|
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, came out strongly in support of the Internet for political campaigning while the Brazilian House of Representatives is ready to vote a bill which establishes serious restrictions to such a communications tool.
"The use of the net in political campaigns must be free and unrestricted; people need to know who their candidates are," said Lula talking in the northern state of Roraima.
"An election can't be something so scary for people to want to limit or ban information," underlined the president.
"All our lives we have struggled for political freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of communication, freedom of the press and now they are thinking in blocking those basic rights that make the essence of democracy."
Lula's comments are part of a national debate in Brazil on the use of Internet, which triggered the drafting of a restrictive project currently under consideration in Congress.
The bill in Congress refers to electoral legislation with specific chapters dedicated to Internet political information restrictions and a ban to all political publicity in Internet.
This week the Brazilian congress must consider several amendments to the original project introduced, among others, by Senator Aloizio Mercadante, head of the ruling Workers Party which has a relative majority in the Senate.
The bill must be approved by October 3 in time to regulate presidential elections of 2010.
The latest public opinion polls have opposition presidential hopeful and governor of São Paulo, José Serra, leading in vote intention with 39%.
A distant runner up is Dilma Rousseff, the candidate of the ruling party and who President Lula personally picked. She figures with a 20% vote intention support.
Mercopress
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.