Foreign Correspondent

So it's been a year - sue me

2008-03-06T06:54:00.001-08:00

Or cut my paycheck. See if I care

Shawn on Harpers on Brasilia

2008-03-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

Shawn on Harpers on Brasilia

There’s an article in the Jan 08 Harpers on the Brasilia at 50 (subscription required http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/0081879). Benjamin Moser is the author. He’s jumping the gun a bit on the celebration, in that the city wasn’t unveiled until 1960, but ground had been broken so I guess it’s fair. By a curious coincidence a friend of mine, a Swedish journalist, has recently been commissioned to write a book on Brasilia. I sent him a link, mostly as a warning of things to avoid. I hope he gets the point.

Reading the article, the question that looms largest is not, what happened to the Capital of Hope, but rather, where did they find this guy, and why did they choose him to write the article? There are clues: he’s writing a biography of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. Lispector once wrote an essay on Brasilia. Ipso facto, Moser knows something of Brasilia. I was once asked to travel to Sierra Leone and write on child soldiers on much sillier grounds, so what the hell.

And indeed, he starts off with exactly the correct premise: Brasilia is 50. Two generations have grown up there, living breathing parts of a great tribute to political ego, national aspiration and uber-rational architectural modernism. What are they like (or better, how fucked up are they)?

It’s something I’ve wanted to get my little claws into for a while, and so when tidbits come along, I save them up, in clipping folders or misplaced computer files.

Example: In a land of samba, choro, pagode, hip hop, brega and funk, Brasilia kids, alone in all Brazil, crave heavy metal. Not “teenage classic rock” as Moser says. Hard core crash and burn metal. Is it the lack of street life, and consequent social dominance of the shopping mall? The alienating need for automotive transport? That’s my working theory, as yet untested. For teenagers, Brasilia is eerily like growing up in an American suburb. How curious they chose the same form of musical rebellion.

Example: A few years back, some university kids from upper class families pulled an Indian from a bus shelter, doused him with gasoline, and set him on fire. Their reason? They thought he was a vagrant (as if that would explain it). While Brazil in general is a violent place, that kind of irrational mayhem is special only to the capital of Cartesian rationality.

Why?

Dunno. It would have been interesting to talk to some of these kids – warped by the world’s most rational upbringing – to maybe find out. Alas, Moser is the least intrepid of reporters. He has some introductions “to people who matter” – presumably not miscreants and metal heads – and when those run dry he just kind of stews. Going out and meeting people without an introduction seems out of the question for Moser, never mind that it’s one of the glories of being a reporter in Brazil that Brazilians will divulge their life histories and intimate secrets to perfect strangers at the drop of a flip flop.

Nor does he seem to know much about architecture. The building’s designed by Brasilia’s architect Oscar Niemeyer he dismisses as “like something Kim Il Sung might have commissioned after a dalliance with Scientology”, observing that each “has some gaudy gimmick tacked to its façade.” Now I have my issues with Niemeyer, as does anyone who’s observed or experienced his buildings. But to dismiss him as one of those gimcrack modernists who endlessly replicate the same box then decorate it with some fancy bauble is to be guilty of simply not looking very closely.

Moser complains too of Brasilia’s scale, and posits its connection to Niemeyer’s supposed hero worship of the dictator and the Strong Man. He may have a point about the city’s scale, but he’s blaming the wrong man. Niemeyer just designed the buildings. The master planner, the uber mind who determined Single Use Zoning and slashed the intersecting Monumental Axes across the virgin landscape, was a meek and mild urban planner named Lucio Costa. But though single-handedly responsible for creating the vast and alienating scale that Moser so decries, Costa, poor man, rates nary a mention. Perhaps Moser could dig up no quotes by Costa speaking favourably of Castro or Stalin.

Summarizing then, Moser’s not much of a reporter, while his attempts at architectural criticism mostly show his own lack of understanding of architecture. What’s left? Fortunately, quite a lot.

Moser seems most at home in the world of books and of the mind, and he does an admirable job tracing the development of the idea of Brasilia, and showing the meaning of this new capital for Brazilians and Brazilian society - the desire to start afresh, forget the injustices of the past, cost what it may in freshly minted grievance. Moser does an equally exemplary job showing how this Fresh New Start was but one of many such, endlessly repeating, doomed by the very manner of its implementation to reinforce all the bad old habits of the ancien regime.

There are some quibbles to be made here as well. Located just down the street from where I live in Rio, the central aisle of the Positivist Church of Brazil has pretty much the same orientation as every other building on its block – due north – which means it’s pointing more at St. John’s, Newfoundland that Notre Dame de Paris, but whatever.

As Moser accurately points out, Paris was the lodestone for all Brazilian intellectuals, architects and urban planners prominent among them. Costa actually tired to tried to camouflage Brasilia’s Corbusian inspiration, claiming that the two intersecting lines came to him as if in a vision (The quote will follow, if I get around to looking it up). Verbiage aside, the plan was pure and vintage Corbu, with only the slight modification of a curving north-south axis (the airplane wing) to set Costa’s design apart from Corbu’s perfect cross.

Curious that sometime after Brasilia was completed, the fixation on France shifted, not to anything native, Deus me livre, but to the next great source of civilisation: the United States (and more specifically, Miami). The apogee of this new desire, curiously also planned by Lucio Costa, is the Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Barra de Tijuca, with broad sidewalk-less streets, countless 4x4s, and gated air-conditioned malls named America, New York, and Downtown.

Barra too was supposed to be a new start. Building Barra was supposed to be a chance to eliminate all that had gone wrong in Rio, starting with favelas. True to form and tradition, no one gave the slightest thought to where the poor and working class would live. Alas for Brazil and for Barra, out of mind is not out of sight.

In other places, the latest urban planning theories try to integrate the poor and working class into a neighbourhood’s fabric, with modestly priced housing salted carefully in amongst the pricier bits of real estate. These are called ‘mixed neighbourhoods.’ 20% is considered to be the magic number. Kept to this proportion, the poor learn from their social betters (and attend their public schools), while the middle class feel both a smug sense of noblesse oblige and the frisson of funky that comes having real live workers (look, mom, a real live butcher) in their midst.

None of this was ever even considered in the next New Start called Barra. The poor were still needed in the neighbourhood – who else would work as maids and doormen, staff the fast food outlets and shops in the mall? But their homes would have to be elsewhere, though where that elsewhere was never specified, except in the negative. A series of wide lagoons were dug or deepened to surround the fresh new bastion of the future like a moat. Wherever the workers would live, it wouldn’t be here.

And so on the waste land just beyond the lagoons, the poor settled once again on the margins of the future. One of these poor communities has recently become modestly famous in the outside world, the subject of a Oscar-nominated feature film.It’s name? Cidade de Deus, the City of God.

Freelancing and Travel, Part I : The Flyer, or Doing it on Your Own Dime

2007-02-14T02:58:00.000-08:00

Just flew back from the Amazon, and boy are my arms tired. Ba-dum-bah. Actually, it’s my bank account that’s feeling weary. Everything in the Amazon is such a long way from everywhere, doing any kind of story there involves ridiculous amounts of time and money, most of it for travel.

For freelancers, travel presents a perilous allure. No fancy expense accounts for us, at least not most of the time. So if you’re going to go tramp about out there in the field, you have to make it pay. Sensible enough. But there’s a catch. How do you know what’s out there, and more importantly, how do you sell what’s out there, before you’ve been out there?

There are two routes out of this dilemma: the pre-sell and the flyer. We’ll take the flyer first, in Part I, and get to the pre-sale in the next post.

Essentially, with the flyer, you just go and hope. You’ve done your homework. You know there’s something good out there – an issue that you think needs tackling, a situation you’re sure will yield good material – but you haven’t got enough information to turn it into a compelling narrative, with characters and tension and violence – something you can sell to an editor. But you will.

For me, southern Para is such an area. For those not up on their Amazon geography, the Amazon rainforest is divvied up among a number of Brazilian states (plus about 6 other countries, but for the moment they don’t count). Each of the states has a slightly different history, and different settlement patterns, and all this affects what happens to the forest in each state.

Para state, which encompasses the mouth of the Amazon river, is a vast and lightly governed no man’s land, where ranchers claim millions of acres for their own on the flimsiest of pretexts, where slave labour is used to clear the forest and sawmills operate in flagrant defiance of the law. A place of epic stories, in short.

So I had a general destination, and I had a news peg – Brazil’s new forest management law. I did not have a specific destination and a specific situation, but 2 out of 3 was good enough, at least this time.

I teamed up with a colleague to cut expenses and we flew from Rio to Belém (Cost of the flight, about US$300). I checked in with my contacts there – a crazy wire service photog, the PR guy at Ibama, the federal environmental agency, one of the state prosecutors trying to bring some order to the chaos. Two days worth of chatting in all, but out of this came a specific target – one that illustrated all the things I wanted to cover in the Amazon – violence, death, environmental rape, and endless government corruption.

We rented a truck (US$60 per day) and set out for our story. A week later, we had it – a lovely, dramatic scam-filled story illustrating everything wrong with all the new Brazilian government approaches to conserving the rainforest. Bad news for the forest actually, but a great story. Call it the Great Amazonian Lumber Scam. I’m going to leave out the details until I get this published, but suffice it say, though we had to flee town at sunset because my colleague had flipped out and begun screaming accusations at a local rancher/politician who also happened to control the local police department (I’ll do post on this later, I think, called Choosing your Travel Companions), I had everything I needed for a great story.

I just have to sell it. To that point, I had ponied up the plane fare (say $300), ½ the truck rental (say $400), hotels ($300), plus booze, food and incidentals ($500). Say a total of around $1500, plus I still had to pay for the flight home. So I have to sell it in a way that makes up for the capital outlay.

A good glossy magazine would be the best option; newspapers pay so little that even selling the piece to three or four of them would only just cover my expenses. The best scenario would be sale to a high paying glossy, followed by re-sales to various papers.

Of course, if I’ve gambled wrong and no one cares about this story, I’m out the expenses and the 2 weeks in the field it took to dig this info up. That’s the danger of the Flyer. Get it right, you get material no one has. Get it wrong too often, and you go broke.

I’ll keep you posted on the fate of the Great Amazonian Lumber Scam as it progresses. When the story appears, I’ll link to it here, and keep track of sales as I go on. We’ll have a record here of whether this flyer paid off.

Next up, Part II: The Pre-sell.

DIY, Slavery, and the esoteric joys of owning a home

2006-12-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

Here is Rio I recently bought a house, and have discovered as all homeowners have throughout recorded history, owning a home is mostly a matter of buying things and fixing things. According to my older home-owning brothers, this is not a process that never ends, entropy of course being ceaseless. But engaging in the traditional home-owning duties presents particular challenges in Brazil.

Brasil is not a land of do-it-yourselfers. It’s another of the perverse legacies of slavery. In the Iberian tradition there was no premium put on personal competence, and no Protestant valuation of honest labour with one’s own hands. On the contrary, the work of mere mechanicals was seen as degrading, as beneath the dignity of a fidalgo. And all this was back in Portugal.

In Brazil, according to Boxer and Roberto Mattos and others who’ve written on the colonial Brazil, even competent Portuguese craftsman – blacksmiths, brickmakers, carpenters – would within a year or so of their arrival on these shores have bought a couple of slaves and ceased all work with their hands.

In Para, where Africans were unavailable, the settlers resorted to long expeditions up the Amazon to capture and enslave native Indians. The Jesuits, who were attempting to convert and settle the Indians, complained about the raids on their missions, but the colonists responded in genuine bafflement that they simply had no alternative. The Jesuit fathers reply that they could always do the work themselves made them no friends. Indeed, the outraged letters of protest back to Lisbon at this outrageous suggestion contributed directly to the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Brazil in the late 1700s by the Marques de Pombal.

Slavery was abolished here in 1888, but thanks to a vast underclass labour remains so cheap, and the subtle social injunction against manual labour so strong, that few men in the mostly white Brazilian middle class know one end of a socket wrench from another. Most don’t even own a decent set of tools.

Things are different where I come from of course, where the ancestral ideal is Jefferson’s hardy yeoman farmer, capable of growing grain, brewing beer, splitting rails and crafting solid lasting furniture, all from his own lands, all with his own hands. On my Canadian side the ancestral archetype is actually the protestant Scots farmer, too damn cheap to hire someone when he could just as well fix it himself; either way, knowing your way around a tool set is highly valorized.

I’m not a complete captive of my upbringing. I will hire others to do work I could do, if it saves me time I could put to use on my writing. But that too presents challenges in Brazil.

For example, upon moving out of my apartment, I was required by my lease to have the place repainted. Fine. It’s a two-bedroom apartment, 1000 square feet, and a friend of a wife’s who lives in our local favela put me in touch with his brother-in-law who said he could do the job for R$700 (US$315), paint and supplies included. Considering the paint costs about R$250/US$110, I thought this a pretty good deal. The painter had a partner. I reckoned it would take the two of them about 2 and a half days to three days to do the whole place ( by which their take per day would be about R$85 (US$38) or about US$4.75 an hour). Not bad by Brazilian standards.

It took them a week. Two guys. Two bedrooms. One week. What did they do with the time? I have no idea. I had reckoned on normal Protestant capitalist thinking to spur them along. It’s not like I was paying them per day or hour. The faster they worked, the more they got paid for their time. But that is not how Brazilians think.

The patron wants this done. He doesn’t pay us much. Fine. We won’t hurry. (Eventually I had to resort to calling and yelling at them to speed things up.) And we won’t do a good job. I arrived to inspect the finished product, I discovered they hadn’t painted the outside of the front door. (you said inside). They hadn’t done the window frames (you said walls) and while they had painted the outsides of the doors of the bedroom closets, they hadn’t bothered with the inside (you said paint the inside of the apartment. The closet doors aren’t inside).

Two guys. Seven days. Half the stuff left unpainted. What had they done with the time? When I shared this story, I discovered countless others had painter stories. My landlady says when she hires painters, she personally supervises most of the process and , and has them do it over until she gets the result she wants. A Dutch friend of mine hired the son of a acquaintance to paint her living room. He took weeks. She finally told him do it by the end of the week, or I’ll do it myself. He laughed at her. How would she paint. That was manual labour. She couldn’t possibly know how. He showed up a week later to pretend to work again, only to find she had carried out her threat. Gringos can do work.

This bizarre attitude to work I also put down to slavery. In colonial times, the attitude was, yes, you own us, you can force us to work. But there’s no advantage to us to work fast, and there’s no benefit if we work well. So we won’t. Not unless you watch us. And force us.

The inefficiency of this system was one of the reasons slavery came to an end. Before he went on to design Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted was a journalist, and one of his more interesting commissions was to go and report on the South and the “peculiar institution” of slavery. His reports were lengthy and wide-ranging, but one of the most interesting passages he compares the cost of a paid-wage day labourer in New York with that of a hired out slave labourer in the South. The day labourer cost about 1/3 less, and did a better job. Just one of the reasons the South lost out to the North.

