdisciplinar de Ética e Economia Personalista.

Perhaps Chafuen’s most prized figure in the administration, however, is Judy Shelton, an economist and senior fellow at the Atlas Network. After Trump’s victory, Shelton was made the chair of the NED. She previously served as an adviser to the Trump campaign and transition effort. Chafuen beamed when he talked about it. “There you have the Atlas people being the chair of the National Endowment for Democracy,” he said.

Before ending the interview, Chafuen intimated that there was more to come: more think tanks, more efforts to overturn leftist governments, and more Atlas devotees and alumni elevated to the highest levels of government the world over. “The work is ongoing,” he said.

Later, Chafuen appeared at the gala for the Latin America Liberty Forum. Along with a panel of Atlas experts, he discussed the need to ramp up libertarian opposition movements in Ecuador and Venezuela.

Listen to reporter Lee Fang discuss his investigation of the Atlas Network on our podcast Intercepted:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michel-temer-president-brazil_us_57c8788ce4b0a22de094ced7

Brazil has a new president after the country’s Senate voted to oust Dilma Rousseff from office on Wednesday, bringing an end to a monthslong impeachment process. The contentious move allowed Rousseff’s ally-turned-rival Vice President Michel Temer to assume power as the country’s leader.

Temer, of the conservative PMDB political party, was Brazil’s interim leader for 111 days, but now officially holds the state’s highest office. He takes over at a time when the country is in the midst of a disastrous economic and political crisis, and has seen support for his government dwindle since he became interim president. Temer was booed when he appeared during the Rio Olympics last month, and in June was forced to deny allegations he accepted a $300,000 bribe in relation to nuclear energy company contracts.

But despite Temer’s unpopularity ― an opinion poll in April showed that 58 percent of Brazilians wanted him impeached ― he has managed to rise from the shadows of the country’s politics and seize its top job. He is set to serve out the remainder of Rousseff’s term, which lasts until Brazil’s 2018 elections....

coup 5/15 all white male cab

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/amid-dilma-rousseffs-impeachment-brazil-prepares-to-roll-back-environmental-laws/

SÃO PAULO—Taking advantage of Brazil’s present political turbulence, as the battle to impeach President Dilma Rousseff reaches its climax, reactionary politicians are quietly rolling back environmental and indigenous protection laws in defiance of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Environmentalists say that if the bill known as PEC 65/2012, now at the Senate committee stage, is approved, it means that major infrastructure projects will be able to go ahead regardless of their impacts on biodiversity, indigenous areas, traditional communities and conservation areas.

Instead of a careful if somewhat slow licensing process which involves scientific assessments including biological, botanical, anthropological and archaeological studies, developers will merely have to present a proposed study of environmental impact to be allowed to begin—without actually having to carry out the study. And once a project is under way it cannot be cancelled or suspended by the environmental protection agencies.

Environment organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, have protested strongly at the bill’s implications. For Marilene Ramos, the president of the official agency for the environment and renewable resources, IBAMA, (in Portuguese only) it means Brazil is going in the opposite direction to developed countries and will no longer be able to control infrastructure projects.

Indigenous leader Nara Baré, of COIAB—the Coordination of Indian organisations in the Brazilian Amazon—said: “Brazil presented targets in Paris but doesn’t do its homework, protecting the forest and us who live in it.”

Carlos Bocuhy, the president of PROAM, an environmental NGO, says the effect of the bill will be to end environmental licensing: “It is completely absurd; it is as though the act of applying for a driving licence entitled you to drive a lorry.”

The Climate Observatory (in Portuguese only) sees the bill as “a bad joke”, even more so in a country that has just sufferedthe worst environmental disaster in its history, the bursting of a dam of toxic mud in Minas Gerais state on 5 November last year. The calamity destroyed all animal and plant life and a major river nearby, and could be the world’s worst disaster after Chernobyl.

