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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How Brazil is making an example of Chevron

Paul M. Barrett, Peter Millard – Bloomberg Businessweek, 05/10/2012

Last Nov. 7 something went wrong at a deep-sea oil well operated by Chevron (CVX) 230 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro. As a massive drill bit punctured reservoir N560, roughly 3,500 feet beneath the ocean floor, monitors revealed pressure much higher than technicians expected. The next day a routine flyover of the field, called Frade, in the Campos Basin, revealed oil on the water’s surface.

Chevron dispatched remote-controlled submarines, which found oil seeping through fissures on the sea floor directly above N560. The blowout preventer, a three-story-tall valve assembly, automatically cut off oil flow at the wellhead. This would not become another BP (BP)disaster, in which the blowout preventer notoriously failed. Still, George Buck, president of Chevron’s Brazil subsidiary, ordered the Frade well shut down. Chevron sent 18 vessels in rotation to contain the oil on the surface, and it readied pyramid-shaped steel caps to cover the seepage points. Workers completed the job in just four days. Buck saw the situation as under control. And technically, it was.

A petroleum engineer in his mid-forties, Buck has an MBA and has worked for Chevron for 23 years. He is 6-foot-5, slender, soft-spoken, and earnest to the point of social awkwardness. He arrived in Brazil in 2009, having worked from Alaska to Texas to Indonesia. He lives with his family in Rio’s fashionable Ipanema beach district. He is not a man about town. After three years in Brazil, he speaks little Portuguese, relying heavily on translators. Nevertheless, on the Frade spill, Buck thought he had made himself quite clear. “Chevron takes full responsibility for this incident,” he said at a press conference in Rio on Nov. 21. At a congressional hearing in Brasília two days later, he added, “Sincere apologies to the Brazilian people and the Brazilian government.”

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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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Brazil: land fights up, but fewer activists dead

AP/Fox News, 05/06/2012

Conflicts over land issues in Brazil increased last year, although the number of rural activists killed nationally went down slightly, according to a report released by a watchdog group that tallies land-related threats and murders. The report found that at least two ongoing conflicts could turn into violent conflagrations.

The Catholic Land Pastoral ‘s survey released Monday showed murders connected to land disputes fell from 34 in 2010 to 29 in 2011. Murder attempts also fell, from 55 to 38. In spite of the trend, the number of conflicts nationwide rose from 1,186 to 1,363, and the number of death threats grew from 125 to 347.

The report was released on the same day a state judge ordered two former high-ranking police officials to be jailed for their part in the worst massacre carried out during a land conflict in Brazil — an April 1996 clash that saw police open fire on some 2,000 landless peasants, killing 19 of them.

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The Brazilian challenge: how to manage asymmetrical regional relations beyond the OAS

Paulo Sotero – Revista CIDOB d’afers Internacionals, April 2012

ABSTRACT - Viewed by the Lula administration as a relic of the Cold War, the OAS was mostly viewed as an observation post. Diplomats were instructed to maintain a defensive stance and to prevent actions perceived as contrary to Brazilian interests. Indifference turned to ill-disguised anger, however, in the first months of the Dilma Rousseff administration, after the Inter-American Human rights Commission (IHRC) issued an injunction instructing Brazil to cease construction of the controversial Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant. Brazil’s reaction included the recalling of its ambassador to the OAS. This has compounded the OAS’s existential problems by making the organization’s financial position even more precarious. If it goes unresolved, however, the clash could complicate Brazil’s strategy to assert its regional and global leadership as a champion of human rights and multilateralism.

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*Article is in Spanish

Abducted Argentine girl found in Brazil

NY Daily News/IANS/EFE, 05/07/2012

A 10-year-old Argentine girl was found by Brazilian police seven years after she was kidnapped by her father, authorities said.

The discovery of the child occurred this March in the western city of Dourados, but was only reported now by the media after the authorities, having confirmed her identity, handed her over to representatives of the Argentine Embassy.

The Civil Police of Mato Grosso do Sul, a state that borders on Bolivia and Paraguay, said they found the girl thanks to an anonymous informant who said the minor was being mistreated and that her father kept her in a “private jail”.

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