Illegal loggers have long invaded areas of the Amazon rainforest. Tired of what they say is a lack of sufficient government assistance, the Ka’apor Indians feel it is time to take matters into their own hands. The tribe sent out their best warriors to hunt down loggers and drive them off their land.
The Ka'apor Indians are the legal inhabitants and caretakers of the territory along with four other tribes. Together, they have set up monitoring camps in the areas that are being illegally exploited.
A report about the serious violations of Human Rights in Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the world cup football 2014 and the 2016 Olympics. Based on economically feasibilities the FIFA and IOC nominated the city as host of the World Cup Football en the 2016 Olympics. Every time again the sport organizations pushing countries in development over the edge. The countries investing milliards of dollars in constructing stadiums and infrastructure meanwhile they are breathing human rights on a massive scale with impunity. The FIFA and IOC don't want to implement a human rights clause or look to the social feasibility, in advance. An inconvenient harbinger about social cleansing of street children ahead of the World Cup and the lack of transparency.
The lead up to the World Cup has prompted large scale demonstrations and public protests to which the police have responded with use of force, and in some cases "less lethal" weapons such as tear gas and rubber bullets. Protests are likely to continue in coming weeks and the Brazilian Congress is considering new laws that could be used to crack down on protesters. Additionally, inadequate regulations and training for policing demonstrations pose a risk of more injuries to protesters due to excessive use of force by police. Everyone has the right to peaceful protest -- to exercise their human rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly - and the Brazilian Government has a duty to ensure that they can. aiyellowcard.org
Over 100 people were arrested in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, during a protest against this summer’s World Cup which will be hosted in the country. Around 2,500 people took to the streets on Saturday for the demonstration which ended in clashes with police late in the night.
Demonstrators gathered in front of the Sao Paulo Art Museum for about one hour before heading out to another part of the city chanting slogans against the tournament. Several chanted “If we have no rights, there will be no Cup.”
Police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, after some anarchist demonstrators wrecked an empty police car, attempting to overturn it, while others smashed the windows of banks and started fires.
Last month's protests swept through Brazil's cities, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets to protest rampant political corruption, declining government services and rising public costs. Contrary to the rosy economic picture that the World Bank and the IMF have tried to paint over the past decade, Brazil's growing discontent with the neoliberal model is now on full display. Find out more in this week's GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.
A more widely-cropped version of the now viral photograph shows just how isolated the woman was she was attacked by officers in Rio de Janiero, Brazil Monday evening. (Photo: Victor Caivano)
A captured instance of brazen police brutality against a civilian has, once again, captured the attention of the global community. The shocking photograph of a lone woman being pepper sprayed at close range by Brazilian police has gone viral, drawing criticism and attention to the ongoing mass demonstrations in Brazil—at which the attack took place—and the chronic undercurrent of police violence that so often follows peaceful citizen uprisings.
New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer spoke with the photographer behind the image, Victor Caivano, who said that the attack happened at around 11:20 PM Monday evening, long after “the protest was over, riots included.” The woman appeared to be a “normal, middle-class university student,” he said, adding that she was standing alone on a “deserted corner” after the police had cleared the area.
He continued: Three riot officers approached the woman and told her to leave. When she objected — the woman either questioned the order or insisted that she wasn’t doing anything wrong, Caivano recalls — she was pepper-sprayed. “This policeman just didn’t think twice,” Caivano says. The woman stumbled backward, “screaming and cursing.” She was detained and taken to a police van. Caivano says local reporters are now trying to track her down.
In the middle of the protest, police man kneels in front of the fire, throws his weapon to burn and talks for the camera ! "To serve a State like this? I am ashamed. I am ashamed of everything we go through, every day!"
A Brazilian congressional human rights committee on Thursday approved legislation that would allow psychologists to treat homosexuality as a disorder or pathology. The commission is led by evangelical pastor Marco Feliciano of the Social Christian Party, who has been accused of homophobia and enraged activists by calling AIDS a "gay cancer" in a tweet. His appointment as head the Commission for Human Rights and Minorities in the lower house of Brazil's Congress was fiercely opposed by gay and human rights groups. The measure approved Tuesday seeks to lift a prohibition on psychologists treating homosexuality that was established by the Federal Psychology Council. The ban has been in effect since 1999.
"In practice, (the initiative's) result would be that a person over 18 years of age, responsible for his actions, who is homosexual and wants to reorient his sexuality, can be attended by a psychologist," said lawmaker Joao Campos, a member of the evangelical bloc of Brazil's lower house. Feliciano had tried for weeks to put the "gay cure" initiative before the commission but had failed as opponents maneuvered to block a vote. The initiative was passed Tuesday amid a low turnout by commission members.
In Brazil, students and the indigenous may be fighting different fights, but they are ultimately part of the same struggle against the neoliberal state.
