Tag: brazil

60 years since coup, Brazilians call on US to declassify its role

Today marks a solemn anniversary in Brazil: 60 years ago, the Brazilian military seized power from the government of João Goulart, marking the start of over two decades of military rule.

Brazil’s 2014 Truth Commission report is the country’s only formal investigation into this period of dictatorial rule. The commission’s 2,000-page report revealed some grisly details of the dictatorship’s human rights abuses, identified over 400 individuals killed by the military, and shed light on Brazil’s role in destabilizing other Latin American countries.

To assist with the Truth Commission, then-Vice President Joe Biden hand-delivered declassified State Department records to former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff — who herself had been imprisoned and tortured by the military regime. The records offered details about the dictatorship and Washington’s enabling of abuses, including a cable from former Ambassador to Brazil William Rountree arguing that condemning the regime’s human rights “excesses” would be “counterproductive.”

Biden’s delivery of the declassified records was symbolic, since the U.S. had supported the coup. The U.S. solidified its support for the putschists the year prior, drew up plans for a U.S. invasion if deemed necessary, and sent a naval task force to Brazil to support the military plotters. In the end, direct U.S. involvement wasn’t needed — Goulart fled to Uruguay by April 4. The coup was carried out by Brazil’s generals, but Washington celebrated it as a victory for its interests nonetheless.

On the one hand, U.S. support for the coup laid bare the hypocrisy of America’s supposed commitment to sovereignty and democracy. Gone was the Kennedy administration’s promise to reject a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.” The Cold War logic of siding with anti-communist dictators for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union prevailed. Washington may have lost China, but it won Brazil — or so the thinking went.

However, even the most cynical arguments for aligning with undemocratic regimes for a strategic purpose often failed to bear fruit, given that many of these regimes departed from U.S. policy on key issues. Many historians of the U.S.-Brazil relationship contend that during this period their ties at times more closely resembled rivals rather than close partners. Rubens Ricupero, a former diplomat and minister of finance of Brazil, writes that, “Little by little, doubts turn[ed] into disappointment, and this le[d] to gradual disengagement in relation to the regime they had helped to create.”

When it first took power, Brazil’s military dictatorship closely followed Washington’s lead. Goulart was out, as was his “Independent Foreign Policy,” a non-alignment stance that emphasized self-determination, decolonization, and non-intervention, devised by the ousted president’s predecessor, Janio Quadros. In line with Washington’s desires, the dictatorship, which rotated through five different military general-presidents between 1964 and 1985, broke off relations with Cuba and even assisted the U.S. in its occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Washington also saw Brazil as a key ideological partner in destabilizing leftist regimes across Latin America. As one Brazilian general put it, the United States wanted Brazil “to do the dirty work.” And it did. Most prominently, the Brazilian regime played a critical role in the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile,. even secretly bringing members of the Chilean military to Brazil to discuss the potential coup. Brazil under the generals also participated in Operation Condor, the secret cooperation of right-wing military dictatorships in much of Latin America to assassinate, or “disappear” perceived leftists and other dissidents during the 1970s.

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The discreet US campaign to defend Brazil’s election

As Brazil prepared to hold a presidential election last October, many governments around the world viewed the vote with a mounting sense of foreboding.  The far-right incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, was openly flirting with subverting the country’s democracy. He attacked the electoral process, claiming that the electronic voting machines used by Brazilian authorities were unreliable and calling for a paper ballot instead. He constantly hinted at the risk of the election being stolen, echoing claims made by Donald Trump in the US. But in the end, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s win in October was accepted without serious challenge by Bolsonaro and the veteran leftwing politician was inaugurated on January 1. The fact that the election was not seriously challenged is a testament to the strength of Brazil’s institutions. But it was also in part the result of a quiet, year long pressure campaign by the US government to urge the country’s political and military leaders to respect and safeguard democracy, which has not been widely reported. The aim was to drum home two consistent messages to restive generals in Brazil and Bolsonaro’s close allies: Washington was neutral on the election result but would not stand for any attempt to question the voting process or the result. The Financial Times has spoken to six former or current US officials involved in the effort, as well as to several key Brazilian institutional figures, to piece together the story of how the Biden administration engaged in what one former top state department official calls a “very unusual” messaging campaign in the months leading up to the vote, using both public and private channels. All were at pains to underline that most of the credit for saving Brazil’s democracy in the face of Bolsonaro’s onslaught belongs to the Brazilians themselves and to their democratic institutions, which held firm in the face of extraordinary challenges from a president bent on retaining power.  “It’s Brazilian institutions that really made sure that the elections took place,” says a senior US administration official. “What was important was that we conveyed the right messages and maintained policy discipline.” The US had a clear geopolitical incentive to want to demonstrate a capacity to shape events in the region. Long the dominant outside power in Latin America, it has seen its influence eroded in recent years by a growing Chinese presence. The administration also had a more direct motivation. After the January 6 insurrection by Trump supporters at the Capitol in Washington attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, President Joe Biden felt very strongly about any attempt by Bolsonaro to question the outcome of a free and fair election, US officials say.

