Brazil in the News

I've been in Colombia for the last week and will be back in Brazil tomorrow, but while I've been away there has been a lot of interesting stuff published in the English-language press about Brazil. In this week's Economist, a piece on the president which weighs in on some of the issues I alluded to in my recent piece on Lula. Among other things, the piece points out that his "instinct for conciliation between political opposites make him friends everywhere. 'He’s my man,' gushed Barack Obama at the G20 summit in London; Fidel Castro calls him 'our brother Lula.'"

But is he being all things for all people, concerned more about popularity than effectiveness? The article drills him for not standing up more to Chavez (and let's not forget Ahmadinejad). It concludes: "The way to [prevent a cold war in Latin America] is not to equivocate between democrats and autocrats, as Lula seems to think. It is to shame Mr Chávez by drawing a clear, public line in favour of democracy—the system that allowed a poor lathe-operator to come to power and change Brazil. Why should other countries deserve less?"

The issue also has an in-depth piece on South American-Asian relations.

Two other articles about Brazil in the big papers:

The New York Times writes about American documents just declassified over the weekend that detail how the Nixon administration encouraged the Brazilian military rulers to back a coup of Chilean leftist Salvador Allende. (Allende was overthrown in 1973, but according to the article it is unclear how much of a role, if any, Brazil played in that.)

And the Financial Times has a great feature by Daniela Gerson about how Brazilian immigrants have transformed Martha's Vineyard, where the Obamas will be vacationing soon. It's really not just about Brazilians on Martha's Vineyard, but  how immigrant communities in general form in unexpected parts of the U.S. and then transform those parts, often with a dose of community tension.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/brazil/090817/brazil-the-news