Only four days after Jair Bolsonaro's election, federal judge Sergio Moro, Lula’s nemesis, hurried to Rio to accept the president elect’s invitation to become his minister of Justice. Even Bolsonaro was impressed by the judge’s enthusiasm. “He accepted as eagerly as a student getting his diploma at graduation,” he said. The new minister will be boss of a greatly...
24 October 2018
Dear LAB Supporter and Friend,
Brazil on the edge
With all eyes on Sunday (28 October)’s second round of Brazil’s presidential elections, LAB has been trying to keep on top of the torrent of news and opinion sent to us. Jan Rocha, our regular São Paulo correspondent has done an extraordinary job. You can see her blog here,...
20 December 2017
Dear LAB Supporter and Friend,
The ghosts of elections past, present and future
Across the world, polls this year have been confounded as elections yielded surprising results (not least, for those of us in the UK, in the 2016 referendum on EU membership and the general election in 2017). These results have led many analysts to identify strands...
This article was first published in Revista Opera. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here.
October 23, 2017: The day begins at 8 o’clock. We arrive in Pacaraima, whose streets, in spite of being Brazilian, are filled with hispanic sounds on every side. As I get out of the car, a man comes up to me offering to...
Brigadier General Gustavo Moreno is sitting behind a wide desk in his air-conditioned office. It overlooks the parade ground of the police compound which sits vacant, belted by the midday sun. A receptionist brings in cups of weak, sugary coffee that Colombians call tinto.
As the police commander for ‘Region Five’, General Moreno is in charge of security for one...
Jan Rocha takes a break from her usual razor-sharp analyses of Brazil's political landscape. Yet, even in Santarém, Pará, where the Tapajos river joins the Amazon, she finds that all is change: rapid urbanisation, a massive grain terminal, clearance of forest for soya and the arrival of indigenous people from Venezuela.
A full moon hangs in the sky over...
Jesús Alberto ‘Chucho’ García is Venezuelan Consul General in New Orleans and previously represented the Venezuelan government in Angola, Mali and Burkina Faso. He is a founder of the Juan Ramón Lugo Afro-Revolutionary Movement. Despite describing the current opposition to Nicolás Maduro as ‘racist and fascist’, he says that the state’s bureaucratic approach to production is ignoring the creativity...
A leading Venezuelan academic, Vladimir Acosta, analyses the challenges facing the Maduro government as the Venezuelan National Assembly meets for the first time since the victory of the opposition coalition in the December 2015 national elections.
The runup to 6th December elections for the National Assembly in Venezuela has seen government and opposition crying foul ahead of what is expected to be one of the closest fought contests in recent years.