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.
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 […]
Video: Artist demonstrators adapted Orff’s Carmina Burana to the slogan “Temer Out” at their occupation of the Ministry of Culture building in Rio de Janeiro. Michel Temer has been acting President of Brasil for two months, despite the election fraud conviction which bans him from running for public office for 8 years. Swept to power by a […]
On Friday, June 10th, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians came to the streets in dozens of cities in 17 states across the country to protest the Soft Coup against democratically elected president Dilma Rousseff. In São Paulo, where an estimated 100,000 gathered on the coldest day of the year chanting “Fora Temer” (Out Temer) the […]
As the Economist and the Washington Post cheer-lead for a PMDB takeover of the Brazilian government, it is worth looking at how PMDB mayor Eduardo Paes managed World Cup and Olympic preparation in Rio de Janeiro. PMDB, the direct descendent of the military dictatorship era MDB party, is the largest political party in Brazil. A […]
During 2012-2013 Brian Mier conducted a study of changes in Rio de Janeiro’s municipal laws related to the World Cup and Olympics. The study was commissioned by the Ford Foundation and overseen by land-rights lawyer Cristiano Muller and the Brazilian NGO Centro para Direitos Economicas e Sociais (CDES). Entitled, Os Megaeventos esportivos na cidade do […]
As thousands of foreign media personnel parachute into Rio de Janeiro in the lead up to the upcoming Olympics, be prepared for an onslaught of what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as mind stopping cliches about Brasil and Rio de Janeiro. In many ways we can treat this as round two of the foreign media frenzy […]