Brazil

Brazil is where they play Football. They have a big Carnival celebration in Rio de Janeiro as well. Their new, in 2019 head man is Jair Bolsonaro, a rather sound sort of chap. He is going to legalise guns to discourage criminals. He knows that the Armed Citizen is the way to go. The left hate him; always a good sign.

 

Lynch Law Enjoys A Revival In Brazil  [ 20 July 2015 ]
It is quick cheap, effective, sending a message to would be perpetrators. Hanging is not the favoured option; beating is the way to go - and healthy exercise to boot. It is a change from Brazilian police taking street children away and shooting them. See e.g. Street kids murdered to clean up Brazil ahead of the world cup. It worked. Lawyers don't like it; there is no money in it for them.

 

Parts Of France Are Now 'Unliveable' Due To Migrants Says Brazil's 'Tropical Trump' President - Allegedly      [ 20 December 2018 ]
Politician tells truth - shock revelation. The Daily Mail makes its allegation. The Mail is lying; at all events their video clip does not match their words. This is not to say that Jair Bolsonaro would not have said it. Telling the truth is possible. Captain Bolsonaro is a sound sort of chap. That is why the Mail & the rest of the Main Stream Media hate him. See the comments. The Mail's  readers are not stupid enough to believe it.

 

President Of Brazil Making Guns Legal For All    [ 30 December 2018 ]
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Brazil's [ allegedly ] far-right President-elect says that on taking office he will allow citizens without a criminal record to own guns. Jair Bolsonaro, who takes office in January, made the statement on Twitter as part of his election campaign to loosen gun laws.  The ex-army captain's message appealed to many Brazilians who want to use guns for self-defense amid sky-high levels of violent crime.  Currently possession of firearms is tightly restricted in Brazil. Civilians must pass through a long process, and the sale of weapons is limited to small calibers.

However gun violence is a problem in Brazil and in 2017, the country set a record for murders with more than 63,000 people killed...........

Bolsonaro won the election crusading against corruption and crime. But the incoming president also faced scrutiny for his comments about women, homosexuals, and minorities, as well as statements praising the former Brazilian dictatorship.  Among Bolsinaro's controversial comments that grew scrutiny during the campaign are times he said he would prefer a dead son to a homosexual one. 
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Jair Bolsonaro is clearly for the people. The Armed Citizen makes a place safer merely by existing. He makes live criminals nervous. Dead criminals do not do it again.

 

Police In Brazil Kill 13 Drug Dealers  [ 10 February 2019 ]
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Brazilian police shot dead at least 13 suspected drug traffickers on Friday during a shootout in a slum in Rio de Janeiro. 

The confrontation broke out when officers were greeted by gunfire as they approached where the group were hiding in the bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa, according to police spokesman Col. Mauro Fliess. The cops returned fire, killing 11 at the scene and injuring several others. Police said later Friday that the death toll had increased to 13 after two wounded suspects died in the hospital.

He said that no police were hurt.
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This is where Carnival happens but the security is serious. The Mail's readers approve. The Mainstream Media whined about their new head man, Captain Bolsonaro. He is a rather sound sort of chap.

 

Bribery, Corruption And The Boys From Brazil
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WHEN Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known affectionately as ‘Lula’, recently woke up as President of Brazil for the third time in 20years, he could doubtless hardly believe his luck (though ‘luck’ really had little to do with it). A man sentenced to 12 years in jail in 2018 for corruption but released after 18 months, and closely associated with Cuba, left-wing guerillas and, indeed, communist China, receiving worldwide approbation from Western leaders and media, falling over themselves to congratulate him on his return to the presidential palace. Suspicious dissenting ears may well have pricked up at the sound of popping champagne corks in Western capitals and newsrooms, when such a man becomes the great whitewashed hope of World Economic Forumites around the globe. What fresh fudgery is this, we might well wonder.

The key to understanding the dynamic here appears to be the contest between the Brazilian judiciary and the executive over the question ‘who rules?’ This is a problem faced by the peoples of a number of Western countries, where judicial institutions regularly attempt to make policy, either directly or indirectly, through their legal decisions. We’re probably most familiar with this from observing how the US Supreme Court has become a political battleground for those who would, or do, struggle to win unconditional popular support for their policies (and scream blue murder when it tries to hand back those powers to the states, as in the Roe v Wade case). Brexiteers will also remember UK Supreme Court ‘spider’ judge Lady Hale proclaiming Johnson’s proroguing of parliament in 2019 ‘unlawful’, an intervention widely seen by both sides as political interference in the battle to leave the European Union.

