Olympic host Brazil dominates list of world’s 50 most dangerous cities

Tim Johnson – McClatchyDC, 1/20/2015

Forty-three of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world are in Latin America, according to a survey released Tuesday, including 19 in Brazil, which will host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

Mexico City didn’t make the list, and Ciudad Juárez, the border city with Texas that was once the world’s murder capital, fell this year to No. 27. But the fallen Mexican resort of Acapulco was No. 3, behind San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and Caracas, Venezuela.

This is the seventh year that the Citizen Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, a Mexico City advocacy, has compiled the list, based on official murder rates per 100,000 residents of cities with more than 300,000 people.

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Big international drug ring dismantled in Brazil

EFE – Fox News Latino, 11/04/2014

Brazil’s Federal Police, in collaboration with security forces of Honduras, Colombia and the United States, dismantled Tuesday an international drug-trafficking and money-laundering ring operating out of Brazil, Venezuela and Honduras, officials said.

The organization was based in Sinop, a municipality in the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, where most of the 24 arrest warrants and 25 search-and-capture orders were served, all handed down by the judge investigating the case. The police operation also extended to another three Brazilian states: Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Amazonas.

The police, who began investigating the organization in 2011, estimate that close to a ton of cocaine was shipped every month from the Venezuelan region of Apure, on the Colombian border and dominated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to Honduras for the purpose of supplying the Mexican drug cartels.

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An American in Brazil

Julia Sweig-The New York Times, 03/02/10

In her campaign for the presidency, Hilary Rodham Clinton barely uttered the word Brazil. But as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton has recognized Brazil as the most powerful country in South America and a rising global power. Her current visit may reflect a political will to make the relationship with Brazil a strategic priority for American foreign policy.

Mrs. Clinton understands that the United States must adapt to a multipolar world, working with powers such as China, Russia and India. Yet in 2009 U.S. diplomacy with Brazil fell victim to disputes over Honduras, military bases in Colombia, domestic politics and tensions over Iran.

With such a late start, urgency seems to permeate the visit. The United States is losing ground as Latin America creates yet another regional organization that excludes it. Likewise, Brazil’s attention will soon turn inward as its presidential campaign kicks in.

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Lula is no longer ‘the man’

O Estado de São Paulo, 12/20/2009 (summary from Portuguese)

Brazil has fallen out of grace with Washington. The enthusiasm shown in April by President Barack Obama – “this is the man” he said of his Brazilian counterpart- seems to have withered. After several clashes, the visit of the U.S. president to Brasilia in 2010 is uncertain.

Disagreements over the election in Honduras and Brazil’s support of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, went well beyond the normal differences between governments.

The malaise has infected the press and arrived in the U.S. Congress, where Sen. Frank Lautenberg suspended the vote of the beneficial measure for Brazilian exporters. According to a Lautenberg spokesperson, the senator’s action came as a response to the Brazil’s Supreme Court decision against the immediate return of the boy Sean Goldman to his father, David Goldman.

Lula’s support of Ahmadinejad, when even China and Russia condemned the Iranian nuclear program, was seen as a disastrous move in the U.S. media. In this context, a Washington Post editorial said the West was right in not offering Brazil a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Lula was also criticized in the American press for dabbling in Central American politics without knowing enough about the region. His intervention in Honduras was seen as an obstacle to the solution of the crisis – an error compounded by the insistence of not recognizing the legitimacy of the elections.

According to Moisés Naim, editor of the magazine Foreign Policy, “Brazil behaves like an immature and resentful developing country.”

In a short time Lula poisoned, without any political or economic gain for Brazil, the goodwill that existed during the Republican administration and maintained in beginning of Barack Obama’s term. To have global influence, the Washington Post commented, Brazil would have to leave the Third Worldism of its foreign policy. Not likely to happen with Brazil’s Foreign Ministry under the control of the current ideological policymakers.

To read the full article (in Portuguese), click here.

