Her candidacy would mean at least a new and quite exciting element in the electoral dispute, set to be a repetition of previous year’s clash between the neoliberal PSDB and president Lula’s focus on economic development (at any cost, for some) with wealth distribution.

PT will most probably choose Lula's chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, the woman behind the ambitious $240 billion dollar Acceleration Programme for the Country's Growth (PAC in Portuguese), which aims to improve roads and railways and develop the energy provision nationwide. 

Marina is a new face in the national scenario, and a very interesting face too. Traditionally linked to the fight for the preservation of the Amazon, she carries the legacy of important environment leaders such as Chico Mendes, an internationally-renowed activist who was murdered in 1988.

In May 2008, she left her post as Lula’s Environment Minister alleging difficulties in pursuing an environmental agenda. Marina strongly opposed some  infrastructure projects included in the PAC such as hydroelectric dams in the river Madeira, in the Amazon.  

In the letter announcing that she was leaving the party she helped found on Wednesday, Marina lamented the fact that "environmental concerns had not been able to take root at the heart of the government". She also said her aim was to challenge ideas of "development based on material growth at any cost, with huge gains for a few and perverse results for the majority" that could lead to the destruction of the natural resources.

Even if Marina Silva does not turn out to be a front runner, she is certain to bring the protection of the Amazon to the centre of the 2010 presidential debate. That’s extremely important in times when the world is debating the new climate change agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol post-2012.

More than that, Marina has always been a favourite of the international media, and will surely channel the attention of international eyes to the dispute.

One thing is sure. With Marina Silva in the race, the other parties and candidates will definitely be forced to take stronger stances on the environment. The entire world will be watching. 

Its polemic riruals include mass exorcisms where followers are "freed" of the devil's incorporation. The spiritual leaders fo the UCKG also promise to "rehabilitate" homosexuals and bring handicapped people "back to normality".  The church is also accused of openly persecuting afro-Brazilain religions.

The charge of fraud was brought up after a two–year investigation by public prosecutors in São Paulo that scanned bank transactions, shares and ownership of several companies linked to the church.

According to the Brazilian Council for Financial Activities Control (Coaf), some 4 billion reais (2 billion dollars) in transactions are considered suspect. Churches in Brazil do not have to pay taxes over donations but have to declare them.

The annual income from donations nears $800 million. The money comes from nearly 8 million followers of 4,500 temples across Brazil.

According to prosecutors the problem is not the origin of the money, but the destination: Macedo and his fellows used it to build a commercial empire. 

The church is also suspected if using fake front companies to launder the money. Such companies would move the assets abroad and then loan money to Macedo and other members of the church. They would then buy companies with the "clean" money. 

The church’s lawyers deny any wrongdoing.

Brazil also has a national law that forbids the import of waste.

According to the federal police the waste should be send back as soon as possible for the UK authorities to decide how to deal with it. The police considers that each day the situation is getting worse with a bigger risk to the public health and the environment.

Brazil has lodged a formal complaint ith the World Trade Organisation that alleged the shipments of UK toxic waste have breached the Basel Convention.

Overall, 99 containers with over 1,400 tons of toxic waste - including syringes, condoms and bags of blood - were found in three Brazilian ports.

Five Brazilian companies have been fined. They claim they thought they were being sent plastic for recycling. Two UK companies are under investigation – one of them belongs to a Brazilian citizen.

Last week, the UK Environment Agency officers raided three properties in the Swindon area of Wiltshire and arrested three suspects.

Over two hundred Colombians have placed a lawsuit at an Alabama district court against a Birmingham-based Drummond coal company for financing right wing death squads in Colombia.
Drummond runs an open pit coal mine in the northern Cesar department, where paramilitary groups assassinated hundreds of civilians from 2000 to 2006. 

The lawyers who presented the lawsuit claim that between 2000 and 2006 Drummond paid paramilitary squads millions of dollars to protect its coal mine from attacks by left wing guerrillas.  But according to them, the paramilitaries also used the money to wage a broader campaign against left wing guerrillas in the department.

