|
Some 10,000 demonstrators marched Tuesday, August 16, in Brazil's capital Brasília to protest against corruption and express solidarity with embattled President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva while Congress kept ahead with the investigation on bribes for votes and illegal financing of political parties.
With their faces painted the green and yellow of the Brazilian flag marchers walked along the Ministries Esplanade, a wide avenue on which the buildings of the three branches of government stand, making a brief stop at the Treasury Ministry.
Angry chants and speeches highlighted protestors' fury with several political parties' attempts to impeach and ultimately remove President Lula and his ruling party from office.
Lula's top advisors and the Workers Party main officials have resigned following disclosures of deep-rooted corruption practices, including illegal campaign funding involving overseas fiscal paradises such as Bermuda.
João Feliciano, president of CUT, Brazil's largest labor federation said demonstrators "oppose coups" and consider talks about removing the president "a destabilizing ploy."
"Lula for us is a symbol; the long established relation with social movements makes us reject any doubts about his honesty or his dedication", added Feliciano.
"We're here to demand corruption be investigated and those guilty punished, but also to defend Lula and his administration", emphasized Feliciano.
This however did not impede the marchers during their brief stop before the Treasury Ministry to reject and condemn the "neo-liberal" and open market policies of the Lula da Silva administration.
The green and yellow faces of unionists, landless peasants and students were reminiscent of the "painted faces" that in 1992 called for the removal of then-President Fernando Collor de Mello, who finally resigned when it became clear he would be convicted in impeachment proceedings.
"We 'painted faces' have taken to the streets to expose a conservative coup and to defend President Lula" said Gustavo Petta, president of the UNE (União Nacional dos Estudantes - National Students' Union.
Students also called for a political reform establishing clear and transparent standards for the funding of political campaigns, which is at the heart of the scandal that has been rocking Brazilian public opinion for over two months and increasingly weakening President Lula's administration and his re-election chances for 2006.
The demonstration was peaceful and policed by nearly 2,000 officers.
A similar protest, this one against Lula however, has been called for today by Marxist parties proposing as an alternative to impeachment moving up the presidential elections scheduled for October of next year.
This article appeared originally in Mercopress - www.mercopress.com.
 |
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.