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.
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 […]
Original version of article at COHA. Reproduced with permission. This interview was originally conducted in Portuguese, and translated by the author. Erminia Maricato is one of Brazil’s most renowned urban planners. In addition to having published 11 books and contributed nearly 40 book chapters, her lectures, often in public forums and protests, regularly draw large […]
Originally written for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs’ Brazil Unit This interview was originally made in Portuguese, and translated by the author. To download a PDF version of this article, click here. On March 15, an estimated one million Brazilians took to the streets in cities across the country to protest unelected president Michel Temer’s proposed […]
On January 6, 2017, the traditional Folia dos Reis festival was declared historic cultural patrimony by the Minas Gerais state government. According to their research, the city with the most number of Folia dos Reis is Uberaba, with 106 separate annual festivals. Folia dos Reis is an ostensibly Catholic festival that celebrates the Three Kings, […]
Now that the disastrous election of Donald Trump has turned the United States into a land of chaos, anglophone journalists are comparing him to leftist Latin American leaders. In most cases, the comparisons are an insult to anyone who has rudimentary knowledge of Latin America. In Bloomberg, Mac Margolis uses what he sees as “identical […]
One day in 1993 I met a group of Brazilian military officers in São Luis airport. We flew off the island by small plane to the Alcântara Launch Center, the main spaceport for Brazil’s space program, where I was to spend two days a week for a year teaching English to […]
What we know, what we don’t, and what we can deduce about the role of geopolitics & hegemony in the Soft Coup which removed President Dilma Rousseff and her Government. By Brian Mier During a recent visit to Porto Alegre, Cuban professor and writer Raúl Antonio Capote Fernández talked about a 20 year recruitment process […]
Brasil has had some of the world’s most progressive city governments over the past 3 decades. For all the news on corruption spread by the international media leading up to last years’ coup, one wouldn’t imagine that some things that are standard practice in American cities like Chicago, such as no-bid contracts and lack of […]
On October 10, non-elected Brazilian president and former military dictatorship official Michel Temer held a $30,000, publicly funded banquet for his allies in the lower house. The event commemorated the launching of a constitutional amendment called PEC 241- referred to as the “End of the World Amendment” by its critics- an enforced Austerity plan which […]