A woman who did not want to be named for security reasons tells of how her brother was killed by the “paracos” – as such groups are known in Colombia.

“The paralimitaries abducted my brother around 7 pm… They tortured him and broke his arm. They took out one of his eyes and pulled out his nails before finishing him off with five shots”.

She says her brother was a taxi driver who had no connection to guerrilla groups. But according to her a few weeks before his death, her brother had a dispute with his former boss. She suspects this man accused her brother of having links with the FARC guerrillas. 

 

Human rights groups claim that paramilitary groups assassinated hundreds of civilians in the north of the Cesar province, as they pushed guerrillas out of the rich savannah.

Drummond admits its mine was surrounded by violence. But the company says it had no relationship with the local paramilitaries. 

When Drummond was sued for the death of two union leaders in 2007, the company told reporters that the victims’ lawyers were simply trying to make some money with false testimonies. Back then, the courts said that there was not enough evidence to link the coal company to paramilitary groups.

But the lawyers like Rebecca Pendleton, who works for Conrad and Scherer, the law firm that initiated the current lawsuit, claim they now have compelling evidence.

“We have direct testimony from members in the paramilitary very high up in the rankings that they had directly received funding from members’ of Drummond´s upper management. They are saying that they received direct payment and that Drummond told them that they needed them as a private security force”.

Conrad and Scherer recently pressed similar charges against Dole, a US Banana company, at a US court.  Another banana company, Chiquita, last year admitted at a Florida court that it paid paramilitaries to protect its banana plantations. And Colombian lawyers are also investigating energy companies like Occidental Oil for their alleged relationships with paramilitary groups.

Professor Nazih Richani has written several books on the role of multinational companies in Colombia´s forty-year-old armed conflict. He says that multinationals have formed alliances with illegal groups when operating in conflict zones where they lack protection from state forces.
How could you do an investment without having security?” he says.  “The multinationals needed security for their personnel and operations, for the physical buildings and the transportation going in and out of the plants”.

Security experts say that at the turn of the century, guerrilla groups were staging dozens of attacks against oil pipelines, railroads and power lines every year.  And Drummonds’ own railroad in the Cesar province was blown up six times in the year 2000. 

But over the past six years, attacks against infrastructure decreased substantially. President Uribe increased the army presence in Colombia´s resource-rich areas. And he set up specially trained “energy battalions” near large companies like Drummond.

Human rights activists say the army counterinsurgency tactics are problematic.  They criticize mass arrests that affect hundreds of civilians. And they say that fighting between the army and the rebels has forced thousands to flee their homes.

In the Cesar province, a leader of a mining union – who asked not to be named – said that he still sees former paramilitaries strolling about towns near Drummond´s mine. He also claims that those who want to change working conditions at the mine have received several death threats.

The Federal Public Ministry, the Brazilian prosecuting service, demanded the Foreign Ministry to inquire the UK about the waste that was sent to Brazil, reports Agencia Brasil.

The Brazilian government must urge the UK to take it back, say the FPM. The government has 10 days to inform on urgent actions adopted in the case of the illegal import of waste. 

The majority of the containers arrived at the Porto de Rio Grande, in the southern Rio Grande do Sul state, between February and May this year. They carried materials considered a health hazard such as batteries, syringes, medicine cartoons, leftover food, condoms and hospital waste - including apparently bags full of blood. .

Authorities fear this might be an attempt to use the country as a dumping ground for hazardous waste, something that has happened in Africa in the past. Five Brazilian companies have been fined - they claim they thought they were being sent plastic for recycling. Two UK companies are under investigation, and the embassy in Brazil said it will act promptly.

On July 4, a group of 35 youths from 11 countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brasil, UK, Spain and Poland started gathering in the city of Pasto, south of Colombia, on the Andean mountain range.

They were cheerfully greeted by local authorities and local residents. Dozens of students from Pasto volunteered to show the city to the foreign visitors.