Greenpeace director Marcio Astrini said of the bill that “if it becomes law, it will act as a factory of tragedies”

Personal stake

Its author, Senator Acir Gurgacz, has a personal interest: his family owns a transport company which would benefit hugely from the paving of the 900 km BR319 highway, linking two Amazon capitals, Porto Velho and Manaus. At present the project cannot go ahead because IBAMA has embargoed the work, alleging environmental damage. The road runs through conservation areas, indigenous lands and areas of largely unspoiled rainforest.

The bill´s rapporteur is Senator Blairo Maggi, a soya magnate, who has cleared thousands of hectares of rainforest in his home state of Mato Grosso, and is tipped to be the minister of agriculture in the new government that will take over once President Rousseff is suspended from office this week.

Environmentalists are already expressing deep concern about the government planned by vice-president Michel Temer, who will become Brazil’s president on 12 May if the impeachment goes through.They note that his policy paper,A bridge to the future, which laid out his plans for government, made no mention of the environment, climate change or the Amazon rainforest.

Instead the big farmers’ and ranchers’ lobby, FPA, or Parliamentary Farming Front, presented the president-to-be with a “positive agenda”—a list of demands which included the abolition of the ministry of land reform, the halting and revision of the demarcations of indigenous reserves and quilombos (territories inhabited by the descendants of runaway slaves), and more funds for agribusiness, which already enjoys substantial subsidies.

Besides the bill to end environmental licensing, other damaging bills are in the pipeline.

Ignoring local wishes

One, known as PEC 215, has been doing the rounds in Congress for over 15 years, but with the imminent arrival of the new, pro-farmer government it is expected soon to be voted into law. If it is, it will mean that the power to decide further demarcations of indigenous areas—nearly 400 are under consideration—will pass from the executive to the Congress.

With both houses dominated by members of the rural lobby, this is regarded as tantamount to ending demarcations. Another 1,611 quilomboareas will also be affected. The importance of the indigenous and quilombo territories is that they tend to conserve forested areas, instead of clearing them for mechanised agriculture or cattle grazing.

By law the areas contained within each rural property (which, especially in the Amazon, are often vast) must be left wild. But another measure on the table (bill 4508/16) will allow them to be used for cattle grazing.

Others will permit mining and hydroelectric dams in indigenous areas without any need for permission from their inhabitants. Reducing controls on pesticides – Brazil is the world’s biggest consumer—is yet another target.

The government of Dilma Rousseff has in no way been a model of protection for the environment and indigenous areas, but it seems that the government of Michel Temer could be much worse.

Jan Rocha is a freelance journalist living in Brazil and is a former correspondent there for the BBC World Service and The Guardian.

===

http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/08/brazil-fines-nestle-pepsi-gmos/

The following is written by Ben Richardson, based on his new book Sugar [2] (Polity, 2015):

Class, gender, nationality and race structure sugar's unequal production, exchange and consumption across the world. This can be seen most vividly in the corporeal effects of sugar: the new type of chronic kidney disease [3] striking down sugarcane field workers in Central America, the high rate of prostitution and HIV in sugar towns in Zambia, and the disproportionate level of tooth decay [4] among poor and Hispanic children in Colorado, US. The circulation of sugar is also embodied in the landscape with unequal effects on wildlife. Fertilizer run-off from sugar farming has contributed to the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef [5] in Queensland and the destruction of fisheries [6] in the Indus delta (by contrast, the sugarcane plantations have provided welcoming habitats for rats and snakes). Yet these environmental changes are also social. In the case of water pollution, those worst affected have tended to be indigenous people and artisanal fisherfolk traditionally dependent on communal resources for drinking and fishing.

So to really get at the global politics of sugar, the essential question for me was “why does it harm some more than others?”

By starting with social relations, I diverged from two standard approaches. The first of these has addressed the poverty-inducing effects of sugar and framed it as an issue of international trade. This stems from the curious situation whereby exactly the same product, refined sugar, can be made from two entirely different crops. These are the grass crop sugarcane which is grown in tropical climates, and the root crop sugar beet which is grown in temperate climates. The near universal ability to grow these crops has allowed governments across the world to build up a domestic sugar industry by protecting markets from imports and supporting producers with favourable prices.

