Brazilian indigenous groups demand better healthcare

BBC, 05/30/2012

Groups of indigenous people in Brazil blocked roads and occupied government buildings to demand better healthcare for their communities.

Several ethnic groups staged a protest at the Health Ministry building in the capital, Brasilia, asking for a meeting with a senior official.

In a statement, the movement’s leaders called for better facilities and access to more doctors.

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Brazil Senate committee OKs gay civil unions, first legislative step for the issue

Washington Post/Associated Press, 05/24/2012

BRASILIA, Brazil — A measure allowing same-sex civil unions passed its first legislative step in Brazil’s Congress, where it has lingered for 16 years.

The human rights committee in Brazil’s Senate approved a measure Thursday that would change law to say a civil union is between two people, without specifying gender. It doesn’t approve gay marriage.

However, Brazil’s judiciary has already cleared the way for gay marriage in the nation, setting national precedent.

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Brazil house passes slave labor amendment

Marco Sibaja – Associated Press, 05/22/2012

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Lawmakers approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday that strengthens punishments for landowners and others who force people into slave-like working conditions, in which thousands of Brazilians are trapped.

The amendment allows the government to confiscate without compensation all the property of anyone found to be using slave labor, which is most common on remote farms but also occurs in urban sweatshops in places like Sao Paulo, South America’s largest city.

The measure says that besides having their property confiscated, offenders will also be subject to penalties for using slave labor that are already in Brazil’s penal code, including fines and jail terms of up to eight years, congressman Domingos Dutra said.

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Brazil fights illegal logging to protect Amazon natives

AFP, 05/21/2012

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil said Monday it was working hard to stop illegal logging in Amazon rainforest land inhabited by the ethnic Awa people, a group said to be threatened with extinction.

“The Brazilian state must accomplish this task with the utmost determination and we are working hard on it,” Maria do Rosario, the minister in charge of human rights, told foreign reporters.

A Brazilian government survey estimates there could be “up to 4,500 invaders, ranchers, loggers and settlers” occupying just one of the four territories inhabited by the Awa, whose total population stands at no more than 450.

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Brazil probing dictatorship human rights abuses

AP/Fox News, 05/16/2012

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on Wednesday swore in the seven members of a truth commission created to investigate human rights abuses committed during the nation’s long military dictatorship.

Rousseff, a former leftist guerrilla who spent three years in prison during the dictatorship and was brutally tortured, was moved to tears as she ushered in the long-delayed commission, whose work begins years after neighboring Latin American nations fully investigated the actions of dictatorial regimes.

“We are not moved by revenge, hate or a desire to rewrite history,” Rousseff said at the ceremony in Brasilia. “The need to know the full truth is what moves us. Brazil deserves the truth, future generations deserve the truth and most importantly those who lost their friends and their families deserve to know the truth.”

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Brazil’s truth commission faces delicate task

Paulo Cabral – BBC Brasil, 05/16/2012

Brazil’s Truth Commission, created to investigate human rights abuses committed during the country’s military dictatorship, is set to meet for the first time on Wednesday amid criticism from both army officers and victims’ relatives.

Military rule spanned 21 years, from 1964 to 1985. More than 400 people were either killed or disappeared, while thousands were tortured.

As the commission gathers for the first time, there is discomfort among some in Brazil’s military over what they perceive as an attempt at revenge by an ideologically-biased government.

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As the clock ticks, trees fall in Brazil’s Amazon

Scott Wallace – National Geographic, 05/14/2012

*Scott Wallace was a Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center in 2009

As Brazil braces for president Dilma Rousseff’s forthcoming decision on whether to sign or veto recent legislation that would alter the country’s Forest Code, rights groups are decrying a surge in illegal land grabs that is wrecking environmental havoc and threatening vulnerable tribal populations.

According to the rights organization Survival International, a gold rush mentality seems to have taken hold of loggers, ranchers and settlers in the eastern Amazonian state of Maranhão, as intruders bore their way deeper into reserve areas set up to protect the forests of the Awá tribe. In addition to 355 contacted members of the tribe, about 100 Awá remain uncontacted, making them one of the very last groups of nomads still roaming the forests of the eastern Amazon. The majority of the 60 or more uncontacted tribes that still survive in the Amazon inhabit the more secluded and remote western regions on the vast Amazon Basin.

Survival has launched a public campaign in recent days that includes a video featuring British film star Colin Firth, best known for his portrayal of a stammering King George in the blockbuster hit “The King’s Speech.” Looking into the camera, an earnest Firth urges supporters to call on Brazil’s Justice Minister to send agents into Maranhåo to halt the destruction. “One man can stop this,” says Firth, “Brazil’s Minister of Justice. He can send in the Federal Police to catch the loggers and keep them out for good.”

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Memories of Brazil’s dirty war

Mac Margolis – Newsweek, 05/14/2012

Memórias de uma Guerra Suja (Memories of a Dirty War) is not the sort of book you curl up in bed with. “My method was always the same. Two bullets straight to the victim’s chest,” explains Cláudio Guerra, recalling his days as a henchman for the Brazilian military dictatorship. Chilly and confessional, it’s also hard to put down. “Most of the time, I never even knew the reason for the mission, nor even the victim’s name.”

Guerra’s story, released last week by Topbooks, is rolled out in 200 pages of spare Portuguese, with another 83 pages of footnotes, as told to veteran journalists Marcelo Netto and Rogério Medeiros. With its jumpy storyline and cumbersome annotations, which cover nearly two decades of crimes and conspiracies in the 1970s and ’80s, the tale is sometimes hard to follow. But the jolting revelations told in unadorned prose (“I helped throw bodies off the cliff … ”) make this book a hauntingly compelling read.

From the 1985 Oscar-winning Argentine film The Official Story, about the children of the disappeared, to Chile’s new Memory Museum, Latin Americans have been busy exorcizing the demons of their darkest hours. But Memories of a Dirty War adds to the genre with what may be the most candid confessional yet from inside the killing machine.

Brazil: Rio shuts makeshift police-run jails

Taylor Barnes – Global Post, 05/14/2012

On a dank commercial street in this working-class suburb of Rio de Janeiro, women and babies line up with tupperwares of beans and grocery bags with crackers in front of what used to be a horse stable. Hundreds of men accused of drug trafficking, murder, robbery, sexual assault or paramilitary activity are waiting for them inside.

It’s as routine as it is illegal: These ad hoc police-run jails were never meant to exist.

With official prisons overflowing, police across Brazil for decades have turned to whatever structure they could find — in some cases old buses and shipping containers — to house their detainees. But what was meant to be a temporary holding pen became years-long imprisonment for suspects waiting for a trial.

These jails operate with no budget or administration. Detainees’ family members bring them food and other necessities. Some privileged prisoners are chosen to run the jail under the watch of a few policemen. Corruption has flourished.

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Brazil shelves plans to build new nuclear plants

AFP, 05/09/2012

Brazil said Wednesday it has shelved plans to build new nuclear power stations in the coming years in the wake of last year’s Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The previous government led by former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had planned to construct between four and eight new nuclear plants through 2030.

But the energy ministry’s executive secretary, Marcio Zimmermann, was quoted as telling a forum Tuesday that there was no need for new nuclear facilities for the next 10 years.

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