The cousins –? — Jerominho and Natalino are ex-cops elected to office — one a city alderman, one a state legislator — by force of mafia-style extortion of voters. Both are now jailed. 

The Folha reports.

Rio police unleashed a raid in the early morning hours today against a gang of militiamen known as the League of Justice that operates in certain areas of the Western Zone of Rio de Janeiro.

In all, 18 arrest warrants were issued, of which 5 have already been served. 30 search warrants were also issued. Police say the group exploits local residents, controlling black-market van services and mototaxis, slot machines, cooking gas, a security tax and a monopoly on cable TV and Internet service.

Among the areas dominated by the group are Campo Grande, Cosmos, Inhoaíba, Santíssimo, Paciência, Sepetiba and adjacent areas.The raid was carried out by 150 members of DRACO, the anti-organized crime division of the state civil police, in conjunction with the state secretary of public safety and the unified internal affairs bureau .

The case is curious for the fact that the hit film Tropa de Elite II had already depicted the same criminal behavior, and more — political cliques using militia muscle to enforce the voto de cabresto, an expression suggesting the leading of the voter as an ass led to the polls by a halter. 

Cop on cop: state judicial police trade gunfire with ex-military police organized into militias.

The pro-rural media is once again drooling its hatred for the MST, which yesterday returned to reoccupy land “claim-jumped” by Cutrale in Iaras, in rural São Paulo.

Altamiro Borges, a one-time editor of Vermelho — the party organ of the PCdoB — recites the litany: the commercial media in Brazil is systematically biased against the Landless Workers Movement, or MST.

The allegation has the misfortune of being painfully obvious, independent of which side you favor. I translate in the spirit of providing context for official diplomatic cables on the situation of the MST.

TV anchors and commentators denounced the “invasion” and ran archive footage in which orange trees were damaged …. footage dating from September 2009. Though Incra has ruled again and again that the land belongs to the federal union, the media insist on demonizing the landless workers movement .

The occupation of Cutrale was part of a day of action for agrarian reform, including an encampment with 4,000 participants in Brasilia and various actions in other states. The media aired not a single word of our grievances or the absurdities of land ownership in Brazil. The media prefers to hear from the “victim,” Cutrale – a fact that at least attracts attention, even if it is negative attention, to the problem of land entitlement.

A criminal omission

At critical moments, the hegemonic mass media always takes sides. It unfailingly takes the side of the powerful, including in this case the barons of agribusiness, against the side of the workers. It will even cover up events that it has already reported during a less eventful period. Cutrale’s is an emblematic case. The newsrooms know full well the irregularities practiced by this company, but prefer the criminal conspiracy of silence.

In May 2003, for example, Veja magazine — possibly for mercenary reasons –- did a long report on Cutrale. Veja recounted that Cutrale is one of the largest agribusiness concerns in the world and that it has built its empire on the basis of predatory and illegal practices. “The Brazilian José Luís Cutrale and his family control 30% of the world market in orange juice, a figure comparable to that of OPEC in the oil business”.

Exploitation, tax avoidance and illegal repatriation of profits

According to Veja, “The company’s secret is buying the fruit at laughable prices … pressing it at the lowest cost possible and selling the end product high”. In 2001, the Cardoso government launched an investigation into Cutrale’s enormous profitability (in the1980s, it posted staggering margins in the neighborhood of 70%).

“An official at the federal tax administration told Veja that part of the strategy used to optimize profits was attributing some of the results to an offshore subsidiary in the Caymans. In this manner, the tax official said, Cutrale paid lower taxes in Brazil”.

Cosan, a candidate for the title of Standard Oil of Ethanol, also remits its profits to tax havens offshore.

“Agressive management”

In general, the Veja article criticized the “managerial aggression of the Cutrale family”, which it said was “legendary in rural São Paulo.” Orange growers in Brazil have few options for transporting their product to market. There are only five large buyers, including Cutrale. For this reason, Cutrale is able to maintain its reign over the orange with a mixture of fear and dependency.”

