|
 Things might change, but at this point it seems quite unlikely that Brazil's Defense Minister, Waldir Pires, will ride unscathed the latest storm on the heels of Brazil's deadliest air accident ever, June 17, which left at least 199 dead. The odds are that he'll be defenestrated.
Pires is in charge of the military, which in turn are in charge of Brazil's air transportation. Most of the air traffic controllers, for example, are military men.
The Brazilian media has been abuzz with rumors about who will be Pires's replacement. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's favorite, it's been said, was Nelson Jobim, who was Justice Minister during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. He was invited but said no to this hot potato.
Lula then considered some shuffling, bringing Foreign Minister Celso Amorim while replacing him with José Viegas, a former Defense minister, who is also ambassador in Spain. Viegas resigned from Defense in 2004 after Lula refused to sack Army Chief General Francisco Albuquerque who had released a note praising the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Viegas wanted Albuquerque out.
Some Lula aides made the president see, however, that such a swap wouldn't be convenient since Amorim is internationally respected and has been heading the WTO's (World Trade Organization) Doha Rounds since Lula's first term of office, which started January 2003.
With Jobim and Amorim out of the competition, the president's next best choice is Paulo Bernardo, the current Planning minister. According to daily Folha de S. Paulo, two of Lula's close aides have already sounded him out, but Bernardo still hasn't received an invitation from Lula to assume the post.
Bernardo is no foreign to the air sector. Earlier in March, he was the guy who intermediated the negotiations between a rebellious group of flight controllers and the government. He was the one who received the controllers' demands and negotiated a settlement in the name of the administration.
Despite an apparent success his intermediation was a big failure and didn't please anyone. The military protested that he had caved in to absurd demands. The controllers ended up empty handed when the government went back an reneged on every promise made by Bernardo. .
In case Bernardo doesn't get the job, still another option would be House Representative José Eduardo Cardozo, who is from São Paulo and belongs to the ruling PT (Workers Party).
Besides Pires' head another one that might roll is that of airport authority Infraero's president, brigadier José Carlos Pereira. Just yesterday, Pereira in response to criticism from Ifatca (International Federation of Air Traffic Controller’s Associations) that the international community should help Brazil solve its air transportation crisis, the brigadier said:
"There are some morons out there willing to interfere. Brazil doesn't need international help. They should look after their own air space and we will take care of ours."
 |
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.