Arquivos Artigos Livro DHB

Toward the end of 2005, the government began anticipatory payments on some parts of the foreign debt. In December of 2005, it paid $15.5 billion to the International Monetary Fund (IMF); in the beginning of 2006 it also eliminated the debt with the Club of Paris (association of creditor governments), paying $1.8 billion; and paid another $6.64 billion in reserves to redeem Brady bonds. Recently, the government announced that it would continue redeeming more bonds to pay down the foreign debt, activating those that should total $20 billion in 2006. The most troubling is that all of the social sacrifice happened in order to reach the growing limit of primary surplus was not sufficient to impede the explosive growth of the federal domestic debt in the last years. Brazil produced a surplus of 3.89% of the GDP in 2002, of 4.25% in 2003, of 4.58% in 2004, of 4.84% in 2005, and of 5.39% of the GDP in the first seven months of 2006, when the internal debt reached R$1.109 trillion reais.

The Paraguayan Army and police are not the only agents of repression that rural workers must confront. In 2004, the Ministry of the Interior of Paraguay created Citizen Security Councils, security forces composed of civilians financed and armed officially by the government with the justification of aiding in the fight against criminality. However, extra-officially, they are supplied by large ranching interests. In practice, these councils function as paramilitary groups acting in defense of cattle-ranching and soy-producing interests. These new security forces are the chief authors of evictions, the burning of homes, and even incidents of rape and assassination of members of peasant organizations. It is estimated that in the entire country there are approximately 22 thousand men in the Citizen Security Councils. The Paraguayan Army, for example, has about 12 thousand members.

In spite of the World Bank’s argument that its projects “alleviate poverty,” in collective contracts, 56% of the families stated that the agricultural production on the land was not sufficient to sustain themselves, and 54% stated that the money that they earn through production is not sufficient to pay installments on the Bank loans. 19% of the families surveyed revealed that they currently have or had experienced hunger since they have been in the Bank’s program. Amongst the families with collective contracts, this number increases to 26%.

The failure of the Doha Round should serve to demystify certain characteristics of the WTO. One of these is the idea that the WTO as an institution promotes “free trade.” In reality, the main role of the WTO is to establish mechanisms of control over the world market, through the imposition of rules that make national development policies impossible, in areas such as agriculture and industry.

Aside from the absence of effective policies for the development of various forms of community communication, the Lula government achieved the record for closures of community radio stations. In the first half of 2006, on average, 10 community radio stations were closed per day, totaling 1,800 closures from January to July of this year. Broadcast grassroots organizations known throughout Brazil, such as Radio Lauza (Bahia), Novo Ar (Rio de Janeiro), Heliopolis (Sao Paulo) and Alternativa (Rio Grande do Norte), were closed in an arbitrary and hostile manner, with their leadership subject to political persecution. Simultaneously – and in opposition to the speed and efficiency of the radio station closures – bureaucratic sluggishness continues in force with regard to evaluation of requests by the communities: more than 8,180 applications for authorization were not even considered, and more than 1,800 have been held up in some Communications Ministry office.

The biggest accomplishment of the current Ministry of Culture is its efforts to establish policies that are based on UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, which recognizes cultural diversity as one of humanity’s landmarks[1]. This means that the State has the obligation to support cultural activities that are usually hidden, or expressed only as “folklore” or exotic art.

In the last 35 years, from 1970 to 2005, 17% of the Amazon forest has been destroyed. The main causes of deforestation are activities related to the extraction of natural resources. Deforestation is a consequence of timber exploitation, cattle ranching, grain production in large farms, charcoal production, as well as large projects, such as roads and dams.

All indications show that in 2007 resources for the registration of primary and high school students and for basic education for those over fourteen years of age will remain unavailable. Also, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada--Ipea), the body responsible for ongoing evaluation of the Brazil Literacy Program, the low impact of the program indicates that it is not sufficiently focused on its target public--those who are absolutely illiterate. Of the 60,000 fishers who are absolutely illiterate, only 10% attended the program in 2006. Of the 10,000 collectors of recyclable materials, 20.1% participated. Only 9% of the 15,000 persons living in quilombos participated.

