By Jan K. Black It was often said in Latin America in the early 1960s that when the United States sneezed, Latin America caught pneumonia. In fact, it was repeated year after year until the fall of 2008, when the United States caught pneumonia and Latin America sneezed. Brazil, in particular, after a short spell […]
No country’s history, society, or politics is defined merely by its (male) political leaders. During the dictatorship, millions of Brazilians resisted the military’s authority (even while millions more supported it), and support and/or opposition from various social groups ebbed and flowed throughout twenty-one years of military rule. While there is no shortage of materials on resistance […]
The partnership between Brasil Wire and LeMonde Diplomatique Brasil continues with our second shared article, by Dr. Marcio Pochmann, one of Brasil’s most important developmentalist economists. The filters that uphold Brazil’s meritocracy are expressed in social monopolies through education, recommendation networks and relationship circles. Public policies for inclusion are challenging them on several levels, revealing […]
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 […]
Brasil Wire proudly announces its new partnership with Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil. Starting today, we will periodically translate and share their articles to advance our goal of providing the best English language news and analysis on Brazil from outside the echo chamber. Today, Silvio Caccia Bava, political scientist and Editor-in-Chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil […]
Brazil currently has its most conservative Congress in decades. As violence against social movements increases and the criminalization of Brazilian social movements in the media and judiciary intensifies, it is a good time to take a closer look at who these movements are and what they are doing. How did they start, and what is […]
‘Transforming Brazil: a History of National Development in the Postwar Era’ critically revisits the context of the time in Brazil in order to reexamine traditional questions and notions pertaining to the nature of Latin America’s political culture and institutions. It was in this period that the region lived some of its most intense and successful […]
In her 1977 book “United States Penetration of Brazil“, former CIA researcher, Professor Jan K Black exposed the complex role the US had played in Brazil’s 1964 coup and its governance since. This extremely detailed forensic investigation should be a standard reference for anyone studying the 1964 coup, the dictatorship period and relations between the countries, both then, […]
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 […]
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 […]