“On one hand, growers need a buyer. On the other hand, they are brow-beaten by such tactics as negotiation of a lower price.” Various growers told Veja about the brutal pressure to lower prices or even to sell their groves, complete with menacing helicopter overflights and other terrorist tactics.

A mountain of lawsuits

This bombastic article was simply filed and forgotten, as were the innumerable lawsuits against Cutrale for violations of labor laws, environmental crimes and pressure tactics used against growers. Between1 994 and 2003, the company was the subject of five cases in the Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica (Cade) for formation of a cartel.

The Brazilian FTC.

Today, the national media simply forgets these facts about Cutrale in order to criminalize the MST. Cutrale is a saint; the MST is a demon. The “privately-owned” media do not even bother to report that the land in Iaras do not legally belong to Cutrale. They are part of the Monções Nucleus, a plot of 30,000 hectares belonging to the federal union. That is to say, these lands have been “claim-jumped” -– in a word, stolen!

[Here, the author inserts the text of the ruling assigning the land to the federal government, by virtue of a century-old bill setting aside this land for family farming.]

The “Orange” Media

In 2007, a federal court granted ownership of the entire expanse to Incra. Cutrale, however, remains in the area based on delaying legal tactics.

I have no way of judging the legal risk the company runs at the moment as the case drags through appeal after appeal. The tactics of the MST are to commit trespass offenses that bring questions of legal entitlement to court, where the gears grind slow and exceedingly dull.

After Cutrale stole title to the land and monopolized production, thousands of small and midsize growers went bankrupt and 280,000 hectares of oranges were destroyed. All the media shows us, however, is the incident with the bulldozer from 2009.

With respect to the Cutrales, with their net worth of nearly $5 billion, meanwhile, the columnists are the real laranjas! Some even hitch their wagon to Big Orange Juice and sell themselves out.

Laranja is slang for a front, facade, or other clandestine agent.

In downtown São Paulo, during normal working hours, hundreds of residences and shop begin and end their days with gates locked down and windows shutterered, to dampen the sound of the sewing machines.

Behind the padlocked gates, thousands of Bolivian immigrants live and work in social groups that blur the boundaries between the cooperative model, outsourcing, and conditions analogous to slavery.

Labor inspectors have begun to unravel the scheme, which is fed by big-time merchants and their agents.

Source: Blog de Ricardo Noblat.

Some 250 companies are on a federal watch list for “working conditions analogous to slavery”  – generally debt slavery.

True story: My immigration attorney, who moonlighted as a civil policeman, was arrested in a raid that took down a shakedown scheme targeting Bolivian street vendors in Brás.

This would make an exemplary case study for a backgrounder of Brazilian culture policy — if anyone care to care about such things. Judging from the Ministry of Culture subsidies for Disney’s Hollywood on Ice recently, I would says there is something to it.

The Mexican entertainment company CIE has sounded out the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro about installing a traditional night-club at the site where the legendary Canecão night club once flourished.

This according to the daily Relatório Reservado, a VC-PE newsletter which is seems to be more often right than wrong, which might have noted that the Petroreal is the only thing keeping the club together at all at this point in time.

Because CIE also has its fingers in such pies as lotteries and electronic sports-betting, I would bet that part of its interest comes from a hoped-for loosening of anti-gambling laws rules in Rio de Janeiro, if not nationwide. You will see a number of entertainment companies drawn to Brazil with just this strategy in mind as the federal government negotiates support for home-cooked content in exchange for the right to produce for this market.

(To complete the picture, the company’s production arm was responsible for a Spanish-language version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

OCESA Teatro is nowadays, the biggest producer of dramatic and musical theater in Latin America; producing each year at least two Broadway-style shows and two or three plays. It is associated with companies in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Madrid, Barcelona andPortugal to help them reduce costs and risks linked with big budget productions and to share them copyrights, music, adaptations, sets or even cast members among the associates.^[1] Most productions include well known actors from other media but specially those popularized by television. Their shows are characterized for having very high standards of quality and competition is almost nonexistent..)

This is not necessarily a healthy development. The numbers rackets known as the jogo de bicho vie with the electronic one-armed bandit for the surplus reales of the Brazilian underclass.Every year, live on the Globo network, you see photographs of politicians dancing samba side by side with bicheiros like Capitão Guimarães — former military torture turned king of the bicho. It is a jaw-dropping sight.

