|
Brazil's Defense Minister, Waldir Pires, has condemned the pressure exerted by American authorities on Brazil to let go the American pilots who had their US passports confiscated after colliding with a Boeing 737 causing the worst aviation accident ever in Brazil, with 154 deaths.
Pires called the American action "inopportune and useless" since the decision do detain the pilots came from the judiciary and not from the Brazilian government. The minister also commented that he cannot believe to be true news published in the American press informing that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will contact him so that he may intercede on behalf of pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladin. "This would be inadmissible. The natural channel for contact in this case would be the diplomatic one, via the Foreign Relations Ministry, and not the Defense minister," he said. On Saturday, October 7, the minister visited the teams working in the search effort for the bodies still missing. The teams include military personnel, firemen, coroners, doctors and paramedics. Until the end of Saturday 117 bodies had been located. The teams were reinforced today with 100 Army men since the fast decomposition of the bodies is making the task harder and harder every day. Thirty seven bodies haven't been located yet. After meeting those involved in the search, Pires praised their work: "These men have been working with dedication and civic bravery in totally adverse conditions. The operation has been conducted with much success.". The plan for today is to have a complete sweep of the dense forest area where the plane fell down, going over each square foot of the area, in a radius of 2 miles around the place the largest piece of the airplane was found and where the main clearing for the search was opened. "We will do everything we can so that all the bodies can be found, identified and handed over to their families for burial," stated the minister. Inquiry Still Going On Air Force Commander, Lieutenant Air Brigadier Luiz Carlos da Silva Bueno, said today that Brazil still has not enough elements to decide who is to be blamed for the Boeing accident. On Saturday the Brazilian press had informed that the Air Force was already certain that the American pilots were responsible for the air tragedy. "The investigations are being done to prevent future accidents," he said. "We still cannot blame anyone." On Saturday, Bueno had stated that soon after the accident the Cindacta (Air Defense and Air Traffic Control Integrated Center) with help from the Air Space Control Department did a simulation using the same route of the planes involved in the accident. The simulated exercise, according to Bueno, proved that there was no communication problem related to the Cindacta system. Brasília's Coroner's Office has identified today another 23 victims of the Boeing accident. Out of the 87 bodies that have already arrived into the IML (Instituto Médico Legal - Forensic Medicine Institute) 61 have been identified, 31 of which have already been claimed by their families.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Charming...
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.