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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
“There’s an unwritten understanding amongst Foreign Correspondents that the U.S. wants PSDB in power.” – Foreign Correspondent, São Paulo, 22/6/2013 Originally published March 2015. As we discussed in the article ‘Brasil’s Citizen Kanes’ the mainstream press in the country has a long tradition of antidemocratic bias. In 1989, as documented in the British film “Beyond […]
Losing elections isn’t easy, and Brasil’s anti-communist paranoia is almost as old as communism itself, but in 2014, the decades-old fantasy of a Marxist takeover of the country is being amplified by a small fringe of Brasil’s right. They have their mentor in astrologer & ultra-conservative philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, who is based in Richmond, Virginia. Their principal bogeymen are Foro do […]
Dilma Rousseff won in the closest and most turbulent Presidential Election since 1989 because the people get to vote, not the markets. The majority of these are people whose quality of life has improved over the last 12 years and who simply trust the party which delivered that improvement to continue their work – no […]
With election campaigning entering its critical phase you could be forgiven for thinking that Brasil was in the throes of economic meltdown, with foreign reports adding a thin sprinkling of credence to such claims & perception. But by global, or even by Brazilian standards, is it remotely fair to call the current state of the […]