Softly, With a Big Stick | Rio’s Militias Today

Add to the necessary new readings list:

• No sapatinho: a evolução das milícias no Rio de Janeiro (2008-2011) | Heinrich Böll Foundation.

This book is the result of research performed by the State University of Rio de Janeiro’s Violence Laboratory, with support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

The objective of this study is to trace the evolution of the militia phenomenon in Rio de Janeiro, documenting changes to their structure and composition, tracing their territorial extent, and analyzing their profitability, their modus operandi, their perceived legitimacy and their community relations.

As the title suggests — no sapatinho means “wearing baby booties” or, if you will, walking softly with your big stick — these parapolitical groups have adjusted their management practices and continue to thrive.

Voz do Brasil | «Authoritarian Hangover»?

Comunique-se reports

One of Brazil’s oldest radio programs, «A Voz do Brasil», is an authoritarian hangover, and commercial radio stations should not be required to air its content.

Broadcasters are also chronically unhappy with the law requiring them to make way for unpaid election campaigning during this year’s election cycle — a step in the direction of election reform, although not a terribly effective one so long as the more fundamental reform of campaign is not enacted and empowered.

This proposition was the subject of heated debate at an August 23 event at the ESPM — Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing — among the directors of radio stations Bandeirantes, Estadão/ESPN and Jovem Pan.

Rodrigo Neves, Acácio Costa and Paulo Machado de Carvalho Neto, respectively, argued that requiring stations to air this content interferes with the services the stations provide.

A «heated debate» in which all participants agree on the fundamental question?

Aristegui | MVS Loses Frequency

Proceso magazine reports:

In a classic end-of-mandate move, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, acting through his communications and transportation minister, Dionisio Pérez Jácome, has decided to benefit the Televisa media group by refusing to renew the 2.5 GHz bandwidth concessions  previously awarded to MVS Comunicaciones.

MVS broadcasts the daily radio program of CNN Español anchor Carmen Aristegui, author of remarkable investigative reporting on election fraud in 2006, among other notable work — the Hildebrando and ChoicePoint scandals, for example. She worked at W Radio until 2003, when her contract was not renewed.

She was fired  for alleged ethical lapses by MVS in 2011 – she had asked questions about the alleged alcoholism of Mexico’s president. She returned to MVS with her own branded channel earlier this year, and was named a knight commander by the French just this summer.

Experts contacted by Proceso say that MVS, owned by the Vargas family, lost the spectrum after having failed to prove its economic viability and its capacity to bring broadband Internet access to a large portion of the population. With the restructuring of the concession, it is quite clear that the only party to benefit will be the monopolistic consortium controlled by Emilio Azcárraga Jean.

The company has operated at 2.5 GHz since 2002, one reads. The concession is valued at some US$ 58 billion over the next 20 years.

Nelson Pretto | Why No Brazilian Laptop Per Child?

Why has the One Laptop Per Child | OLPC program apparently failed to take root in Brazil? I have always assumed a link between Brazilian intransigence and vicious lobbying by the chief Big Tech philanthropic foundation.

In any case, Nelson Pretto of Terra Magazine offers the following analysis. Pretto is professor of education at the Federal University of Bahia and a member of the Bahian Academy of Sciences.

Pretto took part in the panel on promotion of domestically produced content and technology at the recent Brazilian Internet Forum II.

Civita Dei | Notes on The Brazilian Education Lobby

Brasil Escola – an educational publication of Brazil’s Record media group — observes, correctly, a major source of difficulty in trying to cover, in any comprehensive way, the actions of corporate, private and third-sector lobbies, and combinations thereof.

The trouble is that the lobbying industry here is just about as unregulated as Liberty Valence. I translate:

The term “lobby” is frequently heard in the political milieu. Sadly, however, most people hold an incorrect view of the term’s meaning.

First of all, we should understand that lobbying is nothing more than the bringing of political pressure by groups seeking to influence official policy for their own ends, whether openly or in secret.

Lobbying is a very natural activity, something we all do. Examples include a son trying to get his father to increase his allowance, or a union debating improved working conditions.  In the U.S., lobbying is openly recognized  and even regulated by law. Lobbying is acknowledged as an important part of the political process.

