During a year in which the Brazilian Military Police claimed that the São Paulo gay parade somehow shrunk from its regular crowd of 2.5 million people to 20,000 with no discernible difference in size it’s hard to treat crowd estimates seriously, especially coming from traditional anti-PT media oligarchies who own Veja Magazine, O Globo and […]
A toxic rag with an agenda that goes far beyond journalism. – Jon Lee Anderson, veteran reporter at the New Yorker. Last week football legend turned senator Romário Faria made a special announcement to his 2 million Facebook followers. “On Thursday I found out from a Veja magazine story that I have millions of Reais in […]
Written exclusively for Brasil Wire by Marie Declercq. The experience of being a woman in Brasil often seems to be limited to a part in the cliche that it is the country of beautiful beaches, football and women. Although this is often used as a form of praise, it also restricts woman’s role to the […]
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 Olympics are arriving in a year and it is only a matter of time before thousands of journalists parachute into Rio as they did last year during the months before the World Cup. Rio de Janeiro is unquestionably one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It is a magnet for foreign journalists and tourists […]
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, […]
Successive demonstrations in its most important cities, brawls between militants of opposing ideological sides who see the other as an enemy rather than a political adversary, growing numbers of strikes, verbal and written attacks in the media, rising polarization in Congress. A good description of what has been taken place in the country of the […]