Both the US and British governments supported the rise of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. A high-ranking British Treasury official—allegedly future Prime Minister Liz Truss—had secret meetings with the future president in 2018 to discuss “free trade, free markets and post-Brexit opportunities” (BrasilWire, 3/25/20).
The US Department of Justice was a crucial partner in the Lava Jato (“Car Wash”) investigation, which resulted in the prosecution and jailing of Brazil’s left-leaning former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The politically motivated legal campaign against Lula served to prevent his participation in the 2018 presidential election, in what Gaspard Estrada calls “the biggest judicial scandal in Brazilian history.”
Because of this history, and because Brazil is a hard country to explain concisely, I was weary to learn that the British and US state-affiliated media outlets BBC and PBS had co-released a documentary about Jair Bolsonaro only a few weeks before this year’s Brazilian presidential election (10/2–30/22). It didn’t fail to disappoint.
Rise of the Bolsonaros was released on August 28 on PBS, and is airing as a three-part series in Britain on BBC2. It tells the story of Brazil’s far-right president through the words of people like Steve Bannon, Bolsonaro’s son Flavio, journalists, and current or former allies of the president, including a far-right lawmaker who is merely introduced as an “anti-corruption crusader.”
Feigned objectivity
The only time a member of the Brazilian Workers Party got to speak was when Rep. Maria do Rosario was asked to describe her reaction to a misogynistic taunt from Bolsonaro.
With over 20 interviewees, the producers feign objectivity by granting a small proportion of airtime to progressive politicians. Two of the three progressive interviewees, however, are from the relatively tiny PSOL party—a nonthreatening source, given that the party is not even running a presidential candidate this year. The single representative of Lula’s Workers Party, Rep. Maria do Rosario, is given around 30 seconds to answer the following aggressively uncomfortable question: “How did you feel when Bolsonaro told you you didn’t deserve to be raped?”
The cast of journalists included some of the biggest cheerleaders for Lava Jato and Lula’s politically motivated imprisonment. Given the most airtime among the journalist interviewees was Brian Winter, who was introduced as a former Reuters chief in Brazil. The fact that Winter’s current job was not mentioned is indicative of the documentary’s editorial bias.
Winter is vice president of policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas, the think tank founded by David Rockefeller in 1963 that was a key player in the 1973 coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende. Since then, AS/COA has worked, most recently through its media arm, Americas Quarterly—of which Winter is editor-in-chief—to promote nearly every other far-right US intervention in Latin America, including the recent regime-change efforts in Venezuela and Bolivia.
During the Rise of the Bolsonaros opening montage, as footage of a burning rainforest appeared on screen, Winter said, “Jair Bolsonaro believes that the Brazilian Amazon is the magical path to economic prosperity.” There was no mention of Winter’s prominent role within AS/COA, which counts the agribusiness giant Cargill as one of its “elite corporate members.” This omission is especially glaring, since Cargill has been repeatedlycited as one of the main culprits in the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
This set the tone for the film’s treatment of one of the only Bolsonaro policies that was criticized in the nearly three-hour production: illegal deforestation. Every time footage related to this issue appeared, a journalist or Bolsonaro ally arrived on screen to water it down, usually by a ratio of at least two to one.
Bolsonaro meme designer Camila Azevedo describes how deforestation is helping the Indigenous.
One example came nearly an hour in, when the issue of deforestation was first given in-depth treatment. “From the very beginning, Bolsonaro wanted to develop the Amazon economically,” BBC‘s Katy Watson said—as if it were a given that the desertification of former rain forests, the poisoning of rivers with mercury and the destruction of renewable commodity chains is good for the economy.
Similar treatment was given to Bolsanaro’s systematic persecution and dispossession of Brazil’s Indigenous communities, some of which still live with little or no contact with outsiders. APIB—a coalition of Indigenous associations from across Brazil—has already called on the International Criminal Court to investigate Bolsonaro for genocide and crimes against humanity. After Indigenous leader Maial Kayapó explained how Bolsonaro encourages violence against her people, Camila Azevedo, the Bolsonaro family’s young meme designer, pops on the screen and says: “Most Indigenous, they want land to till…. They don’t want to walk around naked for the rest of their lives.”
Rags to riches
Jair Bolsonaro gives PBS viewers a tour of his childhood home.
Bolsonaro’s early years are framed as a rags-to-riches story of rugged individualism. The story begins with the laughable claim that Bolsonaro grew up in the “badlands” of Brazil. In fact, Bolsonaro was born in Campinas, a relatively wealthy city with a metro area population of 3.7 million.
The banana-farming town of Eldorado, where they moved when he was 11, while located in one of the poorest regions of Brazil’s richest state of Sao Paulo, could hardly be called a “badlands.” Brazil’s badlands are the semi-arid back country of the Northeast, where gangs of Wild West–style outlaws called cangaceiros roamed on horseback until the 1940s.
