Beautiful Horizons

Brazil on 60 Minutes

I'm truly stunned that the most popular news magazine program in this country would actually do a segment on Latin America that doesn't involve coups, natural disasters, drugs or disease, so I'm generally pleased to see this segment on 60 Minutes focusing on Brazil:

 

I largely agree with the report regarding the infrastructure and the issue on training workers, but disagree with Eduardo Bueno, the historian/journalist/commentator, who seemed eager to generate old stereotypes about Brazil that seem more rooted in a carioca mentality, than say, one from Parana, Minas Gerais or Sao Paulo (yes, I know Bueno is from Rio Grande do Sul). There are plenty of serious, hardworking, dedictaed Brazilians. Now may very well be their time.

Bad News From Brazil

Brazil's Supreme Court has rejected attempts by the Brazilian Bar Association to modify the amnesty that would have allowed those accused of human rights abuses to be prosecuted for torture.

As the article notes, unlike Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, Brazil has done nothing to prosecute anyone in the military accused of torture during the twenty-one year dictatorship. As time rolls on it's seeming even less likely.

50 Years of Brasilia

Mr. Trend is enthusiastic about Brasilia's 50th anniversary. I, alas, am not. I find the city to be unpleasant, impersonal, even downright Stalinist in its appearance.

It's a place in my mind utterly devoid of charm and a monument to the automobile. It is also a symbol of wasteful spending. There were no roads from the coast to the construction site, so building materials were brought in by helicopter. Even Oscar Niemeyer, the architect who designed the buildings is disappointed with what it has become.

It was wastefully expensive, but I suppose it's one of those places worth visiting once in your life. I have and have little desire to repeat the experience.

Fun Things You Learn on Wikipedia

When I went to Italy a couple of years ago I was impressed that so many of the airports were named after atists, explorers and inventors: Marconi in Bologna, Verdi in Parma, da Vinci in Rome, Marco Polo in Venice, Galileo in Pisa and Vespucci in Florence.

Brazil seems to be moving in that direction, having changed the name of Rio de Janeiro's international airport to Tom Jobim International Airport, but I was especially pleased to learn that the new airport in Maceió, the capital of the Northeast state of Alagoas, is Zumbi dos Palmares International Airport. It's a belated honor for a man who played such an important and tragic role in Brazil's colonial history.

Film Review - The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

The Year My Parents Went On Vacation

Young Mauro's parents are leftists in Brazil in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1970. It was a year of lows and highs in Brazil; the principal high being Brazil's win in the World Cup, making it the first nation to win the World Cup for the third time and the principal low being the rule of Emílio Garrastazu Médici, whose leadership of the nation was without question the most brutal of the twenty-five year military dictatorship that the nation endured.

This was not a good time to be a leftist in Brazil: it was dangerous as the implementation of Institutional Act 5, which unleashed a series of brutal, repressive actions against dissent involving torture and disappearances,  was complete.  Mauro is an eleven-year-old boy whose parents decide to leave him with his paternal grandfather in Bom Retiro, a a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Sao Paulo while they flee for their lives. What they don't know is that in a tragic coincidence, his grandfather has died that same day. The community rallies around Mauro, especially Shlomo, the Polish, Orthodox Jewish immigrant who lives next door and all are enriched by the experience.

You'll be enriched by this film as well. The director, Cao Hamburger, knows the value of understatement in his actors. Michel Joelsas as Mauro gives what may be one of the best performances by a child actor since Brigitte Fossey in Forbidden Games.

Modern Day Quilombos

I truly enjoyed reading this article about legal recognition being given to the descendants of the escaped slaves who formed quilombos, the communities established by the escaped slaves based on their traditional communities in Africa, the most famous of which was Palmares in what is now part of the states of Alagoas and Pernambuco . I had no idea that legal recognition could be  granted to the quilombos, but apparently it was written into the 1988 constitution.

Much of the progress in recognizing the quilombos has come during Lula's presidency:

Since taking office in 2003, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has jump-started the quilombo movement, and upset powerful landowners, by streamlining the process for granting the settlements official recognition and land rights.

Rolf Hachbart, head of the country's land-reform agency, said that helping quilombos is one way the government is paying a historical debt for slavery. More than half of the 63 settlements with land titles nationwide received them under Lula da Silva's government.

The Brazilian government estimates that as many as two million people live in recognized and unrecognized quilombos that total about 116,000 square miles of land.

''These people came here as slaves and never had the right to land,'' Hachbart said. "They were poor and excluded, and we are trying to fix what was a historical wrong.''

Despite complaints from landowners, it is less an issue of land ownership than honoring their traditions:

Quilombo leaders said their fight wasn't just about land. Many also keep alive the traditions of their communities' founders, including growing the same foods and practicing the same religions.

''The difference between us and other communities is that people are preserving the customs of our ancestors, of the people who came in the 18th century,'' said Ananias Nery, a leader of a group of quilombos near the northeastern Brazilian town of Cachoeira.

There is no question that land reform is needed in Brazil and that it is one of the most intractable issues in the country. It's certainly encouraging to see one very small measure taking place, especially through legal means.