Despite the government’s effort to combat racism, there is still an area that needs more attention, which is public security. This area has not been contemplated in an effective way by the government, so Black people continue to be the main victims of urban violence.

One argument in favor of the current labor reforms in Brazil is that flexibility allows businesses to adapt to the realities of the market, gain competitiveness, generate economic growth, and therefore increase the creation of jobs. According to recent International Labor Organization (ILO) publications, these types of reforms have not contributed to the generation of employment. They have contributed to the deterioration of the quality of remaining jobs.

Brazil is described as a country where women and girls are trafficked for sexual exploitation, both within its borders and across South America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Japan, the United States, and the Middle East. This document also states that approximately 70,000 Brazilians, the majority women, are sex workers in foreign countries, many of them victims of human trafficking. Brazil’s main problem, however, is the small number of convictions of human traffickers.

The estimate is that there are between 150-200 thousand undocumented Bolivians living in the city of São Paulo. More than 90% of them work for small factories that are the property of Koreans, Brazilians, and other Bolivians. They work about 18 hours a day, and they get paid $30 cents for each piece they sew. The places where they work, and generally live, are dark, humid, and totally unhealthy. Many people develop respiratory problems or tuberculosis. When the Federal Police free enslaved Brazilians from farms in the Northeast, those workers are free. But when the police find Bolivians in the same situation in São Paulo, the most probable outcome is that they are deported from Brazil. Thus, the immigrants themselves do not want to denounce the situation.

As long as the rate of economic growth remains low, Brazil will tend to specialize in the production and marketing of low value-added goods, with limited technology content and dependent on the low cost of labor. In this sense, economic activity growth may demand more workers, but the profile of employed workers tends to be associated with low compensation and precarious work conditions, not always accessible to highly educated and professionally qualified workers. In a continental country like Brazil, where more than 2.3 million people enter the job market each year, the national economy must grow at least 5% per year to absorb this population. Without it, competition in the job market, even for the simplest positions, will end up driving a reduction of wages and mass unemployment.

Between May 12th and 16th, the Secretary of Public Security of the State of São Paulo published alarming data: in the 251 attacks by the prison gang First Command of the Capital (PCC), and its confrontation with the police, there were 115 deaths, including 32 police officers, 8 prison guards, and 75 people who were shot by both sides.

Between May and August of 2006, three crime waves rocked the State of São Paulo. Police officers’ involvement with criminals by extorting them, and living off of their money, or getting into disputes with criminals about who has the power to commit crimes, make what is illegal the norm and cast aside the legal norm.

The settlements of Santana (Ceará), Conquista na Fronteira (Santa Catarina), Antonio Conselheiro (Mato Grosso) and the “quilombo” communities of Oriximiná (Pará) serve as references of organization and resistance. They contrast with the degraded and abandoned farms that lie under the control of a single landowner. When the farms are disappropriated for agrarian reform, despite the land’s precarious conditions, they are able to quickly expand cultivation and livestock.

Municipalities from the semi-arid sertão region of Bahia suffer from the noxious socio-environmental impacts caused by the Nuclear Industries of Brazil – INB – responsible for the mineral-industrial complex Lagoa Real/Caetité, which produces uranium for Brazilian nuclear plants. The inhabitants of the region have expressed concern over the announcement in Brazilian energy policy to reactivate the nuclear program, including plants located in the Northeast. More than a dozen "usual nuclear events" and various paralyses of activity, which could add up to more than two years of inactivity, unmask the technical and administrative challenges that the INB faces in order to simultaneously operate the system safely and lucratively. What's more, these events only feed into doubts regarding the scientific competence of the business to handle such a dangerous product.

If the government and the proponents of the project to divert the water of the São Francisco River admitted to the economic reasons behind the operation, the debate would be more transparent and more ethical. Camouflaging conflicting economic interests under the pretext of human thirst is intolerable as it is just a new model of manipulation of the Northeast populations in order to support another large project.

