Brasil’s right-wing march under a banner of anti-corruption but the protests of the past weekend illustrated what is actually a fresh manifestation of Brasil’s ongoing class conflict, with an undercurrent of racial tension and a dash of anti-communist hysteria. The Petrobras scandal is a primary concern of many Brazilians today, across the political spectrum, but nebulous […]
“There’s an unwritten understanding amongst Foreign Correspondents that the U.S. wants PSDB in power.” – Foreign Correspondent, São Paulo, 22/6/2013 Originally published March 2015. As we discussed in the article ‘Brasil’s Citizen Kanes’ the mainstream press in the country has a long tradition of antidemocratic bias. In 1989, as documented in the British film “Beyond […]
For those outside Brazil, it went probably unnoticed the flood of messages on Twitter last Sunday night with the hashtag #vaiadilma (Boo Dilma in English). Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff (PT, Workers Party) went to national television on Sunday (8) for a 15-minutes pronouncement, where she asked Brazilians for patience with the austerity measures adopted by the […]
A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn, since there is invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas. – Eli Pariser, author of ‘The Filter Bubble’. There is a growing democratic unease worldwide, acute in Brasil, one of the developing nations with highest saturation of social media, about how […]
Operation Car Wash, the investigation into the misuse of funds within Brazil’s partially state-owned oil company Petrobras, is little over a year old – but it has already taken as many twists and turns as a Brazilian telenovela. Federal judge, Sergio Moro, and federal prosecutors are investigating a complicated scheme in which construction companies allegedly bribed Petrobras […]
This article was originally published in Portuguese on the blog of veteran Brazilian journalist Mauro Santayana 01.31.2015. Brasil Wire have chosen to translate and republish the article to add some factual and historical context to the current debate regarding the Brazilian economy in 2015. All views expressed are those of Mauro Santayana For several months, and especially during […]
In 1992, England’s biggest clubs broke away from the Football League to create their own top-flight division. These clubs realised that with their huge popularity and importance to their respective communities, they were the ones in control and no longer had to defer to a league that did not serve their interests. The result, the […]
Brasil today sits at a rare turning point for any country. Despite the furore surrounding the Petrobras scandal and the water crisis in São Paulo there are far more pressing issues that underpin whether Brasil can make the very difficult jump from middle income to rich, emerging to developed country, in the near future. Brasil […]
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Brazil’s political crisis, which starts in our flawed party financing system and ends on the streets with people that don’t feel represented by politicians, is like an airplane crash; there isn’t just one element that explains it all. Those that try to make it that simple are either misinformed or biased. There are many fans […]