That’s the spirit of the Ruta Inka, an expedition in which Andean communities host youths mostly from Latin America and teach them about their history and culture.

Students must be recommended by their universities or local authorities. Universities such as San Marcos in Peru, a Loja in Equador and Sevilha in Spain engage in the program.

The youths pay 300 dollars to take the 40-day trip through communities that once were part of the Inca Empire in the 15th and 16th century – before it was destroyed by Spanish colonizers.

“Now with the UN convention on indigenous rights there is more self-esteem and interest in learning about our culture – which we were taught to be ashamed of through cultural aggression”, says Ruben La Torre, the mastermind of the expedition, himself a descendant from Quechua indigenous from Cuzco in Peru. “That’s what we try to say with the Ruta Inka: why be ashamed of being indigenous if the best students in the world come here to learn about your culture while their culture is in crisis?”

He started the Ruta in 2002 and so far has taken over 400 students to the Andean region, following a different route every year. At first the idea was to offer an alternative to the Ruta Quetzal, an expedition funded by the Spanish Crown that takes distinguished students from Europe to the most famous Inka trails every year.

For Ruben la Torre, the Ruta Quetzal can be seen as a new form of colonization. “The Ruta Quetzal shows typical indigenous dances, but the natives feel it’s not their event, they end up being amazed by the publicity and the press… They are not the organizers but mere expectators.”

Since its first edition the Ruta Inka has been completely based on the goodwill of the communities since it has no funding from governments. The idea is to reproduce the ‘mingas’ used by the Incas, in which every resident of a region would volunteer to build a bridge or an aqueduct that would benefice everyone.

The result is a different and innovative form of tourism. In Pasto, for instance, the participants were housed and fed in an army base together with the Colombian forces.  

“Being here with the soldiers made us feel like part of the team... We wake up with them very early and quite sleepy. It’s not like in traditional tourism in which everything is given to you, it’s great because you can relate to people, we talk to the soldier and get to know how they live, what are their ideas. It’s very interesting”, says 28-year old Wilson Oveñas from Ecuador:
 

In the village of Yacuanquer, residents led the way on the 2-hour track to the Telpis lake, at the Galeras National Park. After a steep hike through the green Andean mountains, villager Jesus Omar Oban told students a story he learned from his grandfather: 

“The lake has a spirit that makes it rain when visitors are making a mess, so they will run away… When it’s quiet the water is calm but when there are too many tourists there are waves and the lake gets upset”, explained the villager Jesus Omar Oban.

After the hike the expeditionaries were greeted with a meal with choclo, a local type of corn, habas, an Andean type of bean, and home-made cheese before watching a presentation of traditional dances.

This year the Ruta Inka follows its way through indigenous communities, vulcans, lakes and natural reserves in southern Colombia towards the border with Ecuador. It then visits the Ecuadorean municipalities of Carchi, Pichincha, Cotopaxi and Chimborazo until it reaches the biggest archaeological site in Equador, Ingapirca, by mid-August.

There participants will be hosted by the indigenous government of Canar, a community that takes pride in descending from the Incas.

For Spanish girl Alba Julia Pizarro, 18 years old, the route has changed her way of seeing South America’s history. “It changes a bit your vision of the Andean peoples and how we arrived here and most times destroyed everything. Of course it makes one feel sorry, but at the same time it opens the mind and teaches the vision of the conquered ones because we always study history from conquerors’ point of view”.

 

The President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced today that Brazil will lend 10 billion dollars to the International Monetary Fund. The money is part of a $1.1 trillion package agreed at the end of the G20 summit in April to boost international financial institutions, international trade and economies that are struggling with the economic crisis.

Lula told Reuters agency that the deal was settled with the Treasury Minister Guido Mantega on Tuesday. According to Lula, the action will give Brazil the "moral authority" to demand changes "much needed" in the IMF and other multilateral organisms.

Lula advocates for a stronger voice for the emerging economies in organizations such as the IMF and World Bank in order to make them truly multilateral. 

