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The trial of two of the five hired gunmen and mentors in the murder of the American nun, Dorothy Stang, begins today in the city of Belém, capital of the state of Pará, in northern Brazil.
The opening session will be attended by the head of the Special Secretariat of Human Rights, minister Mário Mamede, and the special UN representative for Human Rights Defense, Hina Jilani. Stang was a social activist and environmentalist who worked many years in small rural communities in the area of Anapu, Pará, helping the poor in their struggle to obtain land rights and create sustainable development projects that did not destroy natural resources. She died in February from six gunshot wounds. At the end of September, in a trip to Brazil, David Stang, brother of Stang, said that he was confused because he thought the investigation into his sister's death had been completed. But at a meeting with the ministers of Justice, Márcio Thomaz Bastos, and Agrarian Development, Miguel Rossetto, he was informed that the investigation was going on. "We were in Belém (capital of the state of Pará) to see what the authorities had done. They did not give us any assistance, but we thought the investigation had been completed. Now we are in Brasília and the ministers pat us on the back and assure us that justice will be done," he said. A family lawyer, Brent Rushforth, says that it seems there are at least three more landowners who may have been involved in the Dorothy Stang crime. "The world is waiting to see if there is justice in Pará," he declared, adding that over the last 33 years a total of 772 rural workers have been killed in the region around Anapu, Pará, but only three landowners were ever actually charged with murder. Two of them have disappeared and the other one, the only one to go on trial, is serving a house arrest sentence in his comfortable home in Goiânia, capital of the state of Goiás. Dorothy Stang, an American nun from Ohio who had lived in Brazil for over 30 years, was a prominent activist in the Amazon region. She participated in the struggle for sustainable development in the Amazon rainforest, denouncing illegal lumbering operations, fraudulent land deals and violence against the poor rural workers. Up to now five men have been arrested for her murder. They are in jail in Belém. ABr
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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.
This is Brazilian justice.
There, if you have money, this is the best guarantee to obtain impunity.
Corrupted to the roots at all levels, in economy, polititics, , judiciary and bureaucracy, people are closely inter related.
This is only one part of the "Custo Brazil" !
A sad reality, a true shame, but so it is !