13/02/2014. A curious phenomenon is occurring in Brasil. Since June last year, a considerable number of protesters who have taken to the streets against the World Cup, the government, Cuban doctors, the price of the subway / bus or to support anti-corruption protests, are not leftist students or even troublemakers; these are people who belong to the economic, […]
Brasil has a healthy and noisy media landscape; from sophisticated daily papers and weekly magazines comparable to any in Europe, right through to trashy supermarket rags like you see across the United States. But at the top level there is a deep undercurrent of conservatism that often goes unnoticed, a conservatism that pre-dates any of […]
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 […]
Dilma Rousseff is often regarded as a great unknown outside of Brasil but she has been an active force in official politics since the mid 1970s when she attended meetings organised by the only opposition party allowed by the then Military Dictatorship, the Democratic Movement Party (MDB), while studying Economics at the Federal University of […]
When, in one of its first foreign policy positions, the Brazilian government – charged, together with the US, with concluding the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) – blocked the North American project of a free trade zone, the positions of the two countries started to grow apart. Since then, the […]
By Darío Pignotti. “The United States strategists are firmly in agreement with the foreign policy guidelines advocated by candidate Marina Silva. If she is elected, it will be the victory of a diplomatic model similar to what Brazil used in the 1990s,” says Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, former Foreign Ministry secretary-general during the Luiz Inácio Lula […]
Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB formerly MDB) is Brasil’s largest political party, who control Congress & Senate and are currently in coalition with Dilma Rousseff’s PT. PMDB keep a curiously low profile, have not fielded a presidential candidate for 12 years, are absent from much public debate, unreported abroad, yet hold the vice-presidency, key ministries, and thus policy makers to […]
Emir Sader: For Edward Said, the Orient exists only in the imagination of Westerners. It was created to represent the “other” in the polarisation between “civilization” (themselves, naturally) and “barbarism” (everyone else). Today, more than ever, they have a similar impression with respect to us: it’s as if the Europeans had invented a Latin America […]