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9,000-year-old Human Skeletons and Over 100,000 Artifacts Unearthed in Brazil

Surveyors in Brazil were appraising a site identified for the building of a new apartment complex. However, they downed tools, and called in archaeologists when they started finding bones and shards of pottery. Now, a multi-layered archaeological site has been revealed which has yielded 43 human skeletons and in excess of 100,000 artifacts.

A team of construction workers were planning on building a new apartment complex in the coastal city of Sao Luis, the capital of Maranhao state in northeastern Brazil, when they came across human bones and shards of pottery. Now, having been dated to around to 9,000 years ago, lead archaeologist, Wellington Lage, said the find might “rewrite the history of human settlement in Brazil”.

The six-hectare (15-ac) plot is known locally as Rosane’s Farm. Back in 2019, the Brazilian construction giant MRV hired now 70-year-old Wellington Lage’s company, “W Lage Arqueologia,” to carry out a site survey before the building of a new apartment building. Researching the site, Lage discovered that bones were recovered in the 1970s, and part of a human jawbone was found in 1991.

According to a CBS news article, over the last four years Lage’s team have unearthed “43 human skeletons and more than 100,000 artifacts.” Brazil’s Institute for National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), referred to the discoveries as a “grandiose” haul of bones and artifacts.

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US Media Suppressed Their Government’s Role in Ousting Brazil’s Government

In a new peer-reviewed academic article in Latin American Perspectives (11/19/23), “Anticorruption and Imperialist Blind Spots: The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup,” Sean T. Mitchell, Rafael Ioris, Kathy Swart, Bryan Pitts and I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the US Department of Justice was a key actor in what we call Brazil’s “long coup.” This was the period from 2014, beginning with the lead up to the illegitimate 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, to the November 2019 release of then-former, now-current President Lula da Silva from political imprisonment.

“For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story,” we wrote; “the second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.” The article criticized US scholars on Latin America for ignoring a significant body of evidence of this involvement. It called on Latin Americanists to return to the anti-imperialist tradition that established their field as a leading source of informed criticism of US foreign policy.

In this article, I will make the same call to US journalists who lived in Brazil during this period who remained silent about their government’s role in removing Brazil’s front-running presidential candidate in the 2018 elections, opening the door for the right-wing extremist No. 2 candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.

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Take It From Brazil, Biden’s Ban on Flavored Cigarettes and Cigars Will Be a Disaster

The Biden administration’s flavored cigarettes and cigars ban, currently under final review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will soon make it illegal to buy or sell menthol and flavored tobacco products in the United States. Having announced its intention to prevent people, especially children, from becoming addicted to cigarettes and other drugs, Biden’s FDA will have to grapple with the consequences of their chosen method.

A similar ban in Brazil gives us a window into the probable outcome of Biden’s flavored cigarettes legislation. In 2012, after a series of court battles, Brazil became one of the first countries in the world to fully ban flavored cigarettes, wanting to minimize the demand for cigarette products and curb smoking in the country, particularly among children. 

To enforce the ban, Brazil has used its federal police force and its military police to crack down on the illegal cigarette market—with its government and law enforcement being one of the most vocal proponents of tobacco crackdowns since the mid-1980s. But Brazil quickly faced the fallout from its prohibitionist policy. 