Alas in Brazil, the attitudes toward work have lived on long past abolition. The patron doesn’t pay much, but he can’t make us work hard, or well.

When I moved into my new house I came face to face with the previous owner’s penchant for scuffed white walls and fluorescent lights. The lights I could change. The walls? I could again hire painters. The cost would be about the same. But then I’d have two guys hanging out in my house for a week, pretending to do work.

I did it myself. Took me day and a half, working alone. Considering what I can make in a day, it might have made better sense economically to hire the painters. But I actually like painting. And I did a better job.

While I painted, I discovered other things that needed doing. Cracks in the cement patio. Light fixtures not working. Dry wall peeling from water infiltration. These two, I would have to fix. So I stopped in at a local hardware store to pick up some plaster and a bag of sand and a couple of kilos of cement.

The owner and I chatted a bit first. He admired my motorbike and commented on my accent. I gave the customary compliments to Rio women (to which he agreed), and the customary complaint about Rio violence (to which he also agreed). We were friends, which in Brazil is the essential pre-requisite to doing business.

But as I ordered more and more odds and ends- a tape measure, some wood screws, some light switches - he looked at me ever more puzzled.

“You know what this stuff is for?” he asked

In Canada, to question a man’s knowledge of hardware it to question his competence, and thus his manhood.

“Claro,” I said, tightly. Of course.

“You’re going to do this yourself. You know how to fix things?” Again, with incredulity.

Yes. Again with razors in my voice.

“Here in Brazil, people normally hire someone. But you gringos. You like to do things yourself. “

In my country, I tell him, almost everybody does things for himself. There are even big stores that sell things just for people who want to fix up their homes.

“Yes, yes,” he says excitedly. “I’ve seen that. On television.”

Brazilian Election - Thieves Return to Office

2006-10-02T04:38:00.000-07:00

I wrote the screed below about the WSJ editorial as an email to a friend a few days before Brazil's election. Last night the results of Brazil's first round of polling came in. Slippery leftist Lula finished with 48.61% of the vote, just shy of the 50% margin of victory. He will now be forced into a run-off with the second ranked candidate Geraldo Alckmin (41.64%) at the end of October. Lula's fall from some 55% of the vote a week ago has been quite dramatic. Some attribute it to his blowing off a national televised debate. Some say it's a result of a Watergate like scandal that's broken in the past week, in which Lula's close aides were arrested with US$700,000 in unsourced money, trying to buy a dossier containing sleaze and scandal to be used on the opposition candidates. The voters, it is alleged, are punishing Lula for the stench of ongoing corruption.

It would be a truly healthy thing if this were true, but somehow I doubt it. In other returns from last night, Paulo Maluf - the former mayor of Sao Paulo mentioned in the post below, who stole some US$400 million while in office - got re-elected to the federal congress. He got more votes than any other candidate in the country.

The ex-governor of Para state, who stole some US$700 million, also got re-elected to congress last night. As did 7 of the 12 congressmen accused of receiving money in the Mensalão vote buying scandal.

Also returning to office – my personal favourite result – is Fernando Collor de Mello, the ex-Brazilian president impeached and driven from office in 1992 for corruption. The good people of his home state of Alagoas have elected him to the senate.

Brazilian voters don’t punish corruption because after 500 years they have come to expect it as the norm. Even Lula’s PT party, which promised for 25 years to put an end to corruption if they ever achieved power, has proven unable to keep their hands off state funds. So why fight it? Instead, look to elect a corrupt politician who will steer some of the grease your way. Rouba mas faz. Pra mim.

Is Brazil Nuts -- Or Just the System?

2006-10-02T04:18:00.000-07:00

Is Brazil Nuts -- Or Just the System?

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
September 29, 2006; Page A17

"Corruption is a regular effect of interventionism."

-- Ludwig von Mises
"Human Action," 1949

As Brazilians go to the polls on Sunday to elect a president for the next four years, most pundits are hedging their bets as to whether Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva of the Workers' Party (PT) can win re-election in the first round of voting.

A serious allegation of fraud inside the Lula campaign has become the main issue in the race over the past two weeks. Added to a host of other corruption charges implicating PT members close to the president in the past year, this latest scandal has the potential to force a run-off.

Lula may well be innocent, as he claims, of any involvement in the plethora of scandals now swirling around his party. But it is also true that if corruption has blind-sided him, he has only his own politics to blame. It has been the life work of Brazilian socialists -- of which the PT are among the most hardcore -- to empower the state, without limits, as an enforcer of "social justice" through the wholesome work of politicians and bureaucrats. Now they are reaping what they've sowed: a system that breeds corruption by its very nature, as von Mises warned more than a half-century ago.

--------------------------
A friend of mine who reads the Wall Street Journal sent me this editorial. It's an astonishingly ignorant piece of work - little miss Mary obviously knows Sweet F. All about Brazil, but what is fascinating is how someone with a few facts, no historical knowledge and axe to grind can come to sweeping conclusions that just happen to coincide with their own ideological preconceptions.

Yes, Lula has run a corruption heavy government. That has nothing to do with his brand of highly market friendly socialism, and everything to do with his being Brazilian. For 500 years, Brazil has been run by elites who looked on government solely as a way of capturing the resources of the state and re-directing this wealth to their friends and supporters. In order to keep the social peace, they would usually toss a few bones to the people in the form of some sort of public works – public squares, parks, roads. "Rouba mas faz" is the phrase Brazilians came up with to describe this phenomenon. "He steals but he does stuff".

In the case of the mayor of Sao Paulo ( a right-wing capitalist appointed by a military dictatorship that I’m sure during its vicious years in office met with the full approval of the Wall Street Journal), he stole US$400 million, but built a new road and tunnel under the city. In the case of the free market governor of the Amazon, he stole US$700 million, but pushed the development of farming through the Amazon (seen to be a good thing here).

In Lula's case, his government has mostly stolen for political purposes, to finance the party election coffers mostly, and to buy votes in congress ( At least for the first term. In his second term, I expect him and his buddies to start stealing on their own account -last kick at the can and all that) and as for the 'doing things' part, they have vastly expanded the welfare rolls. Given that most Brazilians are poor (a direct result of 500 years of government by non-socialist, non-honest, thieving but market-friendly elites), this is a good way to get elected.

It has pissed off the middle class, who voted for Lula because he promised to put an end to corruption, but the poor love him. Yes he steals, but at least we're getting some for a change (as opposed to the road builders or soy farmers or other already rich people who traditionally receive government largesse in Brazil). So the only thing that's really different about Lula is who benefits from the theft. If the people voted for the right-wing candidate, would the theft end? They don't think so. They'd just be cut out of the spoils.

And would it be better if nobody stole and the government -right wing, socialist, whatever - just tried to run honest programs and fix the stupid country. Yes, that would be better. But apparently in Brazil that's not an option.

Locusts lead to blackouts....

2006-07-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

Bet you don't see this too often...
Big flying grasshopers, the small ones the size of your palm, the big ones the size of your whole hand, are causing blackouts in Argentina. The locusts land on transformer substations and for some reason swarm about on the insulators. Locust bodies, it turns out, are fine conductors of electricity. When enough of 'em swarm, current arcs through their shells, shorting out the substation. Five villages in the Qulino area have been without power for the past ten days.

from Clarin.com
Una plaga de langostas dejó sin electricidad a tres pueblos cordobeses

Son las denominadas "tucuras quebracheras", que tienen entre 5 y 12 centímetros de largo. La acumulación de insectos en una estación transformadora provocó un cortocircuito.

Las langostas conocidas como tucuras quebracheras miden entre cinco y 12 centímetros y tienen, según especialistas, la particularidad de ser excelentes conductoras de la electricidad, una propiedad por la cual dejaron sin luz a tres pueblos cordobeses.

El norte de la provincia se ve afectado por una plaga de estas langostas. "Se instalan en los seccionadores de la estación transformadora (de energía) y, cuando se acumulan, hacen un arco eléctrico y provocan cortocircuitos", explicaron Nicolás Lobo, gerente de la Cooperativa Eléctrica de Quilino, y Ricardo Vergara, encargado del sistema eléctrico de la cooperativa, al comentar el corte de luz que sufrieron hace 10 días las localidades de Quilino, Lucio V. Mansilla y San José de las Salinas.

Los técnicos indicaron que las langostas aparecieron quemadas y que al estudiarlas descubrieron que "técnicamente por el cuerpo de las tucuras circula la energía en un 100 por ciento".

Las tucuras habitan generalmente en el monte y según dijo el intendente de Quilino, Víctor Maggi, al periódico La Voz del Interior, aparecieron en la región "hace dos años".

La invasión de las langostas también arrasó con pastos, cultivos y árboles en la zona, por eso, "los productores ganaderos están preocupados", remarcó Maggi. Por sus características, la fumigación se realiza de manera manual y, según el intendente, es responsabilidad de cada productor.

Violence in Sao Paulo

2006-07-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

Something is happening in Sao Paulo.

A gang of criminals - the PCC - with an organizational structure modelled on a revulutionary guerilla movement has been directing armed attacks against police and prison guards, and ordering the takeover and burning of public buses. Some 75 police and prison guards have been killed since the attacks began, about a dozen busses burned. In reprisal, police have killed some 300 people they believe might have some connection to the PCC gang. Twice in less than a month the PCC attacks have brought Sao Paulo, the largest city in South America, and one of the ten largest or so in the world, to a complete standstill, as worried bus line owners kept their fleets in the garage and worried workers stayed home.

The first time it made the news in North America. This second time, it has been ignored. Repeated news is no longer news, except when it involves Israel, where the headlines have been unchanged all my adult life, yet somehow continue to make the front page.

Curious too, how different newspapers treat the city's urban violence. In Argentina, readers of Clarin are told that There is panic in Sao Paulo as a result of a Mass Prison Break

19:41 | Brasil: pánico por una fuga masiva de presos en el interior de San Pablo

El Mundo

Al menos cuarenta presos se fugaron de una cárcel de Iguacu do Tieté, en el interior del estado brasileño de San Pablo, causando pánico en la población, informaron hoy medios locales.

In Sao Paulo, readers of the Folha de Sao Paulo are told that Sao Paulo had a peaceful Sunday, with no new attacks, and bus line circulating normally.

16/07/2006 - 16h06

São Paulo tem domingo tranqüilo e sem registros de novos ataques

da Folha Online

O domingo está tranqüilo em São Paulo. Nenhum novo ataque foi registrado desde a noite de sábado, segundo dados da Secretaria de Segurança Pública do Estado.

Ônibus circularam normalmente e a empresa EcoUrbis montou esquema especial de coleta na zona leste da cidade, depois de ataques a três caminhões de lixo desde quinta (13).

In Canada and the US, as I mentioned, readers are told nothing at all.

Sociologists in Rio have speculated that given the number of dead on both sides (50 cops, 400 civilians, presumbed to be gang members in a ten day persiod. This is only slightly higher than the norm. In Rio for example, a cop dies about once a week, and the police kill about four people a day) Brazil could technically be considered to be in a state of civil war.

But so far, the outside world hasn't noticed.

Canadian in Afghanistan

2006-07-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, the error on that NY Times report seems to have been with Reuters. No other newspaper carried the story, and about 20 minutes later when I checked Times site again, the piece had been removed. So Toronto either had better access to information than New York, or being asleep at the switch paid off.

Asleep in Toronto

2006-06-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

Saw this story on the NYT website this morning (June 10) at 8am. Checked the Globe and Mail and the Star. The CBC. Nothing. Checked them again at 11am. Still nothing. Nobody there reading the wires? WHat's up? If this story is true (and it's got a reuters tag, which gives it credibility) this is a major, ask questions in the hosue what is canada doing kind of story. And nobody's got it? Holiday in Toronto today?

Canadian and Afghan Forces Kill More Than 30 Taliban Fighters

By REUTERS

Published: June 10, 2006

KABUL, June 10 (Reuters) - Canadian and Afghan troops killed more than 30 Taliban fighters in the southern Afghan province of Zabul on June 5, the U.S.-led military coalition said in a statement on Saturday.

A joint force engaged over 60 insurgents in the Arghandab district of Zabul. Neither the Afghan nor Canadian troops, who are serving with the coalition, suffered any casualties, the statement said.

An insurgency raging since U.S.-backed forces ousted a Taliban government in late 2001 is going through its bloodiest phase, with 400 people, mostly militants, killed in May alone.

The spiralling violence has resulted from increased Taliban activity, and diplomats and military officials believe the insurgents are trying to spread alarm among NATO governments before the deployment of thousands of extra alliance peacekeepers in the country.

NATO is expected to boost its troop strength to 17,000 from 9,000 by the end of July, while the United States is expected to reduce its force to 20,000 from 23,000.

Sao Paulo shuts down, the PCC, and Rick Salutin

2006-06-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

I wrote a letter to Rick Salutin the other day. The Globe's token lefty had a throwaway graph or two on the violence that shut down the city of Sao Paulo. I, alas was in Buenos Aires when the PCC gang decided to shut down Latin America's largest city. I was surprised how little interest there was in the rest of the world. Two wire pieces in the Globe. About the same in the NY Times. SOme 200 people died, about 50 of them cops or prison guards. A city of nearly 20 million ceased to operate. And no one north of mexico notices. Anyway, Rick's well meaning throw away graphs were as follows:

Klein issues warning on sharing the wealth," read yesterday's Globe headline. At last, someone got to the nub. We're gonna miss Ralph when he's gone. It's always about sharing the wealth -- or not.

All the recent economic discussions evade this: The report on ending poverty, the one on rejigging federal-provincial finances, the Globe articles on fiscal imbalance, arguments over equalization. They debate how governments should spend their money. But governments only funnel social wealth, which is created by the joint efforts of individuals. Underneath is another battle. Economic issues are basically social. The key is always: How does a society choose to distribute its wealth?

In other words, it's about distribution and redistribution; the struggle for the pie, in its fixed, expanding and contracting parts. This is sometimes known as class conflict. The latest Bush tax cuts in the U.S. dole out (i.e. redistribute) $70-billion, and 87 per cent goes to the 14 per cent of households at the top; 22 per cent goes to the 0.02 per cent earning more than a million a year. This reallocation of the pie toward the upper strata has been the main result of "liberal" reforms everywhere.

What do you end up with? Sao Paulo. I know it's hard to remember because it happened last week. Gang leaders of a group called PCC inside prisons set off riots because they didn't want to be transferred to distant prisons where they'd have a harder time running their outside crime operations. Brazil has had enormous upward redistribution of wealth. Crime gangs are a way to steal back some of what was stolen, er, redistributed. I'm not justifying it, I'm saying it's what you get. Police in Rio in the 1990s had death squads that dealt with child poverty by eliminating it in a literal way. Maybe some of the kids who survived decided they'd better get organized, and ended up in gangs like the PCC.

