Rio | New Man With Plan For Van

Black-market van stuffed with 10 armed, black-clad corpses, December 2007, Rio

Source:  R7.

On December 5. Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes announced the creation of a special office of supplementary public transportation, led by state judicial police official Cláudio Ferraz, former commander of the anti-organized crime bureau that has pursued the militias of Rio.

The alternative van service racket is one of many money-making schemes of criminal paramilitary organizations, made up of policemen, jail guards, and soldiers, especially in the Western Zone.

Moto taxis serving areas where vans cannot reach are also very popular. 

Demóstenes Torres | Numbers Are Up?

Item:

• Torres Hires Daughter of Supreme Court Justice | Viomundo.

Senator Torres, of the DEM, or Democrats, is heard on 300 wiretaps conversing with a numbers racketeer and political power broker in his home state of Goiás, which surrounds the federal district of Brasilia.

The former governor of the federal district, also a DEMocrat, José Roberto Arruda, fell suddenly from grace for similar reasons.

I confess that I dislike the DEM, despite my general rule about opining on political matters — I do pay tax here, however.

No, it is more the distasteful sensation of hearing the discourse of my hometown neocons being machine-translated into Portuguese and blasted at full volume, night and day. What, I moved to another hemisphere for this? The  party is known for its McCarthyite rhetoric and gestures of extreme moral indignation, but leads the current governing party, the PT, by a margin of 6 to 1 in politicians relieved of office over corruption charges — and 12 to 1 when the PSDB-DEM slate in the last elections is factored in.

If hometown papers like the New York Times really wanted to present a picture of a deep-rooted and colorful cultural tradition here in Brazil, they would take this case on as an opportunity to explain Carlismo — the political machine of Bahia, run with an iron grip by Antônio Carlos Magalhães. This was a man of legendary brutality and stupidity who is nevertheless treated with a note of adulation in Larry Rohter’s obituary — sickening as it was.

And now, at any rate, another one bites the dust, in a story broken by Leandro Fortes of Carta Capital magazine which has managed to bubble up despite the general silence of the MSM on the topic.

Senator Torres is the focus of a political crisis brought about by the federal police operation dubbed Monte Carlo, which last month dismantled a scheme of corruption and money-laundering in the underworld of illicit slot machines.

The alleged kingpin of the scheme, Carlinhos “Waterfall,” is a personal friend of Torres and exchanged 300 telephone calls with him on a line tapped by the police.

Torres was said to have been of assistance to Mr. ”Waterfall” in a bid to legalize illegal bingo pools and slot machines. The law was passed, but later, in 2007, was struck down by the Supreme Court, which recognized federal jurisdiction. These are the sort of Federal Societeers we see here in Sambodia, where sociopathy is sometimes confused with «freedom-loving».

The Sunday, Paperless | The Rise of the Global Megafirm | Utopian Singapore | Pandemonia in Roma

I am losiing track of my interexistences; I blame the rollout of the write once, post to every single umpteenth channel immediately, a feature introduced recently introduced by WordPress.

I have almost a compulsion to try all these sorts of schemes at least once, but more often than not I am sorry I did.

The Boi Zebu Editorial site is supposed to be a pleasant, succinctly informative intro to our services for clients, but got a little out of control as I succumbed to the temptation to hack Drupal.

This post from today, for example, is really a Sousaphone — news oriented with an alternative slant and animated by the unquiet spirit of Mark Twain — item:

• The Sunday, Paperless | M&A Drives Emergence of Brazilian Megafirms, Reports Folha | Boi Zebu Editorial Services.

As you aee from my online mindmap, writing more in Englilsh on general subjects — survival for gringos, the grey-market cachaça industry, black-marketeering and bartering, great shows and new artists to enjoy — might be more satisifying. I wrote mostly by rote these days, rather than following the meandering path from strt to finish that makes a good essay.

The Economist, whose prose has gotten shriller and more melodramatic over the years, sees “Barbarians at the Gates” of Brazil.

This narrative is about as plausible as the notion that Arab peoplss — except for Saudis and Syrians,, for some reaon — are spontaneously reprising the Orange Revolution — which as we sometimes forget turned out rather badly in the end.

I always enjoy writing about folksononies and comparative xingamentos, and other grist for linguiistic linguiça. I have always wanted to write a language column modeled on the droll intellectual exercises of Willaim Gass — of whom no one has ever heard, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, I have created Sousaphone Semantic Labas, a venue for my experimenting with CAR technique such as data-mining, Web-crawling and SNA.This gets pretty eye-crossingly technical for the general reader, but affords a nice sandbox for semantic tech being developed for Drupal and the like.