In introducing Brazil’s sub-fascist military dictatorship (1964–85), corporate PR flack Brian Winter tells us that it was Bolsonaro’s “golden age.” Brazilian studies professor Anthony Perreira says:
If you were in one of the armed left groups, if you were a member of the Communist Party, if you were a student, and if you were engaged politically, it was a very dangerous time. But for a lot of people, it was a period of growth.
For the last 500 years, Brazil’s export commodity–based economy has been characterized by cyclical boom and bust periods. During the 21-year dictatorship, there was indeed a five-year boom period between 1968–73, but due to the government’s repression of organized labor and its efforts to suppress wages, it was accompanied by a drastic increase in income inequality. By the time the dictatorship ended, Brazil had become one of the most unequal countries in the world.
This inequality was exacerbated by the military government’s lack of commitment to public education, and its eagerness to take out massive loans from the World Bank to fund unsuccessful, environmentally devastating projects in the Amazon rainforest. Such failures led to the economic stagnation, hyperinflation and crippling foreign debt of what is now referred to as the “lost decade” of the 1980s. When Perreira says, “For a lot of people it was a period of growth,” he is clearly referring to the elites who currently finance Bolsonaro rather than the Brazilian working class, which this documentary misrepresents as constituting the president’s primary base of support.
Man of the people
Bolsonaro’s petit bourgeois origins, glossed over in the film, are revealed in the story of his military career. Agulhas Negras, the elite Brazilian army academy where Bolsonaro studied after attending the Preparatory School of the Brazilian Army, has an extremely competitive admissions process. It’s not the type of place where someone who grew up in “rags” would get into, but a traditional pathway of social ascension for members of the lower-middle class.
The documentary also relates how, in September 1986, then-Captain Bolsonaro wrote an article that appeared in Veja (9/3/86), a national news magazine, complaining about military officer salaries. A journalist says Bolsonaro “couldn’t afford to buy a house,” without mentioning that he was arrested for breaking army regulations by publishing the article. The documentary frames Bolsonaro as being broke and unable to support his family, but at the time of the article, Brazilian army captains earned 10,433 cruzados per month—over 12 times the country’s minimum salary of 804 cruzados.
Brian Winter: “I was there when a reporter asked….” Where was he? At AS/COA. What was he doing there? Introducing Bolsonaro to his corporate sponsors in the mining, petroleum and agribusiness industries.
The salary may have been lower than what Bolsonaro felt he deserved, but it placed him among the roughly 10% of the national population in the upper-middle class. Accurately portraying Bolsonaro as a Brazilian elite, however, doesn’t fit with the director’s attempt to portray Lula, who grew up in a mud shack and started working in a factory at age 14, as a liberal elite, and Bolsonaro as a man of the people, the same way Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson recently did during his one-week stay in Brazil running electoral propaganda for the president (FAIR.org, 7/25/22).
Bolsonaro’s 2017 visit to New York is presented as a brilliant strategy to validate his future candidacy to the Brazilian public, to show that “important people in the US wanted to listen to what he had to say.” Interviewee Brian Winter’s role in introducing Bolsonaro to US business elites is not mentioned at all, only alluded to by his anecdote about how cleverly Bolsonaro answered a question from a US reporter at the time about his rape comments directed at Maria do Rosario.
US-style culture war
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon and his far-right allies like Jason Miller have maintained communications with the Brazilian president’s family for years. In fact, the relationship between Bolsonaro’s sons and the American far right is so good that one of them attended the January 5, 2021, “war council” in Washington, DC, prior to the invasion of Capitol Hill. Bannon’s claim in the documentary that he reached out to the Bolsonaros to learn about their social media strategy seems like a blatant lie, since many of the tactics employed by Bolsonaro were clearly based on the Trump campaign’s culture war rhetoric.
The idea that Lula and Bolsonaro are at opposite ends of a US-style culture war is given disproportionate emphasis in the documentary. For example, at certain times when Lula is discussed, footage of men kissing at a pride parade appears on screen, as does an image of the former president holding a rainbow flag.
Such exaggerated treatment of Lula’s role in the cultural sphere ignores the fact that his popularity was largely driven by massive increases in spending on public health and education and successful poverty-reduction policies. Although, unlike Bolsonaro, Lula is not openly homophobic, he has faced criticism from the LGBT community for not going far enough to advance LGBT rights, and from feminists for not legalizing abortion.
Showcasing Flavio Bolsonaro’s sensitive side.
Nevertheless, the largest protests of Brazil’s working class since Bolsonaro took office had nothing to do with culture wars. The 2019 Education Tsunami protests, organized by student groups and teachers unions, brought over 2 million people into the streets of dozens of cities, and effectively stalled the Bolsonaro administration’s attempts to charge tuition at public universities.