The repression against the Movement of Dam-Affected People (MAB), started when they began to denounce the Brazilian energy model, in which residential consumers pay up to seven times more than large corporations. In 2005, 10 people from MAB were arrested, 109 were being sued, and 20 were wounded during mobilizations. In 2006, four people were arrested, 130 were being sued, and 25 were wounded during mobilizations.

The continued persistence of violent attitudes toward Indigenous people on the part of the Military Police—killing, abusing, and humiliating—is a serious problem, as are the cover ups and impunity for these police actions. Between the years of 2005 and 2006, more than 80 Indigenous people were criminally prosecuted in an unjust and illegal manner, in relation to conflicts involving struggles for land. Problems such as prejudice, unjust criminalization, ethnic hatred, and disrespect for the rights of indigenous peoples, still persist in Brazil.

While, as the ILO has recognized, there have been positive movements in the fight against slave labor, old obstacles persist, such as impunity, and the non-approval of Proposed Constitutional Amendment 438-2001, which relates to confiscation of property in cases where slave labor occurs. There is a lack of preventive measures in place to generate income for those workers most vulnerable to abuse and measures designed to implement effective land reform.

The majority of sugar workers come from the northeastern states and the Valley of Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais. In general, when they migrate, they travel clandestinely and are subjected to conditions analogous to slavery. From 2004 to 2006, the Pastoral of Migrants registered 17 deaths that occurred from excessive work. Intensive sweat causes loss of potassium and can lead to cardio-respiratory attacks. Other cases refer to occurrences of aneurysm, the breaking of cerebral veins.

Here we present a brief description of the measures taken during the Lula administration. I. Measures that favored peasant agriculture in Brazil II- Measures that don’t favor peasant agriculture and rural social movements in Brazil Manifesto of the Americas: In…

The lack of an effective agrarian reform policy feeds the violence in Brazil. What is the difference between the landowner who ordered the killing of landless peasants in Felisburgo, Minas Gerais, and those who ordered the killing of the employees of the Ministry of Labor in Unai? What is the difference between the mill owners in Sao Paulo who, through their administrators, daily work rural laborers to death cutting sugarcane, and members of the “consortium” who paid to have Sister Dorothy Stang killed? In other words, what is the difference between the so-called “modern agribusiness” and the old rural oligarchy?

Denounced by our report over a year ago, the traditional strategies of those who defend landowners who order assassinations in the state of Pará— after seeking to postpone court procedures with incidents and interruptions of the legal proceedings— have once again proven efficient against the calls to end impunity. At the court hearings at the Belém Judicial Court District, which tried and convicted Tato as responsible for hiring the executors of the nun Dorothy Mae Stang, human rights defenders sought once again to speed up the proceedings of those accused of hiring the gunmen to commit the crime, Bida and Taradão, by strictly following the time stipulated by the legal proceedings at the Judicial Court of Pará. However, the attempts of these organizations were barred, and were not only slowed to a protracted pace, but all the authorities involved adhere to this sluggish process in the higher courts. Up to this date, the lawsuit remains in the Court of Appeals in Brasilia, with the sole intent of extending these proceedings.

The Eldorado dos Carajás massacre took place on the day of the International Day of Rural Struggle – on April 17, 1996, when 19 landless rural workers were assassinated by the Military Police on the “S” Curve of Highway PA-150, and another 69 were injured. Between 1996 and 2006 – 10 years since the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre -, close to 170 landless workers were assassinated in the state of Pará. In 1996 alone, 33 landless workers were assassinated in the state[1]. Rural violence is a sad situation in Pará. It has the largest numbers of cases of slave labor in Brazil. In addition, it was here that ranch owners ordered the assassination of missionary Dorothy Stang, in February of 2005. In spite of the presence of the Army and the Federal Police in Anapu, the city where the nun lived, rural workers still feel unsafe and suffer from regular threats. The majority of large landowners in the state have armed militias. According to the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), in the last 34 years in Pará, there were more than 770 assassinations of rural landless workers and people that support them. In only three cases there were trials to judge the authors of these crimes.

