Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Brazil: Corruption rat wins the Carnival

This year’s Rio Carnival has been won with a lurid attack on social ills and corruption in Brazil.

The Beija Flor school showed the country with a huge rat in charge, while politicians were seen holding briefcases lined with gold.

Beija Flor beat 12 other schools to win the top prize at the carnival for a 14th time. Preparations for the parade begin months in advance.

Entrants in the competition often adopt a political theme.

The second-placed school also criticised Brazilian leaders in their entry, depicting President Michel Temer as a vampire.

Photos at The Sun.

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All in a (Valentine’s) Day Work

It’s Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, giving you a unique opportunity to simultaneously atone and celebrate if you have a significant other, or just atone.

And then there are the Norwegian curlers.

Read my post, All in a (Valentine’s) Day Work ‎



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Yet another oil industry corruption scandal

This time in Nigeria,

Inside the Bribery Scandal Sweeping Through the Oil Industry. Shell and Eni paid $1.3 billion for oil rights in Nigeria. Whether the money was mostly a bribe is at the heart of one of the industry’s most dramatic criminal cases.

As you may recall, Petrobras to pay $2.95 billion to settle U.S. corruption lawsuit earlier this year.

The Pemex-Odebrecht cases are still in the headlines.

And who could forget the UN’s oil-for-food?

It’s enough to make one suspect that government-owned and UN-connected agencies are ripe for the picking.

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Mexico: CJNG kidnaps two special agents

Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco New Generation Cartel) is on the move. Here are two articles:

Two members of a special investigative police force who disappeared in Mexico a week ago have been shown in a video posted on YouTube.

The two agents from the Criminal Investigation Agency appear sitting in front of five masked men who force them at gunpoint to read a statement.

The armed men are believed to be members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

The cartel has been expanded rapidly and aggressively across Mexico.

Mexico’s Attorney General Raul Cervantes recently declared it the nation’s largest criminal organisation and it has been blamed for a series of attacks on Mexican security forces and public officials.

Here’s the YouTube (in Spanish),

Jesús Pérez Caballero analyzes at InSight Crime, Mexico’s CJNG: Local Consolidation, Military Expansion and Vigilante Rhetoric

The CJNG is expanding its presence and influence throughout Mexico. In each of the states where the group operates, it continues to successfully exploit its defining features: the flexibility to combine a military perspective with its historical criminal ties, a strategic commitment to become involved in pre-existing conflicts, and the promotion of vigilante rhetoric through propaganda.

At the moment, the rewards of this strategy seem to outweigh the risks assumed by the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – CJNG) and its leader, Nemesio Oseguera, alias “El Mencho.”

Read the full report.

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Brazil: Carnival week

It’s that time of year again, and Rio de Janeiro’s top 13 samba schools are ready:

Brazil’s samba schools go political as funding cuts bite (click on the link for the BBC photo essay)

Beija-Flor samba school says it has been “inspired” by Brazil’s dirty politics. Corruption has dominated the country’s news, with former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva being sentenced to 12 years in prison and top business executives and dozens of politicians under investigation over a huge graft scandal.

Beija-Flor, which has won 13 championships, has chosen to portray the country’s troubles by placing a huge rat on one of its floats.

Beija-Flor has also built a colourful polystyrene version of the headquarters of Petrobras, the state-run oil company at the centre of one Brazil’s biggest corruption scandals.

But instead of it looking like a gleaming, modern building, it has been made to look like a collection of ramshackle huts.

The school’s artistic director, Marcelo Misailidis, says it is meant to show how corruption drives Brazilians into poverty and life in the favelas, the sprawling neighbourhoods where many of Rio’s poor live.

There’s a Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Delights theme party al Leme beach (link in Portuguese). More Carnival at O Globo.

Meet Samantha Mortner, the UK woman leading the dance in Brazil

at the Imperio da Tijuca samba school, she’s best known as “musa gringa” the first non-Brazilian dancer to take a lead role at “the biggest party on earth”.

Here is last year’s show,

Last, but not least, you may want to watch Black Orpheus, the luminous 1959 classic.

UPDATE
Linked to bY The Other McCain. Thank you!

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