A samba association here in São Paulo in recent years was stripped of its victory when its major funder turned out to be a local Bolivian marching powder tycoon.

Similar reasons may be imputed to this interest in maintaining the nightclub in the hands of the federal cultural bureaucracy, as part of the federal university system.

The papers here are all taken up recently with the faxina – thorough mopping up — levied against corrupt officials and against by various federal ministries.

And the hefty cultural subsidies provided by the Petroreal are a bone not to be let go of without a fight.

At the moment, the club is in legal hot water over subsidies paid to it improperly because it misrepresented, which is to say, hid its debt load.

Champions of gambling legalized tend to be those “harm reduction,” “legalize and regulate” Greenwashers you may have also heard  tell about.

All I know is that we have seem some awesome shows there — Maria Betânia in 2007 — and hope to see more (more democratically priced).

São Paulo – On March 16, 2005, weekly Veja ran a story headlined “The Tentacles of FARC in Brazil”, detailing a possible link between members of the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores and the Colombian guerrilla.

A leading presidential candidate at the said the PT was in cahoots with the drug cartels to undermine his campaign by starting a drug war in São Paulo. He said it, and he said it again, and many of his supporters said it time and time again.

The article was, however, evaluated as an exaggeration by the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, part of a “political stunt”.

The embassy’s respsonse to the article weas made available by Wikileaks. According to Veja, PT candidates supposedly received 5 million dollars from the FARC at a 2002 meeting at a Brazilian ranch.

At some point — it might have been as early as 2002  – the Forum of São Paulo, an ad hoc group of political movements devoted to achieved power from the left by democratic means — stop listing the FARC as a member organization, for the fact that it remains armed and committed to armed seizure of power.

At the time,  PT members suppossedly met with FARC representative Francisco Antonio Cadenas and worked out the details. Their objective was to finance the reelection campaign of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the 2003-2010 term. The party denied the accusations and Veja was unable to produce documentary evidence of any money transfers.

In the reading of U.S. diplomats, the magazine “exaggerated the real ties between the FARC and the PT”, according to the March 2005 report.  It concluded this when, after the accusations surfraced, the Brazilian secret service, ABIN, which according to Veja had infiltrated the Farc-PT talks, could produce no documents to substantiate the charge. Cited verbatim by the U.S. diplomats, Gen. Jorge Armando Felix, minister in chief of Institutional Security and therefore commander of  Abin, who kept an eye on the investigation, said the documents produced by Veja had been “forged” — they lack the formatting and layout of ABIN documents. “They published a mixture of half-truths and half-lies. There is no official document stating that the meeting took place”, said ABIN chief .

AES Eletropaulo has just returned to us a crispy stereo and burnt-out microwave oven, both fried in a lightning strike or massive surge or something of the kind last month. Big Government made them do it.

We filed a complaint with the company and receive a voucher in return for repairs services from any one of a gazillion SMEs that keep the electrical system glued together.

Brazil is a country that only works because of the The Guy, as in, need gardening done or pirate cable installed? Call The Guy. There ought to be a monument to The Guy.

At any rate, the rolling blackouts of 2001 had contributed to the defeat and demise of the center-right PSDB-PFL coalition in the elections in 2002, my first whole year spent among the empire of the Brazilians.

No matter what else you have cooked up, policy-wise, the trains, it seems, must run on time, and it has been interesting to watch the Brazilian energy sector go all hot under the collar as the minister of mining and energy rose through the ranks to become the duly elected President of Brazil.

Take this item from the 2003 Wikigate file:

• 03BRASILIA602 | 2003-02-21 15:49

¶1. SBU Summary. On February 6, Embassy hosted a Roundtable on Electricity Regulation in Brazil with participation by 16 executives from 8 U.S. and European companies from both the generation and distribution sides. Companies [sic] main concerns were short-term liquidity issues, continued low electricity demand, and the upcoming periodic review of tariff rates.

There is a good then and now story to be written on this subject.

