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"They cannot be kept in Brazil indefinitely. And they cannot be punished for being foreigners either." This is lawyer José Carlos Dias, justice minister during Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government, talking about his clients, Joseph Lepore, 42, and Jan Paul Paladino, 34.
Lepore and Paladino are the two American pilots who have been kept virtually as prisoners by the Brazilian authorities since their executive jet collided at the end of September with a Boeing 737 and all 154 people aboard fell to their deaths in the Amazon jungle. Dias has been retained by New-York based ExcelAire to defend the two pilots in Brazil. Dias law office has filed a petition this Monday, November 6, with Brazil's Superior Justice Tribunal, an appellate court, requesting that that court assign a judge for the case at least temporarily. Marina Dias, José Carlos Dias's daughter, travelled yesterday to Brazilian capital Brasília to take care of this matter. The next step in the process, as soon as a judge is appointed, is to ask that the passports of the two pilots be returned to their owners so that both can go back to their homes and their families in the United States. Both are married and Lepore has two kids: Michael, an eight-year-old boy and Nicole, a three-year-old girl. The former minister once again told reporters that Brazil has no need to take the passports away since Brazil and the United States adhere to international agreements that would allow for the American pilots to be heard by the Brazilian authorities in their own place in the US. The pilots had their passports confiscated by Brazil's Federal Police, on October 3, while they were being undergoing clinical exams at the Brazilian Air Force's Airspace Medicine Center, in Rio. After that they were sent to the Marriott hotel in Copacabana, in the south side or Rio de Janeiro. While that would be a coveted place by a tourist the pilots barely leave their room and rarely watch TV, which for the most part is in Portuguese, a language they don't speak or understand. A constant crowd of cameramen, photographers and journalists outside the hotel hasn't helped them get the courage to walk around, their lawyers say. Two inquiries on the pilots have been started by the Brazilian authorities. Soon after the September 29 accident the civilian police of Mato Grosso state began its own probe. A few days later, the Federal Police decided to have its investigation too. Now, both inquiries have halted. They need information from the investigation being done by the Air Force, but the military are not forthcoming about what they have found. Police chief Renato Sayão, responsible for the federal police investigation, has completely stopped his own inquiry. He hasn't been able even to hear from the flight controllers who were on duty the day of the tragedy. Sayão summoned 10 controllers for a testimony at the end of last month, but all of them refused to show up presenting instead a medical letter excusing them and explaining they were all undergoing psychiatric treatment. Since Sayão has no intention to hear the American pilots before getting the Air Force information, which is not coming and the testimony of the air traffic controllers who are not talking, Lepore and Paladino might be in for a long, long wait.
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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.
the Navy took it upon itself to take my boat and has sence been proven rong 3 times in court .
but sence my boat is missing and no one knows where it is the navy keeps dancing around hoping it will all go away .
like most brasilian lulas gang of thives