CPT’s partial data from January to August 2006 point to the continuation of a tendency toward decline in social movement actions and in the incidence of violence. The number of killings until the end of August was 18.3 percent lower than in the same period of 2005, when 29 people were killed. The number of displaced families fell from 2,339 between January and August 2005, to 927 during the same period in 2006, 60.37 percent lower. The activity of the judiciary was less intense. There were 31.41 percent fewer people evicted from January to August 2006— 11,065 families, compared with 16,131 families in 2005. The number of jailed workers increased significantly. From January to August 2006, 749 people were imprisoned, 351.2 percent more than during the same period in 2005, 166 more than the totals during previous years. This increase is due above all to the imprisonment of militants of the MLST (Movement for Liberation of the Landless), as a result of their occupation of the Chamber of Deputies in Brasilia.

In 2006, the Report on Human Rights in Brazil reaches its seventh edition. Once more, the report brings a broad overview of human rights issues, and shows that fundamental rights are still violated in Brazil. It includes 29 articles containing…

The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights is publishing its annual report on Human Rights in Brazil 2006. This report is fully trustworthy and has a broad reach, covering the following issues:Human Rights in Rural AreasHuman Rights in Urban…

Human Rights in Brazil 2006A Report by the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights Edited by: Evanize Sydow e Maria Luisa MendonçaPhotos: João Roberto RipperGraphic Design: Carlos Vasconcelos PitomboAdministrative Assistance: Marta Soares, Sidnéia Soares e Magali Godoi Translators: Ariane…

One of the main goals of the U.S. policy of military intervention is the control of strategic goods, which includes natural resources, energy and biodiversity, along with the implementation of an economic model that promotes the privatization of "basic services". These "services" are, in fact, basic rights such as health, education, social security, etc. According to writer Eduardo Galeano, the United States always finds "noble causes" to justify the war. They never admit "killing with the intention of pillage".

The sugarcane industry is Brazil’s fastest-growing agribusiness of 2005. Its expansion has brought with it serious consequences for the country, such as environmental destruction, removal of agricultural workers from their land and frequent workers’ rights violations. Sugarcane plant supervisors demand that each worker cut, on average, twelve to fifteen tons of sugarcane per day. Between January 2004 and September 2005, the Migrants’ Pastoral registered eight workers’ deaths due to an excess of work in the cane fields of the Ribeirão Preto region alone.

In Brazil, the taxation model is unjust, regressive, and it concentrates income by taxing workers and consumers in an accentuated way, sacrificing the lowest income level and at the same time going easy on big capital, profits, the latifúndios, and inheritances.

For the past 15 years, Flávio Molina’s family had to endure unnecessary and unjustifiable anguish of knowing that there was a possibility of his remains being among the bones exhumed from a secret grave in the Dom Bosco de Perus Cemetery. It took only 20 days for a private lab in São Paulo to reach conclusive results over the identification of the remains, something that the public agencies could not accomplish in years.

The free access of State-held information is a fundamental requirement in achieving open public debate, enabling people to assume an active role in the governing of their country.

In spite of the potential new policies for advocating children’s rights, established by the ECA (Statute of Children and Adolescents), concrete implementation has been compromised by the lack of interest on the part of the government. The division of responsibility between the Government, the states and counties is still confused and subject to conflict – the various spheres fleeing from responsibility. On the other hand, the population is not well informed or organized to propose, subsidize, demand and evaluate social policies.

The proposal by FUNDEB – despite the extension of federal financing of public education beyond the elementary level – has been criticized by educational and social organizations for excluding early childhood education and daycare centers for the attendance of children of zero-three years old. If the proposal was ratified in its present form it would have a negative impact on the access to education of the youngest children of low-income mothers.

Poverty, hunger, and the violation of the Human Right to Adequate Food remain a challenge to be faced by Brazilian society, especially regarding indigenous peoples, Quilombolas*, Afro descendents, populations in encampments, settled populations**, the homeless, street dwellers, and those who make a living out of garbage dumps. There are still millions of families who, in spite of getting a regular income supplement, are not inserted in the productive process in a sustainable manner, in order to ensure a dignified way of feeding themselves and their families.

In 2004 dentist Flavio Sant’Anna was shot to death without even a chance to defend himself, in a cruel demonstration of the São Paulo Police modus operandi. It was later revealed by the investigative process that being black was the sole reason for his killing.