These companies today face genuine competition in an auction for new concessions starting in 2015; a more consumer-friendly legal and regulatory environment, with  less energy piracy and more formal demand; and an attitude that short-term liquidity and debt-obligations are private matters for private companies to resolve privately with their shareholders.

Companies were clearly anxious over the new GoBs impending reformulation of sector regulation, and most attendees noted that their companies have halted further investments in Brazil pending the emergence of a clear regulatory model. Nonetheless, all company representatives termed their access to GoB officials as “good” and their initial impressions of Minister of Mines and Energy MME Dilma Roussef as positive.

Groundwork was laid for a continuing dialogue between the private sector and the Mission. End Summary.

In the 1999-2013 plan for the expansion of transmission (PET), electricity transmission infrastructure received about R$3 billion year in private investments.

¶2. SBU As part of a mission-wide strategy to coordinate our policy approach in Brazils energy sector, on February 6 the Ambassador hosted a diverse group of electric utilities including U.S. companies Alliant, Duke, Enron, AES, Mirant, and PSEG, as well as European companies EDP Portuguese, and Tractebel Belgian. Grupo Cataguazes Brazilian and Endesa Spanish were last minute no-shows.

It was this paragraph that caught my eye, not least for the reference to Enron.

How has this cabal of concessionaires fared in the meantime, since 2003?

My general impression is that U.S. firms have suffered to the benefit of European ones. It would be interesting to build a model of the sector as it has developed over time, as sketched above. Spanish firms seem to have a special knack for winning infrastructure bid here in recent years, as in their success in auctions for the operation and maintenance of toll roads.

Ambassador and CG Rio had already hosted a similar event for hydrocarbon companies in ConGenRio during the last week of January ref A. Ambassador and CGs have also been meeting frequently with U.S. companies on a one-on-one basis. Econ and commercial officers followed-up the February 6 roundtable by making a courtesy call on MME Secretary for Energy Marcelo Poppe. Ambassador expects to make her initial call on Roussef during the week of February 24.

Finally, although encouraging privatization was the Gospel of State back then, it burned its fingers badly on this particular topic.

Background to a Mess

¶3.UThe timing and concerns of the roundtable reflect the current confusion and uncertainty surrounding the electricity sector.

In the mid-90s, the Cardoso administration embarked on an ambitious privatization program to attract much-needed investment to the state-dominated energy sector.

The process was poorly implemented from the start, as Congress failed to pass comprehensive sector reform legislation similar to that created for the telecommunications sector via the General Law of Telecommunications. Instead, Congress carried out the process piece-meal.

Congress first legalized the sale of states distribution companies. In 1995, Espirito Santo sold its distribution company ESCELCA to a group of foreign investors. U.S. companies, led by AES, began investing in ¶1996.

¶4. U Reform legislation continued to trickle through Congress, resulting in the creation of the national electricity regulator ANEEL in 1997, and the creation of the wholesale energy market MAE in 1998. Although the National Council for Energy Policy CNPE, a committee within the MME, was given responsibility for long-term policy planning, the weakness of the MME as an institution encouraged ANEEL to step into the policy realm and complete the sector reform process de facto through regulation. CNPE has met only three times to discuss long-term policy. Roussef has commented on various occasions that the MME will “recapture the policy role” from ANEEL.

I think it is fair to say that ANEEL has dedicated itself more and more to pure regulation, handing out fines and other punitive actions to the applause of both opposition and situation alike. Underperforming concessionaires is becoming a political whipping boy for authorities who suffer from the fact that the two main rivers here both smell strongly of human feces a decade down the road.

How to boycott NEWS Corp in Brazil, a consumer campaign suggested by Alberto Dines of Observatório da Imprensa?

Rodrigo Vianna has some timely tips, which I translate, as always, in haste.

In fact, boycotting Fox in Brazil means boycotting either Sky and  NET – the “convergent oligopoly” of pay TV – or  Globo.

The pay TV sector is a highly complex value chain comprising at least five nuclei: production, the sale of advertising and the programming of channels, franchishes and distribution, none of which are regulated under the outdated, fragmented  system we now have. .

