Brazil’s Embraer eyes bigger defense role

Laura Bonilla – AFP/Defense News, 04/14/2013

Embraer, the world’s third largest commercial aircraft maker, wants to boost its presence in the lucrative defense sector, with strong support from Brazil’s government.

The company aims to increase its sales in the sector by 25 percent this year, Luiz Carlos Aguiar, president of Embraer’s defense and security unit, said on the sidelines of this week’s LAAD Defense and Security expo here.

Between 2006 and 2012, Embraer’s defense activities expanded by an average of 29 percent annually to represent 17 percent of total sales, up from six percent.

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Two football fans shot dead before 2014 World Cup test event at stadium in Brazil

Talez Azzoni – AP/Daily Mail, 04/15/2013

Two fans were shot to death on their way to a test event at a World Cup stadium in north-eastern Brazil on Sunday, just two months before the venue hosts matches in the Confederations Cup.

The fans were killed about three miles from the Arena Castelao in the city of Fortaleza, one of the six venues hosting matches in the Confederations Cup in June and one of the 12 getting ready for next year’s World Cup.

‘We lament what happened,’ said Tiago Paes, a local World Cup organising committee member who was at the test event in Fortaleza. ‘But there is work being done by the police and the army in many areas of security, so we are not concerned with that for the Confederations Cup.’

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Brazil safety concerns rise after arrest of police officers and gang rape on bus

Jonathan Watts – The Guardian, 04/02/2013

Brazil‘s efforts to improve public safety ahead of the football World Cup and the Olympics have taken two high-profile hits in recent days with the arrests of eight police officers in São Paulo and news of the rape and robbery of tourists in Rio de Janeiro.

The officers were arrested after a television broadcast showed two teenagers being shot dead on 16 March in the Bras neighbourhood of São Paulo, while the occupants of a nearby patrol car did nothing to help.

One of the victims – a 14 year old known as Piui who collected paper and cardboard from the streets – was shot six times. The other victim, whose name has not been disclosed, was shot 12 times.

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Trial starts for killing of Brazil activists

Al Jazeera/Agencies, 04/03/2013

Jose Claudio da Silva and his wife Maria do Espirito Santo had for years campaigned against loggers and ranchers who force slave labour to clear-cut large swaths of the Amazon.

The couple were killed in a May 2011 ambush near the Amazonian town of Maraba.

Antonio Filho, a member of Brazil’s Catholic Church-affiliated Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) who is monitoring the trial, said Wednesday’s trial would last until the following day.

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Embraer signs lease on Super Tucano facility in Jacksonville

Daniel McCoy – Wichita Business Journal, 03/18/2013

Embraer has signed a 10-year lease on a 40,000-square-foot hangar in Jacksonville, Fla., where it will assemble A-29 Super Tucano aircraft built under the U.S. Air Force’s Light Air Support contract.

Brazil-based Embraer and its U.S. partner, Sierra Nevada Corp., beat out Wichita’s Beechcraft Corp. for a second time on the controversial contract last month. It’s initially for delivery of 20 planes to be used by the Afghan military and worth $427.5 million.

The contract continues to be controversial as the Pentagon has overridden a protest of the award by Beechcraft, thereby allowing Embraer to move forward on the program.

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An ugly truth in the war on drugs

Fernando Henrique Cardoso , Ruth Dreifuss – The New York Times, 03/10/2013

This week, representatives from many nations will gather at the annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna to determine the appropriate course of the international response to illicit drugs. Delegates will debate multiple resolutions while ignoring a truth that goes to the core of current drug policy: human rights abuses in the war on drugs are widespread and systematic.

Consider these numbers: Hundreds of thousands of people locked in detention centers and subject to violent punishments. Millions imprisoned. Hundreds hanged, shot or beheaded. Tens of thousands killed by government forces and non-state actors. Thousands beaten and abused to extract information, and abused in government or private “treatment” centers. Millions denied life-saving medicines. These are alarming figures, but campaigns to address them have been slow and drug control has received little attention from the mainstream human rights movement.

This is a perfect storm for people who use drugs, especially those experiencing dependency, and those involved in the drug trade, whether growers, couriers or sellers. When people are dehumanized we know from experience that abuses against them are more likely. We know also that those abuses are less likely to be addressed because fewer people care.

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Murders of Rural Activists up 10 Percent in Brazil

Associated Press, 03/04/2013

A land rights watchdog group says the number of rural activists killed in the country rose 10 percent from 2011 to 2012, with most deaths occurring in the Amazon forest region.

The Catholic Land Pastoral group said in a report Monday that illegal logging and the resulting conflicts were responsible for the majority of the 32 murders of local activists in Brazil last year.

November saw the greatest number of killings. There were six deaths in Para state and seven in Rondonia state. Both are at the center of disputes involving illegal loggers.

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Ocupação no Rio foi considerada a mais tranquila nos quatro anos de UPPs

Diana Brito & Marco Antonio Martins – Folha de São Paulo, 03/04/2013

Em 25 minutos e sem tiros, cerca de 1.500 policiais e 200 fuzileiros navais em 17 blindados da Marinha ocuparam, por volta das 5h de ontem, o complexo de 13 favelas do Caju (na região portuária) e a Barreira do Vasco (na zona norte), abrindo caminho para a instalação de duas novas UPPs (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora) –a 31ª e a 32ª.

Moradores de favela ocupada no Rio pedem limpeza, escola e calçamento
Prefeitura do Rio fará operação de choque de ordem no Caju
No Rio, UPPs dão sinais de crise com a falta de segurança
Alemão e Penha ainda têm problemas, mas já melhoraram muito, diz Beltrame

A ocupação foi considerada pelos policiais a mais tranquila nos quatro anos de programa das UPPs, num momento em que o Estado encara problemas de corrupção e a volta de traficantes em favelas onde já há unidades.

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Brazil’s Lightning Operation takes Rio shantytowns to ensure Olympic travel route

Fox News Latino, 03/04/2013

A lightning operation conducted without incident by Brazilian security forces  early Sunday morning allowed authorities to regain control of two “favelas,” or  shantytowns, in a strategic part of Rio de Janeiro forming part of the roadway  corridor for the 2016 Olympic Games.

The Complejo do Caju and Barreira do Vasco favela districts, which for  decades had been controlled by drug traffickers, were taken over in half an hour  by some 1,500 members of the security forces, mainly the Bope special operations  battalion and the Shock Battalion of the Military Police, backed up by the local  Civil Police and some 200 navy riflemen.

The riflemen, transported on navy armored vehicles, removed the barricades  and other obstacles that drug traffickers had left along stretches of roadway to  make police access more difficult.

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The local journalists under threat in Brazil

Gabriel Elizondo – Al Jazeera, 02/25/2013

A few months ago I got a call from a researcher at a journalism rights group who wanted to know my views on the dangers journalists face working in Brazil.

From my standpoint, it was a pretty simple answer. I told the researcher that, in my opinion, the journalists in most danger in Brazil all fit the same general profile: radio, print, bloggers, working in small- medium-sized towns, usually located in the north or northeast of the country, and who report on local corruption.

This past Friday it happened, again.

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