Rio de Janeiro city councilor and anti–police violence crusader Marielle Franco, who is introduced only as an LGBT activist, was not a member of Lula’s Workers Party. Her assassination at the hands of members of a Rio de Janeiro militia, whose leader Adriano da Nobrega’s wife and mother both worked as “ghost employees” in Flavio Bolsonaro’s state congressional cabinet, is another scandal involving the Bolsonaro family that the documentary glosses over.
Instead, Flavio Bolsonaro, who appears several times in the documentary, shares humorous anecdotes about his childhood, and cries to the camera while remembering the 2018 stabbing incident involving his father, which far-right forces falsely tried to blame on Communists.
Missing Moro
Conspicuously absent: Sergio Moro, who broke the law to remove Lula from the 2018 presidential elections then went on work as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice, is not mentioned once in the documentary.
The most glaring problem in the deeply flawed Rise of the Bolsonaros is the omission of arguably the single most important player in Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency: former Lava Jato investigation judge Sergio Moro. During a period in which the Lava Jato task force was having frequent meetings with the US Department of Justice and the FBI, Moro repeatedly broke the law by collaborating with prosecutors to discredit the Workers Party and help Bolsonaro.
The documentary doesn’t mention that Lula’s election-season arrest, on charges of committing “undetermined acts of corruption,” was made after the Brazilian supreme court, under threats from the Army, opened an exception to the Constitution to enable his imprisonment while his appeals were ongoing. Instead, it brings up frivolous charges that were dropped before his trial even started, such as “receiving 1 million euros in bribes.” The fact that Lula was ultimately released from prison after the election is written off as a “technicality.” There is also no acknowledgment that this delay was only made possible by the political bias of a crooked judge who illegally colluded with prosecutors throughout the trial.
While stating that the supreme court ruled that Lula could run for public office, the documentary omits the fact that he was fully exonerated on all charges, while the judge who imprisoned him, Sergio Moro, was found by that same court to have been tainted by judicial bias. An especially relevant piece of information left out of Rise of the Bolsonaros is the supreme court’s charge that Moro leaked fraudulent audio tapes to media in order to damage the reputation of Workers Party candidate Fernando Haddad just one week before the presidential elections, and then, in a clear conflict of interest, accepted a cabinet position in the Bolsonaro government.
Not even mentioning Moro, let alone describing the crimes he committed to empower Bolsonaro, discredits the entire documentary. Without Moro, a false impression is left that Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power was based entirely on his family’s cunning.
Steve Bannon gets the last word.
The program ends, laying any doubts about its lack of objectivity to rest once and for all, with the narrator saying, “The fate of Brazil is in the hands of its people,” followed by a 40-second pep talk by Steve Bannon—giving the last word on the upcoming Brazilian election to one of the main advocates for overturning the last US election.
The fact that US and British state-affiliated media outlets would promote misleading narratives less than a month before the most complicated Brazilian presidential election in modern history is another sad example of the long tradition of Western media facilitating imperialist meddling in Latin American elections.
Featured image: Jair Bolsonaro and sons, pictured in Rise of the Bolsonaros.
London-listed firm says it will ‘vigorously defend’ plan to continue mining gold and silver.
Peru’s Yanacochagoldmine, a joint venture that includes Newmont Mining Corp. Hochschild is threatened with the closure of two of its mines. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images.
The UK metals company Hochschild Mining is to fight plans by Peru’s government to hasten the closure of several mines in the southern Ayacucho region because of concerns over their environmental impact.
The London-listed mining company has promised to “vigorously defend” its plan to continue mining gold and silver from two mines – Pallancata and Inmaculada – which it claims operate under the “highest environmental standards”.
Ignacio Bustamante, the Hochschild chief executive, said he was “surprised” by the “illegal nature” of the government’s planned action and would “vigorously defend its rights to operate these mines using all available legal avenues”.
Shares in Hochschild plunged nearly 40% on Monday morning, wiping more than £300m off the value of the company, after the Peruvian prime minister, Mirtha Vásquez, told local media over the weekend that four mines in the southern Ayacucho region would be barred from further expansion, and would be closed “as soon as possible”. They closed down 27%, the lowest since April 2020.
Hochschild said it had “not received any formal communication from the government regarding this matter”.
The plan could have severe consequences for Lima-headquartered Hochschild, which sources more than two-thirds of its gold and silver from its Peruvian mines.
The announcement is likely to raise hackles throughout the mining sector in Peru, the world’s second largest producer of copper, which includes UK miners Anglo American, Newmont, Glencore and Freeport-McMoRan. Peru’s mines are also operated by China’s MMG and Chinalco alongside local producers such as Buenaventura.
Bustamante said: “Our goal is to continue investing in Peru, growing our resources and extending mine lives, in accordance with the Peruvian legal framework.”
