Brazil

In an impassioned article, LAB author Marcos Colón denounces the double-standards afflicting the mainstream press in Brazil, prompt to condemn those who defend the Amazon, its rivers and people as radicals and vandals, while they hail the confidence, predictability and business-friendly character of projects to dredge rivers and construct massive ports for exporting soya.

Brazil's National Museum of Indigenous Peoples is struggling. Its funding has been cut to below 2015 levels; it is dependent on FUNAI; and institutional wrangling has left it unable to fulfill its mission. The crumbling museum building is closed to the public and important exhibits are left in limbo. Who will come to its rescue?

Jasmine Haniff reviews Alex Ungprateeb Flynn’s book about Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, which offers a compelling framework for understanding how a social movement can develop an alternative collective future, through decades of grassroots struggle.

Sometime in early January 2005, a photograph of a lone man standing on a beach aiming a bow and arrow toward a camera, made...

Marcos Colón reviews the Cannes and Golden Globe award-winning Brazilian film The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, starring Wagner Moura. The film engages questions of state censorship, political repression, and surveillance not by following a reporter chasing a story, but, this time, by following a man hunted by a system terrified of memory.

‘Indigenous Peoples, poor countries – those who contributed least to the crisis are the ones who show real ability to confront it,’ writes Jelson Oliveira, professor of philosophy at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR) and founding-director of the Hans Jonas Professorship.

The massacre of more than 100 people in Rio's favelas is an attempt by right-wing governor Claudio Castro to court popularity and revive the fortunes of the far right as they look for a successor to Jair Bolsonaro. It is at once a nod to Trump's military interventionism and a challenge to Lula.

The Amazon is a mirror reflecting the deep contradictions in our approach: development which is a monoculture of thought, authoritarianism disguised as progress, the extractive zeal that devours everything, including the future. The mirrors brought by the Xapiri to Yanomami shamans could help us to see, to listen, and to learn. Will the leaders who are gathering for COP30 in Belém be capable of looking into these mirrors?

Not all the peoples of the Amazon will be represented at the COP, especially the women for whom climate change is no longer a threat, but a daily reality, and from which they are the first to suffer. Indigenous, quilombola and black women from the city periphery all confront obstacles to participate, with no guarantees that they will be heard. Agência Pública’s Cecilia Amorim has spoken to women from each of the three groups

'What The Congress of the Disappeared ultimately shows us is that Brazil is a nation that has never truly reconciled with its past. Now...