Brazil’s demand for illegal cigarettes, particularly flavored cigarettes, only increased. Illegal actors quickly entered the market, leading the Brazilian government to conduct dangerous raids against illegal cigarette providers, with some resulting in bystanders being killed in the crossfire. The Brazilian government has lost billions of dollars in enforcement and tax revenues, while expenditures on illegal cigarettes rise. 

Brazil now has one of the largest cigarette markets in the world, despite its efforts to rid the country of cigarettes through prohibition. According to the Brazilian Institute for Competition Ethics (ETCO), the illegal cigarette market now represents about half of the entire cigarette market. Illegal cigarette consumption nearly doubled from 2008 to 2013 and in Brazil’s border areas it nearly tripled. 

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BOLSANARO’S BUTCHERY: CIA FINGERPRINTS ARE ALL OVER BRAZIL’S INDIGENOUS GENOCIDE

From April 1964 to March 1985, a military junta ruled Brazil with an iron fist. Its crimes against humanity throughout this period were extensive, including institutionalized torture, imprisonment, forced disappearances and mass murder. Typically, the victims were political opponents of the regime, although the country’s indigenous population was a specific, dedicated target.

In most cases, their crime was objecting to economic “reform” projects that destroyed their homes or simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the backing and direction of the World Bank, the junta forcibly displaced indigenous people and desecrated their lands to extract valuable natural resources for Western capital. Along the way, these communities routinely endured brutal repression, pogroms, and massacres.

Much of this barbarity was doled out by the Rural Indigenous Guard, a lethal elite police force covertly created by the CIA. The Agency also constructed a system of indigenous prisons, which played a pivotal and horrifying role in the junta’s policies of indigenous cleansing.

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Luzio, who lived in São Paulo 10,000 years ago, was Amerindian like Indigenous people now, DNA reveals

An article published on July 31 in Nature Ecology & Evolution reveals that Luzio, the oldest human skeleton found in São Paulo state (Brazil), was a descendant of the ancestral population that settled the Americas at least 16,000 years ago and gave rise to all present-day Indigenous peoples, such as the Tupi.

Based on the largest set of Brazilian archaeological genomic data, the study reported in the article also offers an explanation for the disappearance of the oldest coastal communities, the residents of which built the icons of Brazilian archaeology known as “sambaquis,” huge mounds of shells and fishbones used as dwellings, cemeteries and territorial boundaries. Archaeologists often refer to these monuments as shell mounds or kitchen middens.

“After the Andean civilizations, the Atlantic coast sambaqui builders were the human phenomenon with the highest demographic density in pre-colonial South America. They were the ‘kings of the coast’ for thousands and thousands of years. They vanished suddenly about 2,000 years ago,” said André Menezes Strauss, an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE-USP) and principal investigator for the study.

The authors analyzed the genomes of 34 samples from four different areas of Brazil’s coast. The fossils were at least 10,000 years old. They came from sambaquis and other parts of eight sites (Cabeçuda, Capelinha, Cubatão, Limão, Jabuticabeira II, Palmeiras Xingu, Pedra do Alexandre and Vau Una).

This material included Luzio, São Paulo’s oldest skeleton, found in the Capelinha river midden in the Ribeira de Iguape valley by a group led by Levy Figuti, a professor at MAE-USP. The morphology of its skull is similar to that of Luzia, the oldest human fossil found to date in South America, dating from about 13,000 years ago. The researchers thought it might have belonged to a biologically different population from present-day Amerindians, who settled in what is now Brazil some 14,000 years ago, but it turns out they were mistaken.

“Genetic analysis showed Luzio to be an Amerindian, like the Tupi, Quechua or Cherokee. That doesn’t mean they’re all the same, but from a global perspective, they all derive from a single migratory wave that arrived in the Americas not more than 16,000 years ago. If there was another population here 30,000 years ago, it didn’t leave descendants among these groups,” Strauss said.

Luzio’s DNA also answered another question. River middens are different from coastal ones, so the find cannot be considered a direct ancestor of the huge classical sambaquis that appeared later. This discovery suggests there were two distinct migrations—into the hinterland and along the coast.

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Pendants made from giant sloths suggest earlier arrival of people in the Americas

New research suggests humans lived in South America at the same time as now extinct giant sloths, bolstering evidence that people arrived in the Americas earlier than once thought.