I thought he had a point, so I sent him a letter. Here it is:
From: Shawn Gerald Blore [mailto:sb@shawnblore.com]

Sent: Mon 5/29/2006 10:45 AM
To: Salutin, Rick
Subject: Sao Paulo gangs and wealth distribution

Hi Rick,

I'm a Canadian journalist based in Rio de Janeiro. I write for the Globe occasionally, when their limited interest and budget permit. Read your comments on Brazil, upward wealth transfer and organized gang violence with interest.

Your analysis of Brazil as a polity where the government exists to transfer wealth upwards was dead on, though your speculations on the origins of Sao Paulo's PCC gang were a bit off. Brazil's large scale criminal gangs actually got their start during the 64-85 dictatorship, when the military had the bright idea of jailing its political prisoners in the same maximum security prisons it used for murderers and drug dealers. (There's a recent movie that dramatized this: Almost Brothers or Quase Dois Irmaos in Portuguese)

The revolutionaries taught the criminals all the tricks of urban revolution they had picked up in training camps in Cuba and elsewhere: how to put together a large scale organisation in the face of state repression, how to implement command and control structures, the intricacies of cell
structure, revolutionary discipline, and even class solidarity.

The last, admittedly, was quickly jettisoned by the criminal gangs, though empty revolutionary rhetoric still forms part of the vocabulary of Rio's largest gang, Commando Vermelho (Red Command).

Of course, empty rhetoric is also now very much the stock in trade of the revolutionaries, many of whom after leaving jail went on to found the PT (Worker's Party).

In its 25 year existence, the PT preached a different kind of politics. It would put an end to the corruption that forms such a large part of the upward transfer of wealth in Brazil, and transform the country for the benefit of the vast poor majority.

In 2002, in his fourth try, Lula won the presidency and the PT came to power. But somewhere along the line, likely after losing the third presidential election, Lula and the PT had changed inside. Once in office, the PT happily began looting the coffers of government agencies and crown corporations, transferring the money through phoney bank accounts and dodgy money dealers to political allies and party bagmen, using the tens of millions of dollars so stolen to pay off debts from the last election, to put together a war chest for the next election, and to
defray the costs of the upper class lifestyle that they as members of the political elite had come to expect.

The rank and file party members who might have complained about such behaviour had mostly been bought off. The Brazilian president has some 25,000 patronage jobs at his direct disposal within the federal bureaucracy. Most of these have gone to PT party functionaries.The party, in the words of a Brazilian sociologist, has gone from a vehicle for the transformation of Brazilian society, to a machine for the social advancement of party cadres.

Lula - who polls show will be re-elected this fall - has demonstrated that even a poor shoeshine boy can grow up to be president, provided he agrees to join the club, join the elite, and play by the rules they've laid down.

The money that was stolen could have been transferred downwards: to public schools - which are a disgrace - or to public hospitals, or to water or sewage or nutrition or community centres or a million other things the poor need. Even prisons. Instead it got transferred upwards to a new political elite, all the more avaricious in that they've only just tasted the spoils of government.

Which, as you pointed out in your column, at least in part explains Sao Paulo. There's no direct causal link between PT corruption and the decision of the PCC gang to shut down the fifth or sixth largest city in the world. The PCC, and the PT, and Brazil's other (equally venal) political parties are all simply fighting for their share of the distribution of wealth, with the tools they happen have at hand.

My $0.02 for today.

Enjoy your column. Keep writing.

Cheers

I don't know what I expected. Have to say I was a tad disappointed in the reply, though.

From: "Salutin, Rick"
To: "Shawn Gerald Blore"
Cc:

many thanks for your very generous, immensely informative response. i'll know a little more than i did, when i go at this subject in the future.

Question Concerning LIbel

2006-06-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

While I was preparing my report on diamond smuggling in Guyana, I posted a question to a journalists listserv on the topic of libel. The wide range of reponses were interesting enough, I believe, to merit re-posting here. There is little consensus in the j-world about libel, or about the justifications for going undercover.

I hope none of those who posted to the list feel this violates the rules of the listserv. If any do, please contact me and I will remove your post. I have removed email addresses from the post, so that they don't get their emails added to a spam list by some evil webcrawler.

From: Shawn Gerald Blore

Dear listers,

I have a situation about which I wouldn't mind some advice.

Since moving to Brazil, one of the things I've gotten into investigating is the illegal movement of diamonds. During a recent investigation into diamond exports in the tri-border area of Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana, I discovered that one Brazilian diamond trader was buying diamonds in Venezuela, processing them in Brazil, and then exporting them through Guyana. I discovered this by posing as a potential diamond buyer, going to this man's office, and asking him how his business worked. He freely volunteered all this information about his activities, all of which are illegal.

Now I would like to publish this information. The Canadian NGO for whom I did the research would also like to publish it, but lacking libel insurance they tend to be very conservative when it comes to naming names. They are considering reporting the information, without reporting the diamond trader's name. To me, that takes away from much of the credibility of the report. I am pushing for putting in the trader's name.

To those with more familiarity with libel law, what recourse would this man have in the Canadian courts if we published such a report? (as a related matter, who would have jurisdiction for a report by a Canadian NGO made available on the Internet?)

I did not record the conversation, but did take detailed notes right afterwards. The man in question has been arrested in the past for moving diamonds illegally across borders. While researching in Venezuela, I spoke to people who confirmed what the trader had told me, namely that he was a large buyer of Venezuelan diamonds.

Given that, how solid is the ground on which I am standing?

Thanks in advance

Shawn Gerald Blore

Latin America Correspondent

Radio, Magazines, Newspapers

www.shawnblore.com

sb@shawnblore.com

Tel: 55-21-8102-4706

Skype: shawnblore

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Shawn Thompson

Under Canadian libel law, you have lost the "consent" defense against libel by using deceit and not idenitifying the purpose of the interview as for publication. That means that if you were sued for libel in Canada, you would have to prove in court that the trader was acting illegally and your interview with him would not constitute proof.

Not using a name does not necessarily remove the threat of libel, if people still have enough information to identify the man.

Hope that helps.

*********

Shawn Thompson
assistant professor
School of Journalism
CT 160
Thompson Rivers University
P.O. Box 3010
Kamloops, B.C.
Canada V2C 5N3

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From: Judy Waytiuk

Great questions all, Shawn. And what a great story!

Can't answer most of 'em, and I hope others on the list can, because they're all extremely relevant. But I can contribute this small snippet: I do know that in Canada, successful defence against a libel suit requires two things; you must be able to prove that what you wrote was true, and you must supply a convincing argument that publishing that truth was in the public interest. Those were the only two criteria we were required as CBC journalists to be able to fulfill in order to run a dicey (in terms of potential lawsuit) story.

Oh, and more more thing: filing intent to sue is not the same thing as suing. If you file intent to sue (and I believe there is a time limit during which that filing must fall), you must carry through with the suit within a certain time period (I think it's a year, but am not sure) or the suit is considered to have been dropped.

Judy Waytiuk,

Winner: 2002 Pluma de Plata, 2002 TMAC Award

2003 Northern Lights Award, 2003 TIAC Travel Media Award

2001 Travel Manitoba Media Award

Web site: http://www.wordsink.ca

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From: Barry Rueger

In a nutshell Shawn, I'd suggest that rather than querying an e-mail list, you and the NGO should consult with a lawyer who specializes in there areas, both in Canada and South America. You have asked many complex questions, not the least of which include the International and Internet elements of the problem.

I suspect that one of the listers here can direct you to a lawyer skilled in libel law.

Barry

===================================

Barry Rueger

Community-Media.com

http://www.community-media.com

AIM/MSN ID: AppalBarry

Blog: http://www.threesquirrels.com

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From: Rob

Hi Shawn,

I'm a grad student at Carleton University. Basically I

think, you need to be sure that the info you have is

true and that you would be able to establish that in

court.

I would recommend you consult Klaus Pohle (a legal

expert here at Carleton)for Canadian advice.

Best regards,

Rob

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From: Shannon Rupp

Hi Shawn,

The short answer is always that truth is the best defence.

However, you have to prove it. And while you're interview is okay, what you really want is a paper trail. People volunteering info about facts may well just be bullshitting, and should this go to court you need to prove due diligence.

Shipping orders; receipts, anything like that would make you golden.

Libel is civil litigation and the defamation laws vary from place to place. You need to pay attention to the law in the place you publish.

In the British tradition, generally speaking, the tort is actionable where the wrong was done. If you run it in, say, the Globe, Ontario law would apply. In the Van. Sun B.C. defamation law applies. In the Independent, English law. But I don't know anything about the court systems in South America. I'm guessing they're based on the laws of the European country that colonized'em? The rules on who is responsible for proving the truth etc. probably vary widely from British-based law. You need to consult a lawyer where you publish.

The Internet is still a grey area and people have been suing where they think they'll have the best luck, or conversely, where the damage was done, or pragmatically, where they can lay hands on the bastard who did it.

If you can't force someone into to court, you can't sue him. Well, you can, but you can't enforce the court order.

So if you publish something on a Russian website where laws have pretty much gone to hell, it would be tough to sue the publisher. You'd have to bring the action in Russia. And the law there may not be as tough as it is in Brazil. And you could sue in Brazil, however, how do you drag the Russian publisher into court?

See the problem?

There are some other practical considerations. For damages, can the plaintiff prove he has lost something tangible? A sum of money. A job. A reputation, which in turn interfere with his ability to do business. If you're calling him a criminal, and that would open him to criminal charges -- that's a pretty quantifiable damage.

Then there is the simple matter of court costs. You can go bankrupt being right. Libel is a terrific place for someone with deep pockets to engage in vexatious litigation. Generally the rule is: name everyone, but pay attention to the guy with money. So the publisher, who presumably has libel insurance, is on the hook. But you could be liable personally, too. Depends on the jurisdiction and the details. And just how malicious the plaintiff is.

Incidentally, printing a report without naming him could open you to libel suits from other people. Could the description be mistaken for someone else? Perhaps another businessman? There's a famous Canadian case where students accused J-skool profs of sexual harassment in the school paper, but didn't name them for fear of libel. They should have accused the profs of incompetent teaching on media law. Because the profs were a small, identifiable group and no was named, they all became suspect -- they were all libelled. So they sued those kids, successfully.

So the real rule is: always consult a lawyer first. Libel is so tricky that most lawyers won't even touch it. There are a handful of experts in Canada who serve every media outlet and would-be plaintiff.

But here's a question for you: my understanding is that diamond dealers aren't the nicest people in the world. Why does libel scare you more than, oh, say, knee-capping?

Just sayin'.

Good story, though. Bon chance.

Shannon

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Shawn Gerald Blore

It's a good point Barry, and I will suggest it to my editors as the next step. I was checking what kind of knowledge base was out there.

Cheers

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Barry Rueger

Hi Shawn,

Having once been on the receiving end of a groundless but very expensive suit, I tend to be a lot more careful!

Remember that being right doesn't matter if you can't afford 50-100K to fight the suit.

Barry

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Shawn Gerald Blore:

Hi Barry,

Which is a very good point. However, I also tend to think on the lines of 'how likely is someone to sue'. Someone located in Brazil, engaged in illegally trading diamonds, with a prior arrest record, is I would be prepared to gamble, not going to want to call attention to himself and his activities through a lawsuit, particularly one that would likely have to be fought in a faraway place like Canada.

But then it's the Clint Eastwood question: Did I use 5 bullets or six? Do you feel lucky?

Cheers

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Sylvia McBean

I suggest you talk to your insurance agent. If your NGO won't cover you then maybe you shouldn't be writing for them.--Sylvia

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shawn Gerald Blore wrote:

Never said they wouldn't cover me. I don't think I implied that anywhere in my post, but if I did then I correct it here.

That said, it's a complicated issue, and I thought I would poll the list to see what kind of knowledge base there is out there. As many helpful respondents have pointed out, we're journalists, not lawyers. So it's on to step 2.....

Best

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Ross Crockford

Hey Shawn,

Greetings from Victoria! I've been enjoying your work for the Globe,

Toro, and CBC, and I'm very interested in seeing your diamond- smuggling story. Being a former lawyer, I felt I should weigh in on

the question you posted to the CAJ list. What everyone has said is

essentially correct: the fundamental defence against libel is TRUTH.

A tape recording is the best proof that the smuggler said what he

did, but if you can show a judge that you are a professional

journalist and produce handwritten notes you made immediately after

the interview, that's almost as good.

So if you ended up in a Canadian court, you'd probably win. But

lawsuits are as much about money as they are about finding fault.

With enough cash, even a crazy person can find a lawyer who will take

their case, sue for libel, and then grind their opposition through

expensive proceedings -- without any intention of ever actually

taking the matter to trial. That's always the risk writing about

anyone who's wealthy. Although I would think that with a diamond

smuggler, the greater worry is that he'd want to do physical harm.

Hope

all is well with you.

Ross

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Charles Bury
Subject: Re: Question concerning libel

News about smuggling is definitely in the public interest, so I don't think you have a legal problem as long as the information is correct.

But you definitely have a moral problem: "I discovered this by posing as a potential diamond buyer". So the first thing you said to this guy was a big lie. Some investigation that was. Any place I've ever worked you'd get fired.

As for your tax-exempt buddies, I always wondered if there were supermarket tabloid NGOs.

Pretty tacky. Ethics, eh?

Charles Bury

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Eric Geringas

Charles, how about you get off your high horse. Maybe the Sherbrooke Record doesn't do

undercover journalism, but plenty of other respectable media do. Just in the last few

years, a BBC reporter joined a police force undercover to investigate institutional

racism, the Spokane Record found out the city's mayor trolling the internet for

sex with minors, the Toronto Star (and the CAJ's own Rob Cribb) infiltrated telemarketing

boiler rooms, the fifth estate found lax security practices at airports, etc., etc.

Tacky? Tacky is attacking another journalist without knowing the first thing about the

story or the work it took to get it.

Eric Geringas

Who thinks CAJ directors should be careful when talking about ethics these days

Toronto

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Shawn Gerald Blore
Subject: Re: Question concerning libel

That's certainly your call Charles. I don't know your experience investigating South American smuggling rings, but certainly in mine walking in the door with smile and a tape recorder and saying "Hi, I'm a journalist. Please tell all about the various ways in which you are breaking the law" just doesn't yield much in the way of information (though it is a good way to put yourself in physical danger).

So all told, I'm glad I never worked for you. As for your pissant crack about supermarket tabloids, clearly you've got some bee up your behind about NGOs, but what it is I really don't care.

Best

From: "Parent, Jean-Francois"

Please folks,

Let us not let this thread get outta hand.

You're on par as far as adjectivity goes, and I'd like it to remain thus.

Thank you

Jean-François

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: "Erica Johnson"

Subject: Re: Question concerning libel

Yes of course...ideally, journalism should be conducted in the open. But sometimes misrepresentation is necessary to tell an important story that's in the public interest. According to the CBC's policy handbook, clandestine methods of fact gathering may be used if the activities being investigated "concern illegal, anti-social or fraudulent activities or clear and significant abuses of public trust."

I'm no lawyer, but I'd say Shawn's investigation hits a number of these qualifiers.

Erica

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: "Dunphy, Bill"

Temper lads, temper.

