Writer, geographer and former development professional who has lived in Brazil for 26 years. Former directorate member of the Fórum Nacional de Reforma Urbana (National Urban Reform Forum). Has lived in São Luis, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Author of “Os Megaeventos Esportivos na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro e o Direito á Cidade” (CEPR: Porto Alegre. 2016). Editor of "Voices of the Brazilian Left" (Sumare: São Paulo. 2018). Editor of "Year of Lead: Washington, Wall Street and the New Imperialism in Brazil" ((Sumare: São Paulo. 2019) Irregular correspondent for the Chicago radio show This is Hell.
Djamila Ribeiro, 37, is currently one of the most popular writers and public figures in the Afro-Brazilian woman’s rights movement. She was born into a working class family in the gritty port city of Santos to communist parents. Her father was active in the local longshoreman’s union and used to take her to the Soviet […]
Carlos Latuff is one of the World’s most famous political cartoonists. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1968, he published his first political cartoon in a Longshoremen’s Union newspaper in 1989 and continues drawing cartoons for unions to this day. As the internet gained force during the 1990s, he began drawing cartoons in solidarity with […]
It is increasingly apparent that the Brazilian economy was deliberately destabilized to lay the groundwork for the 2016 soft coup that removed former President Dilma Rousseff from office. This does not represent anything new for Latin America; creating the conditions for a successful coup typically takes several years and economic destabilization is normally part of […]
By Brasil Wire Contributing Editor Brian Mier. During the 1960s, legend has it that governor José Sarney sat down at a table with a group of cattle-ranching cronies and aerial photographs of Maranhão state, in Northeastern Brazil. They marked boundaries on the photos with pencil and divided up the […]
By Brian Mier. The political situation in Brazil is getting confusing, even for people who study it. To summarise recent events, in April the organized left held the largest general strike in Latin America this Century, demanding for a halt to the austerity reforms and for illegitimate president Michel Temer’s immediate resignation. On May 24, […]
After giving former Congressional President Eduardo Cunha months of advance warning which enabled him to hide millions of dollars of bribe money before his arrest in 2016, and repeatedly refusing to admit evidence that would enable him to arrest PSDB party leader Aécio Neves and illegitimate president Michel Temer, Sergio Moro, acting as both prosecutor […]
During illegitimate, corrupt president Michel Temer’s attempt to implement an unnecessary extreme austerity regime that plunged millions of people below the poverty line and caused the UN to warn that Brazil may return to the World Hunger map, one of the most under-covered stories is the organized left’s efforts to resist the state of exception. […]
by Brian Mier. On the night of May 23, I joined a group of activists from the Central de Movimentos Populares (CMP) social movement for the 16 hour bus ride from São Paulo to Brasilia. The trip was coordinated as a bus caravan and as we stopped for dinner along the way it became apparent […]
Luiz Gonzaga Gegê da Silva is a historic figure on the Brazilian left. A member of the MR-8 resistance movement during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, he spent time behind bars as a political prisoner and later became a founding member of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), running for national party […]
By Brian Mier. During my 22 years in Brazil I’ve gotten used to gringos moving down here who, before taking the time to understand how things work, begin immediately bad mouthing the entire country based on local observations about the neighborhood or city they live in, which is usually somewhere in Rio de Janeiro’s South […]