There are now an estimated 1.1 million jobs in sugar manufacturing [7] and tens of millions more in sugar farming scattered over 120 countries in the world. Moreover, sugar is considered by the World Bank to be the second most protected agricultural commodity in the world behind rice. In 2008 the level of import tariffs and domestic subsidies on sugar accounted for almost one fifth of all agricultural support [8] – that amounts to a lot of redistributive tax!

The injustice that both free traders and development campaigners have pointed out is that protectionist policies seem largely to benefit sugar producers in developed countries. They argue that by keeping out exports from developing countries, trade barriers have denied poor people the chance to trade their way out of poverty and thus confined them to a life of hunger. Or as the Wall Street Journal once pithily put it: “Addiction to sugar subsidies chokes poor nations’ exports [9].”

While trade protection remains important in shaping who benefits from sugar production, the idea that the industry is controlled by wealthy farmers in the European Union (EU) and the US is increasingly untenable. First, significant steps towards liberalisation have happened over the last two decades, turning the EU into a net sugar importer for the first time since the 1970s and opening up the US to unlimited imports from Mexico (whilst sending increased amounts of processed food and High Fructose Corn Syrup the other way). In fact, the US is consistently one of the world’s biggest importers of sugar.

Second, demand for sugar has grown most rapidly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, leading to a steady shift to sugarcane planting in the Global South over the last six decades. Brazil, India, China and Thailand are now the production powerhouses of the global sugar economy.

The third problem with the trade protectionism argument is that they treat countries as homogenous units rather than hierarchical societies. Since there is significant inequality within countries as well as between them focusing on which country sugar is produced in only gives us part of the picture.

There are many examples of men (and they are usually men) in developing countries who have become fantastically wealthy through sugar while their fellow citizens languish in poverty. Two of the richest people the world in fact built their business empires on the back of sugar trading enterprises: the Nigerian Aliko Dangote now worth an estimated $25 billion and the Malaysian Robert Kuok worth $12 billion. Others have found their fortunes as sugar industrialists. The Brazilian Rubens Ometto Silveria Mello, worth $2 billion, made his money at the helm of a sugarcane milling company and was dubbed “the world’s first ethanol billionaire [10]”.

Beyond those agri-businesses selling sugar as an ingredient, there are those re-selling it in the form of manufactured foods and drinks. These include Western-based multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. Together these companies made over $50 billion profit in 2013; a handsome return for their managers and shareholders. (Did you know that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, despite its stated goal to improve global health, holds stock in Coca-Cola, Mars, Wal-Mart and Kraft-Heinz [11] worth over a billion dollars?!). These examples of wealth accumulation all belie the idea that we can determine who benefits from sugar simply by looking at national levels of output and export.

The second approach to sugar politics has addressed its adverse health effects. If the injustices of sugar production have been framed as a problem of trade protectionism then those relating to consumption have been framed, quite separately, as a problem of corporate manipulation. These companies are charged with purposefully misleading the public into dangerous eating habits. On the one hand, they manufacture and market foods high in sugar, salt and fat, and on the other hand, lobby governments to water down dietary guidelines and labelling regulations.

Like the literature on trade protectionism though, while it contains some important insights, as a political critique this approach also has its limitations. First, it tends to ignore the countervailing appeal of diets and detoxes popular in the media. Among these are Atkins, Dukan, Glycaemic Index, paleo and No Sugar, all of which have changed the consumption of sugar either by discriminating against sucrose or shifting eating habits away from sweetened foods altogether. Studies which focus only on the dominance of corporations thus miss these forms of (typically feminised) agency and marginalise the response of companies to it. Product reformulation using artificial sweeteners and the takeover of health conscious brands have been particularly common strategies, although by no means a solution to the spread of diet-related disease.