Hochschild said it was a significant employer in the region, employing more than 5,000 people directly and about 40,000 indirectly, and has long-term investment plans for the local region.
“We are prepared to enter into a dialogue with the government in order to resolve any misunderstandings with respect to our mining operations. However, given the illegal nature of the proposed action, the company will vigorously defend its rights to operate these mines using all available legal avenues,” Bustamante added.
The Brazilian Amazon, where dense rainforest was long believed to be absorbing human-caused pollution, has emitted close to one-fifth more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere than it has stored.
An alarming new study found that between 2010 and 2019, the Amazon released 16.6billion tonnes of CO2, while sucking up 13.9bn tonnes.
“We half-expected it, but it is the first time that we have figures showing that the Brazilian Amazon has flipped, and is now a net emitter,” the study’s co-author Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a scientist at France’s National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), told AFP. “We don’t know at what point the changeover could become irreversible.”
Researchers compared the volume of CO2 sunk into the forest to the volumes released by fires or cutting down trees.
Trees, especially the old growth forests which have been standing for millennia, store carbon and have had an impact on slowing the climate crisis being driven by man-made pollutants like the burning of fossil fuels.
However the reverse is also true: when forests burn, tree carbon matter is pumped into the air as CO2, adding to emissions levels.
The Amazon, one of the planet’s richest regions of biodiversity and home to thousands of indigenous peoples, suffered the worst blazes in a decade last year.
The destruction of the rainforest has proliferated under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, whose government has weakened environmental protections and pushed development of mining, cattle-ranching and logging.
Mr Bolsonaro has frequently played down the Amazon fires, calling evidence produced by his own government showing thousands of blazes a “lie”.
The study also found that deforestation increased by four times in 2019 compared with 2017 and 2018, leaping from around 2.5million acres to 9.6million acres – an area more than twice the size of Connecticut.
Investigation by NGO Conectas Derechos Humanos and São Paulo University has sought out the reasons behind the country’s Covid-19 death toll of more than 212,000 victims, as well as documenting the statements made by the president about the pandemic, vaccines and controversial ‘cures’.
Cemetery workers burying a coronavirus victim in Manaus, Amazonas state, Brazil, January 6. EDMAR BARROS / AP
The grimmest timeline in the history of public health in Brazil emerges from an investigation of directives issued by the government of President Jair Messias Bolsonaro relating to the Covid-19 pandemic. In a common effort undertaken since March 2020, the Center for Research and Studies in Public Health Law (CEPEDISA) of the Public Health College (FSP) of the University of São Paulo (USP) and Conectas Direitos Humanos, one of the most respected justice organizations of Latin America, have collected and scrutinized federal and state regulations relating to the novel coronavirus, producing a brief titled Rights in the Pandemic – Mapping and Analysis of the Legal Rules in Response to Covid-19 in Brazil. On January 21, they put out a special edition making a strong statement: “Our research has revealed the existence of an institutional strategy to spread the virus, promoted by the Brazilian government under the leadership of the President of the Republic.”
Obtained exclusively by EL PAÍS, the analysis of the production of ordinances, provisional measures, resolutions, normative instructions, laws, decisions and decrees by the federal government, as well as a survey of the president’s public speeches, draws the map that has turned Brazil into one of the countries most affected by Covid-19 and that, contrary to other nations, still lacks a vaccination program with a reliable timetable. There is no way of telling how many of the more than 212,000 Covid deaths in Brazil might have been avoided if the government led by Bolsonaro had not executed a project with a view to spreading the virus. But it can reasonably be said that many people would still have their mothers, fathers, siblings or children alive today were it not for the existence of an institutional project by the Brazilian government to spread Covid-19.
There is an intention, a plan and a systematic course of action contained in the government rules and in Bolsonaro’s speeches, as the study shows. “The results dispel the persistent interpretation that there was incompetence and negligence from the federal government in the management of the pandemic. On the contrary, the systematization of data, although incomplete due to the lack of space for publishing so many events, reveals the government’s commitment and efficiency in favor of the widespread dissemination of the virus over the Brazilian territory, clearly stated as having the objective of restarting economic activity as soon as possible and at whatever cost,” says the publication’s newsletter. “We hope this timeline provides an overview of a process we are undergoing in a fragmented and frequently confusing fashion.”
The research was coordinated by Deisy Ventura, one of the most respected legal scholars in Brazil, researcher on the relations between pandemics and international law, and coordinator of the doctorate program in public health and sustainability of USP; Fernando Aith, chair of the Department of Policy, Management and Health of FSP and director of CEPEDISA/USP, a pioneering research center on health law in Brazil; Camila Lissa Asano, Program Coordinator of Conectas Direitos Humanos, and Rossana Rocha Reis, professor of the Political Sciences Department and the Institute for International Relations of USP.