Certainly both the tone of Charles off the cuff (and off the handle) remarks are both uncalled for and unhelpful. But by the same token there is an ethical issue underlying his concerns that merits some discussion.

Which is not to say that Shawn's choices were bad or unethical - I don't think any of us know enough to make an informed judgement on that. (And as Eric rightly pointed out, rushes to judgement have proved expensive in the past).

Still.

Here's what the CAJ guidelines have to say:

Reporters will not conceal their identities, except in rare cases. When, on rare occasions, a reporter needs to go "under cover" in the public interest, we will clearly explain the extent of the deception to the reader or listener or viewer. We will not commit illegal or improper acts.

Seems Shawn likely has a strong prima facie case that his decision to "pose as a diamond buyer" falls within the CAJ guidelines, so I'm not sure why it warranted the reflexive reaction it seems to have.

What I find interesting here is whether anyone has any clear rules (personal or corporate) for when it is okay to employ deception to gather information for a story.... I suspect they are all as general as the CAJ's.

Jan Wong posed as a desperate, newly single mother of two for her rather fun and informative series on minimum wage work running on Saturdays in the Globe. She decieved her landlord, several prospective empoyers and one actual employer, her co-workers and her clients. What's "rare" about crappy minimum wage jobs in our economy?

Nothing.

Should she be sensured by the CAJ Was she justified? I think quite easily in that the public good is advanced to some degree and I'd judge that small advance to be greater than the harm caused by her actions.

But could you not argue that while she's playing at being poor that apt. and that job aren't going to people who truly need them? Sure, but I doubt that really amounts to any great harm - there are more crappy jobs than people to fill them, ditto substandard housing.

Bill Dunphy

(as a personal aside I too infiltrated a scam charity boiler room for an investigative piece at the Sun back in 1992 going so far as to build up a fake resume with real reference ready to lie for me. In two days of working the phones I cheated people out of well over $1,000. I well remember the frantic calls I had to make to all those donors the next day, confessing that I wasn't Robert Johnston but was really Bill Dunphy a reporter investigating the 'charity'. Ethical? Maybe - we did try to mitigate the potential harm and we did shut the damn thing down and get them hauled into court. Still, there's an argument there.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Shawn Gerald Blore
Subject: RE: Question concerning libel

A discussion was not what Charles was trying to start, clearly, but Bill is right in saying it's a topic worthy of debate. Not that I feel I need particularly to justify what I've done, but here's the Greater Public Good behind researching diamond smuggling (excerpted from my about to be released report)

"Conflict diamonds are diamonds used by rebel armies to finance war. Diamond-fuelled wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia and elsewhere, have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people over the past fifteen years. The Kimberley Process began in 2000 in an effort to halt the trade in conflict diamonds."

Now the main problem with conflict diamonds is in Africa, but the Kimberley process will only work if all nations worldwide adhere. Hence my investigations in South America.

In Brazil, during an earlier investigation, I discovered that one trader who had previously been deeply involved in conflict diamonds during the civil war in Sierra Leone had subsequently moved to Brazil and resumed illegally exporting diamonds. Many of these diamonds came from an Indian reserve in the Amazon, where the conflict between miners and Indians lead to a brutal massacre of 29 people (miners all, and proof that conflict diamonds aren't limited to Africa).

In his case, I was able to prove using government documents that I ferreted out that the trader had made one fully fraudulent export worth about US$3 million. The documents showed the trader had set up a phoney mineral claim that he used on export documents as the purported legal source of the exported diamonds. I was later able to prove - again using government documents - that approximately 25% of Brazilian diamond exports came from similar phoney claims. Well and good, the police investigated and it looks like this guy is going to jail. That investigation was possible because the trader was working within a single country, with a paper trail that, while phoney, could be followed.

In Guyana (the investigation to which I alluded when I polled the list for libel advice - naively, as many pointed out) I discovered a Brazilian diamond trader that had been arrested several years ago and thrown out of Guyana was still managing to carry on with his business thanks to lax border controls. People in the diamond fields were telling me this guy was a heavy buyer of Guyana diamonds, perhaps the heaviest. Through contacts in Georgetown, I also learned this man's office was in a Brazilian city on the Guyana border. So, he's been arrested once for trafficking in diamonds, he's still buying, he's located in Brazil, and authorities have no current record of his activities or how his business works. Sounds to me like he's smuggling. And given that his business is wholly illegal, going through government documents is going to yield zip.

The only way I could think to confirm that was to arrange to go talk to him, and find some way to get him to talk about his business. Frankly, the thought of marching into his (walled, heavily guarded) compound with a smile and a "hi, I'm a journalist" simply never crossed my mind. Had it, I would have had my head examined. I got in, instead, with a story about being a diamond buyer, and engaging the trader in conversation found out he was buying his diamonds in Guyana, bringing them across the border to Brazil for grading and sorting, and then shipping them back across the border for export. Two illegal border crossings. He was also buying diamonds in Venezuela and shipping them out through Guyana, with phoney Guyanese papers - in violation of Venezuelan, Brazilian, and Guyanese law, and an international treaty signed by 40 nations, including Canada.

Confirming - for me - that this wasn't all blather, the guy pulled out a 5kg grocery sack of diamonds and spread it out on the table for me to see. That's 25,000 carats, for those who don't know - somewhere in the neighbourhood of US$3-US$5 million. One hell of a lot of compressed carbon all in one place.

Do I have any regrets about what I did - yes, I wish I'd had a hidden camera.

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"Judith Ince"
Subject: RE: Question concerning libel
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:42:48 -0700
Looks like you are doing terrific work, Shawn, and the NGO you are working

for is lucky to have you; but on your next job, perhaps they could spring

for a mini-disc recorder or a hidden camera...

All the best,

Judith

Vancouver

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From: Marshall Jones

So what you are saying, Bill, is that the end justifies the means?

I don't have a solid take on this. I have never posed as anything but

a reporter (hee hee), but the earlier stated concerns by Charles are

valid, if not over-stated, because 'posing' cheapens what we do and

should be done seldomly.

If I was covering courts and some judge decided to bastardize the law

because the end justified the means I would scream from the hilltops.

If some bureaucrat shoved some documents in the shredder because he

felt the end justified the means, well... you see my point. One man's

justification is another man's lie.

I'm glad Charles raised the topic on this otherwise boring board.

Jan Wong's walk on the poor side, for example, was a cheap stunt that

offers nothing that couldn't have been obtained with interviews from

real people who don't have a good job to return to.

And we wonder why people trust us only slightly more than lawyers.

Marshall Jones

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From: Michael Cottingham

I just can't believe what I just read. I have bitten my tongue on this

list a few times, ignoring ignorant comments and, instead, trying to be

supportive where I can and offering positive, constructive comments

where I think they might help. And I have benefited tremendously from

the supportive guidance I have received, for which I am immensely

grateful. This list tends to be both respectful and professional, with

only a few exceptions dealing specifically with divisive issues. I

guess that's why I am shocked at Charles' comments which have,

naturally, generated expressions of displeasure and disdain.

A fellow journalist has asked for help with a difficult issue and what

he received from one person's response would be almost enough to

discourage one from using this list again. We are each ambassadors to

this list as well as to our fine profession and I am deeply concerned

of the affect it has when one of us turns on another with little more

reason than blind arrogance. I can barely justify turning on another

even to counter such arrogance.

As an investigative journalist, I have had to misrepresent myself to

gain access to worlds where, if my intentions were known I'd be lucky

to have my fingers, let alone my life, just to get a small piece of a

bigger puzzle. Going undercover and deceiving a source is never

entered into lightly, especially when the source would rather keep

their world out of the limelight at all costs. I doubt Shawn or anyone

else on this list would deceive a source as a matter of convenience, so

the lecture in that area was not necessary. And the cheap shot at

NGO's as "tax-exempt buddies" really leaves me shaking my head in

disbelief. What-up, bud - what NGO urinated in your bedtime snack?

Shawn, I have to commend you on your courage to tackle such a

dangerous, difficult and complicated issue. There are many affected by

the trade in illegal gems, including the harvester and the end

consumer, both of whom are quite often in the dark regarding the

business in between the source and the demand. This situation shows me

how little I actually know about certain aspects of libel - I didn't

even know there was such a thing as libel insurance. I guess it's to

us what malpractice insurance is to doctors. I've been fortunate to be

buffered from this by my publisher who has backed me up so far.

I wonder if it would be possible to shop this story out to a larger

publication and fall under their coverage? Certainly the story has

legs enough to make it into larger, more mainstream publications with

deeper pockets. Of course, I would want to make sure they will back

you if push comes to law suit.

As well, I think I would avoid any thoughts of self-publishing this and

only have it published my someone with the confidence and resources

necessary to see the story all the way through its natural lifecycle.

I hope this helps or at least offers you some encouragement to continue

trying to help your story see the light of day. And if there's

anything I can do to help on our side of the border, you know how to

get a hold of me.

Regards to all,

Mike Cottingham

Scribbler with a conscience, in the Capital

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Charles Bury wrote:

News about smuggling is definitely in the public interest,

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: "Jennifer Fowler"
Subject: Re: Question concerning libel

Shawn,

As others have pointed out, best to consult a lawyer for your questions

re. libel law. However I can say that the question of which court has

jurisdiction when something is published on the internet still seems to

be up for interpretation.

The CAJ intervened recently in a case where someone was suing the

Washington Post for an alleged libel that happened 10 years ago and

wanted to do it in Ontario because the story in question had been

published on-line and was therefore, albeit briefly, available to

readers in Ontairo. A lower court agreed that Ontario was an

appropriate jurisdiction for the suit and that the Washington Post

should be prepared to defend itself anywhere in the world, but the

Appeal Court decided no - Ontario was not the appropriate jurisdiction

because hearing the case could lead to Ontario media having to defend

themselves anywhere in the world.

Your question was regarding a Canadian publication available on-line,

which is something different, but there are probably still no hard and

fast rules as to jurisdiction.

Your story sounds fascinating.

Jennifer

Diamond Smugglers - II

2006-06-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

With the success of my Brazilian discoveries, I was hired to go scope out the situation with diamonds in Guyana. (Little country, top of South America, once called British Guyana).

While the Guyanese government takes diamonds and diamond smuggling much more seriously than the Brazilians, they too are not immune from smuggling. Here too I discovered a fairly major smuggling operation, with diamonds coming from Venezuela, getting smuggled into Brazil and laundered to the world via Guyana.

The full report is here:
http://www.pacweb.org/e/

"Triple Jeopardy – Triplicate Forms and Triple Borders: Controlling Diamond Exports from Guyana "

The Report generated a big article in the Sunday version of Brazil's big paper Globo. Here it is translated:

Sunday, 7 May 2006

Page 43

Boa Vista on the diamond contraband Route

International Agency sounds alarm on the risk of Brazil losing certifying and market for stones extracted from the country.

Jose Meirelles Passos

Washington

Little Boa Vista, capital of the state of Roraima, is transforming itself into a growing entrepot of contraband diamonds. And the lack of action by the authorities could wind up compromising all the legitimate national trade of this precious stone. Principally with respect to exports, because Brazil runs the risk of being expelled from the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, the system of certification that guarantees the authenticity and provenance of diamonds. And, por tabela, the real value of Brazilian product could fcall on the international market, advises Partnership Africa Canada.

According to investigations of the entity – a partnership between the Canadian International Development Agency, and non-governmental organizations of Canada and Africa – Boa Vista is a principal end of a triangle that has Georgetown in Guyana and Santa Elena de Uairen in Venezuela.

Guyana, Roraima and Venezuela in a laundering scheme

This is today the triple frontier of diamond trafficking in Latin America. “The south of Guyana has a long, porous and undefended border with the state of Roraima, in Brazil. And this, in turn, has an equally porous border with Venezuela,” says the report by PAC.

And this area, according to the organization, have everything to become the major laundry of fortunes from the international black market of the sector: diamonds mined in Africa, in non-authorized areas, or stolen by mercenaries, could use the route through Boa Vista to acquire the appearance of legality and enter cleanly into the market.

This is possible because the scheme of the traders of the area involves the acquisition of documents in Guyana which, though official, are at the same time false. For example, the certificates of origin emitted in Georgetown are legal, but the major part of the diamonds to which the papers refer did not come from the place declared in the document.

“Twenty percent of the diamonds mined in Guyana are smuggled to Brazil, where they are classified, and mixed with diamonds that come from Venezuela. They are then taken back to Guyana, together with the Venezuelan diamonds, for the emission of Kimberley certificates, evading the controls of three countries and not paying royalties,” says a piece of the PAC report obtained by Globo.

The equivalent of at least US$8.6 million in diamonds from Guyana were smuggled to Brazil through this scheme last year. At he same time, Brazilian traders acquire in Venezuela about 100 thousand carats – with a value of at least US$11 million – and send them in the same way (i.e. under the table, through smuggling) to Guyana.

There they obtain certificates of origin – as if they were extracted in Guyana – using corruption schemes to be able to export them legally to Europe, Arab countries and the United States. The entire process resembles a classic money laundering operation. According to PAC, authorities deliberately don’t closely examine their own official registries in Guyana.

As it happens there has been an absurd increase in diamond production in Guyana. In 1998, Guyana produced 33,500 carats. The volume jumped to 445 thousand carats by 2004. The increase in the number of garimpeiros, and majority of them from Brazil, certainly helped increase the extraction of diamonds in the region. But the investigations of the agency headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, indicated that the major part of the volume –which comes to be registered as if it were diamonds of local provenance – became possible because of an increase in smuggling.

Stones aren’t detected by airport scanners

The smuggling route for diamonds is practically open. There are control barriers on some roads, but they are inoperative. The couriers can even indulge in the luxury of transporting their stones by air. Diamonds, at the end of the day, do not appear on X-ray machines used to check airport baggage. And in the airports of Georgetown there is not even a inspection post of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, responsible for the diamond sector.

“The customs inspections at Cheddi Chagan airport are quite informal. Owing to the culture of petty corruption in Guyana, it’s very likely that someone caught with diamonds could buy the silence of authorities with a small bribe,” says the report “Triple Threat”, containing the results of investigations on smuggling by PAC.

Sunday, 7 May 2006

Page 43

Brazil violates rules of certification

Report of organisation says that Roraima exports stones of other countries

Jose Meirelles Passos

Washington

If in Roraima there exists very little, or almost no diamond mining, whey is its capital Boa Vista full of merchants of the precious stone? This question should alert Brazilian authorities to the suspicion that there is something strange in this scenario, say the directors of the international l agency Partnership Africa Canada. It’s own investigations show that those diamond traders obtain diamonds of Venezuela and Guyana, legally or via smuggling, and after classifying them obtain false certificates of origin to export them.

“The existence of this illicit route turns Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil into violators of their promises with respect to the Kimberly Process (for the international certification of precious stones). And, as the principal actors in this business are Brazilian, it falls to Brazilian authorities – in teh Department of National Mineral Production, Policies Federal and in the Prosecutor’s Office – to take measures to close this illicit route,” suggest the most recent report from PAC.

