Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

October 24, 2017 By Fausta

Brazil: Rio police kill Spanish tourist

A Spanish woman visiting Rio was shot and killed by Rio police. Maria Esperanza Jimenez Ruiz, 67, was visiting a crafts fair at the Rocinha favela with her brother and his wife.

According to reports,

Police said officers opened fire on a vehicle in Rocinha, one of the city’s largest so-called favelas, or slums, hitting a passenger in the neck. The victim, whom police identified as 67-year-old María Esperanza Jiménez Ruiz of Spain, was taken to a nearby hospital but couldn’t be revived. After the shooting, police determined that the vehicle was providing an organized tour of the community.

Two police officers are now under arrest.

Police and other public employees are not getting paid because debt service over last year’s Olympics,

The surge in police violence has come amid severe budget problems in Rio following the Olympics last year. Police officers, like other civil servants, aren’t receiving their salaries on time, let alone sufficient funding for equipment ranging from office supplies to patrol cars. A touted initiative to introduce community policing to troubled neighborhoods like Rocinha has fallen into disarray.

Rio state police have killed over 700 people in the first eight months of 2017.

In other news, Odebrecht subsidiary Braskem deposited US$1,5million in a bank account belonging to Emilio Lozoya, advisor to Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto and former Pemex director.

The 2012 transaction was discovered as part of the ongoing Odebrecht corruption investigation.

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Filed Under: Brazil, Fausta's blog Tagged With: #Rio2016, Emilio Lozoya, Enrique Peña Nieto, Odebrecht, Rio Olympics

October 11, 2017 By Fausta

Braxit!

Three southern states in Brazil – Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná – may want to secede.

Via Steve Hanke, who tweeted,

Voters all over are beginning to show their opposition to corrupt politicians. Secession movements bound to spread. https://t.co/YJPC0PVuEo

— Prof. Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) October 10, 2017

Indeed,

At polling stations in the Paraná state city, Londrina, voters told local media they were disillusioned with the federal government and a giant corruption scandal that has seen dozens of politicians and members of the business elite jailed or indicted.

Acacio Fernandes Tozzini told online newspaper, Redacaõ Bonde: “Our nation has reached a dramatic level of political disorder that is impossible to mend. We want to get rid of Brasilia, Brazil has reached the apex of corruption.”

Like Catalonia, they’re being used as cash cows, and they don’t like it (emphasis added),

Others complained that the south of Brazil saw little return from taxation which mostly benefitted the poorer northern regions of the country who have bigger voting rights than the south.

The Brazilian Constitution does not allow secession.

Were the secessionists to succeed, the Animaniacs would need a redo,

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Filed Under: Brazil, Fausta's blog Tagged With: Braxit, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina

October 6, 2017 By Fausta

Brazil: Olympic corruption and the sixteen bars of gold

Remember last year’s Rio Olympics? Allegedly the Committee chief was the bag man:


Read my post Olympic-sized corruption: Sixteen bars of gold

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Filed Under: Brazil, corruption, Fausta's blog Tagged With: Carlos Nuzman, Da Tech Guy Blog

October 3, 2017 By Fausta

Brazil tames inflation

Great news for the largest country in Latin America,
Brazil’s minister says inflation to end 2017 below 3 percent.

Americas Quarterly has a rundown of Pres. Michel Temer’s reform agenda on energy, infrastructure, environment and mining, foreign trade, and project financing. Most aim to reduce the role of government in the economy. Some aim to privatize government-owned companies. Regarding pensions,

Brazil’s severe crisis has been blamed on its ballooning public debt, and pension is the one item where the government believes it can make substantial savings.
. . .
The government wants to create a minimum retirement age of 65 for men and 62 for women and make the system more equal in its treatment of public and private sector workers. Unions have held strikes and protests claiming the government is simply making workers pay for the country’s mismanaged finances.

Coming up:
Brazil Lets In Big Oil Firms After Keeping Them Out for a Decade. The country looks to expand its crude potential and revive its economy with an auction this week

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Filed Under: Brazil, economics, Fausta's blog Tagged With: Michel Temer

September 19, 2017 By Fausta

Venezuela: Topic of discussion at the Palace

Pres. Trump talked about Venezuela during a dinner he hosted last night at the Palace Hotel,
Trump calls for democracy to be restored in Venezuela ‘very, very soon’ but avoids talk of a ‘military option’

– President Donald Trump met with a group of Latin American leaders Monday
– He said the Venezuelan government was ‘collapsing’ and the people were ‘starving’
– He said the U.S. was prepared to take ‘further action’ if the Maduro administration persisted in imposing ‘authoritarian rule’
– He called the situation ‘completely unacceptable’
– Trump said in August there was a ‘possible military option’ for Venezuela

Brazil’s President Michel Temer was among the guests, along with the presidents of Colombia (Juan Manuel Santos), Panama (Juan Carlos Varela) and Peru (Pedro Kuczynski), and Argentina’s vice president Michetti.