Brazil, U.S., OAS flunked Honduras test

Andres Oppenheimer-Miami Herald, 12/03/09

The gold medal for political hypocrisy should go to Brazil. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is leading the group of nations that is not recognizing the results of the Honduran elections won by leftist-turned-conservative businessman Porfirio Lobo. Lula da Silva says, rightly, that recognizing Lobo’s election would set a bad precedent for Latin America because it would legitimize an election convened by a non-democratic government.

The trouble with that argument is that most of today’s democracies in Latin America were born out of elections called by coup-originated governments, starting with the 1989 victory of late Chilean President Patricio Aylwin in national elections organized by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Also, the recent Honduran elections were not a concoction of outgoing President Roberto Micheletti’s de facto regime, but had been scheduled before the coup.

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U.S. Faces Rising Resistance to Its Latin American Policy

José De Córdoba and David Lunhow-‘The Wall Street Journal, 12/02/09

The U.S., which once considered Latin America its own backyard, is having an increasingly tough time calling the shots in a region where countries like Brazil and China are vying for influence, and where even tiny Honduras stands up to the “Colossus to the North.”

While the U.S. remains the dominant player in Latin America, its clout is curtailed by several factors, including Brazil’s rise as a regional power, the influence of a clique of anti-American nations led by oil-rich Venezuela, and the growing muscle of China, which sees Latin American resources as key to its own economic growth.

The Obama administration, though popular in much of the region, has found itself squabbling over a host of issues, from Cuba to the U.S. military’s use of bases in Colombia to how best to resolve the Honduran crisis.

Honduras stood firm on the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya. The U.S. and other foreign governments pressured the interim government to let Mr. Zelaya serve out his term, which ends in January. But the provisional government hung on long enough to hold Sunday’s presidential election without reinstating Mr. Zelaya.

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United States, Brazil at odds over Honduras crisis

Mica Rosenberg and Gustavo Palencia-Reuters, 11/30/09

Honduras’ disputed presidential election is likely to set Washington against emerging Latin American power Brazil over whether to recognize the winner of a vote promoted by the leaders of a June coup.

Conservative opposition leader Porfirio Lobo easily won the election on Sunday, but he will struggle to get recognition in Latin America where many leftist governments see the election as a nail in the coffin of ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

The United States has tried and failed to have Zelaya, a leftist, reinstated and now looks resigned to backing the election as the best way for Honduras’ to get out of political gridlock and diplomatic isolation.

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Honduras lodges lawsuit against Brazil at U.N. court

Reuters, 10/29/09

Honduras has lodged legal proceedings against Brazil at the International Court of Justice in The Hague over Brazil allowing ousted President Manuel Zelaya to take refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

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Sleepless nights holed up in Brazilian Embassy

Esteban Felix-The Associated Press, 10/27/09

Nearly a month has passed since I slept in the dark.

All night long, floodlights shine on the Brazilian Embassy where I have been holed up with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya since he slipped back into the country.

When I do manage to sleep, I’m awakened by high-pitched cat calls from the soldiers ringing the compound, and music so loud the windows vibrate.

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Brazil and USA have their hands tied in Honduras by Paulo Sotero

On October 16th, 2009 the Brazil Institute’s director, Paulo Sotero, wrote an op-ed in the Estado de São Paulo on the situation in Honduras.

Op-ed by Brazilian journalist Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, says that Brazil and the United States not only have been incapable of finding a solution to the crisis in Honduras, but are also beginning to see their bilateral relations hurt by the impasse. He states that in the U.S., the crisis has been an excuse for Republicans to undermine the Obama’s administration’s foreign policy. Sotero goes on to say that the bilateral relationship will remain at a standstill until Thomas Shannon and Arturo Valenzuela are confirmed. He ends the article saying that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Brazil gives Lula an opportunity to play a positive role on the global stage of nuclear non-proliferation. However Sotero warns that Lula also risks playing into Ahmadinejad’s hands as he did with President Hugo Chavez in the case of Honduras.

Read more here