The judicialisation of politics in Brazil, which even jaded left-wing human rights activists have called excessive, has recently seen, among other things, ex-president Jair Bolsonaro legally ordered to put on a mask or face being fined US$400 a day; or, perhaps more egregiously, during the election, banned from referring to Lula as ‘corrupt’, despite the latter’s unquashed conviction for using money from bribes to buy himself a luxury apartment.

Lula’s release from prison came only as a result of the Supreme Court striking down a law regarding his imprisonment that they judged unconstitutional. In effect the court decided it was unlawful to imprison someone until he had exhausted all possible avenues for overturning a verdict that would send him to the big house. You may wonder whether anyone would ever go to prison under such a regulation, and it certainly should provide an indefinite stay-out-of-jail card for those whose wealth from corruption can buy them world-class lawyers. Serendipitously, and hardly coincidentally, the court’s humane attempt to protect the innocent from wrongful imprisonment meant Lula could walk free from his incarceration more than seven years early.

Having sprung him from his luxury cell, a Supreme Court judge later declared that the court which condemned Lula to prison was ‘not competent’, ordering a retrial, but in the meantime restoring Lula’s electoral eligibility. The court dismissed calls ahead of the 2022 election for an independent audit of the electronic voting machines which they themselves control, and slapped arbitrary arrests on elected officials and media critical of their power. It seems likely that the ongoing arm-wrestling match between army man Bolsonaro and the judiciary has been a key motivator for the latter’s increasingly overt attempts to load the dice against the now ex-President. Seven of the court’s 11 members had been appointed by Lula or his appointed successor Dilma Roussef.

Having scraped the election victory in October 2022 (a win hotly contested by such Brazilian journalists as Allan Dos Santos who was banned from the social media platform Gettr for suggesting there had been election fraud), Lula may be the toast of Western capitals, and of course many millions of ordinary Brazilians, but the distrust of the Brazilian state by the equally huge number of Bolsonaro loyalists and their fellow-travellers was what angered them enough to set up hundreds of roadblocks in protest at the contested result. Their post-inauguration ‘January 6’ moment in the capital Brasilia, on January 8,2023, was a more adventurous attempt than the brief, good-natured but wrong-headed ‘occupation’ of the Capitol building in Washington DC two years’ ago. It saw protesters occupy and trash not one, but three distinct state buildings, of which one, notably, houses the Supreme Court. They had just made their way there from an encampment outside the country’s central army base in the capital, where they’d been lobbying for weeks for the army to back an insurrection, and for all the world looked like they had the approbation of members of the military police as they stormed and vandalised the centres of political power.

Meanwhile, much like Donald Trump, post-election Bolsonaro seems to have slipped out via the fire exit, abandoning and disowning his supporters (whom Lula, dipping into the Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau playbook, has labelled ‘terrorists’ and ‘Nazis’ as a result of their January 8 shenanigans). He is currently seeking an extended stay in the US, perhaps hoping for some kind of asylum as the wheels of political prosecution turn against him, while roundly condemning the trespassing protests against the election outcome. Much like the January 6 2021 pro-Trump protesters, dozens of whom are still in solitary confinement awaiting trial, it looks as if their hero is going to leave them in the lurch to suffer alone the no doubt brutal consequences of their disobedience, with no words of grace and favour from the man they’d hoped would save their country. It would seem one more populist rebellion has been crushed, tarred, feathered and ‘crapped on from on high’ (to quote Bolsonaro’s son’s words on Lula’s release in 2019), not just by Lula, but by his opponent too.

The tumultuous world of Brazilian politics looks set to continue to deliver its fair share of surprises. Old-fashioned leftist Lula, whose ties to the former Soviet Union and communist China have been detailed in an extraordinary documentary produced by the Epoch Times, has refused to back the continued arming of Ukraine, a small but not insignificant gesture that could play a part in stopping, or at least slowing, the slide towards global war. Meanwhile, just after Lula invited French President Emmanuel Macron to participate in his proposed environmental conference later this year, his navy scuttled a decaying French warship filled with asbestos floating off their Atlantic coast. Imagine the looks on the faces of the environmental protesters for whom Lula has long been their great green-and-yellow hope after nasty old Bolsanaro’s reign.

In Brazil it would seem the political carnival has a lot of life left in it yet.
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Interesting, exciting, challenging? Fun from a distance.