Although squatters are frequently treated as criminals in the national and international media, according to article 5 of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, any citizen who does not own property has the right to occupy any abandoned tax-scofflaw building and pressure the government to convert it to ownership-based social housing. In São Paulo, a dozen buildings […]
According to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, land banking is a crime. Unlike in, for example, the United States, it is illegal for a landlord to hold a building empty for years, without paying real estate taxes or maintaining the property, waiting for real estate values to rise so that he can flip it. If […]
During the lead up to the 2016 Coup, a series of alarmist articles in the Brazilian and international media warned of Brazil’s spiraling public debt. In January, 2016, for example, the Economist wrote, “public debt is worryingly large for a middle-income country and rising fast. Because of high interest rates, the cost of servicing it is […]
April 30, 2018. Hundreds of buses have already arrived in Curitiba and hundreds more are traveling in caravans on route to this Southern Brazilian city of 3 million, where ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been held as a political prisoner for three weeks, for what promises to be the largest May Day protest […]
In the early hours of Saturday Morning, April 28th, as hundreds of protesters were sleeping in their tents at the Lula Livre Democratic Vigil outside the Parana Federal Police headquarters where Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is being held in solitary confinement, gunmen opened fire injuring two activists, one critically. As in the case of […]
By Cynara Menezes. The media repeat that Lula is not a political prisoner. Nevertheless, like all political prisoners, he is being barred from receiving visitors in jail. A judge from Curitiba is behaving as if she has superpowers and controlling who can and can not visit the ex-President of Brazil, an international personality with friends […]
When Rio City Councilwoman Marielle Franco was assassinated on March 14, much of the international coverage omitted the fact that she was a socialist and the most prominent critic of Rio de Janeiro’s federal military occupation. In this article from the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) Manchêtometro project, which quantifies bias in media coverage, […]
On the morning of Wednesday, April 18, PT (Workers Party) President Gleisi Hoffman conducted a series of interviews with foreign television networks about the political imprisonment of ex-President Lula, the leading presidential candidate for 2018, who is serving a 12 year prison sentence based on charges that he received illegal reforms on an apartment, after […]
By Gabriel Deslandes. The successive institutional crises of Brazil, along with the social chaos provoked by the economic crisis, installed a climate of an apparently unforseen collective mistrust which all conventional politicians seem to be engulfed in. Globo, whose responsibility in this was central, couldn’t be out of this conjuncture. The network, who never inspired […]
By Gabriel Deslandes. When the Worker’s Party PT saw itself being pressured like never before by the media coverage of the “mensalão” scandal, its’ leaders probably did not imagine that years later, an investigation of illegal currency exchange operations and capital flight by the Federal Police would end up influencing a campaign of public demoralization […]