A lot of that material I had been writing up in Portuguese for O Bicho, Preguiça, my blog in Portuguese. Mostly for the practice in Portuguese prosfication. I translated a lot of material on SEO-SEM marketing from the English, sometimes creatively, to bring the Brazilian media watcher up to speed on the sort of work down by PR Watch and SourceWatch and others.

I stuck up some model projects that might be worthy of Tropicalization, like a mini version of SourceWatch, above.

But I sense that the Bicho is getting boring and formulaic and I would like to dedicate it more to news and personal narratives for Brazilian friends — maintaining it as a pillar of support for colleague who battle to make a decent standard of ethics prevail in the  major newsrooms.

And so I am entirely confused, and readding my Sunday paperless mash-up of a paperless newspaper from Calibre.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, for example, shows up in a Uruguayan daily under a portrait of Chomsky saying, “The U.S. is following the standard script in Egypt.”

She is probably right.

Arruda and the Quasi-Government: Old School and New School

Time will tell whether the emergence of the quasi government is to be viewed as a symptom of decline in our democratic government, or a harbinger of a new, creative management era where the purportedly artificial barriers between the governmental and private sectors are breached as a matter of principle. — Kevin R. Kosar, “The Quasi Government: Hybrid Organizations with Both Government and Private Sector Legal Characteristics” (Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2007)

A year or so ago, I found myself taking a lot of notes on the New Public Management, Digital Era Governance, and related intellectual fads in public administration.

I wound up getting more and more interest in the QuaNGO model of public governance for which the British New Labour became known, with government services outsourced to “organized civil society.”

See, for example,

Nongovernmental organizations receiving such government contracts became known in the literature as “quasi-nongovernmental organizations” — or better, as some argued, “quasi-governmental organizations.”

An offshoot of this phenomenon is the problem of the so-called GONGO– the “government-organized nongovernmental organization.”

GONGOs can provide plausibly deniable fronts for actions that governments are barred from taking, or do not wish to be held accountable for.

Blackwater is becoming the epitome of the post-modern GONGO, you could argue, for example.

The use of Republican Party e-mail systems to conduct U.S. government business during the Bush ibn Bush years — in a bid to take those communications off the public record and into the zone of privacy — is another example.

In Brazil, where barriers between the public and private sectors have been breached as a matter of principle and custom for centuries — the phenomenon in this and similar cases is known as “endemic corruption” — GONGOs have flourished, and along with them, the communications strategies peculiar to them.

One such strategy is the “astroturf,” or fake grassroots, campaign, as I was explaining to a Brazilian friend recently. The “spontaneous” protests outside vote-counting facilities in Florida in 2000 — the “protesters” were Republican congressional aides flown in to “exercise their free speech rights” — is a classic case in point.

The saga of José Roberto Arruda, governor of the federal district for the DEM political party  – the Democratas, formerly the PFL, a successor to the pro-dictatorship ARENA party that provided Brazil’s generalíssimos with a democratic facade smaller than the world-famous Brazilian bikini zone  – is another case in point.

Arruda and a number of his top lieutenants were seen discussing bribes and stuffing wads of cash into their socks on videotapes secretly recorded by an Arruda aide turned state’s evidence. The tapes were leaked to the media and a maelstrom of jornalismo fiteiro ensued. See

• História Cabeluda: Arruda and the Magic Mountain of Money

Arruda, expelled from his party, is fighting — with remarkable success, so far — to stave off impeachment, even after the leader of the government benches in the district legislature, not expelled from the DEM, was removed from office by court order.

What is interesting is the “grassroots” movement that has arisen to defend the governor — who in early December used the district military police to brutalize nonviolent demonstrators against him.

It isalso interesting  to note the hagiographical interview with Arruda in the “yellow pages” of Veja — the national newsweekly of the Editoria Abril — praising the governor as a paragon of the New Public Management, essentially.

If Arruda is a paragon of the NPM, then so were Tammany Hall and Jimmy Hoffa — and so is Mexican teachers’ union (SNTE) leader Elba Esther Gordillo — and thus the public management philosophy at work here is really not so new after all. QED.

Arthur Paganini of Brasília Limpa writes — thanks to  Paola Lima for the link – and I translate hastily:

The organization behind the movement in support of Federal District governor José Robert Arruda is composed of associations and unions with ties to the government. Boasting an excellent infrastructure, the demonstrators who defend the governor accused of paying bribes to political allies have shown up every day in front of the District Legislative Assembly to mount an “action in defense of governability.” Along with a truck-mounted sound system, on site full-time, the group has chemical toilets and tents to protect them from the sun and rain. The organizers are  former campaign organizers for Arruda who have held appointed posts in his government, as well as senior officials of organizations with ties to the governor.