While the world has been watching Turkey, another country is experiencing revolt: Brazil. Just like Turkey, Brazil has recently experienced relative success in economic terms. But just as in Turkey, the spoils of this economic growth are divided extremely unequally. Just like in Turkey, a relatively small provocation has sparked a much more widespread chain reaction. Unlike in Turkey, that provocation is a direct attack on living standards. But the anger exploding as a result of it appears to run just as deep.
According to the BBC, “the demonstrators were mostly university students, but the authorities said there were also groups of anarchists looking for a fight.” The idea that some students might be anarchists by conviction, and that some anarchists go to college because they like to learn, apparently does not occur to either “authorities” or the BBC. And the ones “looking for a fight” were above all the rabid police troops themselves, who used excessive amounts of teargas and rubber bullets against mostly unarmed demonstrators, some of whom did attack shops and set fire to tyres. But that’s what desperate people do if you make their lives even harder by rising the prices of public amenities in a context of rapid inflation.
Overall, more than 50 people were left injured and the number of arrests exceeded 200. According to the BBC, “police say they seized petrol bombs, knives, and drugs.” Sure. And yes, “police acted with professionalism”, according to the state governor. Obviously. After all, repression is their profession.
Protests against bus and underground fare rises in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo have turned violent. Police fired rubber-coated bullets and tear gas, and detained more than 200 people. Police say they seized petrol bombs, knives and drugs. Violence has also been reported at protests in Rio de Janeiro.
Prices for a single ticket in Sao Paulo were raised on 2 June from 3 reals ($1.40, £0.90) to 3.20 reals ($1.50, £0.96). The authorities say that the rise is well below inflation, which since the last price rise in January 2011 has been at 15.5%, according to official figures.
An estimated 5,000 protesters converged on the streets of Sao Paulo's central area on Thursday - the fourth day of the protests. Most of the protesters are thought to be university students The protesters clashed with police, who fired tear gas to try to disperse the crowd. At least 55 people have been injured, according to the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. It added that six of its journalists had been wounded, two of them shot in the face. State Governor Geraldo Alckmin branded the rioters "vandals" and promised to act to avoid a repeat of the violence.
Jose Rodrigues Moreira, a Brazilian man accused of conspiring to kill two environmental activists, has been acquitted, as two other men were found guilty. The jury set Moreira free on Thursday due to insufficient evidence, disappointing family members of the murdered married couple who claim he was the alleged mastermind of the attack and has enjoyed impunity.
Jose Claudio da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espirito Santo, had for years campaigned against loggers and ranchers who force slave labour to clear-cut large swaths of the Amazon. They had reported illegal loggers to police and federal prosecutors, and were killed in a May 2011 ambush near the Amazonian town of Maraba.
Two men, Lindonjonson Silva Rocha and Alberto Lopes do Nascimento, were found guilty of killing the couple and sentenced to more than 40 years in prison each. "This is a clear defeat for the families of the victims," said Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from the court. "This was the person they really wanted to see go to jail.
"There are about 100 people outside the court; family members, friends, acquaintances. They're all chanting 'justice' and 'crime'." Prosecutors vowed to appeal the acquittal of Moreira.
Police in Rio de janeiro evicted two dozen Amazon natives on Friday from an old Indian museum that will be demolished to clear areas adjacent to Brazil's legendary Maracana soccer stadium, the main venue for next year's World Cup.
The Indians from different Amazon tribes had been living on the grounds of the Rio de Janeiro museum since 2006 and were resisting its demolition, which caused further delays to the overhaul of the stadium complex.
Riot police handcuffed the Indians, some of whom wore feathered headdresses and body paint, and used tear gas to disperse street demonstrations by sympathizers trying to block the eviction.
Brazil is on deadline to deliver stadiums that will host the 2014 World Cup, a global sporting event that is a chance to showcase the South American nation's emergence as a world economic powerhouse. It is also a challenge for its deficient infrastructure that could become an international embarrassment.
Her nom de guerre was Estela. Part of a shadowy urban guerrilla group at the time of her capture in 1970, she spent three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles.
That former guerrilla is now Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. As a truth commission begins examining the military’s crackdown on the population during a dictatorship that lasted two decades, Brazilians are riveted by chilling details emerging about the painful pasts of both their country and their president.
The Awá are one of only two nomadic hunter-gathering tribes left in the Amazon. According to Survival, they are now the world's most threatened tribe, assailed by gunmen, loggers and hostile settler farmers.
Their troubles began in earnest in 1982 with the inauguration of a European Economic Community (EEC) and World Bank-funded programme to extract massive iron ore deposits found in the Carajás mountains. The EEC gave Brazil $600m to build a railway from the mines to the coast, on condition that Europe received a third of the output, a minimum of 13.6m tons a year for 15 years. The railway cut directly through the Awá's land and with the railway came settlers. A road-building programme quickly followed, opening up the Awá's jungle home to loggers, who moved in from the east.
It was, according to Survival's research director, Fiona Watson, a recipe for disaster. A third of the rainforest in the Awá territory in Maranhão state in north-east Brazil has since been destroyed and outsiders have exposed the Awá to diseases against which they have no natural immunity.