According to specialists of the organisation, the Brazilian diamond sector is in a crisis. The basic reason is that 50% of national production “comes from fraudulent or highly suspect sources; and of every two Brazilian Kimberley certificates, one is likely false.” Half of the diamond exports from the country, says PAC “are made by fraudsters, fugitives and phantoms.”

The vast majority of Brazilian diamonds are produces by garimpeiros who work in areas without mining permissions. Because of this, to cover the export of diamonds without documentation, Brazilian sellers are obliged to produce documents with apparent legitimacy, says the report from PAC.

Diamond Smugglers - I

2006-06-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Much of the Fall (or Spring, for those of you in the norhtern half of the world) I spent tracking down diamond smugglers of various stripes.

In Brazil, a report I wrote in 2005 on the various ways diamond traders were putting diamonds illegally into the international system finally bore fruit when the Brazilian federal police launched a series of raids under the codename Operation Carbon, resulting in the arrest of some ten diamond traders, most of whom I had named in my report. Operation Carbon was a particularly gratifying , in that the Brazilian government agency in charge of regulating the diamond industry - the DNPM- had denounced and rejected my report when it was published, and had even gone so far as to publish a counter report, supposedly rebutting my findings. The author of their rebuttal report - the regional head of the DNPM -was one of those arrested in Operation Carbon.

Here's an article on the arrests in the Folha de Sao Paulo. I have a translation somewhere, and if I find it I'll post it, but for the moment it's Portuguese only:

0/02/2006 - 13h03

PF e Receita prendem contrabandistas de diamantes no Rio e MG

da Folha Online

Receita Federal, Polícia Federal e Ministério Público Federal deflagraram hoje operação conjunta de combate ao contrabando de diamantes em vários Estados.

Batizada de "Operação Carbono", a ação prevê o cumprimento de 40 mandados de busca e apreensão em sedes de empresas e residências e também de 11 mandados de prisão. Pelo menos seis suspeitos já foram presos no Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais.

Participam da operação 260 policiais federais, além de 70 auditores fiscais da Receita.

Durante um ano e meio, a PF e a Receita investigaram um esquema de comércio clandestino de diamantes, articulado por empresários do setor, com o auxílio de contadores, doleiros e servidores do Departamento Nacional de Produção Mineral. Esse órgão é responsável pela emissão de um certificado que atesta a origem e a legalidade da extração das pedras.

Durante as investigações, foi constatado que, muitas vezes, as pedras são extraídas de garimpos ilegais nas regiões Norte e Centro-Oeste do país, ou mesmo no exterior, e posteriormente são atestadas por certificados falsos. Há indícios de que algumas dessas pedras sejam provenientes de áreas de conflito na África.

A operação combate, além do contrabando de pedras preciosas, os crimes de lavagem de dinheiro, sonegação fiscal e evasão de divisas. Dentre os investigados há pessoas cujos nomes constam de registros da Drugs Enforcement Agency (Agência Anti-Drogas dos Estados Unidos), da ONU e da Interpol.

Also ironic was at the time the Federal Police launched their raids, I was working on a follow up report, a rebuttal to the government's rebuttal. In the first report, I had deliberately left a couple of trails un-followed, in the belief that local media would follow up and that would create more news. For example, I had shown that one million dollar diamond export was clearly fraudulent, and I had given the name of a company - located in Belo Horizonte - through which the diamonds had been routed. I assumed some keen reporter would dig up the names of the director of the company and go ask just what was up. I underestimated the basic laziness of most reporters. In the year the report was out there, no one followed up. So now it was my turn again.

While raids continued and arrests piled up, I continued digging, determining that not only was that million dollar export phoney from beginning to end (the earth the diamonds came from had never been dug, the company through which the diamonds had been routed - yes I found their names and called - dealt in paint pigments, not diamonds, and had never hear of this export) but that fully one quarter of Brazil's diamond exports were demonstrably false. The country's fourth largest exporter was a dead man, Fabio Tadeu Dias da Silva. The third largest exporter was an indigent living in a homeless shelter. Someone was using the names of these people to create phoney paper trails to get contraband stones into the system so that they could be exported legally (with Kimberley Certificates) into the international market. As I wrote in my report, the odds on favourite for the mastermind of this scheme was a Belo Horizonte Diamond trader named Hassan Ahmad. Certainly, he was the one behind the fraudulent million dollar export. And he was only living breathing human being to benefit from the exports made by the dead man, Fabio da Silva.

My full follow up report is available on the website of Partnership Africa Canada, the Canadian NGO that commissioned the report: http://www.pacweb.org/e/

And once I put it up on my website, I will include a link here:

Blog Neglect?

2006-06-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

Accusation: Blog Neglect
Prosucutorial Evidence: No posts since Jan 6, 2006.
Exculpatory Evidence: General purpose pathetic whining and non-credible excuses (I was in Guyana. I was busy. The ghost of my long lamented dead dog ate my keyboard)
Verdict: Guilty
Sentence: Regular blogging, until credibility is re-established.

Elections in Canada: Why Care?

2006-01-24T03:38:00.000-08:00

Today is election day in Canada. Last night I wait until midnight to begin surfing the web, only to discover that with daylight savings pulling in opposite directions this time of year, Rio is actually three hours ahead of EST. No way am I waiting until 1am just to start watching the results.

I log in again at 7:30am. Rio time. A Conservative minority. As predicted. 134 to 103(Liberal) to 29(NDP) to 51(Bloc) to 1, or something like that. I surf the Globe and CBC sites for local races.

Vancouver centre: poor old Svend goes down to the utterly useless Hedy Fry. How does that woman keep getting elected? Bill Siksay is back. As is Stephen Owen. Penny Priddy takes Surrey North. The contemptible Ujal returns, albeit to opposition, which is better than he deserves. Ian Waddell does not get to live off the public taxpayer yet again. And BC once again gives a kick in the face to the party in power, dropping the conservative seats. Good for us.

I check the entire province, riding by riding. The Globe’s assertion that the NDP got a windfall from a split in the vote is not quite supported by the numbers. Or rather it is, but the same thing benefited the Conservatives in at least as many ridings.

Then I do spot checks in Ontario – Olivia Chow in Trinity Spadina. My parent’s riding in Ottawa Orleans goes Conservative. My brother’s in Toronto Danforth goes Liberal.

I check Manitoba. Charleswood, where my aunt lives. Conservative. St. Boniface, my cousin, Liberal. Where are the province’s NDP seats hidden?

I surf the Globe’s interactive map. Saskatchewan – mostly Conservative. Poor old Tommy Douglas. Quebec. Who’s voting Conservative in Quebec. Check the numbers and discover the Conservative’s are actually the second party in many ridings, with the Liberals a rump third.

The big question: why do I care? In Rio none of this will affect me. Hell, in Vancouver it arguably didn’t affect me. The big answer: I don’t know. It’s a compulsion. Like biting nails or picking toes. I can’t help myself.

Grander political thoughts: In Bush’s first election, he ran from the centre and governed from the far right. Such is the power of the conservative media machine in the US (plus the serendipitous aid of Bin Laden) that even after four years pandering to the wealthy few and ignoring or screwing over the many, he won re-election. Could this happen in Canada? I doubt it.

For one, Harper needs the other parties to govern, and he has no right-wing allies. For two, the machinery of right-wing media spin is largely absent in Canada. Yes there is the Fraser institute – but their brief is pseudo-science studies. They serve now and again as quote sluts, they’re not really an echo chamber. Beyond that, there is no cadre of willing columnists at the ready, willing to applaud every move no matter how radical, off the wall or just plain nasty. (Witness them lining up in favour of the president’s claim that his inherent powers as commander in chief give him the legal right to break the law. What’s next: summary executions for swarthy-faced Americans. All within my powers as commander in chief)

Other thoughts: Liberal successor? Michael Ignatief. Let’s hope not. I think Rick Salutin had Ignatief’s number. Here’s a man who’s made a living as a public policy intellectual, not by speaking truth to power, but by flattering power, by sucking up to the powers that be. He’s a man with no cojones, a court jester who knows his classics. Ujjal Dosanjh? Betcha he’s thinking about it. Brian Tobin? I rather like the idea of former reporter becomes PM.

Brazil Gun Violence: A 5-minute documentary

2005-11-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is the pitch I sent CBC's Sunday news show for a 5 minute piece on the Brazil referendum banning guns. It includes a quick intro, and then the script. Plus the footage, some of which was extraordinary. Because I'd never worked for CBC TV before, I hashed out a rough cut according to the script below. So they had the extraordinary footage, the script, my credentials, the works. They still passed.

So I turned around and sold it a 2-minute version to Dutch National TV. Go figure. A prophet is not without honour....

Brazil Gun Violence:

Over 40,000 Brazilians died by gunfire in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available. Close to a 1000 of those were shot and killed in Rio de Janeiro. That’s about 3 killed every day.

The carnage is extraordinary. The causes are numerous: vast divisions between rich and poor, leading to the spread of favelas or shantytowns; a thriving network of heavily armed drug traffickers; weak, corrupt and ineffective government; Public distrust of government, and especially of the police.

To reduce this ever growing toll of violence, the Brazilian government is holding a nation-wide referendum this Sunday on whether to ban the sale of firearms. If passed, only those with a professional exemption would be able to purchase a firearm. Polling shows voter intentions split about 50-50 pro and con. Whatever the outcome, many Brazilians doubtful the measure will have any effect.

The story is less about referendum than about entrenched culture of violence. To create this report, I spoke with:

1. Luciana, a former university student who got shot in the neck by a stray bullet during a shootout between police and traficantes (drug traffickers). Attended by full-time nursing staff, Luciane is slowly adjusting to a life-sentence in a wheelchair. Her breathing and speech is mechanical. She tells us how it happened, how she fears for the ever-increasing violence in Rio. She tells us learning to write. Her hope is for a future with less violence.

2. Joao, a chieftain of the drug trafficking faction Commando Vermelho. Joao wears a headscarf in the interview, and waves two large pistols. He says that he and his crew are always heavily armed. They carry AR-15s (a type of fully automatic assault rifle), revolvers, grenades. The referendum won’t affect him, because these weapons come straight from the police. This is unique footage. No one, but no one, goes into to traficante-controlled favelas to film interviews with drug bosses. It’s next to impossible to arrange, and extremely dangerous. Had the police come on a raid, we might very well have wound up dead.

3. Innocent residents of one of Brazil’s larges favelas – Rocinha – who while celebrating a baby shower came under fire from the elite police swat group. They show me bullet holes in the cement and wounds in themselves. They wonder what the point is of disarming the population, when the traffickers and the police remain armed.

4. The officers at a police weapons storage location. None appeared on camera, but there is lots of footage of seized guns

BEGIN FULL SCRIPT.

Post card images of Rio de Janeiro. Beaches; Sugarloaf; Christ on the Corcovado..

VOICE OVER:
Blessed by beauty, Brazil is also a country beset by violence.

Heavily armed police by roadside. Favelas crawling up hillside beneath Corcovado. Closeup of heavy police weaponry

VOICE OVER:
Vast divisions between rich and poor have lead to the spread of shantytown favelas. The favelas become the hideout and staging ground for armed drug gangs, which do battle with the police. Brazilians rich and poor get caught in the middle.

Team of nurses bringing carrying tubes and hoses accompanying wheelchair bound girl as she leaves bed. Nurse plugging tube into contraption on girls throat. Puff Puff sounds from ventilator.

VOICE OVER:
Gunfire killed 40,000 Brazilians in 2003. In Rio de Janeiro, about 3 people are shot and killed each day. Many more are severely injured, like Luciane, shot in the spine and paralyzed from the neck down.

Luciane, sitting up talking to camera

LUCIANE
I breath only through a machine. My speech is also mechanical. And now, after all this time, I am finally managing to make this movement like this.

She contracts her neck muscles repeatedly pulling one side of face down into a kind of grimace.

beat

University building entrance. Teenagers walking up and down flight inside school grounds. Group of girl students eating lunch.

VOICE OVER
A university student, Luciane was on campus eating lunch when a battle broke out between police and drug traffickers in a favela overlooking the school.

Luciana in her chair speaking to camera

LUCIANE
They were many shots. Lots and lots of shots. Everyone left running. Except that from where I never had time to get out, not from where I was sitting.

Lunch tables where Luciana was shot empty of students. Return to close up of Luciana.

VOICE OVER
Luciana needs full time care from a team of nurses…

Nurse feeding Luciana. Shots of ventilator. Puff Puff sounds.

VOICE OVER
…and her family.

Luciana’s father leans over and tenderly gives her a kiss. With her wonky paralyzed lips she kisses him back.

VOICE OVER
Though she lives in a walled house in a safe neighbourhood, the violence of Brazil still frightens her.

Shot of peaceful garden, of walled house.

LUCIANE
It’s getting worse all the time. Every time you open a newspaper or magazine…

Newspaper Cover – O Povo – Four dead men. Close up of grisly front page

….and every day there’s an incident of death, assault, violence…every time. It’s very large the number of cases
Close up of Luciana looking afraid.

Beat

Luciana in her chair, father patting her face.

VOICE OVER
…She hasn’t given up on the future. This computer program allows her to write, slowly. Each time she makes a noise – kluck – she selects one letter of the alphabet.

Luciana and two nurses –one with mouse, other with microphone. Luciana and nurse holding microphone to face. Close of mouse. Computer screen selecting letters. Close-up of flowers painted carefully on Luciana’s fingernails.

LUCIANE
My dream would be to have less violence, less armed robberies….and to return to having a normal life.

Luciana as she was in 15th birthday photo. Photo of Luciana in bikini. Close-up of screen as it spells out REFEN-D-O

VOICE OVER
It takes a full 15 minute for Luciana to write out referendo – sim! REFERENDUM – YES!

Headshot or close-up of Luciana. Father at gate of house. Father closing gate of house.

VOICE OVER
On Sunday, October 23rd, Brazilians voted/are voting in a referendum on whether to ban the sale of all firearms.

Ext shot of CORE police headquarters. Two successive shots - close-up then super close-up – on CORE’s logo, a grinning skull crossed by two heavy caliber assault rifles.

VOICE OVER
This is the headquarters of the Rio de Janeiro swat team CORE. It’s where many of the guns seized by Rio police get stored.

Close up of dozens of pistols on table like bunches of bananas. Of racks of hundreds and hundreds of seized pistols. Of machine gun with gang logo ADA. Of assault rifle hanging by itself on empty pegs.

VOICE OVER
If you make guns illegal, the yes side argues, fewer of these weapons will wind up in the hands of criminals.

Beat

Scenes from a Rio favela. Woman and baby by shack in dirt street. Man walks by hulk of Volkswagen Beetle corroding by an open sewer.

VOICE OVER
But in a country where so much of the population lives in poverty, and where governments often can’t provide even basic services, yet another law rarely seems like the solution.

Joao the traficante appears on camera dressed in bright red shirt. He wears deep black sunglasses, and a black T-shirt wrapped around his head like a balaclava. In his hands there are two evil-looking black pistols. He gesticulates with them as he talks.