The negotiations had been going on for some time. At the G20 meeting, Lula had said he wanted to be the first Brazilian president to be able to lend money to the IMF. "Don't you guys think it's very 'chic' for Brazil to lend money to the IMF?", he asked reporters.

In 2005, Brazil paid off its $5.5 billion debt to the IMF two years ahead of schedule. 

Photograph of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by World Economic Forum

One aspect of this drama, however, remains largely unnoticed. It struck me as quite surreal to read the list of passengers: abroad the plane were,

58 Brazilian, 61 French, 26 German, 2 American, 1 South African, 1 Argentinian, 1 Austrian, 1 Belgian, 5 British, 1 Canadian, 9 Chinese, 1 Croatian, 2 Spanish, 4 Hunagrian, 3 Irish, 1 Icelandic, 9 Italian, 5 Lebanese, 2 Morroccan, 1 Filipino,  2 Polish, 1 Romanian, 1 Russian, 3 Slovakian, 1 Danish, 1 Estonian, 1 Gambian, 1 Swedish, 6 Swiss, 1 Dutch, 3 Norwegian and 1 Turk.

Yes, that's right: no less than 32 nationalities were abroad that plane, flying from Rio to Paris, two main tourist destinations. A significant portion of the world! The plane carried a mix of businessmen - senior executives of French tire maker Michelin SA and German steelmaker ThyssenKrupp were on board - and regular tourists flying to one wonderful city to another.

In any case, the fact that all these nationalities were victims is food for thought. This was clearly an event that could only happen in globalized times. Right now citizens of countries in all 5 continents are following with anxiety the search for any trace of the plane that carried their fellow citizens.

The fact that the drama is being monitored by 24 hour news channels in (at least) every one of those countries makes the tragedy even greater, in an ever smaller world. Irreversibly, more and more tragedies will affect people from different countries.

But while the national media of these countries focuses on their own citizens, international journalism is missing a great chance to take in the great side of globalization: the fact that it shows that people are mixed, are everywhere, and are equal. Unfortunately, the Airbus disaster seems to prove exactly this. 

A transnational journalistic approach to events in this new era is still to be developed.

The journalist Maurício Hashizume obtained hard evidence that the company Brenco - Companhia Brasileira de Energia Renovável, a multimillion-dollar company that runs ethanol projects in Brazil aiming at the international markets, hired a middleman specialized in enlisting workers in the state of Goias for sugarcane plantations.

Many times, workers hired João Pereira da Silva, also known as “João Paracatu”, ended up being forced to work in degrading conditions and even conditions similar to slavery.

A January 2008 contract obtained by the journalist establishes that João Paracatu would get 10% of the workers’ productivity. He was hired to recruit 240 rural workers and take them to farms in the west of Goiás to work in sugarcane plantations.   

In February 2008, 17 of these workers were found by fiscals of the Ministry of Labour working in degrading conditions.   

The workers claim to have been promised a salary of 450 dollars, health plan, decent accommodation and alimentation provided by Brenco. But when they were found by the government officials, they had been sleeping in an improvised dormitory for two months.

There was only one toilet, and trash was spread all over floor together with rats and insects. The workers said they were never given products to clean the place. There were no mattresses for everyone – let alone beds – no filtered water and the food was prepared by them in a camping cook.

Some of the workers claimed that their bank cards and PIN numbers were collected by the middleman. All the workers interviewed by the government fiscals said they had not left the place because they did not have money for bus tickets.

The company Brenco denied the allegations saying that workers were being paid.

But Public prosecutor Antonio Carlos Cavalcante Rodrigues say no receipts of payments were found at the time the workers were liberated. 

According to him, the contract obtained by Reporter Brasil – which had been validated by the juridical department of Brenco and by a public notary office – violates the Constitution and the Labour legislation.

Joao Paracatu has been involved in at least three other episodes of recruiting slave workers for farms in Goiás, according to Reporter Brasil. The prosecutor Antonio Carlos himself had filed an action against him for his "recruiting" services.