In Brazil, a woman is beaten every 15 seconds, but this statistic does not show the true extent of the problem. Every 15 seconds a Brazilian woman is prevented from leaving her home, every 15 seconds another is forced to have sexual relations against her will, and every 9 seconds another is criticized for her sexual conduct or her performance at work, either in or outside the home.

The social inclusion of people in a street situation depends in large part on individual transformation, but also on a change in attitude by society, media, and governments.

In Brazil, the number of homeless people increased from six million in 2004 to seven million in 2005. In addition, about 13 million people live in precarious houses, with no access to basic services. The number of cases of displacement and forceful removal of rural communities has grown. The most serious case happened in the month of February, 2005, at the Western Industrial Park, Sonho Real Settlement, in the city of Goiania, which caused the death of two people and left 24 people wounded. The removal and the destruction of housing of approximately 4 thousand families led to the formation of a favela around the sports gymnasium destined to give provisional shelter to the population that had been removed.

Many young people are forced to make a choice between study and work. Generally speaking, in all of the metropolitan regions that have been analyzed, the number of poorer young people who succeed in reconciling work and study is much lower than the number of young people from families with greater resources.

The largest gaps in the workforce have not been salaried workers, but self-employed, autonomous, independent and cooperative workers, among others. Moreover, the type of self-employed work that has really expanded is what is traditionally called “autonomous” work—which is characterized, in general, by poor working conditions and income. Currently, unemployment has become a complex and very heterogeneous phenomenon, achieving a generalized form in practically all segments of society, including spheres with high levels of education, experienced professionals and workers with the highest salaries. It is thus possible to conclude that there are no longer any strata of Brazilian society that are immune to unemployment.

Several workers testify that some factories deny them daily food rations when average productivity is less than 10 tons of sugar cane per day. Recent reports indicate that wages are declining in several locations. In the Itapolis region in Sao Paulo, the pay for a box of oranges is only R$ 0.30 (USD $0.15) while in 2001 the price was R$ 1.30 (USD $0.60). In the Riberão Preto region, factory owners distribute a glucose-based liquid to workers after lunch time in order to compensate for their lack of food to meet the demands of growing productivity. Because workers use so much energy, there are many cases of cramping and severe back pain. Dehydration due to the unrelenting rhythm of the work—a worker swings his knife 9,700 times a day to reach the average 10 tons of sugar canes—causes cramps and provokes numerous physical problems including heart attacks.

Bolivians, Paraguayans, Peruvians and Chileans compose a virtual army of cheap and abundant workforce in the capital of São Paulo. The draft of the New Foreigner Law that is passing through the National Congress is extremely selective from the economic point of view and doesn’t resolve the situation of the undocumented immigrant workers.

Taking only three states of the country (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais), a comparison with patterns of police forces known for violence (such as South Africa and the United States) reveals a pattern of use of lethal force completely out of acceptable proportions. The police of these three Brazilian states have killed almost five times more civilians than all of the North American states combined.

Between 1995 and 2005, almost 16,500 slave workers were liberated in Brazil. In 2005 alone, there were 3,285 freed workers and 119 ranches inspected, 56 mobile group operations and R$ 6,257,566.40 (US$2,844,448.36) paid in fines. Researchers on the issue and representatives of the Ministry of Labor agree that the National Plan for the eradication of Slave Labor— developed under Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government and launched under Lula’s government—was an advance in government policy against slave work.

We would like to call urgent attention to the situation of the Guarani-Kaiowá nation in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where intense violence have been committed against indigenous people.

Diversity creates unique local and environmental identities. It ties territory, social practices, environment and culture. It cements cultural identities that transform into trenches of resistance. It breeds shared political will to fight for rights, for traditions, for survival and for perspectives of a future without the destruction of its own history and ways of life. It raises the desire for dialogue, for respect and for the construction of political unity between various cultures and peasant identities for the popular struggle around the right to an existence and to the right to build a future.

