‪‪ Brazil's Homeless Workers' Movement‬‬ is growing

The state secretary of Housing of Pernambuco, Bruno Lisboa, canceled the meeting scheduled for January 21 with members of the Movement of Homeless Workers (MTST). After not being received by the secretary, members of the MTST tried to enter the building of the State Housing Company (Cehab), in Recife to protest.

Cehab's office called the police. A military police group was deployed to contain the demonstrators. The group was received by the Military Police with rubber bullets and tear gas bombs. A protester and a police officer were injured. About 20 people were detained.

According to lawyer Ivan Moraes, "members of the Movement of the Homeless Workers of Pernambuco suffered violations of rights and were victims of police aggression". In his Facebook page, he defends that Governor Paulo Câmara open a channel for dialogue and debate the social use of the land that is idle and belongs to the State of Pernambuco, next to the Terminal do Barro, in Recife.

The movement for decent housing has been growing in Brazil. The group that demonstrated in Recife is formed by citizens who lost their shacks in a fire in the Happy Family community occurred on 2016. Many families have lost everything.

The Federal Constitution of Brazil guarantees every citizen the right to decent housing, and since 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a dignified dwelling has become a universal and fundamental right for people's lives. To decent housing, and since 1948, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a dignified dwelling has become a universal and fundamental right for people's lives.

Today, MTST is one of the most important political groups in Brazil. Its growth since the 1990s is undeniable, largely because of the growing fight for rights in the country and scary growth in housing prices, many of them virtually impossible for ordinary Brazilians.

Watch videos about police action and demonstration in Recife:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu9-GRt0aLY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maZS0S1F9hs

Brazilian government is cutting funds to fight Zika virus

According to Folha de S.Paulo, federal and local governments in Brazil are going to spend less money to prevent and fight epidemics like Zika, dengue and chikungunya. Brazil will spend less money in 2015 than in 2014. The difference is big. In 2015, the total invested in these policies was 4,6 billions reais. In 2014, the government spended 5,1 billion reais.

On top of that, the current Minister of Health, Marcelo Castro, is going to be absent from his duties. For him and his party (PMDB), is more important that Castro take part in political disputes in Brasilia this week. The fight against zika virus will have to wait.

Brazil’s right-wing is on the move

Today, hundreds of thousands joined right-wing protests for ouster of Brazil’s president. They want the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Her government is accused of failure in its response to state-owned oil and gas Petrobras crisis. The company is in the midst of an unprecedented financial crisis and a scandal of corruption. The Petrolão (Petrobras scandal) has become a political nightmare for Mrs. Rousseff, whose popularity has hit record lows.

At São Paulo, Brazil biggest city, according to the police, 275.000 of people protested at the Avenida Paulista. According to Datafolha, a local polling company linked to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, there were 100.000.

Some protesters, like the group SOS Forças Armadas, want the end of Democracy. For them, the solution is simple and very scary: they want a dictatorship. Those right-wingers defend the military regime that ruled from 1964 to 1985, one of the most dark chapter of Brazilian history.

What is carnism?

In this video from Portal NAMU, Melanie Joy explains carnism, the invisible belief system that shapes our perceptions about the meat we eat. In her opinion, belief systems like this have sanctioned the behavior that gave rise to a mindset in which we can love some animals and eat others.

Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff

Brazil’s presidential campaign is getting a momentum. Political change is just around the corner. After the socialist and presidential candidate Eduardo Campos had died in a tragic plane crash, everything changed. Marina Silva, who took Eduardo’s place at the Socialist Party campaign, is growing.

Eduardo Campos's unexpected death put Marina in the media. She appears almost every day in the local media. Today there are rumors that she will compete with President Dilma Rousseff at the second-round runoff, taking the place of Aécio Neves, who is currently representing the country’s right wing.

Now, two women, both leftists, who offer different perspectives on the means of changing the country, are going to compete. Dilma is linked to PMDB, the most physiological political party in Brazil. Marina is very close of Neca Setubal, daughter of banker with a fortune estimated at 792 million Reais. Neca is Marina’s counselor and team leader.

Today, in Brazil, nothing is certain, only that things are going to be the same, no matter who won the election. 

Cost of Living in Brazil

It would be very useful to talk about the cost of living in Brazil. Thinking about that, Superinteressante magazine published an article in english explaining why everything is so expensive here in Brazil. Click here to read more.

Bible, homophobia, racism, religion and politics in Brazil

During his testimony in the Supreme Court (STF), Marco Feliciano, the new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives called Africans a cursed people. 

In the defense filed in the Brazilian court, his lawyer, Rafael da Silva Novaes, delivered a document which was written “quoting the Bible [...] African descendants of Ham [or Cam], son of Noah. And, as Christians, we believe in blessings and therefore we cannot ignore the curses”.

According to the text, the only way people of African descent be “cured” is accepting Jesus Crist. Such absurdities led to numerous demonstrations around the country. The evangelical pastor Marco Feliciano, as a President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives has banned the presence of citizens from its sessions to keep out protesters demanding his resignation.

In his church, in a recent sermon, Feliciano said the follow about homosexuals: “I am against their promiscuity. I don't want my daughters to go out on the streets and see men with shaved legs kissing each other. The Brazilian family must be respected”.