Some experts believe that lobbying should not sneak in  through the back door, which only supports accusations of improprieties.  According to Maria Coeli Simões Pires, secretary of regional development and urban policy for the government of Minas Gerais, there are no angels in the political world, and no demons as well, merely interests, chief of which are economic interests. Viewed this way, lobbying must unlink itself from illegalities, since defending special interests is not only not illegal but rather a fundamental right.

First of all, in the case of «edutainment» policy, what groups seek to influence federal, state and local education policy in Brazil, and what are their respective agenda and tactics? The answer involves sophisticated governance structures set up to facilitate private- and third-sector collaboration with municipal, state, and federal bodies and private enterprise.

«Program, get your program, you can’t tell the players without a program!”

Selecting key-man nodes in publicly available social networks and traversing their relationships — above, aa chain leading to international philanthropy by Sylvan Laureate — is a legitimate method, but also very labor-intensive.

I propose using automated «beat-building» techniques to obrain an overview of the sector.

First, relevant and useful Web sites are selected and crawled, breadth-firt — using NaviCrawler or WIRE, in my case — and a link ecology analysis is performed, using Pajek, Gephi and yEd.

Then, using yEd, basic social network characteristics can be diagrammed and pondered visually.

Vulture Culture | An Impromptu Link Sociology

Item: SEC Launches Inquiry Aimed at Private Equity.

Federal regulators have launched a wide-ranging inquiry into the private-equity industry that examines how firms value their investments, among other matters.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division sent letters to private-equity firms of various sizes in early December as part of an “informal inquiry,” according to the letter and people familiar with the matter.

In response, as PR Watch reports, private equity firms from all over the world have mounted a PR campaign using viral strategies to polish the tarnished public image of the sector as a flock of “vulture investors.”

My bookshelf contains the second edition of The Vulture Investors: The Winners and Losers of the Great American Bankruptcy Feeding Frenzy — published in 2000. There is also a really badly written financial thriller with a similar title.

At any rate, this mobilization of a PR rapid response team  presents a unique opportunity to track the development of a viral campaign from brainstorm to viral firestorm, in case of success.

Port Seguro | Insurance Firm Forms Phone Farm

MVNOs: quite simple, really.

The Porto Seguro insurance group announced today it has signed a deal with TIM, the Italian-owned Brazilian cellular operator, to co-launch a virtual cellular network.

Wow. I did not see that one coming. Porto Seguro is our car insurance provider and a darn good one at that, by the way.

So how is thatt going to work?

EXAME reports.

The joint venture will avail itself of a 2010 ruling by ANATEL, the Brazilian FCC, authorizing the formation of virtual operators, or MVNOs. In this scheme, one company may use the calling facilities of a cellular operator to sell telephone services under its own brand.

” Porto Seguro Telecomunicações and TIM Celular have signed an infrastructure sharing deal that will provide person mobile telephone service over a virtual network,” Porto Seguro said in a press releasee.

Datora Telecom, which will also specialize in the sale of calling minutes, says it has an interconected network “of more than 100 operation” joined together by VoIP connections. The company is controlled by  Chaicomm do Brasil Holding, which recently took a stake in Porto Seguro Telecomunicações.

So, really, TIM made a deal with Chaicomm.

Who is Chaicomm Holding? It is presided by one Tomás Henrique Fuchs, so far as I can tell, and lists the same Av. Brigadeiro Faria Lima address as Latam Comunicações Ltda. — of which no one has ever heard, so far as Google knows.

Jucesp — the local equivalent of the corporate registry run by our Secretaries of State — knows of a Chaicomm with R$10,000 in capital, listing its business activities as consulting and unspecified information services.

Free and Independent Sambodian Media: The 30% Solution

Brazil has a rule — dating back to the Vargas dictatorship and the  República Nova alike; enforced equally by the April Fools Revolution and the democratic Goulart government it overthrew; and enduring down to the present day: Foreign-owned media companies are prohibited from owning more than a 30% stake in any Brazilian mass media outlet.

During the military dictatorship, Time-Life had high hopes of taking a big stake in Globo and ch0wning the explosive growth of the Brazilian television market, but the generalíssimos shot them down.