VOICE OVER
This favela is controlled by a drug gang called the Comando Vermelho. The local chief goes by the name of Joao. Normally, along with his pistols, he carries an AR-15 assault rifle.

JOAO
Here is Rio de Janeiro we don’t have the ability to buy AR-15s (assault rifles) because they don’t sell them, but we (drug dealers) have a lot of contact with
the police, because they are always bringing guns for us (to buy), supplying us. Like I was telling you, they (the police) always have guns for sale…we never have to buy in the stores…

Close-up of Joao’s masked head
JOAO
In Rio de Janeiro they don’t have stores that sell heavy weapons, AK47s, AR15s. These are the guns that we need, with a faster firing rate, the better guns…these we always buy from the hands of the police. All the guns we have they brought.

(OPTIONAL) JOAO
There’s no way they can’t sell to us, because they don’t have any money.

INTEVIEWER
Where did you get that gun?

Close up of Joao listening to question
JOAO
Bought it from the police….last Friday

INTEVIEWER
How much?

JOAO
800 Reis. (about US$360)

Close-up of Joao’s Face. Then cut to gunfighter-style gun twirl.

INTEVIEWER
What other guns do you have?

JOAO
We have AR15s, we have 7.62s, we have pistols…we have a lot of those…a lot. We have grenades. We always go well armed.

INTERVIEWER
Will the referendum make any difference to you?

Joao’s head shaking
JOAO
No. No. No.

Joao puts one gun in belt in crotch on left side. Then second gun on right. Ready to rock. Close up on his eyes behind sunglasses.
Beat

Two heavily armed police patrol street in front of favela.

VOICE OVER
Whatever (despite) the outcome of the referendum, the war between police and drug gangs will almost certainly continue. This is Rocinha, the largest shantytown in Brazil, some say the larges in Latin America…

Repeated popping go off. Sounds like low caliber gunfire or – the actual case – fireworks.

VOICE OVER
The bottle rockets are a warning to those inside that the police are once again coming in. Residents of Rocinha, the ordinary poor are tired of getting caught in the cross fire.

Heavy sound of drums. Pulsing. Rhythmic. Slightly martial. The sound of samba. Wide shot. Four kids in a line practicing samba beat. Close up on ten-year old struggling with drum almost as big as he is. He smiles as he pounds away.

VOICE OVER
This community centre in the favela is today being used for samba practice. A week ago, residents here were holding a baby shower….

Pull back zoom to alleyway. Shot of kids mural on community centre wall.

….The party began in the afternoon and went on until evening, women and children spilling out into the alleyway.

Two women and one girl in alleyway pointing.

VOICE OVER
Sometime after dark, for reasons still unknown, a police from a tactical swat unit that had been hunting through the favela for drug dealers, opened fire on the baby shower.

Interview shot Sandra
SANDRA
Out of nowhere, they started firing. 15 people were injured. 2 of them gravely injured. One is still in hospital.

Little girls with arm in a bandage. She got shot in the hand. Splinters (cement or ricochets) caught her in the leg as well. She shows nasty stitches.

VOICE OVER
Fortunately, the SWAT unit seem to have lousy aim. Many of the shots ricocheted through this fruit store, or chipped holes out of these concrete steps. The splinters of lead and flying concrete cause most of the injuries.
This woman – Cristina – got shot in the breast.

Cristina showing X-ray of slug lodged in chest area. Pulling down top to show bandage on breast. (Perhaps with Samba background?) Close up of wound.

VOICE OVER
It’s left her with doubts about disarmament

Cristina in fruit store
CRISTINA
I don’t know how to vote. If I vote yes, if I vote to disarm many people, but the police carry on armed, and I was shot by the police…So, I’m not sure what to do.

Flip flop feet stepping up past the bullet hole in the step

SANDRA
That’s the only difference between police and criminals. That one has a badge and an official job, and the criminals don’t. But there’s not much difference. They both go armed. They both kill. They both when they want to do something, just do it. And our authorities unfortunately do nothing, like always.

SANDRA
Why try to disarm a population, in which the police and the criminals go around armed? Why do that? Why not disarm the police and the criminals, and then disarm the people?

Kids down alleyway past bullet hole steps. Cue the samba. Quick montage of Rocinha shots (Close up shot of Rocinha. Med shot of favela) getting us down to shot of people walking on Rocinha’s main street.

VOICE OVER

The day before the election, Rio de Janeiro police issued a statement that they shot at the baby shower because a known drug dealer was in hiding ‘less than 20 meters away’. They did not apologize. On referendum Sunday, the people of Brazil voted by an overwhelming majority – 65% to 35% - not to outlaw firearms. The yes vote reached its highest levels in poor communities such as Rocinha, but even here managed to reach only 40%.

Guns, Rio, Violence

2005-10-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

Back in the Correspondent Game again, and this time it's close to war correspondent exciting. Doing a piece about guns and violence in Brazil and specifically Rio. It's a war in all but name. On one side the armed drug trafficking gangs of the favelas. On the other, the police. About 1200 get killed every year, by police. About 300 police die. And then there's the bystanders. In the course of investigating, it was necessary to interview one of the drug chieftains. Here's what that interview lookied like. Later I'll add some photos of police and innocent bystanders. Hoping to sell this all to the CBC.

What you learn by Travel Writing

2005-10-06T09:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm still finishing up next year's Frommer's Guide to Brazil. It's not war correspondent exciting, but it pays the bills. And you learn things.

Yes, you learn things, even doing travel writing. Brazil, for example, must have the most politicized civil service in the world. Every time a new government comes to power – at any level - they scrap everything the previous government has done, and fire a large percentage of the employees. That way, they can hire their friends and put their own stamp on new programs.

For example, just spoke to the tourism agency of the state of Mato Grosso. The state had an excellent tourism department. The website was vast and informative, the books and brochures colorful, informative and attractive. Despite that, the new regime has closed the downtown office and the airport kiosk, taken down the website, apparently pulped the old tourism books, brochures and CDs, and moved everyone out to a new office in the government precinct on the edge of town. Now they’re awaiting funding to re-create all this stuff from scratch.

This happens not just with tourism, but with every single government department in Brazil, at city, state and federal levels. The new Lula government wanted to scrap an innovative micro-credit program that was lending small amounts of money to under-capitalized micro-business people who had been frozen out by the banks. They were seamstresses who wanted to buy a sewing machine; fruit vendors who wanted to expand his stock of merchandise.

Why? It seemed the perfect kind of program for a left leaning government, and it was. But it had been created by the evil previous regime of Fernando Henrique. Program managers only succeeding in escaping the axe through some very deft political maneuvering.

It’s this stupid political tie in to everything that ensures that programs never have any continuity. It’s why nothing ever gets done in Brazil, because even useful programs get scrapped every four years.

And that’s my rant for today.

Thoughts on Katrina and Television

2005-09-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

My apologies to any who attempt to read this blog regularly. Been a long time since the last update. For the month of August I was out on the road, researching an update to the Frommer’s Guide to Brazil, one of the projects I do to keep myself from starving.

Intellectually, the work is not a great challenge (though for restaurant reviews one does have to come up with a cornucopia of synonyms for ‘good’), but it does get me out into the far flung bits of Brazil.

On the other hand, while out on the road I missed my chance to do a quick hit on the bank robbery in Recife, and I missed much of the early coverage of Katrina.

Speaking of which, just flipped on the tube to kill an idle half-hour, and after flipping past a Fox update on Katrina I hit upon yet another of the missing persons shows – they are legion on TV now – Missing, Cold Case, Cold Play, etc – and I couldn’t but marvel at the irony in the juxtaposition.

Television is wish-fulfillment. Viewers see a world they wish was real. Judging by the popularity of the Cold Case shows, what America wants is a government that looks after them: a dedicated cadre of civil-servants, well-educated, well-spoken, balanced for race and gender but all equally good looking, who efficiently make use of all the technology for which America is famous (plus good old American common sense) to make sure that no child stays missing, no mother left to ponder the fate of a missing son, no murder left unpunished. In the show, these super civil servants provide this service to all Americans, regardless of race or class or gender. No Citizen Left Behind.

Now compare this to the reality exposed in the Katrina disaster: nursing homes full of old people abandoned to drown or die in the heat; black residents, men, women, and children, attempting to flee the city centre, driven back across the bridges by gun-toting white suburban sheriffs with order to shoot to kill; corpses left to rot on the street for a week. Every Man for Himself, and the Devil and the rising floodwaters take the hindmost.

In Brazil, television is also wish-fulfillment. That’s why so many novelas (prime-time soaps) feature a Rio de Janeiro populated by beautiful upper middle class white people. But in Brazil, this is fantasy. Rio never was this, and no matter what Brazilians do, it never will be.

But Americans could have a government that cared. Americans have had a effective civil service composed of dedicated and efficient professionals. They could have it again. All they would have to do is vote for it. Just mark a ballot. Instead they vote for a nitwit cowboy who hates government and has nothing but contempt for civil servants, a man who has looted the treasury and debased the civil service. Do Americans see this? Do they add up the costs in taxes and decide an efficient compassionate government their TV habits say they want would just cost too much money. Do they decide they want that government, but only for themselves? Or are they just too clueless to get it? I wish I knew.

More reports on Brazil in the days that follow. I promise.

See the New We Do Cool Shit Blog

2005-08-01T07:31:00.001-07:00

http://wedocoolshit.blogspot.com

The Foreign Correspondent Blog is dedicated to the trials, tribulations and dollars and cents struggles of Freelance Foreign Reporting. The New We Do Cool Shit Blog, on the other hand, is dedicated to the fun we have.

Check it out. But don't believe Douglas about the wheel.

We Do Cool Shit!

2005-08-01T07:31:00.000-07:00

We Do Cool Shit!

Missed Ops

2005-08-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

They buried the Brazilian shot to death by London Police last week. You won't find any links to articles by me, though, 'cause I was out of town when he got whacked and - after calculating the potential news value of the event - I opted not to return to cover things.

I may well have made a miscalculation there. I thought there wasn't that much news value in the thing, at least for foreign audiences. Yes, the Brazilian press was going nuts - interviews with his mother, father, 3rd grade teacher, neighbours, people who might have met hime once at a backyard BBQ in London - but for the rest of the world I thought the story was really in London - what had the British police been thinking, what lead to gunning down an innocent man, was shoot to kill now the official policy, plus some exploration of the idea that in the war on terror it may be considered better to waste a few innocents rather than risk the safety of the many.

In Brazil, I calculated, there would be nought but weeping rellies and the coffin arriving on an airforce plane.

In a sense I was right: in Brazil there WAS nothing weeping relatives and arriving coffin. But it was a coffin that generated world wide attention, seemingly. So I probably should have dropped all and gone to Minas Gerais (about an 8 hour bus ride from Rio) to join the media hordes in witnessing the coffin.

That probably would have been good enough for a story in the Globe and Mail, plus quick radio hits to CBS and CBC, plus a longer feature for NPR - a total of perhaps $US550 in all. But I didn't. I was off digging up another story that - I hope - in the long run will pay higher dividends. Such are the gambles one makes.

I did do a CBS radio hit - 25 seconds of my voice (which works out to 4 short declaratory sentences) - for the grand sum of $45 US.

-----
There are correspondent aquaintances of mine here who covered the story simply by watching the coffin's arrival on local TV and describing what they saw for the audience at home. Much cheaper and easier than actually going to the scene, but I still feel it's cheating somehow. (Even though they do still dateline Rio de Janeiro)

Links to recent Articles

2005-07-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

Foreign Correspondent

Finally got around to posting some of my recent work on the website. For all who interested here in my recent newspaper work. Still have to find a way to post my radio stuff. And I have an award or two not in the list (he brags) and there are some magazine articles I'd like to get up. I did a big series for EnRoute on what makes a city civilized. All very tongue in cheek, then I find the World Bank using it in presentations, and academics quoting me in courses. Got to get a link up to that soon.

Anyway, here's the links...

BRAZIL SHOWS SIGNS OF CRACKING DOWN ON FRONTIER JUSTICE
By Shawn Blore | The San Francisco Chroniclel

Tacit approval of urban death squads may be changing

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Nova Iguacu, Brazil -- As if it were yesterday, Nilmo, a pizza deliveryman, recalls the first person he shot to death nine years ago.

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/SF%20Chronicle/SF%20Death%20Squad.htm

DESPITE THE CALM, REFORM PRESSURES CHALLENGE BOLIVIA
By Shawn Blore | The Globe and Mail

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA– The blockades around Bolivia's capital have been down for more than a week, and things have returned to relative calm after violent protests overturned the government of Carlos Mesa this month

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/Globe/Bolivia%20June%2028.htm

BOLIVIAN CITY LEARNS PRICE OF PROTEST
By Shawn Blore | The Globe and Mail

EL ALTO, BOLIVIA– - With a fragile truce declared in the protests after the inauguration of new President Eduardo Rodriguez, life in the poor Bolivian city of El Alto has begun an uneasy return to normality.

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/Globe/Bolivia%20June%2014.htm

POLITICAL TURMOIL PARALYZES BOLIVIA
By Shawn Blore | The Globe and Mail

SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA– Planes were grounded, roads blocked, and bussed paralysed in Bolivia as the congress of this troubled Andean nation began meeting in the former capital city of Sucre to choose a successor to outgoing President Carlos Mesa.

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/Globe/Bolivia%20June%2010.htm

A NONCHALANT KILLER DEFENDS RIO-STYLE JUSTICE
By Shawn Blore | The Globe and Mail

But vigilantes provoke Brazil's outrage after recent massacre of innocents

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The first man he killed was riding a bicycle. "I had been warned, so I had my gun, with a newspaper over top, like this." The man demonstrates a nonchalant squat on the concrete stoop of his modest house in the Baixada Fluminense, the ring of poor industrial cities surrounding Rio de Janeiro. "When the guy rode up, I shot him."

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/Globe/Death%20SquAD.htm

BRAZILIAN SUPERSTAR ENJOYS DOUBEL BILL AS CULTURE MINISTER
By Shawn Blore |

No stranger to political controversy, singer relishes role of artist as outsider.

RRIO DE JANEIRO -- Gilberto Gil emerges with guitar in hand stage right, pirouettes twice on the way to the microphone and begins a bossa nova version of John Lennon's Imagine. At 62 years of age and sporting slightly shaggy dreadlocks, the Brazilian musical superstar is simultaneously touring in support of a new album and directing policy as his country's Minister of Culture.

http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/Globe/Brazil/GilbertoGil.htm

Bolivia - Worth the Money?

2005-07-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Foreign Correspondent
BOLIVIA - WORTH THE MONEY??