In the last few days some actors and singers protested against Feliciano. Even the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, said that she is against any form of discrimination. 

Slavoj Žižek talking about Brazil

He left his apartment in  in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and went to Brazil to talk about politics and James Bond movies. Take a look at the video.

Marco Feliciano: Bible and racism

Yesterday,  the evangelical preacher Marco Feliciano, new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives, could not preside over the session. Dozens of demonstrators protested against the presence of Feliciano in the presidency. His session lasted only eight minutes.

Sources in Brasilia say that the congressman suffers great pressure to leave office. Feliciano was also subpoenaed to testify next April in the Federal Supreme Court on a charge of embezzlement.

According to the UN, “most discrimination in Brazil is subtle and includes slights, aggressions and numerous other informal practices, while consciously egregious and overt racism directed at particular individuals, especially in the form of racial insults, is more commonly recognized as racist. Even though Brazil’s anti-racism laws target such incidents, which have long been considered un-Brazilian, subtle individual and institutional practices maintain and reproduce racial inequalities. Racialist ways of thinking, in which racial hierarchies are accepted as natural, are apparently as culturally embedded in Brazil as they are throughout the world”.

Feliciano is a product of this racialist way of thinking and he did not seem to regret his remarks on Twitter. Feliciano wrote that “Africans are descended from ancestral cursed by Noah. That's a fact”. The worst is that racist ideas like these receive support from many people in Brazil, especially evangelical fundamentalists. For a multiracial nation with a rich African influence like Brazil, that's a shame.

Brazil: losing billions of dollars

China was eagerly buying Brazilian commodities and Brazilian producers were happily counting money. But Chinese buyers are afraid of one of the biggest problems in Brazilian economy: investments in infrastructure. 

Our production is growing faster than the infrastructure. This year, the country should harvest of 183.6 million tons, an increase of 10.5% in production compared to 2012. This will be the largest crop in our history.

It’s a marvellous growth, no doubt. The problem is the infrastructure to drain all this output. We don’t have ports and logistics infrastructure able to drain this massive amount of commodities. Today, our bigger port, the Port of Santos, located in the city of Santos, in the coast of São Paulo, is suffering. The queue of trucks waiting to transport their cargo at the port of Santos reached 30 km. The lack of infrastructure has created a permanent queue of hundreds of trucks.

All these problems and slowness to drain the production made our biggest importer, the Chinese group Sunrise, cancel the purchase of nearly 2 million tons of soybean due to the delay caused by the lack of infrastructure in Brazil. This decision represents a loss of billions of dollars to Brazilians farmers.

The poor infrastructure also helps to destroy much of the crop. In the state of Mato Grosso, producers have lost part of their harvest for lack of trucks to transport the crop. They also have no place to store the harvested soybeans.

According to The Economist, "Brazil’s government has woken up to the urgent need to improve the country’s infrastructure. It is auctioning road, railway and airport concessions. Last month it added ports to the list, promising to spend 54 billion reais to expand and dredge public ports and to improve landside access over the next five years". But today, in Brazil, the infrastructure problems are still far from a solution.

Brazil: the misogynists and homophobics in our House of Representatives

Marco Feliciano, the new President of the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities of the Brazilian House of Representatives, did it again. Now, O Globo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil, is showing an interview that he gave in 2012. In this interview Feliciano said: “When you stimulate a woman to have the same rights as men, she wanted to work, their share as mother starts getting canceled, and so she is not a mother, there's only one way it knows: that she does not marry, or maintain a marriage, a relationship with a person of the same sex, and who will enjoy the pleasures of a union and will not have children. I see a subtle way to reach the family, when you stimulate people release their instincts and live with people of the same sex, you destroy the family, you create a society where only have homosexuals, you see that society tends to disappear because it does not generate children”. (“Quando você estimula uma mulher a ter os mesmos direitos do homem, ela querendo trabalhar, a sua parcela como mãe começa a ficar anulada, e, para que ela não seja mãe, só há uma maneira que se conhece: ou ela não se casa, ou mantém um casamento, um relacionamento com uma pessoa do mesmo sexo, e que vão gozar dos prazeres de uma união e não vão ter filhos. Eu vejo de uma maneira sutil atingir a família; quando você estimula as pessoas a liberarem os seus instintos e conviverem com pessoas do mesmo sexo, você destrói a família, cria-se uma sociedade onde só tem homossexuais, você vê que essa sociedade tende a desaparecer porque ela não gera filhos”). 

The absurd is that Feliciano is not alone. He just reflects the thinking advocated by members of the majority of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, a very powerful and ultraconservative group in Brazilian politics. His thoughts represent a misogynist and homophobic way of understanding our society, which has undergone vast socio-politico-ideological changes in the last few years. Feliciano is a product of a country that goes, at the same time, one step forward and one step behind.

For Hildete Pereira de Melo, a very important scholar known for his acting and his studies linked to the feminist movement in Brazil, "assign responsibility to homosexuals for the destruction of the family is a delusion". The thing is that this ideological/cultural war is getting dirtier and crazier in Brazil.

The worst is that the number of congressmen linked to the evangelical churches is growing and the future seems not so bright at the moment.