There is an enormous amount of pressure to amend the legislation, however.  Brasil Econômico, to take a recent example, has apparently gotten around the rule by assigning the majority of shares to the Brazilian-born wife of the proprietor, a Portuguese from Portugal.

The Abril group has tested the limits of the rule as well, taking on Naspers of South Africa as a 30% stakeholder in its publishing arm and Telefonica of Spain as a partner in its cable TV operation, TVA — a deal that generated a great deal of political heat, with opponents claiming that the complex structure created to swing the del violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Thirty Percent Solution.

Abril has functioned as a content pipeline for foreign content producers from the very beginning: Its initial succes came as a local publisher of Disney comics in translation. Scrooge McDuck = Tio Patinho.

Rolling Stone Brasil, Playboy Brasil, MTV Brasil … the list is a long one. The flagship  Veja is essentially the bastard child of a Time magazine clone with the New York Post.

When Time dedicated its cover and unprecedented editorial space to the launch of the iPhone, Veja did the same thing, the same week.

Men’s Health. Cosmopolitan. Elle. National Geographic. The insufferable Piauí magazine, despite its innovative format, is a New Yorker clone through and through, with translated articles and lots and lots of exposure for Art Spiegelman.

Properties formerly owned by Abril include Abril include ESPN Brasil, HBO Brasil, Bravo Brasil, and the Universo Online portal — which, although now part of the Folha de S. Paulo group, hosts such Abril content as MTV’s Web presence.

My wife used to work for a local clone of Sassy — although this is a Hearst title, I think.

A fresh case, according to Relatório Reservado — an interesting investor tip and rumor sheet, published by veterans of the alt.press of the “festive left” back in the 1970s —   is the quarrel between NET and GVT in the cable TV space.

NET — a partnership between Globo and holdings of Carlos Slim, the grand Mexican telecoms tycoon — is evoking the 30% Solution against the expansion of GVT — recently acquired by Vivendi of France.

Samsung Said Sizing Up SambaPad

Brazilian techie friends will be delighted if the rumor is true:

• Subsidiária brasileira vai ajudar a desenvolver o tablet da Samsung

It says, unsourced, that the Brazilian subsidiary of Samsung will play a major role in developing a tablet computer to go head to head against the iPad, to be launched by 2011.

Above, a Samsung tablet for your refrigerator. What will they think of next?

Actually, I think I recall seeing something similar in that Schwarzenegger sci-fi film where he gets cloned against his will and must cooperate with his clone to save his family.

I translate, hastily:

The device will be tested simultaneously in South Korea, the U.S. and Brazil, and Brazil will share pride of place with the home office in the product launch. The Brazilian subsidiary will get additional funds for the marketing of the product.

Samsung already provides the CPU for a $188 Android-based “sub-iPad” gizmo, the CherryPad from CherryPal.

I suppose it would fall somewhere in between the smartphone and the laptop infotainment delivery device that is the iPad.

You may have noticed an acceleration of trade talks and cultural exchanges between Brazil and South Korea lately — to such an extent that an evangelical political leader has recently been accused of being a gabbling Moonie in the yellow press.

The charge appears to be pure guilt by the most tenuous of associations — a leading journalistic genre here.

We have two TVs, a Gradiente and a locally manufactured Samsung. Both work good.

Cato and the Millenium Institute: Fear and Loathing in Old Sambodia

We must use fear as a method of neutralizing the enemy’s principal resource: the free circulation of ideas and information.

Brazil is a living laboratory for the observation of humanity’s darker impulses.

DoLaDoDeLá is the blog of Marco Aurélio Mello — a veteran TV Globo journalist fired, he for ideological unreliability, he says. It was a big to-do at the time in the industry.

Mello now works for the rival Record network as a special editor. Record, founded by the powerful Protestant evangelical domination IURJ, has been hiring dissident Globo talent away from the traditional market leader for some time now.

Mello says the manifesto translated below was placed on his windshield by an anonymous source, but that a computer-literate friend was able to interpret the headers of the printed electronic message and may be able to identify the source eventually.

He has not published a facsimile of the message yet, as he ought to, though. Old habits die hard when you work for decades at the Silver Venus: Worst. Television. Ever. Except maybe for Televisa and the incredible RCTV. Ecuadoran and Peruvian TV is pretty godawful, too, if it comes to that.