Second, these studies are divorced from issues of production. One of the biggest developments in recent years has been the growth of the ethanol biofuel market. By 2013 fully 15 per cent of global sugarcane production was turned into ethanol; a proportion which is expected to almost double over the next decade. Meanwhile, the masses of corn grown in the US that have been diverted into biofuel production has put inflationary pressure on the price of High Fructose Corn Syrup, making it less competitive compared to sugar [12] in the North American sweetener market. Ignoring these dynamics blinkers us to which agricultural crops end up in our food, in what form, and why.

Third, this account has little to say about the prospects for conscious political change. For example, in his otherwise excellent book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, the journalist Michael Moss concludes by putting his faith in enlightened shopping to save the day. In his closing paragraph, he argues that:

They [the major food corporations] may have salt, sugar and fat on their side, but, we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.

Not only is this is perverse conclusion to reach after spending the previous 346 pages detailing the myriad ways that American consumers have virtually no meaningful choice over what they eat, it also rules out other sources of change and ways of acting. By reducing politics to individual choice at the checkout and starving it of its collective character and varied institutional expression, accounts like the one given by Moss may do more harm than good.

So how should the global politics of sugar be approached instead? My book proceeds from two foundations. The first is that the circulation of sugar is deeply structured by capitalism. Since the 1990s this has been entrenched on a global scale. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the formation of the World Trade Organisation have undermined national farm policy, while the industrialisation of China and marketization of food provisioning across the Global South has underpinned a seismic ‘nutrition transition’. Through these changes and more, the reach and use of sugar has been transformed. As such, a critical analysis of capitalism is necessary not for advocating Communist revolution of the food system (“Eaters of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your fast-food chains!”) but to appreciate why this system has led to social inequality and political crisis.

Inequality is reproduced in many ways; from under-paying easily exploitable farm workers like migrants and women, to disproportionately marketing processed sweetened foods to racial minorities and children. Likewise, the over-production of sugar has led to systematic contradictions including periodic market crashes [13] and exacerbating a global diabetes epidemic [14]. These in turn have produced crises (a farm crisis, a health crisis) which state authorities have been called upon to manage. And contrary to the common assertion that equates capitalism with free markets, it is often capitalists themselves have called for state intervention, either to make a market function in their interests or else protect them from the vagaries of it.

At the same time as taking global capitalism seriously, it is also important not to ascribe it with uniform and omnipresent characteristics. Capitalism need not be a single fate. This refers both to the different ways in which capitalist economies can be organised and the limits to which capitalist principles of private property, commodification and endless accumulation extend. Think of the bake-a-cake sales that raise millions for charity. These are just as much part of the economy as a factory making chocolate bars or a futures exchange trading sugar contracts. What this second foundation does then is to create some room for human agency, without which every eventuality would be boiled down to the inner workings of capital – no better than other deterministic accounts of sugar [15] which ascribe everything to its irresistible sweetness or the characteristics of the cane plant.

Progressive political change is not about changing people’s relationship to sugar per se but changing our relationships to one another. Reducing sugar consumption may lower some people’s risk of diabetes, but if those same people remain reliant on poor quality food then it is likely that they will suffer from other forms of diet-related ill-health instead. Similarly, increasing crop productivity through high-yielding seeds may help farmers make a decent living, but only insofar as they are not then subject to price cuts by other businesses in the supply-chain.

I argue that this change comes about through site-specific struggles to value life differently. They are site-specific because they take different forms in different places – a campaign against child advertising here, a protest against water pollution there. But what they have in common is a desire to govern by a different metric, one that recognises values beyond ‘the bottom line’; be it the sanctity of childhood or the preservation of the environment. These contestations might cohere into broader systemic change that would make sugar provisioning more ecologically sound and socially just. This is a move that, I believe, must ultimately challenge the profit-driven organisation of food and farming itself.

:{Brazil Farmers Say GMO Corn No Longer Resistant to Bugs:(style="outline:none"):}:

Earlier this year, a similar problem arose in the U.S., when scientists confirmed that corn-destroying rootworms...