The timeline is composed of three axes presented in chronological order, from March 2020 to the first 16 days of January 2021. The first is regulatory acts of the Union, including regulations adopted by federal authorities and agencies and by presidential vetoes; the second, acts of obstruction to the state and municipal governments’ responses to the pandemic; and the third, propaganda against public health, describing it as “a political discourse that mobilizes economic, ideological and moral arguments, besides fake news and technical information lacking scientific proof, with the aim of discrediting public health authorities, weakening public adherence to health advice based on scientific evidence, and promoting political activism against the public health measures needed to contain the spread of Covid-19.”
The study’s authors note that the publication does not include all the regulations and statements collected and stored in the research database, but a selection of them, with a view to avoiding repletion and presenting the most relevant for analysis. The data was selected from the database of the project Rights in the Pandemic, from jurisprudence of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), as well as official documents and speeches. The axis defined as “propaganda” also included a Google search for videos, posts and news.
The analysis shows that “the majority of deaths would have been avoidable with a strategy to contain the disease, and that this constitutes an unprecedented violation of Brazilians’ rights to life and to health.” And that this took place “without any of the administrators involved being held responsible, although institutions such as the Supreme Federal Court and the Federal Court of Accounts have countless times pointed out federal administrators’ conscious and deliberate conduct and omissions that clash with the Brazilian legal order.” It also highlights “the urgency of an in-depth discussion of the configuration of crimes against public health, crimes of responsibility and crimes against humanity committed during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil.”
Bolsonaro’s deeds and words are well known but end up being diluted in the day-to-day reality fed by the production of factoids and fake news, in which the war of hatred is also a strategy to cover up a consistent and persistent project that forges ahead as the temperature of exchanges is kept at a high level on social media. The publication of the report causes shock and unease because it systematizes the explicit production of evils put in action by Bolsonaro and his government over almost a year of the pandemic. One of the investigation’s greatest merits is precisely that it has articulated the president’s many official measures and public speeches in the timeline. From this meticulous analysis, the plan emerges with all its phases duly documented.
The analysis also shows up clearly which populations are the major targets of the attacks. Besides Indigenous peoples, to whom Bolsonaro has even denied drinking water, a series of measures has been taken to deny workers the chance of protecting themselves from Covid-19 and isolating. The government has extended the concept of essential activities to include even beauty salons and has sought to deprive various categories of workers of the right to the emergency aid of 600 reals provided by Congress. At the same time it attempted to put in place a double standard in the treatment of health workers: Bolsonaro has entirely vetoed a project that offered financial compensation to workers incapacitated as a consequence of their work in containing the pandemic, while trying to relieve public sector workers of any responsibility for acts and omissions regarding Covid-19. In short: the hard and high-risk work of prevention and fight against the pandemic is discouraged, while failure to act is stimulated.
By withholding resources appropriated for the fight against Covid, the government has hindered patient care in the state and municipal public healthcare systems. A constant war is being waged against governors and mayors who try to implement measures to prevent and fight the virus. Bolsonaro uses vetoes to cancel out even the most basic measures, such as the compulsory use of masks inside establishments authorized to operate. Many of his measures and vetoes were later overturned by the Supreme Federal Court (STF) or Congress.
This is another important point: the analysis of the data also highlights how much more tragic Brazil’s situation might be if the STF and other bodies had not stopped several of the virus-disseminating measures enacted by the government. Despite the frailty shown by institutions and society, there is a visible effort on the part of the main actors to attempt to neutralize or cancel out Bolsonaro’s actions. It is possible to project how much these efforts, added and associated with a government that was willing to prevent the disease and fight the virus, might have done to prevent deaths in a country that possesses the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde, or SUS). Instead of this, Bolsonaro has unleashed a war in which a large part of institutions’ and organized society’s energy has been wasted to reduce the damage caused by his actions, instead of focusing on fighting the greatest public health crisis in a century.
Almost a year on since the first case of Covid-19, it is yet to be seen whether the institutions and society not in collusion with Bolsonaro will be strong enough, faced with the map of the institutional actions to spread the virus, to finally put a stop to the agents disseminating the virus. The use of the state machine to promote destruction has been decisive in bringing about the present reality of more than a thousand graves dug every day for people who could still be alive. More than 60 requests for the impeachment of the president have been presented to the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia (DEM party). At least three requests have been sent to the International Criminal Court linking genocide and other crimes against humanity to the actions of Bolsonaro and members of his government regarding the pandemic. The next few weeks will be decisive for Brazilians to state who they are and how they will respond to future generations when asked what they were doing while so many people were dying of Covid-19.
From Witness 3rd February 2021. Find 47 min Video Here:-
Indigenous survivors of Peru’s civil war see photos taken during the brutal conflict, stirring memories from the past.
Thirty years after they reported from the epicentre of a civil war in the Peruvian highlands of Ayacucho, three photojournalists return in search of the people they photographed.