As it turned out, the Bolivians went and settled their constitutional crisis peacefully. No civil insurrection. No war. Only one dead person. Great for them. Crap for visiting journalists. In the end though, things turned out OK for me too. I managed to interview the head of the opposition movement Evo Morales, and most of the other key political leaders in La Paz. With that work I was able to sell a total of three pieces to the Globe and Mail. I also did my debut as a CBC radio reporter. Radio pieces are fun to put together, but at CBC rates it's simply not worth the effort. They pay US$55 a hit. Considering that newsgathering and editing for 1"20s piece will run to from 5-10 hours, you're looking at less than minimum wage. The rate apparently doubles if you're in a war zone. The live 5 minute chat from the Current (a national CBC radio show) is on the other hand remarkably well paid. C$100 a minute. No editing involved. You just have to be there and know what you're talking about. The Globe pays its usual paltry US$250 (bad, but standard for papers). And I managed to sell a short radio doco on Evo Morales to the NPR show LatinoUSA. Between all of that I actually managed to pay my expenses and turn a small profit on the Bolivia trip. And I now know the country and the political players for when the next crisis hits.

Am now trying to sell magazine pieces on the country. No one's interested in anything but Iraq, but trust me, the world will wake up and discover Bolivia...or rather, be forced to wake up...

Also trying to interest the world on the decline and fall of President Lula. Considering he was a media darling just two years ago you'd think the world would be more interested that his government has been revealed to be a common pack of corrupt plundering thieves...

Bolivia Update

2005-07-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

Bolivia Update
So Bolivia....

Wound up stranded in Santa Cruz. Attempting to get the fuck out of Santa Cruz made my way to the military airport, where I found out the army planed to lock up the capital tight starting that night. The armed forces looked set to support the transfer of power to Hormano Vaca Diez, a man roundly despised by the vast majority of the Bolivian population, a man from non other than Santa Cruz.

The shut down of airports and military machinations was enough for a story for the Globe, who under deputy foreign editor Guy Nicholson was taking a lively interest in South America. The deputy deputy Linda Hossie was also keen, well-informed and helpful. I'll post a link to that article as soon as I post it on my website.

In the meantime, events were happening elsewhere in Bolivia. I summarized those events in a newspaper article, one that was never published because a)it was a bit too much like a wire piece and b) I filed it late saturday; the Globe has no Sunday edition, and by MOnday it was stale-dated (The SF Chronicle, my other string said it was too wire-like. They're probably right)

Anyway, I've pasted it below because it explains what happened while I was forced to dawdle in Bolivia's hot Amazon lowlands.

BEGIN ARTICLE
Santa Cruz, Bolivia
The Andean mountain republic of Bolivia came to within hours of a civil war, before backing away late Thursday night. In the end, it was the death of a single protesting miner that made the difference.

The constitutional crisis in the Andean mountain nation began June 6 when President Carlos Mesa tendered his resignation, citing a lack of support in the Bolivian Congress and escalating street protests in the capital city La Paz as proof that he was no longer able to govern.

According to the Bolivian constitution, the man next the line of succession was the head of the Senate Hormando Vaca Diez. A rich landowner from the oil-rich region of Santa Cruz region, Vaca Diez could count on the support of Bolivia`s two rightist political parties and much of the country’s middle class, but he was despised by the country’s indigenous peoples and labour unions.

The president of Bolivia’s powerful coca growers union Evo Morales declared that he would not accept Vaca Diez as president under any circumstances.

Despite this, the Bolivian congress, meeting in the historic city of Sucre in order to avoid the protests in the capital, looked set to elect Mr. Vaca Diez president. Mr. Vaca Diez spent the afternoon in a celebratory lunch with his family and members of his own Santa Cruz parliamentary faction. Just before 3pm on June 9, Mr. Vaca Diez gave an interview to a local television station in Sucre in which he said that he already felt himself to be president.

In the capital, the chief of the armed forces, Admiral Luis Aranda Granados, appeared at a news conference to explain that security measures including troops on the streets and at the airport were being taken to ensure the stability and continuity of constitutional rule in Bolivia. The military, the Admiral stated, "will respect the will of Congress," in effect backing Mr. Vaca Diez’ bid for president.

"As long as there is no break with the constitution and no break with democracy, the
armed forces will remain the supervisors of this process, " the Admiral said.

In Mr. Vaca Diez oil-rich home province of Santa Cruz, alarmed citizens began preparing themselves for the worst. ¨We expect that the Indians will come down to invade us,¨ said resident Jairo Sanchez. ¨But have arms. We know how to welcome Indians.¨

At the Santa Cruz military airport, duty officer Ernar Cabrora said that the armed forces had received orders to remain on high alert, adding that the moment the Bolivian congress elected Hormano Vaca Diez president, the military planned to move in force into the streets of La Paz to put down protests and ¨support the constitutional order.¨

Then around 4pm groups of protesting miners attempted to break through a government roadblocks to get into the city of Sucre and block the Congress from meeting. Bands of angry miners, many of them armed with sticks of dynamite, had been protesting in La Paz for weeks

At an army blockade outside the city of Sucre, one mining leader was killed when soldiers opened fire on a bus that attempted to run the blockade. The death was the first in nearly four weeks of protests.

Some dozens of other miners managed to reach the center of Sucre and began protesting and launching dynamite sticks in the historic Plaza 25 de Mayo, outside the building where the congress planned to meet.

At that point, the Bolivian armed forces began to reconsider their support for the would-be president. Mr. Vaca Diez was taken to the Sucre army headquarters and remained there for nearly six hours of tense negotiations.

Finally, around 10pm, Mr. Vaca Diez re-appeared to announce that he intended to renounce his right to the presidency. The congress convened, and shortly before midnight, Mr. Vaca Diez and the second in line of succession, the equally controversial President of the Chamber of Deputies Mario Cossio, both formally renounced their rights to Bolivia’s highest office.

The head of the supreme court, Harvard-educated Justice Eduardo Rodriguez was then sworn in as president. Members of Congress including a very unhappy looking Mr. Vaca Diez then joined with the new president in singing Bolivia’s national anthem.

In Mr. Vaca Diez power base of Santa Cruz there was anger at his renunciation. “It was totally unconstitutional, a result of force and pressure and anti-democratic, ” said Lucio Gonzalez, a law professor in the city of Santa Cruz. “I think they didn’t want him because they will never accept a president who is cruzeño (from Santa Cruz).”

But for other Santa Cruz residents, Mr. Vaca Diez’ resignation came as a relief. “I seriously thought we were heading for a civil war,” said shop-owner Pablo Ortiz. “Now we have some time, we’ll have new elections, and we can begin a dialogue again with all parts of Bolivia.”

In the capital La Paz, reaction was less jubilant. Indian groups held a large rally in the Plaza San Salvador, a large square in the center of the city. Indigenous leaders at the rally vowed to continue with blockades and protests until the new government agrees to nationalize the country’s oil and gas industries. Leaders of the Bolivian Workers Federation of Miners, one of Bolivia’s two main miner’s unions, also vowed to continue the struggle until the government agrees to nationalization.

The other main miner’s union, the Cooperative of Bolivian Miners, held a march in honor of their fallen comrade, and then began departing the capital for their home base in the city of Oruro. Throughout La Paz, campesinos who had come to the city to protest could be seen departing, banners furled, clothes and other possessions carried in large nylon packs on their backs.

Despite the lessening of tensions, however, vast and dangerous political differences remain unresolved in this poor South American nation.

In the east of the country, the oil rich province of Santa Cruz is still demanding greater autonomy, the better to exploit its oil and gas wealth. Santa Cruz is lowland, Amazonian in climate, inhabited by people who have few ties to Indian culture, and take pride in their international outlook and their modern work ethic. ¨This is the other Bolivia, said Jairo Sanchez. ¨Eastern Bolivia. Here everything functions. Here people know how to work.¨

In contrast, the Western highlands or altiplano is home to a much larger population, the majority of indigenous descent, most of whom look at Santa Cruz oil and gas reserves as a precious national patrimony that should be used to reduce their abject poverty.

“What the oil oligarchs in Santa Cruz can’t see is that that oil wealth belongs to us, to the indigenous people of Bolivia. It must be used intelligently, to transform Bolivia into a modern industrial country, a country that is fair to its workers and indigenous people” said Hebert Choque Taeque, the general secretary of the Bolivian Workers Federation of Miners.

Just after his swearing in, Bolivia’s new president Eduardo Rodriguez stated that he has no mandate to make changes to Bolivia’s oil and gas sector. His only role is to ensure stability until new elections can be called. Questions about the nationalization of the country’s natural resources must be left to a new elected parliament.

The question is whether Bolivia’s restive indigenous people and powerful miners’ union will allow the new president the luxury of breathing space.

Bolivia - in Search of Headlines and the $$ to pay for them

2005-06-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

Bolivia - in Search of Headlines and the $$ to pay for them

Monday, June 20, 2005

Got back from Bolivia on Friday. When did you leave for Bolivia, you ask? (Go ahead, ask). For me it all started on June 7.

For Bolivians, it started either late in May, when protestors began putting up blockades on highways around the country, or several hundred years ago, when Francisco Pizarro’s brother came in, and subdued what remained of the southern Inca empire, and installed a white/criole government that has lasted more or less intact ever since.

The proximate cause of the crisis was public dissatisfaction with a new energy bill brought in by President Carlos Mesa, a former journalist and former vice-president, elevated to high office only after the much-despised quasi-gringo elected president Carlos Sanchez de Lozada was turfed in 2003.

Those manning the blockades - Bolivia’s labour unions and indigenous groups mostly - were demanding full nationalization of Bolivia’s oil and gas industry. Mesa’s bill only increased taxes on foreign oil companies operating in the country. That was not going to be enough.

These, however, were but short term demands. What the protestors really wanted was a constituent assembly with powers to re-write the constitution. Because those doing the protesting and blockading are nearly all Aymara or Quechua Indians, and what they really want is to take control of Bolivia’s government. Given that they make up some 65% of the population, it’s not that unreasonable request. It’s just not one the non-Indian elite are too keen on.

So, did I know all this June 7? Was I a long-term student of Indigenous movements of resistance in colonial Andean societies in the post modern world of the Washington Consensus?

No. But I knew a story when I saw one.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday June 7 I got a call from a colleague who works for a European radio network. It looked like the Bolivian government was going to fall. Her network was pretty sure it was going to send her to cover the chaos. Did I want to come?

It was a generous offer. She is a long-term student of Indigenous movements of resistance in colonial Andean societies in the post modern world of the Washington Consensus. She hangs out at smoke-ridden left-wing klatches. She has oodles of contacts in Bolivia.

So why bring me? We work well together. We’re both alternatively pushy and extravagantly charming. Two of us lets us switch the good cop bad cop roles. And besides, I know how to fix her computer.

My question, the immediate question of any reporter lacking the essential social safety net of an unlimited expense account: could I make this pay? And if not that, can I at least cover my expenses and break even?

A quick call to Varig. Flights from Rio to La Paz are US $575. TAM and cheapo Gol don’t fly. US$600 it is. Factor in $50 a day expenses. I’m going to need some markets to pay for this.

Rapid fire emails to every outlet I’ve ever written for- are you interested, how many pieces will you take? Newspapers – The Globe and Mail, The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle. Magazines – Macleans, The Walrus; TV – never done TV, but I email a reporter friend at CBC and ask if they want a stringer and who to contact. Radio – email an NPR show I work for and CBC’s the Current. Then I email all my CBC radio contacts and ask for the news editor there.

It’s now late Tuesday. A few No’s come in. The Monitor has someone there already (but it’s nice to hear from me again, they say – always polite, the CSM). The Current is interested, maybe, but no commitments. Do I have contact numbers there?

Loads of emails from CBC friends have established the TV and Radio news editors. Emails to TV go unanswered. Fuck him. Phone call to the radio news desk reveals the editor is home for the day. Maybe tomorrow.

My Euro-colleague hasn’t got the final go-ahead from her editors. Next day’s early Varig flight is out. Maybe the LAB flight in the afternoon?

Wednesday Morning. June 10. The Globe still hasn’t responded. What’s going on? I write for them intermittently from SA. They at least know me. Maclean’s – nothing. Quelle surprise. Retirees in Moose Jaw not interested in Bolivia. The Walrus – also nothing. The Walrus readership is likely interested, but it’s a long lead-time mag, with an editor notorious for slow email turn-around-times. I knew when I sent it was a long shot.

NPR editor is leaving on vacation. Cannot take anything for two weeks. By that time crisis likely over.

CBC radio editor is encouraging, in that you’ve never worked for us so you cannot fully be trusted but since the government long ago slashed us to Toronto-based Timbit of our once world-spanning global donut I suppose we must at least give you a try kind of way. Gives me the FTP address and password, tells me to limit it to 1’30’ hits. Okay. Rate for that is $45 a piece. Hmmm. 45 is to 600 as Timbit is to.....Michael Moore? Mass of glutinous carbs? The similie won't come. I consider not going.

Get a nice email from a producer at the current. Asks me when I’m leaving. I tell him I’m not sure I am. Everyone says they’re interested maybe. No one willing to commit. He says he’ll see what he can do.

CBS radio calls. My emails to friends and friends of friends have circled the world of cyberspace, bouncing from Toronto to Vancouver to Baghdad to the 212 zone of New York city. The producer on the line says they’re looking for a Brazil based stringer. But no, they have no interest in Bolivia, ‘not unless a lot more Americans die.’

I call friend and tell her I’m likely not going.

Wednesday. PM. Globe editor finally emails. Sorry, he says. My spam filter put your emails in the trash can. Yes, he says, we’re interested. If the crisis lasts we’ll take 6 or 7 pieces. At $250 per piece, that’s enough to cover expenses.

I call Euro-friend and tell her it’s a go. Her editors are still hesitating, but she’s willing to say fuck it and go without permission. LAB’s afternoon flight still a possibility. Except that it just got cancelled. LAB won’t say why.

I walk down the beach past the Copacabana Palace to the Varig office. Plunk down the plastic. US$583, taxes included. As far as the pretty Varig bunny knows, flights to La Paz still flying.

Back home to pack. The Current emails. They can offer a live radio debrief. $425. I may even make a profit on this trip.

Thursday, 7am. Flight takes off normally. Lands in Sao Paulo. We’re told to exit plane. This is abnormal. We de-plane, circumnavigate departure lounge in search of new gate. Load up and take off. On landing in Bolivian city of Santa Cruz we’re told the flight to La Paz has been cancelled. The airfield is closed. The air traffic controllers have gone on strike. Or the army has taken control of the airport. No one’s completely sure.

We are stuck in Santa Cruz

----to be continued ----

I have used up the one hour I allot to blogging at any one time. Further notes on the Bolivia trip when I next get an hour free.

Recent Work

2005-06-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

What have I been up to?
It's been a long time since my last post on the old Blore in Brazil blog. In the interim, I have moved from Ipanema (beach front neighbourhood of the young and beautiful, a long way from city centre, lily-white except for maids, cleaners and sellers of suco (fresh-squeezed fruit juice))
over to Leme (beach front neighbourhood of the old and wrinkled, lily white except for maids, cleaners, suco sellers and people commuting from the two nearby favelas of Babilonia and Chapeu-Mangueira.
Leme has the advantage of being much closer to Centro, and the disadvantage of being full or retirees. Retired officers - colonels and generals and the like - are particularly fond of Leme for some reason. The statue on the beach-front plaza in Leme is of General Castello Branco, possibly the most vicious of the military dictators who ruled Brazil during the 1964-1985 dictatorship.