The Instituto Millenium is a lobbying group representing Brazilian media cartels such as Globo, Abril, RBS, Folha-UOL, and the Estado Group, all with extensive institutional ties to Opus Dei.

Millenium is essentially an implausibly deniable branch office of four neoconservative group in the U.S., which have provided soft money and organizing methods to ideological fellow travelers throughout Central and South America, with support from NED, STATE and USAID.

1. Cato
2. Atlas
3. Heritage
4. Endeavor International
5. NED-CIMA-USAID

The methods of the Millenium are highly reminiscent of those used by Dick Morris and Rob Allyn in the Mexican elections in 2006, when they worked undercover in Mexico in violation of Mexican law. This is probably not an accident. Brazl’s top political marketer, a certain Sr. Manhanelli, is an associate of the CIGP at Florida University, where Morris is also an affiliated consultant.

As to the social entrepreneurs of Harvard, suffice it to say that the vice-chair of Endeavor International is the son of El Tigre, Emílio Azácarraga Vidaurreta, and heir to the throne of Televisa, a media group with 75% of the Mexican market. The chairman is one of those Bronfmans — the one who swapped his booze empire for control of Vivendi-Universal, now NBC Universal.

Brazil’s IBOPE-NetRatings was hired to police TV advertising during the 2006 Mexican campaign, but reported it had failed in its mission. As a result, an Amazon of black propaganda with a financial model along the lines of a SWIFT Boat campaign, later solemnly declared illegal by IFE, the federal elections institute, was aired during a strategic time period.

Nielsen NetRatings was later hired to explain away statistical anomalies in the live feed of the vote count — above — provided by a technology company belonging to the PAN candidate’s brother-in-law, hired without competitive bidding by IFE

As reported on CNN Español by Carmen Aristegui. See

• Nielsen: Alternate X-Ray of IFE’s Black Box
• Intercontinental Ballistic Statistics: The Science Behind Mexican Fraud Charges

The first act of the incoming PAN government was to propose and pass the so-called Ley Televisa, which among other things made renewals of public spectrum concessions automatic and immune to congressional oversight.

When a PAN senator, Santiago Creel, denounced the legislation as the fruit of corrupt dealings, Televisa mounted a massive slander campaign against him, associating him with Ye Gon Li, an alleged smuggler of methamphetamine inputs who claimed that the $250,000,000 seized at his Mexico City home was a PAN slush fund.

I have been writing a series in Portuguese explaining the neoconservative lobbying industry in the U.S. and the modus operandi of the four movementarian think tanks to Brazilian readers.  I feel I owe this to my hosts. After all, Karen Hughes used to say that we expats ought to consider ourselves citizen-ambassadors combating the stereotype of the Ugly American and The American Friend.

More importantly, as I make a point of reiterating, my interest in the case is as a U.S. citizen royally pissed off about the use of tax dollars to fund political activities abroad that would be illegal at home. Ron Paul agrees with me.

This supposed manifesto of the Millenium Institute, we can at least say, is highly consistent with the rhetoric and tactics of the media campaign we have witnessed so far in this election year in Brazil.

It is also highly consistent with the tactics employed to oust Salvador Allende in Chile, as detailed by the Brazilian historian Moniz Bandeira in his book Formula for Chaos.

The emphasis on the emotional appeal is cribbed wholesale from Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, in a book co-authored by an American political consultant from IPSOS in Chicago — whose name lurks in the fine print on the book’s cover.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

The purported manifesto:

1. A criação imediata do Instituto Millenium, que reuna pensadores capazer [sic] de forjar um discurso de forte apelo emocional, preferencialmente atemorizando a opinião pública.

1. The immediate creation of the Millenium Institute, a gathering of thinkers with the capacity to forge a discourse with a powerful emotional appeal, preferably one that will strike fear into the heart of public opinion.

2. A criação de meios de reduzir o campo de ação dos guerrilheiros (regulamentação severa, censura e manipulação).

2. The creation of means to reduce the range of action of the guerrillas (severe regulation, censorship and manipulation)

3. O esgotamento da capacidade do adversário de renovar as forças para uma nova ação (sufocamento).

3. Attrition of the enemy’s capacity to renew its forces for fresh action (suffocation).