Armed with handmade weapons, Indigenous residents of the area had fought back against the brutal Maoist armed group known as the Shining Path.
Vera Lentz, Alejandro Balaguer and Oscar Medrano had captured their resistance in photographs. Now, as they encounter survivors, memories are stirred that challenge the official history of the war.
Culture ministry says it will press charges against activists for damage to world heritage site as UN climate talks began in Lima.
Greenpeace’s ‘time for change’ message next to the hummingbird geoglyph in Nazca.
Greenpeace has apologised to the people of Peru after the government accused the environmentalists of damaging ancient earth markings in the country’s coastal desert by leaving footprints in the ground during a publicity stunt meant to send a message to the UN climate talks delegates in Lima.
A spokesman for Greenpeace said: “Without reservation Greenpeace apologises to the people of Peru for the offence caused by our recent activity laying a message of hope at the site of the historic Nazca lines. We are deeply sorry for this.
“Rather than relay an urgent message of hope and possibility to the leaders gathering at the Lima UN climate talks, we came across as careless and crass.”
Earlier Peru’s vice-minister for culture Luis Jaime Castillo had accused Greenpeace of “extreme environmentalism” and ignoring what the Peruvian people “consider to be sacred” after the protest at the world renowned Nazca lines, a Unesco world heritage site.
He said the government was seeking to prevent those responsible from leaving the country while it asked prosecutors to file charges of attacking archaeological monuments, a crime punishable by up to six years in prison.
The activists had entered a strictly prohibited area beside the figure of a hummingbird among the lines, the culture ministry said, and they had laid down big yellow cloth letters reading “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable” as the UN climate talks began in Peru’s capital.
“This has been done without any respect for our laws. It was done in the middle of the night. They went ahead and stepped on our hummingbird, and looking at the pictures we can see there’s very severe damage,” Castillo said. “Nobody can go on these lines without permission – not even the president of Peru!”
Peruvian authorities are also seeking the identity of the archaeologist who led the activists to the site and the plane from which the photos of the stunt were taken, he said. “It was thoughtless, insensitive, illegal, irresponsible and absolutely pre-meditated. Greenpeace has said it was planning this action for months.”
Tina Loeffelbein, a Greenpeace spokeswoman at the summit, said she was not aware of any legal proceedings being brought against the group. She said Greenpeace was cooperating with the Peruvian authorities and seeking to clarify what took place.
In a statement Greenpeace said it was concerned that it could have caused “moral offence to the Peruvian people”.
The statement read: “Our history of more than 40 years of peaceful activism clearly shows that we have always been most respectful with people around the world and their diverse cultural legacies.”
Castillo responded: “Disrespecting humanity’s cultural heritage – I don’t think that’s the message this summit or Greenpeace is trying to spread to the world! Most of us in the cultural sector agree with the message. But the means don’t justify the ends.”
“We took every care we could to try and avoid any damage. We have 40 years of experience of doing peaceful protests,” Kyle Ash, Greenpeace spokesman, told the Guardian. “The surprise to us was that this resulted in some kind of moral offense. We definitely regret that and we want to figure out a way to resolve it. We are very remorseful for any offense that we’ve caused and we’re very remorseful for that.”
He said Greenpeace met on Wednesday with Peru’s minister of culture, Diana Alvarez. He said the organization hoped to maintain a dialogue with the Peruvian government. He added Greenpeace would take “total responsibility” if any permanent damage had been caused to the archaeological site.
“It’s not a matter of money. The destruction is irreparable,” Ana Maria Cogorno, President of the Maria Reiche Association named after the German archaeologist whose groundbreaking research on the Nazca Lines from 1940 onwards saw them gain recognition and protection, told the Guardian.
The hummingbird etching on which the Greenpeace stunt was laid was the “only one of the lines which was completely untouched and perfectly conserved”, she said. “It’s one of the symbols of Peru,” she added.
Last week Greenpeace projected a message promoting solar energy on to Huayna Picchu, the mountain that overlooks the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, another protected archaeological site in Peru.
Thirty-five inmates reported dead due to drug overdose at overcrowded jail.
The rising death toll at an overcrowded prison, said by authorities to have been caused by widespread drug overdosing, has raised suspicions among human rights activists.
Pressure is mounting on Venezuela’s government to launch a full investigation into 35 deaths within a week at David Viloria prison, in the west of the South American country,
The trouble began on Monday with inmates going on hunger strike for better conditions, according to prison officials.
They said a violent group stormed an infirmary and drank a lethal concoction of pure alcohol and drugs used to treat epilepsy, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Another 100 prisoners are said to be in comas as they continue to receive treatment for intoxication.
Politician William Ojeda, a member of the country’s ruling Socialist Party, visited the jail on Friday. He said a number of the inmates had been former drug addicts suffering from withdrawal symptoms.
