A few days ago, in a São Paulo hotel suite, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took a pause in a daylong slew of calls with foreign leaders to give his first interview since his narrow October 30th election triumph over Brazil’s far-right incumbent President, Jair Bolsonaro. Foremost on Lula’s mind was his upcoming trip to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend the COP27 climate summit. It will be his first trip abroad as President-elect, and there was a lot to be done beforehand. Lula, who turned seventy-seven in October, looked his age, and also tired and preoccupied. The transition was getting underway, but Bolsonaro, in Trumpian fashion, had not formally conceded, making for a tense atmosphere. As Lula spoke, however, his famous high energy levels returned. Before long, he was sitting forward in his chair and grabbing me excitedly to make his points.
Tag Archives: Brazil
After Two Tense Days in Brazil, the Path Is Clearing for Lula’s Comeback
Few political encores of modern times have been as epic as that of Brazil’s maximum politician, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday last week. Just three years ago, the charismatic left-winger known universally as Lula, who served as Brazil’s President for two terms, from 2003 to 2010, was in prison, eighteen months into a twelve-year sentence on corruption charges. This past Sunday, having secured early release with a court-ordered suspension of the charges against him, Lula won Brazil’s Presidency for the third time, in a runoff vote. He did so narrowly, with 60.3 million votes to 58.2 million for his far-right rival, the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
A couple of hours after the polls closed, Lula appeared at a São Paulo hotel, where he gave a victory speech to a packed roomful of journalists and his election team. He thanked God, his wife, Janja, who was at his side, and several of his political allies for aiding him in his triumph. In a manner that felt reminiscent of Joe Biden’s conciliatory words after beating Donald Trump, in 2020, Lula alluded to Brazil’s bitter divisions by saying that he wished to be the President of “all Brazilians,” while asserting, “There aren’t two Brazils. There’s just one.” (His supporters in the room applauded, but everyone knew that it wasn’t true.)
Lula, uma ressurreição
Poucas pessoas viajaram tanto pelo mundo e viram tão pouco fora dos hotéis, palácios e escritórios como Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (77 anos, Garanhuns, Pernambuco). Ele já era o ex-presidente do Brasil quando, numa viagem oficial à Índia, não poupou nem um único momento fora da agenda oficial, nem mesmo para uma breve escapada para visitar um dos mais belos monumentos do mundo. “Nos últimos anos, Lula não tem feito nada além de política. Ele não se aproveita de nenhuma viagem para ver nada. Na Índia ele nem sequer viu o Taj Mahal. Ele ficou no hotel recebendo políticos”, revela seu biógrafo e amigo Fernando Morais, quem o acompanha há uma década.
A política é o combustível que alimenta esse homem pragmático e camaleão, que após sua queda da graça, está encenando a mais inesperada ressurreição política dos últimos tempos. Ele está agora acalentando seu terceiro mandato no comando da principal potência a América Latina, que governou entre 2003 e 2010.
Imaginar o cenário atual teria soado delirante há quatro anos, quando o líder sindical metalúrgico que fundou o Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) era praticamente um cadáver político. Preso por corrupção seis meses antes das eleições, ele não pôde sequer votar nas eleições ganhas por um político de extrema direita nostálgico da ditadura, Jair Bolsonaro, 67 anos. Lula já tinha conhecido a prisão durante o governo militar.
https://elpais.com/america/2022-10-30/lula-uma-ressurreicao.html
Brasil, ante la campaña electoral más tensa
En 1989, y luego de 29 años sin poder votar a raíz del régimen militar impuesto en 1964, los brasileños volvieron a elegir un presidente de la República.
Desde entonces fueron llevados a la presidencia por el voto popular cinco candidatos, siendo que tres de ellos – Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula da Silva y Dilma Rousseff – lograron ser reelectos.
Hubo campañas electorales tensas, pero nada comparable a la de este año, en que disputan el actual mandatario, el ultraderechista Jair Bolsonaro, y el expresidente de centroizquierda Lula da Silva.
Cuando un tema da mucho que hablar, lee todo lo que haya que decir.
https://elpais.com/opinion/2022-09-10/brasil-ante-la-campana-electoral-mas-tensa.html
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro Is Afraid of Going to Jail, and He’s Right to Be
“I’m letting the scoundrels know,” President Jair Bolsonaro told supporters last year, “I’ll never be imprisoned!”
He was shouting. But then, Mr. Bolsonaro tends to become animated when talking about the prospect of prison. “By God above,” he declared to an audience of businesspeople in May, “I’ll never be arrested.” As he spends “more than half” of his time dealing with lawsuits, he surely feels well armed against arrest. But there’s desperation in his defiance. The fate of the former Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez, who was recently sentenced to prison for allegedly orchestrating a coup, hangs heavy in the air.
For Mr. Bolsonaro, it’s a cautionary tale. Ahead of presidential elections in October, which he’s on course to lose, Mr. Bolsonaro is plainly worried he too may be arrested for, as he put it with uncharacteristic understatement, “antidemocratic actions.” That fear explains his energetic attempts to discredit the election before it happens — such as, for example, gathering dozens of foreign diplomats to fulminate against the country’s electronic voting system.
Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, Is Bringing Devastation to the World
“I’m an army captain,” Jair Bolsonaro said in 2017. “My specialty is killing.”
He has been true to his word. In just over three years in office, Mr. Bolsonaro has overseen an administration notable for its disregard for human life. There are, most immediately, the country’s 660,000 deaths from Covid-19 — the second most in the world, after the United States. Throughout the pandemic, he obstructed social distancing, sabotaged mask wearing and undermined vaccination. He maintains that he “didn’t make a single mistake during the pandemic.” So we have to assume it all went according to plan.
Then there are the guns. A series of presidential decrees loosening gun controls have opened the floodgates. Last year the federal police issued 204,300 new gun licenses, a 300 percent increase from 2018. Permits granted by the army to hunters and collectors rose 340 percent. The country, which recorded the most homicides in the world in 2021, is awash with firearms.
And then there’s the planet. Deforestation in the Amazon has reached its highest rate in 15 years, thanks in no small part to the president’s eager dismantling and defunding of environmental enforcement agencies. Not content with his efforts so far, Mr. Bolsonaro is now attempting to push through five bills that will strip away Indigenous rights, open up the Amazon to rampant profiteering and bring untold damage to the planet.
Brazil’s Pioneering Solution to Vaccine Shortages
The World Trade Organization was supposed to meet this week to consider a proposal that has been languishing for the past year: a temporary waiver of pharmaceutical intellectual property during the pandemic to allow poor countries to make many of the same tests, treatments, and vaccines that rich countries have had throughout the pandemic. Yet, in a cruel reminder of the urgency of the problem, the WTO meeting was postponed, owing to the emergence of the Omicron variant, detected by scientists in South Africa (though precisely where it originated remains unclear ).
There is near-unanimous agreement that vaccinating the entire world is the only way to end the pandemic. The higher the vaccination rate, the fewer chances the virus will have to acquire dangerous mutations. Before quickly becoming the leading global variant, Delta was first detected in India, where under 3% of the population had been vaccinated. Today, Africa has the world’s lowest vaccination rates, with only 7% of Africans having been fully vaccinated.
Covid-19 pandemic is worsening hunger in Brazil
The abandonment of policies to combat poverty is pushing Brazil on a path back to the United Nations World Food Programme’s Hunger Map. In fact, the country has already reached the food insecurity indexes that initially put it on the map, even though the UN has not yet officially done so.
The Covid-19 pandemic has already caused the loss of 7.8 million jobs and served to exacerbate an already precarious situation. According to data from the Free University of Berlin in Germany, 125.6 million Brazilians suffer from food insecurity. The number is equivalent to 59.3% of the country’s population.
“We wake up with no hope of having bread, breakfast, rice. And without knowing if we will have something to eat the next day,” says Jaqueline Félix, from São Paulo, who used to be a cleaning lady and a sales clerk but gave up looking for a job.
Bolsonaro Is Getting Desperate, and It’s Clear What He Wants
For weeks, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has been urging his supporters to take to the streets. So on Sept. 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, I was half expecting to see mobs of armed people in yellow-and-green jerseys, some of them wearing furry hats and horns, storming the Supreme Court building — our very own imitation of the Capitol riot.
Fortunately, that was not what happened. (The crowds eventually went home, and no one tried to sit in the Supreme Court justices’ chairs.) But Brazilians were not spared chaos and consternation.
‘Paradise exists!’: Sebastião Salgado’s stunning voyage into Amazônia
‘The captain of the boat would not allow us to swim in the river,” says Sebastião Salgado. “There were a lot of caiman about. They are so big in Amazônia – they’re the size of crocodiles. There are lots of constrictor snakes, too. They are not poisonous but they are huge. When one catches you, you’re finished. It will break all your bones and eat you. Then there are the piranhas.”
Salgado is not just talking to me via Zoom from Paris, where he has his studio. He is leading me on a breathless quest into Amazônia, the world’s most extensive rainforest. The photographer, clearly enjoying himself, admits that his favourite moments in life are when he’s setting out on a journey. “I am inside my transport – a plane or a boat – anything that brings me there. I am going to see something!”
We are talking about his hefty new photography book Amazônia, a stunning succession of black and white panoramas. Looking through his images, I feel the same awe I would feel in front of sublime paintings: serpentine rivers flow through seemingly limitless forests, sheer-sided rock escarpments vanish into skies, and apocalyptic clouds loom over wispy treetops. Yet Salgado does not talk about his work as art. He speaks of it as a journey, an adventure story, a history of the world.
Salgado has photographed some of the most extraordinary scenes Earth has to offer: gold miners crawling like termites up the muddy sides of a giant pit, refugees clinging to life in dusty wastelands, oil wells ablaze in the deserts of Kuwait. But exploring the Amazon region of his native Brazil, with its hard-to-navigate tributaries, was a new challenge. He almost lost an eye and now has an implant in his knee, after two accidents. And, while those dark waters in his pictures may look calm, they are not to be trusted. At one point, he hired a big riverboat capable of carrying 100 people, even though it was just for him, his team, their equipment and food supplies.
Idler on a hammock 