In case you wonder, the Palace Hotel is owned by the Sultan of Brunei.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Filed Under: Brazil, Fausta's blog, Venezuela Tagged With: Donald Trump, Juan Carlos Varela, Juan Manuel Santos, Michel Temer, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, PPK

September 6, 2017 By Fausta

Brazil: Dilma & Lula’s $500 million

Attorney general says the two former presidents and allies in their leftist party embezzled around $500 million.

You read it right: half a billion $US, out of $9 billion (emphasis added),

Brazil’s attorney general on Tuesday accused former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff and some of their political allies of embezzling around $500 million between 2002 and 2016, a period encompassing all of the leftist party’s 13 years in power.

Attorney General Rodrigo Janot said that during Mr. da Silva’s and Ms. Rousseff’s terms, the suspects, all members of the Workers’ Party, or PT, used state-run companies to pocket taxpayer money.

Mr. Janot’s office said in a press release that the alleged scheme cost at least $9 billion to public coffers. Mr. Janot sent the charges to the Supreme Court, which has an undefined amount of time to either accept or dismiss them before any trial is launched.

Brazilian ex-presidents accused of forming criminal group.

At the BBC,

Mr Janot said that Lula was the head of the alleged organization, and that the Workers’ Party received some $480m (£370m) in bribes in several public entities, including Petrobras and the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES).

The scheme allegedly started with Lula’s victorious election campaign in 2002 and ended when Ms Rousseff was impeached last year, Mr Janot added in a 230-page document.

Dilma says there’s no evidence.

Lula’s running for president next year, if his appeal against a corruption conviction is successful.

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Filed Under: Brazil, corruption, Lula Tagged With: Dilma Rousseff, Rodrigo Janot

July 18, 2017 By Fausta

The beginner’s guide to Brazil corruption

The BBC has Brazil corruption scandals: All you need to know. It’s clearly not all you need to know, since not only are entire books being written on the subject, the Beeb forgot to mention that the Federal Police shut down the Lava Jato task force, for instance, and Odebrecht is almost a second thought.

But the article is OK as a beginner’s guide to Brazil corruption, the way comic books used to be an introduction to classic novels like, say, War and Peace.

I’ve been posting on Odebrecht and Lava Jato for years, but the extent of the corruption is such that by now it is safe to say that Brazil’s corruption is second to none.

If you can read Portuguese and have hours to spare, browse through O Globo’s Lava Jato section. It is an object lesson on the corruption big government brings about.

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine.

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Filed Under: Brazil, corruption, Fausta's blog, Lula Tagged With: Lava Jato, Odebrecht

July 12, 2017 By Fausta

BAD NEWS: Brazil shuts down Lava Jato task force UPDATED

Bad-bad news:
Brazil Shuts Down Successful Corruption-Fighting Task Force

Brazil’s Federal Police announced this week that it would shut down a crusading anticorruption task force, drawing a rebuke from prosecutors who warned the move could throttle investigations that have exposed systemic corruption among the country’s political and business elites.

The decision comes as President Michel Temer, who is among the politicians facing criminal charges stemming from the unit’s work, is scrambling to shore up support among lawmakers to avoid trial over bribery allegations.

Never mind that; the excuse is “to increase efficiency,”

The Federal Police, which announced the shift on Thursday, characterized it as a bureaucratic reshuffling of personnel and resources that would increase efficiency. In a statement, it said that members of the team known as the Lava Jato, or Car Wash, task force would be absorbed into the organization’s main anticorruption division to more effectively “fight against corruption and money laundering and facilitate the exchange of information.”

Task force members, Brazil’s national association of prosecutors and the federation of Federal Police call it “a clear setback,” which is quite the understatement when you consider that Lava Jato investigators have recovered more than US$3 billion so far, and they were not done.

This will have very negative effects on the economy. Prof. Steve Hanke tweeted,

Ending Car Wash task force= major setback in Brazil’s fight against corruption. Dragging whole economy down. https://t.co/JNqr5CFil4

— Prof. Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) July 12, 2017

In more bad news, Venezuelan drug lords are using the port of Santos, Brazil, to ship meth and cocaine to Europe via Guinea Bissau, Nigeria and Ivory Coast in Africa.

UPDATE
Lula got a 10-year prison sentence. Will he do time in jail?

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Filed Under: Brazil, corruption, Fausta's blog, Lula Tagged With: Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Lava Jato, Nigeria

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