Prisoner rights activists are sceptical of the official version, with a lack of information and access for family members leading to suspicions that inmates might have been poisoned to restore order.
Ligia Bolivar, a human rights expert at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas said government information was so incomplete that “counting the deaths now requires going to the morgue”.
The relative of an inmate tries to find out information about her loved one.
President Nicolas Maduro has yet to comment on the incident, despite calls for a thorough investigation from Roman Catholic Church leaders and the UN’s human rights agency.
Government officials have said the situation is now under control after it called in the National Guard and transferred hundreds of prisoners to other facilities.
Mr Ojeda said all prisoners’ rights were being respected in the handling of the incident.
Police arrested the jail’s warden, Julio Cesar Perez, on Thursday. He is expected to be charged in connection with the deaths.
Venezuela’s 32 prisons are among the world’s most violent and overcrowded, housing almost three times their intended capacity according to the International Centre for Prison Studies.
The number of inmates has doubled since 2008 as a result of rampant crime and stuffer mandatory sentences. Last year 506 died in the Venezuela’s jails, according to prison watchdog groups.
David Viloria prison, previously called La Uribana, is named after a guard who was one of 58 people killed there last year during the second-deadliest prison riot in the country’s history.
It was built to hold 850 inmates, but was believed to be holding around 3,000 when the latest disturbances broke out.
How can we explain elongated skulls that are thousands of years old that contain genetic material “unknown in any human, primate or animal known so far”? For months, many of us have been eagerly awaiting the results of the first DNA tests to ever be performed on the famous Paracas skulls. The results for one of the skulls are now in, and the scientist that did the testing is declaring that this skull represents a “new human-like creature” unlike anything that has ever been discovered before. So are these actually Nephilim skulls? Do they come from a time when the world more closely resembled “the Lord of the Rings” than most people living today would ever dare to imagine? There are those who believe that extremely bizarre hybrid races once roamed the planet. With each passing year, the scientific evidence continues to pile up on the side of those that are convinced that the Nephilim actually lived among us. As the knowledge of this evidence becomes more widespread, what is that going to do to the commonly accepted version of history that all of us have been taught?
If you are not familiar with the Paracas skulls, the following is a pretty good summary from a recent article by April Holloway…
Paracas is a desert peninsula located within the Pisco Province in the Inca Region, on the south coast of Peru. It is here were Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, made an amazing discovery in 1928 – a massive and elaborate graveyard containing tombs filled with the remains of individuals with the largest elongated skulls found anywhere in the world. These have come to be known as the ‘Paracas skulls’. In total, Tello found more than 300 of these elongated skulls, which are believed to date back around 3,000 years. A DNA analysis has now been conducted on one of the skulls and expert Brien Foerster has released preliminary information regarding these enigmatic skulls.
As Holloway noted, it is researcher Brien Foerster that has been leading the charge in reviving interest in these elongated skulls. Now that the DNA results are in, interest in these skulls is almost certainly going to skyrocket. The following quote from the geneticist that conducted the DNA analysis comes from Brien Foerster’s Facebook page. Please keep in mind that this geneticist was not told the history of these skulls in advance. So he was able to examine them without any preconceived notions. What he found was absolutely shocking…
Brazil’s national Congress is under pressure from landowning groups to green light GM ‘terminator’ seeds. Photograph: Ruy Barbosa Pinto/Getty Images/Flickr RF
Brazil is set to break a global moratorium on genetically-modified “terminator” seeds, which are said to threaten the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world.
The sterile or “suicide” seeds are produced by means of genetic use restriction technology, which makes crops die off after one harvest without producing offspring. As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds for each planting, which reduces their self-sufficiency and makes them dependent on major seed and chemical companies.
Environmentalists fear that any such move by Brazil – one of the biggest agricultural producers on the planet – could produce a domino effect that would result in the worldwide adoption of the controversial technology.
Major seed and chemical companies, which together own more than 60% of the global seed market, all have patents on terminator seed technologies. However, in the 1990s they agreed not to employ the technique after a global outcry by small farmers, indigenous groups and civil society groups.
The moratorium is under growing pressure in Brazil, where powerful landowning groups have been pushing Congress to allow the technology to be used for the controlled propogation of certain plants used for medicines and eucalyptus trees, which provide pulp for paper mills.
The landowning groups want to plant large areas with fast growing GM trees and other non-food GM crops that could theoretically spread seeds over wide areas. The technology, they argue, would be a safeguard, ensuring that no second generation pollution of GM traits takes place. They insist that terminator seeds would only be used for non-food crops.
Their efforts to force a bill to this effect through Congress, ongoing since 2007, have been slowed due to resistance from environmentalists.
The proposed measure has been approved by the legislature’s agricultural commission, rejected by the environmental commission, and now sits in the justice and citizenship commission. It is likely to go to a full Congressional vote, where it could be passed as early as next Tuesday, or soon after the Christmas recess.