Brazil Has Done More To Stop Climate ChangeThan Any Other Country, Study Finds

BY EMILY ATKIN ON JUNE 6, 2014

Brazil's cuts to greenhouse gases are more than three times bigger than the effect of taking all the cars in the U.S. off the road for a year....

http://insideclimatenews.org/covering-ground/20140513/new-amazon-forest-law-will-it-stick

...

The same could be said for Brazil's vaunted "Codigo Florestal," or Forest Code. Enacted in 1965, this is the law that limited the amount of forest that could be cleared in any given area—up to 20 percent of the total area for large properties in the Amazon, more for smaller properties and in other regions. It also prescribed how much forest must be retained along riverbanks and set standards that protect slopes. From an ecological perspective, it was hard to beat.

But the Forest Code, like the carefully planned architecture of Brasilia, has been utterly overwhelmed by reality.

There's a saying here that some laws stick, some don't. The old Forest Code simply didn't stick. Enforcing the regulations on the poor and generally lawless frontier was impossible. For land barons clearing massive tracts for cattle or smallholders cutting some trees to make by, protecting forests seemed like a luxury. new 2012 law....

4. Brazil

In 1964, General Castelo Branco led a coup that sparked 20 years of brutal military dictatorship [13]. U.S. military attache Vernon Walters, later Deputy CIA Director and UN Ambassador, knew Castelo Branco well from World War II in Italy. As a clandestine CIA officer, Walters' records from Brazil have never been declassified, but the CIA provided all the support needed to ensure the success of the coup, including funding for opposition labor and student groups in street protests, as in Ukraine and Venezuela today. A U.S. Marine amphibious force on standby to land in Sao Paolo was not needed. Like other victims of U.S.-backed coups in Latin America, the elected President Joao Goulart was a wealthy landowner, not a communist, but his efforts to remain neutral in the Cold War were as unacceptable to Washington as President Yanukovich's refusal to hand the Ukraine over to the west 50 years later.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/jose-rodrigues-moreira-amazon-activists_n_3020665.html?ref=topbar

Wealth: Heir to a minor fortune, Eike Batista’s early wealth came from the construction of railways and ports

to ship iron ore to Asia, a carbon intensive effort due to its inherently resource rich, long distance, and heavily

polluting processes. He got his start mining for gold in the Amazon, an activity that has been a device of

deforestation in the planet’s largest carbon storage ecosystem. His is now the founder and CEO of EBX

Group, a constellation of companies involved in oil and natural gas, coal mining, electricity production, and

shipbuilding. In 2007, Batista went on to found OGX, an oil and gas exploration company. His shipping

business, OSX,12 is Brazil’s largest private-sector exploration and production company.

AlterNet [1] / By Cedar Attanasio [2]

What Happens When a Global Billionaire Is Backed Into a Corner?

May 12, 2014 |

Eike Batista used to be the richest man in Brazil. At his peak, in 2010, he commanded a fortune of $34 billion dollars. He was named by Forbes as the world’s 8th richest man. He vowed to become number 1, aiming for a net worth of $100 billion. While his commodity and logistics empire had experimented overseas--in Canada, Greece, Russia, and China--he made his biggest profits back home.

Fans and critics alike couldn't stop talking about his opulent life style. Hereportedly parked his sports car [3] in his bedroom. He competed in speedboat racing. He traveled in a private jet, and commuted around Rio by helicopter.

Then, in under 4 years, Batista lost his entire fortune. Business journalists have performed a number of autopsies on his career in capital allocation, the best and most gory of which might be Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek feature[4].

Beyond the ups and downs of the money game however, there’s another story. Last Thursday, the rule of law stung Batista himself. A federal court [5] froze $55 million of his remaining assets. He’s charged with insider trading, money laundering, and market manipulation. Local newspapers revealed that he started hiding his assets last year, in anticipation of bankruptcy. What happens when a member of the global elite is backed into a corner?