Scientists analyzed triangular and teardrop-shaped pendants made of bony material from the sloths. They concluded that the carved and polished shapes and drilled holes were the work of deliberate craftsmanship.

Dating of the ornaments and sediment at the Brazil site where they were found point to an age of 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, the researchers reported. That’s several thousand years before some earlier theories had suggested the first people arrived in the Americas, after migrating out from Africa and then Eurasia.

“We now have good evidence — together with other sites from South and North America — that we have to rethink our ideas about the migration of humans to the Americas,” said Mirian Liza Alves Forancelli Pacheco, a study co-author and archaeologist at the Federal University of Sao Carlos in Brazil.

In the past decade, other research has challenged the conventional wisdom that people didn’t reach the Americas until a few thousand years before rising sea levels covered the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, perhaps around 15,000 years ago.

The ornaments were discovered about 30 years ago at a rock shelter called Santa Elina in central Brazil. The new study is the first to analyze them extensively and rule out the possibility that humans had found and carved them thousands of years after the animals perished.

The team of researchers from Brazil, France and the United States said their analysis shows this handiwork was done within days to a few years after the animals had died, and before the materials had fossilized. The researchers also ruled out natural abrasion and other things that might explain the shapes and holes. They reported their findings Wednesday in Britain’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal.

“We think they were personal objects, possibly for personal adornment,” said Thais Rabito Pansani, a co-author and paleontologist at the Federal University of Sao Carlos in Brazil.

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Reporter Who Covered the “Brazilian Roswell” Varginha Incident Comes Forward with New Details


In the span of barely 18 months beginning, in January 2022, a UFO landing and alien encounter in South America has garnished enough attention to have gone from being referred to by many as “Brazil’s Roswell” to being well on its way to turning the New Mexico UFO incident into “America’s Varginha.” The incident occurred in January of 1996 when a large number of people in Varginha, a major metropolitan area in southeastern Brazil, claimed to have witnessed a UFO flying and landing, with a few of them claiming to see one or more extraterrestrials, a sizable number reporting military personnel removing the UFO or its crash debris, and one or possibly more becoming ill from touching an ET or the debris or breathing the air near it. While the military and the Brazilian government have never confirmed the UFO nor the aliens, witnesses, doctors, soldiers and others are suddenly coming forward with more details about the Varginha. This week, a reporter who covered it in 1996 has given an interview and released a book with new information on what she saw behind the scenes of what is becoming the most famous UFO and extraterrestrial incident of the modern era.

Journalist Margarida Hallacoc was born in Poço Fundo, just 50 miles from Varginha in the state of Minas Gerais. In January 1996, Hallacoc was a reporter for Jornal Hoje em Dia (“Today’s Newspaper”) at the Varginha branch – putting her in the perfect location to cover the fast-breaking news about the mysterious incident. To promote her new book on the case, “The ETs of Varginha: Behind the scenes of another world coverage,” Hallacoc sat down for interviews with João Marcelo on his UFO YouTube channel (view it here in Portuguese) and with Noticiar.net. besides being a journalist and author, Margarida Hallacoc was a writing professor in the Journalism and Advertising courses at the Centro Universitário do Sul de Minas (UNIS). As such, she told Noticiar.net that her book takes a different approach to previous ones on the Varginha incident.

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The Man Who Touched an Alien at Brazil’s Roswell – Newly Released Forensic Report Shows a Strange Bacteria Killed Him


On January 20, 1996, the incident that has since become known as ‘Brazil’s Roswell’ began when three young women in Varginha, a major metropolitan city in southeastern Brazil, reported seeing an alien being described as having red eyes, a large head with “spots like veins on the skin” and an unsteady bipedal gait that made them think it was injured or sick. This was followed by more reports of aliens, UFO sightings, military presence, witnesses who allegedly filmed aliens being removed from the area, and one young policeman who claimed to have touched one of the extraterrestrials and was infected with a mysterious disease which soon killed him. Details of his experience and death have remained sketchy at best, but documentary filmmaker James Fox managed to finally get detailed reports from witnesses for his 2022 documentary on the Varginha incident called “Moment of Contact.” Fox returned to Varginha this year and recently announced he has obtained more information from the forensic pathologist who examined the young policeman who allegedly touched an alien. What he found could shed new light on Brazil’s Roswell.

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