FSP: FBI Sent Bait for Hate to Haití Não É Aqui

Exit polls show Chávez referendum victory. But Chávez had already conceded quote your shitty little victory end-quote by then. O Globo was worse: CHÁVEZ WON BY CHEATING! (Hugo lost.)

The Bergen Record newspaper in New Jersey reviewed Mr. Turner’s court documents and found the FBI had admonished Mr. Turner in July 2007 for his rhetoric and “the potential of it inciting acts of violence” but continued to use him. The FBI also paid Mr. Turner to meet with a wealthy, white supremacist in Brazil.

An item today from the Sunday Folha de S. Paulo tends to reinforce the deep prejudice of every New Yorker: that New Jersey is a mobbed-up banana republic — run out of the Bing of Tony Soprano and Co. –where we are frightened to set foot. (I have ridden PATH exactly twice in 13 years.)

The item also reflects on the quality of journalism at the often-ridiculed FSP.

The local fishwrap presents information that is readily available in the public domain as <based on secret sources>.

Eu, hein? (Roughly, <pull the other one.>

This story was broken by 419 news sources (Google News results) on November 30, 2009. Two weeks ago.

And the FSP is regurgitating it as a red-hot scoop involving investigative reporting of the most romantic kind.

Eu, hein? (Roughly, <there is one born every minute>.

O FBI, a polícia federal norte-americana, ajudou a bancar a ida ao Brasil de um radialista e blogueiro radical de extrema direita de Nova Jersey como isca para atrair e identificar grupos extremistas brasileiros contrários aos Estados Unidos, de acordo com pessoas que tiveram acesso a documentos do governo norte-americano.

The FBI … helped bankroll a visit to Brazil of a white-supremacist radio personality and blogger from New Jersey as bait designed to attract and identify Brazilian extremist groups who oppose the U.S., according to persons who had access to U.S. government documents.

According to the dozens of other journalists — I can make a list of their bylines if you like — who covered the trial of this FBI informant code-named <Valhalla> and requested copies from the court clerk. (I bet you can even download them from the Internet for a minimal fee to cover court expenses.)

Harold “Hal” Turner, 47, viajou a Curitiba, no Paraná, em 2005, onde se apresentou como líder da National Alliance, um dos maiores grupos de supremacistas brancos dos EUA. Ali, se encontrou com um simpatizante brasileiro, com quem teria discutido doação de US$ 1 milhão à causa americana, e com um representante da Sociedade Árabe Brasileira.

Hal Turner, 47, traveled to Curitiba, Paraná, in 2005, where he represented himself as leader of the National Alliance, one of the largest white-supremacist groups in the U.S. There, he met with a Brazilian sympathizer, with whom he allegedly discussed a US1$ million donation to the cause, as well as a representative of the Brazilian-Arab Society.

Honduras: The Joy Division and the Army of Alarm

fear: abhorrence, agitation, angst, anxiety, aversion, awe, bête noire, chickenheartedness, cold feet, cold sweat, concern, consternation, cowardice, creeps, despair, discomposure, dismay, disquietude, distress, doubt, dread, faintheartedness, foreboding, fright, funk, horror, jitters, misgiving, nightmare, panic, phobia, presentiment, qualm, recreancy, reverence, revulsion, scare, suspicion, terror, timidity, trembling, tremor, trepidation, unease, uneasiness, worry (thesaurus.reference.com)

Globo (Brazil) reports: Honduran polling opens in atmsophere of  calm.

Globo (Brazil) also reports: Honduran polling opens in climate of fear.

On the same news portal, in the same thread, at the same time.

If you trace the conflicting characterizations back, you see that Globo is simply cribbing different news agencies, such as Reuters, AP, AFP and EFE.

These, in turn, are picking up on either the standard meme of the  situation (<election as fiesta>) or the standard meme of the opposition (<election as Kafkaesque farce>).

But not both.

The Estado de São Paulo, I thought, did a nice backgrounder on the issue that mentions both but endorses neither. Its headline:

Voting Begins in Honduras

Honduras: Drugs and Thugs on the Slug Line

Amid a heavy crackdown on the press by the military, the Honduran daily El Libertador is managing to do independent journalism in support of the Zelaya-strict constitutionalist viewpoint.

Item: It is claimed that coup leader Roberto Micheletti is linked to the Colombian cocaine cartels in an official document prepared for the DEA by the Honduran military.

