Frei Betto, 70, a Dominican Friar and author of 52 books, is one of the central figures in the Brazilian liberation theology movement. Tortured and imprisoned for four years during the military dictatorship, he went on to play a key role in the formation of the CUT labor union federation, the Central de Movimentos Populares […]
During the approach to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s re-scheduled visit to the United States there has been much talk about what Brasil can do to improve relations between two of the Western Hemisphere’s largest countries. The majority of reporting focuses on Brazilian failures but most of the problem lies in Washington. Decades of weak engagement by […]
The United States engagement with its Latin American neighbours over the past century has been a catalogue of failure, culminating in China filling the vacuum. After initial support in the 19th Century for Latin America’s independence from former European colonial powers, known as the Monroe Doctrine, the United States rapidly moved from defender of post colonial freedom to […]
“Latin America” is not a country. It is a vast region of the Earth with parallel indigenous & colonial histories, independence struggles, mostly common language, but with very distinct national identities, often lost on outsiders. Through language and some peculiar historical twists of fate, Brasil is yet more distinct still. It is an enormous, continent-sized federation of […]
Written by Jake Johnston. Original version published at The Americas Blog by CEPR. Republished with permission. On Sunday, October 4, 1998, as international bankers, investors, finance ministers and officials from the leading multilateral development banks met in Washington for the annual World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, many eyes were looking south, to Brazil. […]
Manipulation of event & protest attendance is of course commonplace the world over, with enormous manifestations against the Iraq invasion being a high-profile example of disparity between Media, Police & Organiser estimates. But in recent times Brasil, & specifically the Military Police of São Paulo have taken this practice to a bizarre and implausible extreme. […]
The Economist holds an unusual position in the Brazilian media landscape, it is frequently featured on front pages of major conservative dailies and has a formal partnership with lone-voice centre-left weekly Carta Capital for reprints in Portuguese. It is hard to imagine the New York Times or Guardian paying the slightest bit of attention to Brazilian equivalent, […]
You might have seen this odd map popping up in your timelines over the past few weeks, a map purporting to reveal the principal interests of each country, based on “Google data”. On this map “prostitute” leads the ranking in Brazil. Like many curious maps, it went viral & in multiple languages. Originally, it was produced by […]
On April 29 2015, the Military Police of Paraná attacked thousands of striking teachers in Curitiba with tear gas, pepper spray, dogs, and rubber bullets. Hundreds were wounded, and the governor has attempted to divert responsibility by blaming shadowy infiltrated anarchist “agitators.” This is the story behind the carnage, from a Paraná university professor who […]
The legacy of colonialism is no more apparent than in the asymmetry between attitudes to sovereignty in the developing world and the developed. It would certainly be difficult to imagine a Brazilian Minister taking the international stage to propose the privatisation of the British Lake District, but this is analogous to what David Miliband put forward in […]