Some Links Worth Your Attention

Boz looks at the utter failure of Radio Marti and TV Marti, which appears to be mired in corruption, cronyism and ineffectiveness. Congressional investigations are slated for next year and they are long overdue. The criticism is bipartisan.

I'm with Marc Cooper on this. We are in the midst of a war that we apparently are neither winning nor losing, led by a president who looks more and more like Bambi in the high beams and yet Miss USA's partying habits are what's really important. God help us.

Mr. Trend reports on a little known aspect (here in the US) of Brazil's history.

Abuse Just Coming to Light

Here's a little more tarnishing of Getulio Vargas' halo:

Alcidino dos Santos was on his way to the market to buy vegetables for his mother one morning in 1942 when an army officer stopped him and told him he was being drafted as a “rubber soldier.” Men were needed in the Amazon, 3,000 miles away, to harvest rubber for the Allied war effort, he was told, and it was his patriotic duty to serve.

Mr. dos Santos, then a 19-year-old mason’s assistant, protested that his mother was a widow who depended on him for support, but to no avail. He would be paid a wage of 50 cents a day, he recalls being told, and receive free transportation home once the conflict was over, but he had to go, that day.

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, Mr. dos Santos and hundreds of other poor Brazilians who were dragooned into service as rubber soldiers are still in the Amazon, waiting for those promises to be fulfilled. Elderly and frail, they are fighting against time and indifference to gain the recognition and compensation they believe should be theirs.

The present government should be treating these people better, but the deck seems stacked against them:

In 1988, though, Brazil ratified a new Constitution with an article that called for the rubber soldiers to receive a pension valued at twice the minimum wage, or $350 a month currently. But many who served here found themselves ineligible because they could not supply the required documents. Their original contracts had been lost, destroyed by rain or handed over to rubber plantation bosses and never returned.

Those who have qualified receive a pension that is barely one-tenth of the amount paid to Brazilian soldiers who fought in Europe during World War II. In 2002 a member of Congress from the state of Amazonas introduced a bill to pay rubber soldiers “who are living in misery” the same amount, but the bill remains stalled in committee.

This is purely and simply wrong. One wonders if the authorities think that if they merely hold out long enough, the problem will go away. I have often criticized Larry Rohter and usually with good reason, but I must credit him with bringing this issue to light. I knew nothing about it.

A Half-Measure

The recent release of papers related to Brazil's military dictatorship really strikes me as a half-measure:

Bowing to domestic and international pressure, the Brazilian government has begun releasing intelligence files compiled by the former military dictatorship on government opponents, including victims of torture and those who disappeared.     

A preliminary list of people whose activities were monitored by military intelligence during the dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, has already been made public. As of Jan. 1, those people will be allowed to examine their own files, which are being transferred from military control to the National Archives.

Government officials estimated the files contained more than a million printed pages, plus photographs and films.

The belated release of the documents comes little more than a month after the United Nations Commission on Human Rights issued a draft report urging Brazil to be more assertive in dealing with the dark corners of its recent past.

I'm not alone in my sentiments, either:

Brazilian human rights organizations, however, immediately criticized the breadth of the document release, saying it was timid and incomplete. Only documents up to 1975 are covered, and even for that period, "unrestricted access" is granted only to those with a "direct interest," like a spouse, parent or child.

Even for them, references to third persons are to be deleted so as to "preserve the private life, honor and image" of those parties, according to a government policy statement.

Want to preserve impunity? This is how:

Questioned by reporters, Ms. [Dilma] Rousseff {Lula's chief of staff] said it would be "highly naïve to believe" that any released documents would name those responsible for the jailings, torture and killing of political prisoners.

I will gladly acknowledge that I have nary a shred of proof for this, but I would not be surprised if a situation similar to this was the reason for this approach.

Analysis of the Left Schism in Brazil

Roger Cohen, whose Globalist column routinely appears in both the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times, has a gem published on October 15. It's about the different career paths of José Dirceu, the disgraced former chief of staff for Lula who's still sitting in congress and Fernando Gabeira, who as a young radical was involved in the kidnapping of the American Ambassador to Brazil,  Charles Elbrick in September 1969 which later became the subject of the film, Four Days in September.

It is fascinating to see the divergent paths that the two men's lives took.  I urge you to read the entire article. I have met Cohen on a couple of occasions as we have friends in common (and in fact many years we also had friends in common without having met each other). He spent several years as Rio de Janeiro correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and has a thorough knowledge of the political history of Brazil in that era.

I especially like this comment by Gabeira:

"I thought they were Social Democrats, but they were more like Communists of the former East," Gabeira said.

Dirceu called Gabeira to the presidential palace in a last bid to persuade him to stay in the party, but other matters detained him. Gabeira was kept waiting for two hours. Furious, he stormed out, declaring that "An absence of elegance has its limits." The last shred of solidarity between these men of the left was gone.

Gabeira, despite his past, is more deserving of our respect than Dirceu. Gabeira grew. Dirceu mutated.