Inspired by the movement for real democracy and people’s power that has spread to hundreds of cities around the world, young Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro have created their own version of “Occupy Wall Street”, dubbed “Occupy Rio”.
Seringal Sao Bernardo, in the state of Acre in Brazil’s Western Amazon, is a settlement of seringuieros – rubber tappers – who have lived on their piece of forested land since before they were freed from plantation serfdom in the 1970’s.
The recent murder of two environmental activists took place the same day the Brazilian Congress passed legislation that would allow agribusinesses and ranchers to clear even more land in the Amazon.
The past ten years in Latin America have witnessed a major shift to the left in both the halls of government power and society. This transformation resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and books seeking to explain George W. Bush’s imperial designs, the leftist trend in the region and the dynamics of US-Latin American relations. […]
“Something is different. I don’t know how, but you can tell that things have changed,” said a committed Worker’s Party (PT) supporter on election night in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo. […]
Brazil is now a big league player. In the decade in which it begins its ascent, the country is so important that it is forcing its main competitor in the region, the United States, to redesign its foreign policy to take into consideration Brazil’s prominence, a tactic that might destabilize all of Latin America.
The 2010 World Cup will kick off in South Africa this June, but Maureen Msisi, of the Landless People’s Movement wants to know “who this development [is] really going to benefit? Not … the people that most need it,” she says. Activists across the Atlantic in Brazil are saying the same thing, throwing into question a development model that has accompanied massive international events such as the World Cup and the Olympics for nearly two decades.
Copyright 2003-2018 Upside Down World