It is asked whether the DEA has been asked to verify this information. Good FOIA topic.

The document is produced in facsimile:

Excerpts from the report by Jean-Guy Allard.

El nombre del cabecilla golpista hondureño Roberto Micheletti aparece en una larga lista de narcotraficantes redactada, en una fecha no precisada, por un alto oficial del Ministerio de la Defensa y Seguridad Pública de Honduras que lo relaciona con el Cartel de Cali, la red colombiana de narcotráfico.

The name of Honduran coup leader Roberto Micheletti appears on a long list of narcotraffickers prepared, on an unspecified date, by a senior official of the Honduran Ministry of Defense that links him to the Cali drug trafficking cartel.

Argentine Press Freedom Bill Is An Assault On Press Freedom: Globo

“Smile, you’re being manipulated”: commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Globo television network.

O Globo tells an out and out lie when it describes as “proceeding through congress in secret” a bill that has been widely debated in Argentine society and about which a Google search turns up thousands of mentions. One cannot even begin to fathom the cynicism of Globo.

O Biscoito Fino e a Massa on “democratization of the media” in neighboring Argentina.

Está ouriçada a grande mídia argentina, e particularmente seu maior grupo, o Clarín. Tramita no Congresso desde o dia 18 de março um projeto enviado pelo governo de Cristina Kirchner, que revisa a legislação imposta em 1980, no auge da pior matança ditatorial da história do país. O projeto de Lei de Serviços de Comunicação Audiovisuais limita o poder midiático que um único grupo pode exercer, reduz de 24 para 10 o número de concessões que um indivíduo poderá receber e elimina as restrições à liberdade de informação em nome da segurança nacional contidas na lei da ditadura. Em qualquer sentido que se olhe, ele promove uma democratização ou, pelo menos, as condições para alguma alteração no quadro monopolista de hoje.

The major news media in Argentina, and especially the country’s largest media group, Clarín, is all aflutter. A bill introduced by the Kirchner administration has been working its way through the congress since March 18 that revises the legislation imposed in 1980, the height of the bloodiest dictatorial violence in the history of the nation. The Audiovisual Communications Services Bill limits the power a single group may exercise, reduces from 24 to 10 the number of concessions an individual may receive, and eliminates restrictions on the freedom of the press in the name of national security contained in the dictatorship-era law. Anyway you look at it, the bill promotes a democratization of the media, or at least provides the conditions for altering the monopolist situation that prevails.

Foi o suficiente para que O Globo fizesse uma matéria que, sob a manchete “Casal K faz nova investida contra a imprensa”, conseguia ser ao mesmo tempo sexista – a presidenta é Cristina – e factualmente falsa. Não há, ao longo de todo o projeto, uma linha que atente contra a liberdade de expressão ou informação, muito pelo contrário – ele elimina as que havia na lei de 1980. O projeto de Cristina Kirchner limita, sim, a “liberdade” de que um único grupo controle 70% do mercado.

All of which was enough for O Globo to run a story which, under the headline, “Kirchner Couple Attack The Press,” managed to be both sexist — the president is Cristina Kirchner — and factually false.

Ecce Globo, eternal font of nasty, self-serving, quacking nonsense that it is.

Xô! A Take on the Sarney Tapes

"OUT WITH SARNEY CAMPAIGN CIRCULATES ON 100 BLOGS!" Alt.media from Maranhão, where the powers that be own the TV.

The Brazilian journalist does not feel free to write. More than just having to follow the editorial line of the publications they work for, the complaints principally have to do with coercion by political or business groups. –“A Profile of the Brazilian Journalist”

Sarney diz que grampo da PF “não tem nada”: Former Brazilian president José Sarney, recently elected president of the Senate here, is angry about a report by the Economist that calls his election “a victory for semi-feudalism,” and says the federal police have nothing incriminating on his son, who runs the Sarney family businesses.

The Senate president-elect has been targeted for a campaign of jornalismo fiteiro of late — negative press based on the leaking of court-approved wiretaps. The Sarney-bashing may have more to do with competition among media cartels than it does with public probity or the res publica.

But who is this Sarney fellow? It was during Sarney’s presidential administration, the first after the transition back to constitutional democracy, that radio and TV concessions began to be handed out to political allies as party favors.

Sarney’s Minister of Communications, the late Antônio Carlos Magalhães, made sure that the Sarney clan controlled the Globo TV franchise in their home turf of Maranhão, to take a random example.

The Magalhães clan still controls the Globo franchise in Bahia, TV Bahia, to this day.

