In 2016, with Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment underway, a rumour spread that actor Wagner Moura, regular collaborator with director Jose Padilha, had refused the role of Lava Jato Prosecuting Judge and self-styled national saviour, Sérgio Moro, in a new drama series. He had just completed a second season portraying Pablo Escobar in Narcos, also directed by Padilha, and also for […]
One day in 1993 I met a group of Brazilian military officers in São Luis airport. We flew off the island by small plane to the Alcântara Launch Center, the main spaceport for Brazil’s space program, where I was to spend two days a week for a year teaching English to […]
FASE – one of Brazil’s oldest and most respective Non-Governmental Organisations, have published this bulletin on the current situation in the country. Although Michel Temer’s government has brandished the old, worn out motto “Order and Progress,” day by day the country is undergoing a paradoxical combination of escalating repression against social movements with the mere […]
The first piece translated & published in partnership with Outras Palavras explores the disturbing circumstances around the plane crash which killed 5 people, including the Supreme Court’s rapporteur to anti-corruption operation Lava Jato (Car Wash), Judge Teori Zavascki. A tracked aircraft, a busy hangar, eyewitness reports, a controversial rescue and threats. Facts flood the internet, but old media abandons […]
In January 2017 Brazil’s Prosecutor General Rodrigo Janot made an unprecedented trip to Davos for the World Economic Forum, during which he addressed assembled billionaires about the strides his country was making in combatting corruption. The nature and purpose of his trip raised eyebrows. Federal deputy Paulo Pimenta (PT-RS) remarked: “I did not find any legal provisions […]
Christina Rickardsson, 33, is a successful Swedish businesswoman who spent the first years of her life as Christiana Mara Coelho , one of tens of thousands of homeless children who did what they could to survive on the rough streets of Brazilian cities during the crisis years of the 1980s and 1990s. After winding up […]
What we know, what we don’t, and what we can deduce about the role of geopolitics & hegemony in the Soft Coup which removed President Dilma Rousseff and her Government. By Brian Mier During a recent visit to Porto Alegre, Cuban professor and writer Raúl Antonio Capote Fernández talked about a 20 year recruitment process […]
Brasil has had some of the world’s most progressive city governments over the past 3 decades. For all the news on corruption spread by the international media leading up to last years’ coup, one wouldn’t imagine that some things that are standard practice in American cities like Chicago, such as no-bid contracts and lack of […]
I touted this idea four years ago when we watched Obama’s second inauguration and noticed that Latin America was completely absent from any major initiative. Now, more than ever, the idea starts to gather gravity. Brazil and the US are becoming more alike, at an accelerated pace. After suffering at length with the slow and […]
In October São Paulo voters went to the polls and threw out one of the World’s most progressive big city governments in favor of João Doria, from the conservative PSDB party. Doria, the former star of the Brazilian franchise of Donald Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice, campaigned on the vague promises of “cleaning up the […]