Getting Away With Murder

The Batista family is no stranger to strategic criminal litigation. In 2012, Batista’s then 20-year-old son Thor hit and killed a bicyclist. It was a Saturday night, and Thor drove himself and a friend down a Rio highway in a Mercedes-Benz sports car. The bicyclist was a railroad laborer named Wanderson Pereira dos Santos. He was on his way to buy flour for his wife’s birthday cake, according to a piece in the New York Times. In a highly stratified society divided by race and class, the case was symbolic [6]of Brazil’s existing problems. Pereira dos Santos was black and poor, relegated to the non-existent pedestrian system. Thor was rich and white, driving a sports car straight out of a Hollywood movie.

In Thor’s defense, highway crossings in Brazil are extremely dangerous. Pereira dos Santos didn’t have the right away, he wasn’t near a crosswalk, and he probably didn’t have any lights or reflectors. Thor’s father, Mr. Batista, lashed out at the dead bicyclist to his more than 1 million Twitter followers. “The carelessness of the cyclist could have killed three people,” he tweeted.

The trial was a mess, however, showed a different picture of the accident. Thor and his father paid off the family in an out of court settlement, and they violated their own secrecy clause. That resulted in a separate fine. Then, the court learned that Thor already had a record, with many points against his license for driving infractions. He had already hit another pedestrian [7] and admitted [8] on Twitter that he “knew there were a lot of bicyclists crossing in the area [where Pereira Santos was].”

Finally, the court found Thor guilty of involuntary manslaughter (homicidio culposo, sem intenção de matar). It seemed for a moment that the rule of law extended beyond property rights, all the way to human rights. In a country where only 8% [9] of murders are solved, and 70% [10] of homicide victims are black, the conviction might have been welcomed by the public.

However, Batista’s lawyers succeed appealing the decision. When the sentence finally came, it was watered down from prison time and a driving ban to a stint of community service and a $500,000 fine. His driver’s license was suspended for only two years. (A tabloid reported that he now drives an Aston Martin, like the one from the 007 films.)

In response, Brazilian blogger Andre Forastierri wrote an article entitled Thor and Eike are Innocent, We’re the Guilty Ones.

“Thor symbolizes the new, rich Brazil. Wanderson makes me think, ‘poor old Brazil.’ [.... The Batistas] still have plenty in the bank, and Thor walks free. The reason is that we continue to live in the poor, old Brazil, which allows Eike to be so rich, and therefore untouchable and automatically innocent, him and his offspring. [....] They are and will continue to be innocent. We’re the guilty ones.” [Translation mine].

Multiplication of Wealth

Long before his son hit a bicyclist, before he gained and lost his billions, Eike dedicated himself to what he called “multiplying wealth.” The son of the former mining minister and life-long minerals tycoon, Eike was educated in Europe and coddled amongst Rio’s elite. Thanks to his time abroad, he skipped the worst of Brazil’s dictatorship. When he returned to his home country at age 23, he set out to build his own fortune.

Tapping his social circle in Rio de Janeiro, he raised enough money enough to fund his first entrepreneurial adventures in the Amazon. He founded his first company, Autram Aurem. It made millions in the booming gold business, first as a middleman and later as a mine-operating entity. Thanks to high gold prices and a stable Brazilian currency, he was able to convert tracts of the Amazon into tangible assets.

To my knowledge, no one has documented Autram’s Aurem’s impact on the health of the Amazon. As a buyer of gold from pick-and-shovel operations in the 1980s, it very likely contributed to the deforestation, invasion of indigenous lands, and creation of goldmining footholds that pervade to the present day. With mechanized mining, it may have spewed out all sorts of externalities, such as mercury poisoning.

Success in mechanized alluvial mining led to a global conglomerate. Soon Eike had mines in in Russia, Chile, and even Canada. A large oil project in Greece failed when he couldn’t secure an environmental permit. A big investment in Canada helped him form his first publicly traded company, TVX.