The sector also succeeds in avoid any and all external controls by Anatel or the Ministry of Communications, not to mention CADE, the antitrust regulator, to a degree.

Processing …

There are even more factors to take into consideration. An example: in this soccer-mad country, how to boycott the “converging oligopoly” that have the broadcast rights to the major and minor league championships?As we see in this case, the opportunity to boycott Fox products are slim to none for the ordinary citizen. Until we have a regulatory framework that uses democratic means to provide citizens with modes to redress the hegemony of media companies that are divorced from the public interest and further, that promote social and political violence, there is little that can be done.

via Escrevinhador.

Veja had access to CIA, FBI, Treasury, Interpol and Federal Police documents showing that Muslim extremists use Brazil as a base of operations and to recruit make converts. Then we tracked one down and photographed him.

Brasilianas examines the case of an Arab-descended Brazilian who became a poster child for the supposed threat of Muslim terrorism in the country.

The latest census counted only 170,000 Muslims in all of Brazil, though they may have been undercounted.

There are a gazillion Arabs in São Paulo especially — the vast majority of them with Syrian and Lebanese Christian roots.

I translate hastily, to make a note of the incident for myself.

Recently, Veja magazine and the Abril publishing house were convicted for publishing an article titled “Brazil’s network of terror,” in its April 6, 2011 edition.

The civil suit brought by 16 Islamic organization requests a right of reply to the slanted article. Veja  has already appealed the decision. In the article, the magazine exposed once again to public scrutiny a man with a reputation for moving millions to fund the activities of Islamic extremists and a series of other crimes, none of them proven in a court of law.

Assaad Ahmad Barakat was transformed into the face of terror at the Paraguayan border, the genuine representative of Osama Bin Laden in this part of the world, and because of this served six years in prison in Paraguau after being extradited to Brazil in a controversial decision by the Supreme Court. The charge for which he was convicted: tax evasion of 100,000 guaranis, the equivalent of some $30. He served out his entire sentence, has no criminal charges against him, and yet finds his face splashed across the cover of Veja once again as “the terrorist among us.”

“I did my time and am trying to get my life back to normal here is Foz do Iguaçu. Suddenly I pick up a magazine and see my face once again portrayed as that of a vicious outlaw.” After leaving prison, Barakat lived for a year in Curitiba, then returned to Foz. He lives in Brasil and owns and operates a small business.

The moral of the story is that Brazil’s largest newsweekly by circulation is a never-ending font of vicious drivel. Case in point.

Writing in the Observatório da Imprensa, the ever-irascible Alberto Dines trots out the argumentum ad Nazium to give NEWS Corp a good thrashing over this News of the World affair

It is a mistake to consider Rupert Murdoch as a contemporary version of those press barons of the past. His lineage does not pass through W.R. Hearst. He is more of a Joseph Goebbels. Murdoch is a global right-wing strongman whose purpose is to destroy political liberalism and the welfare state built up during the last century. Former Spanish premier Jose Aznar is not a member of the board of directors of News Corp. because of his journalistic skill. He is there as an exponent of a reactionary Spanish right that still venerates Francisco Franco.

I know people here in Brazil who still venerate Franco. It’s unnerving.

Aznar’s frantic attempt to blame the 11-M bombings on ETA, the Basque separatists, was a colorful episode that revealed much about the independence of the Spanish press and the integrity of  Aznar.

And the other directors? I had read somewhere that a Saudi prince was second only to Murdoch as a holder of NEWS Corp shares, but all I see is the obligatory partner from  Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers — where Al Gore is a partner. .

It might be an interesting exercise to look at the NEWS board as a social network with potential synerges, such as the ideological affinities, if any, with  Aznar’s Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis — with its echoes of Brazil’s IPES, the Institute for Social Studies used as a front to plot the 1964 coup.

I will do some research, see that turns up.

In the meantime, not to be missed is the company’s July 15, 2011, Form 8-K, especially the section “A Message from James Murdoch on Issues at News International” …

This weekend, News International will run advertisements in all national newspapers. We will apologise to the nation for what has happened. We will follow this up in the future with communications about the actions we have taken to address the wrongdoing that occurred.