"The Awá and the uncontacted Awá are really on the brink," she said. "It is an extremely small population and the forces against them are massive. They are being invaded by loggers, settlers and cattle ranchers. They rely entirely on the forest. They have said to me: 'If we have no forest, we can't feed our children and we will die'."
But it appears that the Awá also face a more direct threat. Earlier this year an investigation into reports that an Awá child had been killed by loggers found that their tractors had destroyed the Awá camp.
You feel nothing? I understand, you do not know what is Belo Monte. What this country is Brazil, with a hypocritical society unable to put a stop to this policy rotten. LETS STOP THE INSANITY IN OUR BEAUTIFUL BLUE GLOBE PLEASEEE!!!; Unfortunate examples such as the construction of the hydroelectric plants of Tucuruí (PA) and Balbina (AM), the last built in the Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s, there is evidence.
Displaced communities and flooded huge tracts of land and destroyed the fauna and flora of these regions. Balbina, 146 km from Manaus, meant flooding of the Indian reservation Atroari, fish killed, food shortages and hunger for local people. In contrast, it was the supply of electricity for the local population was not met. The disaster was such that in 1989, the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), after analysing the situation in the Uatumã River where the dam was built, completed by his biological death. In Tucuruí it was not much different. Nearly ten thousand families were left without their lands, indigenous and riverine. Given this situation, in relation to the Belo Monte, one must wonder how anti-democratic as the project was being conducted, the cost-effectiveness of the work, the fate of energy to be produced and the lack of an energy policy for the country favors alternative energy.
Loggers in Brazil captured an eight-year-old girl from one of the Amazon's last uncontacted tribes and burned her alive as part of a campaign to force the indigenous population from its land, reports claimed on Tuesday night.
The child was said to have wandered away from her village, where around 60 members of the Awá tribe live a primitive life in complete isolation from the modern world, and fallen into the hands of the loggers.
Luis Carlos Guajajaras, a local leader from a separate tribe, told a Brazilian news website that they tied to her a tree and set her alight as a warning to other natives, who live in a protected reserve in the north-eastern state of Maranhão ."She was from another tribe, they live deep in the jungle, and have no contact with the outside world. It would have been the first time she had ever seen white men. We heard that they laughed as they burned her to death," he said.
Reports of the killing, which was said to have happened in October or November last year, were seconded by the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), a Catholic group
Brazil has taken a big step towards passing new laws that will loosen restrictions on the amount of Amazon rainforest that farmers can destroy, after its lower house of parliament voted in favour of updating the country's 46-year-old forest code.
In a move described as "disastrous" by conservationists, the nation's congress backed a bill relaxing laws on the deforestation of hilltops and the amount of vegetation farmers must preserve. The law also offers partial amnesties for fines levied against landowners who have illegally destroyed tracts of rainforest. The legislation, which must still be passed by the Brazilian Senate and approved by President Dilma Rousseff, aims to help owners of smaller farms and ranches compete with under-regulated rivals in countries such as the USA and Argentina.
The father of the Swedish Queen, Walther Sommerlath, was a member of the German Nazi Party and took part in the “Aryanisation” of Jewish-owned businesses.
The father of the Swedish Queen, Walther Sommerlath, took part in the expulsion of Jews from the German business sector. In April 1939, he bought a metal engineering plant in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood of Berlin. The previous owner was a Jewish engineer who, now destitute, had to leave Germany shortly afterwards. The Royal Court of Sweden declines to comment these new facts.
In the mid 1920s, Walther Sommerlath moved to São Paulo, Brazil where he worked for the steel company Acus Roechling Boulerus do Brasil, a subsidiary in the German steel group Roechling. After the war, in 1947 the Sommerlath family returned to Brazil, where Walther Sommerlath worked as the president of the Brazilian subsidiary of the Swedish steel-parts manufacturer Uddeholm. (wikipedia)
Government researchers in Brazil say they have found one of the world's last uncontacted tribes in a remote corner of the Amazon rainforest.
Aerial pictures revealed by the Brazilian government's agency of indigenous affairs (Funai) showed four large thatched huts fully surrounded by various crops in the Vale do Javari region. Aloysio Guapindaia, a Funai director, also said they would work to keep the tribe isolated and safe. The tribe is thought to belong to the Pano linguistic group that straddles the border between Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.
A landless peasant activist has been found dead in Brazil's Amazon state of Para, the fifth murder in a month believed to be linked to the conflict over land and logging in the country’s rainforest region. The body of the victim, Obede Souza, was found over the weekend in the dense forest surrounding his home in the landless settlement of Esperanca, near the town of Pacaja. Police said on Tuesday that the activist was killed by a gunshot to his head outside his home and that an investigation was under way.
Amazon killings Timeline: May 24: Jose Claudio Ribeiro and wife Maria do Espirito Santo