The “X” in TVX symbolized the multiplication of wealth. As his resource and infrastructure empire grew, he incorporated the “X” in each company’s name: OGX, for oil and gas, LLX for logistics, MPX for energy, and so on. For Eike, multiplying was an end in itself. Growth for growth’s sake, he reasoned, would help build up Brazil.

Yet building up Brazil appeared sometimes to be an afterthought. In another candid moment during his Charlie Rose interview, Eike admitted it was largely insecurity that fueled him to achieve. Growing up, he walked in the shadow of his father. Mid-career, Brazilians knew him only as only as the husband of Luma Oliviera, the Playboy cover girl and a well known figure in Rio’s Carnival scene.

He certainly wasn’t known for philanthropy.

“Don’t compare me to these people [Bill Gates and Warren Buffet],” he said in a filmed interview [11] with the Wall Street Journal, also in 2010. “My money is all in my projects. [Not all] philanthropy is good. I prefer to give them a rod, and let them fish. Maybe will the profits of all this, we can build some hospitals or something.” He never specified who “they” were, but in the context it seemed like he was referring to the class of people that get run over on highways by playboys.

Something Fishy

Insider trading is perhaps the most damning charge that Rio’s federal court has brought against Eike. Here’s the gist of the argument. In fall or winter of 2012, Eike and other OGX board members were reportedly informed that their largest investment was going bust. That big investment was the Tubarao Martelo oil fields, and it had 62% less reserves [12] than his team had stated when pitching to investors and the market in general. They were no longer commercially viable [13], wrote the Brazilian magazine Valor.

Allegedly, Batista sold a chunk of his personal OGX stock right after he received the news. Only in July of 2013 of the following year did his company share the information with the public. Therefore, the argument goes, he used his position inside the company to sell stocks only he knew were worthless, rotten shares from a barrel he helped ferment. The court recently said that he snagged $63 million this way [14].

Publically, he tightened his belt. He sold his helicopter and scrapped his yacht. Some claimed [15] he was buying less lavish lunches. Privately, he offloaded assets to his sons, as revealed last week by Brazilian outlet Folha [16]. Perhaps sensing impending bankruptcy, he quietly transferred ownership of residence and vacation homes to his sons, Thor and Odin. On paper, he valued them at a little over $7 million. In reality, they’re probably worth more like $22 million.

A few weeks ago, after the federal probe was announced, Eike projected confidence in an interview with the Wall Street Journal [17]. "It's excellent that everything get clarified," Mr. Batista said over the telephone. "I'm very calm. Let them investigate."

Now, the federal court has frozen his assets. After consulting with lawyers, Folha believes that the court could seize the homes as well, since they were transferred after his alleged financial crimes occurred. As in Thor’s homicide trial, Eike is likely to maneuver in court until he achieves the most banal sentencing possible.

The Bubble Builder

When OGX first started it’s oil venture, it boasted a 100% hit rate in the wells. Before the facts were in, its shares peaked at $22. Once the real oil reserves were made public in July of 2013, they plummeted, bottoming out at around $0.18. But it wasn’t the first time that Eike had overpromised and underdelivered. Back in his Canada days, the boom and bust of gold pumped up and later gutted TVX. Apparently, TVX lost 96% [4] of its peak value.

Why such a gap between perceived value and results? The Economist used to call Eike Brazil’s salesmen. [18],” they said. In Brazilian circles, Batista’s persona lent itself to this joke comparing him to another well-known billionaire. “Who made more money with PowerPoint, Eike Batista or Bill Gates?”

After his fall, English language media called him out on his braggadocio.

“Mr. Batista liked to call [oil] assets ‘idiot proof.’ [19] But years after he took them to market, none has turned a profit,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. What did that mean for the business world?

“It’s partly a story of Brazil falling out of favor with investors, but it’s really a story of someone who made really big promises, priced everything to perfection, and failed to deliver,” said Alex Cuadros [20] (see video below). He’s now writing a book [21]about some of the 40 or so billionaires in Brazil.

“It is completely absurd; it is as though

the act of applying for a driving license

entitled you to drive a lorry.”