Brazil

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on January 17th, 2012

The Saint-Fluer family is living in a bathroom in a once abandoned hotel in the dusty Amazon border town of Brasileia, Brazil.

There is dad Wesley, his wife Angeline, and their five-month-old baby, Isaac.

The bathroom is about the size of a closet.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on January 11th, 2012

In the northwest Brazilian Amazon town of Brasileia, population 20,238, there are almost 1,200 Haitians.

They often mill around during the day, clustered in groups in the shade trying to keep cool from the steamy heat, waiting for weeks for their work documents to be processed so they can get a job in another part of Brazil.

But on Tuesday it was the two other guys sitting alone who caught my attention. They could have been Bolivian perhaps, or even Brazilian. But I knew they weren’t.

“We are from Bangladesh,” AHM Sultan Ahmed, 36, tells me with a smile when I approach and ask to talk with them.

His friend, Abdul Awal, and my photojournalist, Maria Elena Romero, and I, all sit together on the grass and begin to chat.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on January 2nd, 2012
Hi, old friend! Obama and Rousseff in Brasilia in March. [Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR]

In one of her last official appearances of 2011, on December 22, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, arrived in a sweltering gymnasium in downtown Sao Paulo to give a speech to a few hundred working-class social activists.

In her speech, she mentioned “Lula” more than 10 times.

At one point the audience briefly broke into chants of “Lula, Lula, Lula!”

Lula wasn’t even present.

“Lula” is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the wildly popular and charismatic former president of this country.

This is the man who in 2009 told a ballroom of CEOs at a regional World Economic Forum meeting in Rio de Janeiro he was going to scrap the speech his advisors had prepared and instead gave a blistering and empassioned critique of how the rich, developed nations were resonsible for the global economic mess and it was poor all over the world paying the price.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on December 18th, 2011
This tear gas cannister was reportedly used on Bahrain's pro democracy activists.

On Sunday the New York Times ran a column by Nicholas Kristof titled: “Repressing Democracy, with American Arms.”

The column examines the United States’ millions of dollars in arms sales to Bahrain, a country in the midst of a 10-month government crackdown against pro-democracy protestors that has reportedly left at least 35 dead.

Down south, here in Brazil, a similar discussion – albeit on a much smaller scale - is taking place after photos surfaced on the internet allegedly showing tear gas manufactured in Brazil used against the activists.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on November 24th, 2011
Photo: Reuters

Ildo Luis Sauer spent five years as the Director of Gas and Energy for Brazilian energy giant Petrobras. He left the company in 2007, and now is the director of the postgraduate programme in energy at the University of Sao Paulo’s Institute of Energy.  Sauer travels the world giving lectures on energy policy, and remains one of Brazil’s top independent consultants on the matter.

With Chevron coming under increased scrutiny for the oil spill off the coast of Brazil more than two weeks ago, Sauer sat down with Al Jazeera to discuss the whole matter. 

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on November 16th, 2011
Lula shaves his iconic beard.

I was once at a dinner party in the United States not too long ago, when a guest asked me a simple, straight-forward question: “Is that guy with the beard still the president down there in Brazil?”

The guy with the beard.

I chucked, and answered, no, the bearded guy is no longer president. It’s now a woman. The guest, who admitted to not following Brazil news that closely, gave me a quizzical look and then I think the conversation quickly moved on to the weather or something like that.  

File 52286

Lula da Silva and his famous beard when he was president of Brazil [Getty] 

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on October 11th, 2011
The Massachusetts statesman's presidential ambitions include a plan for his Latin neighbours.

If Mitt Romney becomes president of the United States, he apparently has big plans for Latin America. 

“Neither the Bush administration or the Obama administration really focused on Latin America,” a Romney aide apparently told a conference call of reporters late last week, according to this article in Politico. 

The article quoted an aide who said President Mitt Romney would envision “larger campaigns for economic opportunity in Latin America” and that Latin America would be one of the main regions in the world Romney foreign policy would differ from George Bush or Barack Obama. 

Fair enough.

With that in mind I took great interest when on Friday Romney released his 44-page foreign policy white paper titled: “An American Century - A Strategy to Secure

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on August 8th, 2011
Photo by GALLO/GETTY

According to workers at the Brazilian government-run national Indian foundation, FUNAI, late last week a group of men from a paramilitary faction from Peru, armed with rifles and machine guns, entered Brazilian territory and encircled a remote jungle guard post used by FUNAI researchers to study and protect isolated indigenous tribes near the border with Peru.

The incident happened at a FUNAI post known as Xinane, a very remote monitoring location in Brazil's Acre state that serves as a small, five-person research base for the study and protection of isolated indigenous tribes in the region.

FUNAI officials say the armed men were most certainly trying to kill Indians in the area to make way for illegal logging, or new cocaine trafficking routes through the forest from Peru.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on June 25th, 2011
Picture of Maria Lucimar Pereira, believed to be 120 years old. Photo: Courtesy via Folha.com

Her name is Maria Lucimar Pereira and she is reportedly 120 years old. No, that is not a typo.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on June 22nd, 2011
Photo of a newly discovered hut of the korubo indigenous tribe. Photo: Peetsa/Arquivo CGIIRC-Funai

As far as I am aware, the discovery was first reported June 16 by A Critica newspaper in Manaus, and confirmed this week by the Brazilian government’s national Indian foundation, known as Funai.

The new tribe was discovered in the remote eastern part of the Brazilian Amazon about 1,130 kilometers east of Manaus.

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Two thatched roof huts thought to belong to the newly discovered tribe. Given that there are crops around the huts, they are thought to be healthy. Photo: Peetsa/Arquivo CGIIRC-Funai  

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