Environment groups say there would be global consequences. “Brazil is the frontline. If the agro-industry breaks the moratorium here, they’ll break it everywhere,” said Maria José Guazzelli, of Centro Ecológico, which represents a coalition of Brazilian NGOs.
This week they presented a protest letter signed by 34,000 people to thwart the latest effort to move the proposed legislation forward. “If this bill goes through, it would be a disaster. Farmers would no longer be able to produce their own seeds. That’s the ultimate aim of the agro-industry,” she said.
The international technology watchdog ETC, which was among the earliest proponents of a ban on terminator technology in the 1990s, fears this is part of a strategy to crack the international consensus.
“If the bill is passed, [we expect] the Brazilian government to take a series of steps that will orchestrate the collapse of the 193-country consensus moratorium when the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meets for its biennial conference in Korea in October 2014,” said executive director Pat Mooney.
But Eduardo Sciarra, Social Democratic party leader in the Brazilian Congress, said the proposed measure did not threaten farmers because it was intended only to set controlled guidelines for the research and development of “bioreactor” plants for medicine.
“Gene use restriction technology has its benefits. This bill allows the use of this technology only where it is good for humanity,” he said.
The technology was developed by the US Department of Agriculture and the world’s largest seed and agrochemical firms. Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Monsanto and DuPont together control more than 60% of the global commercial seed market and 76% of the agrochemical market. All are believed to hold patents on the technology, but none are thought to have developed the seeds for commercial use.
Massive protests in the 1990s by Indian, Latin American and south-east Asian peasant farmers, indigenous groups and their supporters put the companies on the back foot, and they were reluctantly forced to shelve the technology after the UN called for a de-facto moratorium in 2000.
Now, while denying that they intend to use terminator seeds, the companies argue that the urgent need to combat climate change makes it imperative to use the technology. In addition, they say that the technology could protect conventional and organic farmers by stopping GM plants spreading their genes to wild relatives – an increasing problem in the US, Argentina and other countries where GM crops are grown on a large scale.
A Monsanto spokesman in Brazil said the company was unaware of the developments and stood by a commitment made in 1999 not to pursue terminator technology. “I’m not aware of so-called terminator seeds having been developed by any organisation, and Monsanto stands firmly by our commitment and has no plans or research relating to this,” said Tom Helscher.
On its website, however, the company’s commitment only appears to relate to “food crops”, which does not encompass the tree and medicinal products under consideration in Brazil.
International pressure must be brought on Brazil to protect its native peoples against industrialisation of the Amazon.
Representatives of the local indigenous communites and environmental activists demonstrate in Sao Paulo against the construction of Belo Monte dam at Xingu river in the Brazilian state of Para. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
These are challenging times if you happen to be an indigenous inhabitant of South America’s largest democracy. Not since the dark days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, when the indigenous people were regarded as “obstacles to progress” and their lands were opened to massive development schemes, have they faced such an assault on their rights.
The fortuitous discovery of the landmark Figueiredo report, which documented appalling crimes against Brazil’s tribal peoples during the 1940s, 50s and 60s and led to the creation of the tribal rights organisation Survival International in 1969, has re-ignited debate, and serves as a warning at a time when the denial of land rights and killing of indigenous people continues.
This is a battle for the rule of law and the right to self-determination, a cornerstone of the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. As the Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Brazilian Amazon, or COIAB, recently stated: “The current government is trying to impose its colonial and dominating style on us … [it] has caused irreversible harm to indigenous peoples using bills and decrees, many of them unconstitutional.”
One bill under discussion would prohibit the expansion of territories occupied by indigenous people and will affect villagers living in the rich agricultural mid-west and south, where violent land conflicts are most acute and where Brazil’s powerful rural lobby includes politicians who own ranches (many now selling sugar cane to supply Brazil’s burgeoning biofuels industry) on land due to be returned to the indigenous people.
It will be particularly disastrous for the Guarani in Mato Grosso do Sul state, living in roadside camps or overcrowded reserves. Their leaders and shamans are systematically attacked and murdered by ranchers’ gunmen as they attempt to regain their ancestral land, tired of waiting for the federal authorities to take action.
A proposed constitutional amendment would give congress (dominated by the agricultural and mining lobby) the power to participate in the process of demarcating land occupied by the indigenous population, causing further delays and obstacles to the recognition and protection of territories. This would put the wolf in charge of the sheep.
Further north, in the mineral-rich Amazonian state of Roraima, politicians are backing a draft mining bill. If approved by congress it would open up indigenous territories to large-scale mining for the first time. The Yanomami people’s land, the largest forested indigenous territory in the world, is subject to 654 mining requests alone. A Yanomami spokesman, Davi Kopenawa, said to Survival International that mining “will destroy the streams and the rivers and kill the fish and kill the environment – and kill us”.
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The Truth is Where? 