Its political machine there, however, took a bitter blow with the election of Jacques Wagner as governor in 2006 and the elimination of ACM III, the late Senator’s grandson, in the first round of the municipal elections in Salvador in 2008.

Sarney himself had to move to the remote state of Amapá (capital: Macapá) to guarantee his Senate seat after losing his traditional stronghold in Maranhão to marauding Brizolists.

At the moment, the ex-president with the Stalin moustache is also angry about a federal police investigation of his son in which he is captured on court-ordered wiretaps talking about how they are going to plant negative stories about political adversaries in the captive news media.

This sort of thing happens. See also

• “Why It Sucks to Be a Brazilian Journalist”
• “Why It Sucks to Work For Globo”

Sarney and his daughter, also a federal senator, suffered a defeat at the hands of Jackson Lagos of the PDT in the last gubernatorial elections in Maranhão.

Lagos is now being impeached by a regional elections court for alleged vote-buying. He claims he is being ratfinked by the crooked Sarney machine. His case is due to be heard by the federal elections tribunal today.

Brazilian news media: Boil before assuming it’s fit for human consumption.

The Folha de S. Paulo reports:

O presidente do Congresso, senador José Sarney (PMDB-AP), minimizou ontem a divulgação de grampos telefônicos sobre conversas entre ele e seu filho Fernando Sarney -executivo que dirige as empresas da família e que está sendo investigado pela Polícia Federal.

The president-elect of the federal congress, Sen. Sarney (PMDB-Amapá), minimized yesterday that publication of wiretap transcripts of conversations between him and his son Fernando, an executive who runs the family businesses and is under investigation by the federal police.

Em sua edição de anteontem, a Folha transcreveu um telefonema entre o presidente do Senado e Fernando. Em uma escuta legal feita pela Polícia Federal, ambos aparecem discutindo o uso de duas empresas de comunicação da família, a TV Mirante (afiliada da Rede Globo) e o jornal “O Estado do Maranhão”, para veicular denúncias contra rivais na política maranhense que integram o grupo do atual governador, Jackson Lago (PDT)

The day before yesterday, the Folha printed the transcript of a phone call between the Senate president and hi son. In a court-authorized wiretap conducted by the federal police, the two men are heard discussing the use of two media companies belonging to the family, TV Mirante (a Globo affiliate) and the Estado de Maranhão newspaper, to publicize charges against local political rivals allied with the sitting governor, Jackson Lago (PDT).

I will have to read that transcript.

No sábado, o jornal “O Estado de S. Paulo” também publicou trecho de conversa entre o senador e seu filho empresário. No diálogo, Sarney questiona Fernando se ele havia recebido informações da Abin (Agência Brasileira de Inteligência).

On Saturday, the Estado de S. Paulo also published an excerpt of a conversation between the Senator and his son. In the conversation, Sarney asks Fernando if he had received any information from the Brazilian National Intelligence Agency (ABIN).

Bolivia: Evo’s Final Hour!

The Observatório da Imprensa reprints the item from Valor Econômico: Evo Morales starts his own newspaper to counter the “lies” of the Bolivian press.

The news might make Brazilians of a certain age, like our dear Nona, who is 95, nostalgic for the days of Última Hora, the only major Brazilian newspaper to openly and uncritically support the Vargas government of the early 1950s.

(Última Hora — “last hour” — got its name from a common feature of newspapers of the day: a column of short news items received in the final hour before deadline.)

The paper, published by Samuel Wainer, duked it out with the Tribuna da Imprensa of Carlos Lacerda — the Veja of its day.

(Lacerda was, like Mike Bloomberg, both a media owner and governor of a large urban area — the federal district, still known as Guanabara state at the time. Unlike Lacerda, however, Bloomberg is not likely to be on the CIA payroll.)

The Lacerdist journalistic style was replete with vicious lying and innuendo in the service of a not particularly well-hidden agenda– sort of like that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer wins the Pulitzer for writing a Drudge-like rumor-driven blog.

That sort of press still exists down South American way. Venezuela’s RCTV was a prime example. You have to see this shit to (dis)believe it.

Anyway, on to the news of the news:

Enquanto o grupo espanhol Prisa, que edita o jornal El País, um dos maiores da Espanha, colocou à venda sua rede de mídia na Bolívia, o governo boliviano lançou na quinta-feira (22/1) um jornal estatal.

As the Prisa group, publisher of El País, one of Spain’s major dailies, puts its media network in Bolivia up for sale, the Bolivian government, on January 22, launched a state-run newspaper.