But the company Brenco claims it had no knowledge of the accusations against Joao Paracatu and needed his help to recruit labour in Goiás because it was not well known in the region.

In May this year, Brenco obtained a legal writ that determines it will not be blacklisted in the government’s file of companies that recruit slave labour. Such companies are denied loans by state banks and financial institutions. 

Brenco is engaged in many ethanol projects in Brazil. In August 2008, it got a 600 million dollar financing from the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) for investment in ethanol plants and to build an ethanol-duct from Goiás to the port of Santos in the southwest.

The full article in Portuguese, together with a copy of the contract, can be read in the website Reporter Brasil.

The first one is a draft law that regulates the classification and access to government files, a Brazilian version of the Freedom of Information Act. President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva urged the Congress to approve the law as soon as possible.

The President also announced a website with information from this period. The site is part of the National Archives and allows any citizen to navigate through hundreds of documents held by state governments and universities.

This is the biggest move to avail files from the dictatorial period to the public. Until today many military officers defend that they were acting righteously when persecuting, arresting and torturing opponents of the regime. They claim by doing so they saved Brazil from the communist threat.

However, as many human rights advocates have repeatedly pointed out, the broad amnesty led to absolute impunity of crimes committed in that period. Even though torture is well documented, until today not one official has been punished for crimes committed in the name of “national security”.

That’s why the release of such documents is a landmark move. Some say a name-and-shame approach might bring some justice to the families of the 475 opponents who died in the hands of the military between 1964 and 1985.

However, the government’s delay in publishing them (Lula himself was a political prisoner) only proves that many of those involved in the dictatorship are still influential.

Professor Fábio Konder Comparato, a respected lawyer and jurist, was skeptical about the news. “The government is trying to repair the damage because it was sentenced by the Interamerican Court of Human Rights for not unveiling information about the Araguaia Guerrilla (a set of guerrilla operations that happened in the North of Brazil in the 70s)”, he told radio Jornal Brasil Atual. But for him, the damage is already done since many documents have already been admittedly destroyed by military officials.

Human rights groups see the move as a step forward, but still unsatisfactory. They urge the government to open the archives of Armed Forces – which they say can help to unveil the fate of the militants who have died or are still missing.

Other South American countries like Chile and Argentina have already done so.

"Over 796 people have been affected in ten states; 38 people have died; and 270 minicipalities face floods due to excessive rain in the states of Ceará, Maranhão, Piauí, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Bahia, Alagoas, Amazonas, Pará e Santa Catarina".

These figures, with the same exact phrasing, had been published all over the national media. But I had a simple doubt: what does “affected” mean?

Without any fear of sounding pretty stupid (after all, being a journalist IS asking obvious questions such as "what does it mean", "where is the money going to", "are you lying, sir?" ), I decided to call the National Defence Service.

I reached them in the morning but, to my surprise, nobody at the press office could answer my question. I talked to two people in there who both sounded like they had never been asked this question before:

- Mmm, I believe it means people who’ve had to flee, but I’m not sure… Let me check with the technical staff.

Yet early in the afternoon the press office people had still not reached any conclusions. I had to call several times. Only in the beginning of the evening a woman, sounding extremely tired, told me:

- No, no, whoever told you that was wrong… These are people without water, electricity, road, plus the homeless, dead or injured….

That is an easy conclusion to get to, one could say. However, it’s precisely the type of thing that can not be assumed by a journalist, or in this case, by a big part of the media industry.

Plus, the fact that the press officers had no idea what their own statement was saying (and that the entire national media had been repeating the same stuff without any questioning) came as a shock to me.

The fact that it took them an entire day to figure out so simple a question was also pretty shocking. In any case, if one's in a hurry to break the news it's always best NOT to ask simples questions.

But then again, whoever gets their news from the web (there's a saying: like the sausages, one should never try to learn how news are made) is more than used to endless repetitions of terms, and figures, and data - and many times, nobody knows where they come from. So here's a hint of how news - or sausages? - are made in Brazil.