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.

TV Globo: “Rio das Pedras Is Heaven on Earth”

I have been taking notes for a while on a possible book idea on the militia phenomenon in Rio de Janeiro — the cidade maravilha‘s answer to the CONVIVIR and (which became the) AUC paramilitaries of Colombia.

What I have so far is that the following proposition needs to be fleshed out (and rendered in plain English):

There is an historic nexus among the jogo de bicho, the narcoretail trade, carnaval, political corruption, television monopolies (Rede Globo and its allegedly illegal worldwide distribution rights deal with the racketeering-dominated LIESA — whose Web site Globo hosts), and mafia-style anti-democratic mini-states of exception (fiefdoms) with Clockwork Orange levels of gnostic ultraviolence.

If that all sounds crazy, consider the case of the TV Globo soap opera Duas Caras (Two Guys/Two Faces), which ran from October 1, 2007 and May 31, 2008 on the Globo network and in (dubbed) syndication elsewhere in South America (it was particularly popular in Ecuador, one reads).

The soap opera revolves around two central characters: a Rio real estate developer named Marconi Ferraço and a shantytown community leader named Juvenal Antena.

The pairing Marconi-Antena is suggestive of some relation of interdependency between the men: Marconi was the inventor of radio. Radio transmits. The antenna receives.

Interesting. I think there is something to that.

Antena is briefly an employee of Marconi — his security chief — but quits and founds Portelinha in defiance of the new order. Having thrived under the Old Boss, he ceases to receive orders broadcast from the New Boss.

In fact, the two men engage in a vicious power struggle, in the courts and in the streets, over property rights to athe abandoned construction site owned by Ferraço, which Antena and his people invade — recalling the invasions of the MST, a well-known militant agrarian reform movement in Brazil.

(I once observed the MST throwing a BBQ for Noam Chomsy, believe it or not. Superb ribs, gaucho style, and Brazuco-Deutsche keg beer, the best. I was not invited. But my eyes feasted.)

The shantytown is later reciprocally invaded by a drug gang — in cahoots with Marconi, I think.

In a broad way, the relationship between the two men represents the conflicting relationship between the two poles of Rio society: the “asphalt” and the “hillside” (morro).

That is, the on-the-grid formal, taxed, zoned and regulated, city and the off-the-grid, untaxed, unzoned and unregulated informal shantytowns.

In a last-minute plot twist among many others — the blockbuster concluding episode features no fewer than 11 marriages, an all-time record featured widely in Editora Globo bridal magazines — Juvenal Antena and Marconi Ferraço are discovered to be long-lost brothers.

Ferraço (spoilers!) atones for past sins and is reunited with his long-lost love in a Caribbean (fiscal) paradise, while Antena loses his bid for asphalt legitimacy and is left, significantly, lovelorn, alone, and stripped of his former power.

Now, Maria Lima Marques, an M.A. candidate at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, has observed as follows in a paper for a conference on interdisciplinary culture studies at the Federal University of Bahia in May 2008, titled “Hero or Criminal: Juvena Antena and the Personal Domination of the Portelinha Shantytown” (my trans.):

The Globo soap not only has based the Portelinha shantytown on a real-life shantytown, Rio das Pedras, but has portrayed the community as a model shantytown.

In real life, however, the Rio de Pedras shantytown is run by a vicious and lethal mafia of corrupt police engaged in vice, extortion and protection racketeering and parapolitics — the so-called militias of Rio.

Enthyeme: TV Globo presents shantytowns run by mafias of corrupt police engaged in vic, extortion and protection racketeering — as well as parapolitics, including political assassinations — in a utopian light on national TV.