Specialists say that no large center in the Northeast needs the waters of the São Francisco to supply its population. This is only the pretext. What is certain is that 70% of the water to be diverted will go for irrigation, industry, and shrimp farming. In any event, let’s say that the project will supply twelve million people in the urban environment. This would be the noble motivation. What the men behind the diversion don’t talk about is that in Northeastern Brazil there are 2.2 million families spread throughout the barren lands—the so-called diffuse population—which means approximately 12 million people. This is the population that lives with constant insecurity with regard to water, both from the quantitative and qualitative points of view, as well as in terms of regularity of access to water.

The government’s energy policy has been focused creating the best conditions for large corporations in the sector, guaranteeing huge profits with the production and sale of electric energy in Brazil.

If before Sister Dorothy’s death, threats were made even by the local radio, giving the names of the people who would be the next victims, today there is another way. It is hidden, inhibited by the presence of the Army and the Federal Police, who were installed there after the crime. But the insecurity of rural workers in the region is still the same. Impunity is the main reason for this situation. All the murderers who shot Dorothy may be convicted, but few believe in convictions for those who ordered the crime.

More than two years later, 75% of the National Plan for Agrarian Reform has not been implemented. Fewer than 100,000 families have actually been settled, when the Plan established a goal of distributing land to 400,000 families.

In the state of Pará, in the last 33 years there have been 772 murders of rural workers and of people who supported them. Only in three of these cases the people who ordered the killings were sentenced.

The rate of new settlements in the first half of 2005 was below what was needed. During this period, only 15.9 thousand families were settled, compared to the settlement of 21.7 thousand families in the first half of 2004 – which is an insufficient number.

From January 2003 to July 2004, Brazil received $3.2 billion in loans from the World Bank and from the Inter-American Development Bank. During this same period, Brazilian public institutions paid $6.9 billion to these banks. In other words, Brazil sent abroad $3.7 billion more than it received.

In spite of some legal instruments adopted by the Brazilian government against torture and abuse, the process of abiding by UN recommendations is far from expected. Abuses by policemen are still frequent. The investigation of crimes committed by policemen is still done by inefficient and partial courts. The prison system is in a precarious state, with overcrowded jails, exceeding of detention times, and absence of information to the families about the situation of the inmates.

Our colleague Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, the current General Secretary of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations, said: “It’s possible to guess, with relative certainty, how the FTAA will turn out. The FTAA will be mostly like NAFTA, and any difference introduced will only be to make it more advantageous to the U.S.”

Homophobia has been responsible for the killing of 2,403 gays, lesbians, and transvestites in Brazil in the last 20 years. At the end of 2003, the government launched the Brazil Without Homophobia Program. This was a historic moment for the advance of homosexuals’ human rights.

Contrary to other countries, there is not, in Brazil, any way to prevent cross-ownership of communication media, i.e., the possession and licensing of means of communication of different types in a single geographical area. Scarcely six private national open television networks and their 138 affiliated regional groups control 667 media outlets. Their vast field of influence is fed by 2194 VHF television stations that encompass more than 90% of the national stations. Add to these another 15 UHF stations, 122 AM radio stations, 184 FM stations, and 50 daily newspapers.

Comparing the gains in wage readjustments with the losses owing to “rotation” in the first half of 2004, we had around 5.1 million workers hired and 4 million workers laid off. Rotation brought an average salary loss of 40% for those who were rehired.

If it is true that all initiatives that promote affirmative action policies at any teaching level should be valued, it is also true that any mechanism that implies the support of private initiative by the public sector in education can occur only for limited periods of time as an emergency measure, based upon a clear plan to offer quality public education to everyone.

The agreement on intellectual property, known by its acronym TRIPS, which was signed along with 12 other agreements during the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is unjust because it gives a monopoly to the bearer of knowledge about essential products such as food and medicine. Such is the case of the treatment for AIDS. Brazil started applying TRIPS from the first year of the signing, which prevented our country from producing generic drugs and made it dependent on generics from India. Beginning in 2005 India cannot produce these medicines any longer. As a result, the costs for our country to treat AIDS will go from R$ 700 per year to R$ 3.5 billion per year, which can be the end of Brazil as a model for the treatment for the illness.