One of the largest open-air landfills in Latin America is set to close. But while environmentalists are applauding the decision, not everyone is happy.
Activists say the landfill in Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil’s largest cities, exceeded its capacity a long time ago and that keeping it going would spell disaster for the environment.
But some of the city’s poorest residents depend on it for work. Al Jazeera’s Lucrecia Franco spoke to them and sent this report.
While U.S. attention has focused on the raging drug war just south of the border in Mexico, the battle to control drugs in Brazil is taking more lives.
Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels three years ago, 9,500 people have died in drug-related violence, including 5,300 killed last year, according to the Mexican government.
In Brazil, 35,000 people were fatally shot in 2007, and most of the deaths were drug-related. According to the government’s public safety secretariat, there are nearly 23,000 drug-related homicides a year.
The drug war in Brazil is centered in its best-known city, Rio de Janeiro, and its slums, known as favelas, where police sometimes fear to tread, as well as in poor neighborhoods of Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, Recife, Salvador, Curitiba and Belo Horizonte. Gun battles rage between rival gangs that seek to control the lucrative trade, particularly in cocaine, whose use has doubled in recent years in Brazil, according to the United Nations.
The drug war burst into international headlines earlier this month when traffickers in Rio shot down a police helicopter. The crash and an ensuing battle between the traffickers and police and between rival drug gangs killed 39 persons. (more…)
Brazil’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave its green light this Thursday, October 25, to Venezuela to become a full member of Mercosur. The controversial vote ended up 12 votes in favor of the measure against 5 against, proof of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s power to get his way.
Together with Brazilian business leaders Lula had been lobbying Congress to get it to allow Caracas to be part of Mercosur. Now the vote goes to the full house for the final vote. No date has been scheduled for this procedure.
Venezuela’s application to enter the Mercosur is pending in the National Congress for more than two years. The official request of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to the Brazilian president was presented in December 2006, In February 2007 Lula sent Congress a message asking the approval from both houses.
The approval occurs the same day president Lula arrives in Venezuela for a working visit with Chavez. (more…)
Heinz Muller
A German man reportedly dumped by a Brazilian woman he met on the Internet has been living in an airport for 13 days and isn’t saying when he will leave.
The man, identified by authorities as Heinz Muller, is out of money, according to airport workers, some of whom bring him meals from the food court.
The 46-year-old former pilot passes the time wandering the airport in Campinas, an industrial city about an hour’s drive from Sao Paulo, or using his laptop perched on a luggage cart. Occasionally he speaks to workers and passengers in basic Portuguese mixed with some Spanish.
Muller arrived in Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 2 and can stay as long as he breaks no laws, said a spokesman for Brazil’s civil aviation authority, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with policy.
Most European tourists are allowed to stay three months in Brazil, presumably giving Muller until early January before he would face deportation. (more…)
During the inauguration of a remodeled sports and cultural complex at Mangueira’s Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva talked about the difficulties to solve the violence and crime that plague Brazil and Rio de Janeiro, in particular.
The president even got a cake to celebrate his 64th birthday. The Olympic center Jamelão, named in homage of a renowned samba singer who became the Mangueira samba club’s official crooner and died in 2008, should benefit 6,500 children and teenagers from the community.
A reporter asked Lula why the government hadn’t kept its promise in 2007 of bringing peace to Complexo do Alemão (German Complex), a favela (shantytown) ruled by drug traffickers. “If it were easy,” Lula replied, “it would have already been done. But this is hard because we are normal folks dealing with the narcotraffick, which is made up by abnormal people, who take up guns”.
“Some people believe that the governor can put an end to the gangs in a minute. If it were easy, the violence wouldn’t have lasted 30, 40 years. … When violence like that happens there is this idea that Rio is like that. … There is violence in Rio, São Paulo, Bahia, Paraná, but in Rio the repercussion is bigger than in any other city,” said the president. (more…)