Recent Work:
Reports:
In terms of work, I have published a major report on diamond smugging in Brazil
(see The Failure of Good Intentions http://www.pacweb.org/e/ )

Radio:
and begun an illustrious career in radio with a piece on CBC's The Current
(http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2005/200504/20050414.html )

and a similar, shorter version of the same piece on an NPR show, LatinoUSA
(See shows June 3-9, 2005 http://www.latinousa.org/program/index.html )

Selling the same material to several different outlets is one key to surviving as a freelancer. Alas, many outlets (newspapers, radio, magazines) seem to think they have a right to demand all rights to your work. This is an ongoing conflict, about which more later.

Newspapers:
and done another piece for the Globe and Mail, just to keep my hand in. (link is only for subscribers. I'll get it up on my website soon. In the meantime, here's the opening graph

A nonchalant killer defends Rio-style justice

But vigilantes provoke Brazil's outrage after recent massacre of innocents

By SHAWN BLORE

Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Page A14

Special to The Globe and Mail

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The first man he killed was riding a bicycle. "I had been warned, so I had my gun, with a newspaper over top, like this." The man demonstrates a nonchalant squat on the concrete stoop of his modest house in the Baixada Fluminense, the ring of poor industrial cities surrounding Rio de Janeiro. "When the guy rode up, I shot him."

The killer, who gives his name only as Nilmo, says he has since killed another seven men, a tally he considers minuscule.

"My role in the group is more support. There are other guys who do most of the killing," he says.

The lead executioner of his group, a death squad that metes out vigilante justice in the city of Novo Iguacu on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, has dispatched at least 75 victims. All told, their death squad has killed hundreds.

"I'm God's lieutenant," Nilmo says. "The Bible says, the one to take life is God. I'm not God, but sometimes, with guys like these, you have to take them and send them on their way to God."

The Purpose of This New Blog

2005-06-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many readers my old Blore-in-Brazil blog had. Less than ten, I had thought, but now and again the oddest people would write to tell me they had read and liked my blog, or that I should get the thing going again. Popular demand, however, is not really why I've resurrected the monster. Rather, I was inspired by reading a few other blogs, in particular a series of blogs created by screenwriters in LA. (See http://www.johnaugust.com/ and http://www.davidanaxagoras.com/) Some are struggling, some are quite successful, but what I found fascinating was the fairly honest inside look they give on the business of being a professional writer in the LA film and TV world.

So, this new re-purposed blog (not being an MBA or a business writer, I have never before been able to use the word re-purposed), will attempt to provide a fairly honest inside look at the business of being a freelance foreign correspondent. Exciting chases under fire with beautiful kalishnakov-toting guerilla leaders will, of course, crop up regularly here. But in addition I plan to write - with as much honesty as possible - about the business side of foreign corresponding; that is, how do you make a living writing about exciting chases under fire with beautiful kalishnakov-toting guerilla leaders, when news consumers in first world markets would much rather read about food, traffic, weather, sports or just about anything else? And how do you spell Kalishnakov?

Tune in next post, and see.....

Everything from my old Blore-in-Brazil Blog, transferred over

2005-06-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

The Old Blore-in-Brazil Blog

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Ah Brazil. Two cops get in an argument. They pull out their guns to settle it, gunfighter style, on the streets of Copacabana. One ends up shot in the belly, the other in the back. The story only makes page A8.

28/04/2004 - 06h34m
Tiroteio entre policiais causa pânico em Copacabana

Jorge Martins - O Globo

RIO - Dois policiais, um civil e outro militar, trocaram tiros nesta madrugada após uma discussão na esquina da Avenida Nossa Senhora de Copacabana com Rua Dijalma Urich, em Copacabana. Testemunhas disseram que o desentendimento começou em frente ao hotel Vanity e, em meio à confusão, sacaram armas e houve o confronto. Os vários tiros disparados provocaram correrria e pânico nas pessoas que passavam. As marcas da violência ficaram nas portas de aço de duas lojas. Os baleados são o PM Carlos Germano da Silva, agente do serviço reservado do Batalhão de Copacabana, com um tiro na barriga e outro no braço, e o policial civil Luis André de OIiveira, da 12º DP ( Copacabana), com dois tiros nas costas. Eles estão internados no Hospital Miguel Couto. Dois amigos do policial civil foram detetidos e levados para a delegacia.

// posted by Shawn @ 4:42 AM

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Tuesday, April 13, 2004 10:50 PM
Tuesday, April 13, 2004 10:50 PM

Went to Rocinha again today, where the police war with the traffickers rages unabated. Que corajoso, a friend remarked, when I told her where I was going. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed encouragingly, so instead of disparaging the danger I did my best off-to-the-Western-Front-but-its-really-rather-nothing look. It never hurts to play up the undaunted courage shtick.

The truth is that with this war at least, for 99% of the time, for 99% of reporters, the danger is close to nil. But I didn’t tell her that. I’ve never been a war reporter, but I think this is likely true for most wars. I didn’t tell her that either.

In any case, to catch this war, I caught a mini-bus, one of the quasi-legal jitneys that circulates on Rio’s waterfront. At the end of Leblon, where the road climbs up the rocks above the surf and snakes along the cliff-side towards Sao Conrado and Rocinha, I saw the first of the reported 1200 police that now patrol this combat zone – a squad of six or seven motorcycle cops, stationed on the entrance of one the Av. Niemeyer’s most expensive short term sex motels.

Maybe it was just a convenient wide-spot in the otherwise narrow confines of this cliff-side highway. Or maybe the governor insisted on protecting the free passage of Zona Sul residents to and from their mid-day quickies. Or maybe it was just coincidence. It’s a question I’d like to ask the Public Security Secretary Anthony Garotinho. Before the road descends into Sao Conrado I count four more motorcycle squads – every one parked in front of a sex motel.

At the crossroads where the Av. Niemeyer crosses the Lagoa-Barra auto Estrada we hit the first checkpoint, manned by about 10 cops from the 35th division of the Rio Policia Militar. The name is indicative. Though the PM are ostensibly a civilian force, they are more fully paramilitary than any civilian police force I’ve yet encountered. (This may date back to the dictatorship – I’ll have to check this point). Individual cops are called soldados. The ranking system is fully military – lieutenant, captain, major. The man in charge of the city’s police wears a brush cut and three gold stars on his shoulderboards – the rank and hairstyle of a Brazilian PM Colonel.

At the checkpoint, the soldados of the 35th have revolvers drawn, assault rifles at the ready, but we in our air-con jitney get waved through. Class has its privileges —that’s its point. Under the viaduct and Rocinha comes into view. It’s impressive from the roadside, a medieval warren made of concrete and cinderblock, a souk blown up to 21st century scale. Two women in the front seat titter nervously; one makes a joke about ‘living in the Zona Sul’. They go silent when I ask the driver to let me off.

On the walkway into Rocinha a pamphlet man passes me a handbill for a local dentist: Extractions R$5 (US$2). Fillings R$10 (US$3.5) with amalgam, R$15 (US$5) with tooth-coloured resin. R$60 (US$20) for a root canal. Instalment payments and credit cards encouraged. Welcome to Rocinha, where all the luxuries of the Zona Sul are available, at a cut rate price and with the quality omitted.

The journalists have set up shop in a café by the main access road where the PM have parked their Blazers. Another 15 cops, these from the 13th BPM, hang around with nothing much to do. 15 Cops. Four blazers. If there are really 1200 soldiers patrolling around, I wonder where they’ve parked the other 296 Blazers.

I make friends with a reporter from Rede-TV – a poor cousin to the Globo network that makes most of its money showing cheap US sitcoms while providing the bare minimum of original programming. Canadian readers will recognize the business model. News is Rede-TVs flagship, its only real justification for the money it rakes in.

The reporter is pretty and young and obliging. Within minutes I’m up to date on what’s happened today – nothing – and have numbers for the press liaison for the PM head office and for the Secretary of Security. I also learn that she has a boyfriend from Calgary – part of the reason she’s so nice – and she’d really much rather be covering anything else but urban warfare. ‘Sports’ she says. ‘Carnaval.’ War reporting, she says, is definitely not her praia.

Friday evening she arrived just after the invasion began. ‘It was like that scene at the beginning of Private Ryan,’ she tells me. “Bullets flying everywhere. You had no idea where they were coming from or who was shooting. Everyone ran. We hid in a kind of hole beneath a building. There were kids screaming and crying. We had to stay there for hours.”

Has she been up into Rocinha today? No, she says. Her editor won’t allow it. Too dangerous. Yesterday, I tell her, I wandered up around much of Rocinha, to the PM post and beyond. I saw some 30 cops, a lot of people going about their daily lives, and not much else. ‘You have to be careful’ she says. Didn’t you hear about them threatening reporters yesterday?’

Globo has a feed on the walkie-talkie frequency used by the trafficantes, and a reporter whose job it is to listen in all day. Not a job I envy, but in this case the endless hours of tedium paid off. In one idle moment of chit-chat one of the fugitive gunmen said something like ‘let’s shoot us a reporter’.

Canadian papers have an admirable Protestant reluctance to blow their own horn. They hazards of the trade are rarely ever mentioned. The dangers of getting the story are never allowed to overshadow the story itself. Brazilian papers are entirely free of such hang-ups.

Globo put the idle chit chat on the front page.

Some of the cops have come into the café to relax and grab some coffee. I chat up one and learn he and his mates are pulling 12 hour shifts. How much overtime you getting? I ask. Overtime? He looks confused and then just laughs that odd sort of bitter Brazilian laugh, and grabs a seat at table. Soldiers have no right to overtime. Part of the terms of service.

A side benefit of the paramilitary police structure, it seems, is military terms of service. While civilian cops would be sucking up double overtime, soldier cops give up even the basic rights accorded under Brazilian labour code, much less the extortionary powers of a well-armed police union. This soldier gets a monthly salary, and works as much and wherever and whenever he’s told.

Another PM – his assault rifle slung over his back - takes advantage of my absence to begin chatting up the pretty Rede-TV reporter. Brazilian PM have next to none of what a Canadian solder once told me is called ‘muzzle awareness’. The chatty soldier bends down to comment on something in the reporter’s notes, and not incidentally to get a better view down her top, and the muzzle of his assault rifle tilts up until it’s pointed into the face of his seated colleagues — the mean dark hole of the barrel just inches from his nose.

“Careful, pra caralho,’ says the threatened PM, grabbing the barrel and pushing it back down, and thus levering the amorous soldier back into vertical, putting the TV reporter’s breasts again just tantalizingly out of his view.

A messenger comes asking for a reporter who’s set up an interview with the president of the resident’s association. I haven’t set anything up, but I take advantage of the opportunity to tag along. We’re lead up the same winding road as I walked yesterday. As before, there are cops by the Caixa Economica Federal, and nowhere else.

The Resident’s Association is a two-story building of cracked concrete, no more nor less dilapidated than any in Rocinha. The president, who I meet upstairs, is a young-looking man of 32, black, wearing a golf shirt stenciled with the name of the organization on one breast – Uniao Pro-Melhoramento dos Moradores do Rocinha – and his title, Presidente, on the other. William de Oliveira. He’s an ex-DJ, I learn from newspaper clipping I read downstairs, and the former host of a TV show on TV Rocinha. He has a son aged 9, and a daughter aged 6 weeks. He looks very tired.

As it was the other reporter who set up the interview, I let her lead off. Unfortunately she seems ashamed to be asking questions, or ashamed of her braces, or maybe just ashamed to be alive. She clamps her hand over her mouth and mumbles into her fingers: mmmm nn mmmms situation.,mmmmm.

Say what?

Though elected just two months earlier, President William proves to be an old hand, however. He gives his points in perfect point form, allowing time to scribble before moving on.
• The situation in Rocinha is normalizing, he says, despite what some in the press are saying about a state of war.
• out of 180,000 residents, only a few families have had to leave
Q?How many? – I interrupt.
• about 10
Q? Because of the location of their houses, or because of their connections to traffickers?
• because of the location of their houses, up high near the forest
I shut up and let her carry on her mumbled questions
• more than ten years we have had no problems in Rocinha; this is something unaccustomed for us
• business is functioning today, though at about 50% of the normal level. Bills still arrive. People still have to pay taxes
• Caixa economica closed yesterday and today. It may open tomorrow.
• Police are necessary at the moment to restore order. We just want them to do so in a way that respects the rights of Rocinhans, their right to peace and their civil rights
Q? Have you had complaints from residents about the police?
• A few. Aggressive house searches, that sort of thing
Q? Security Secretary Garotinho is giving a press conference this afternoon on measures to deal with the violence in Rocinha. Has he asked for your opinion?
• No
Q? Has Garotinho ever asked for your opinion?
• No
Q? What is needed?

This leads to a very long answer indeed. The residents of Rocinha, says William, need to see more of the government than just the police. They need to see more state projects. At the moment the state government has only one small bit of infrastructure in all of Rocinha. 200,000 residents and one state project. The state is very far from Rocinha. Here, he says, pulling out a letter he’s just fired off to the governor. Here’s what we need.

The letter is a list of asks. It’s a long list. I jot down only the ones William has marked urgent. Basic sanitation; water supply; a state government social service office, which could advise people on programs that they are eligible for; a library; a low-cost pharmacy; a playground.

While I read this, William’s cell phone goes off. One of William’s cell phones. He has three. Plus a land line. They occupy him for next half-hour, effectively ending the interview.

I strike up a conversation with William’s 2nd in command, a 52 year old evangelical Christian named Paulo.

What do you think of the media coverage of Rocinha?

“I read most of papers. I watch TV. I don’t recognize Rocinha there. The media construct this conflict between the marginalized and the police. And that’s it. To the media, that’s Rocinha.”

“They make comparisons with Iraq. I keep hearing that. Rocinha is like Iraq. They like to pretend that they’re war reporters, that they’re in Iraq. Rocinha is not Iraq. Iraq doesn’t exist in Rocinha.”

“Rocinha is a community that has had to exist solely on its own resources. We get nothing from the government. We’ve been trying for years to get the services we deserve. Has Globo ever reported on that? Has Globo ever helped us in that battle? Of course not. If it weren’t for this war, the truth is we would not have a single reporter here.”

“There are other stories here. This is a community with hunger, where people are lacking even the cesta basica. This is also a community of artists. We have artists in the schools, kids in the schools, who make arts and paintings. Sometimes they sell them to the tourists who come here. They could sell more f they had the resources for paint and materials, but they don’t. Has anyone reported that?”

“We want more attention from the government. This is an area of 200,000, with no basic sanitation, no water, no leisure area, no playgrounds or football area, no sports facilities. We should have that, but the government is not interested in providing it, and the press aren’t interested in reporting on it.”

Back down in the café, the Rede-TV woman tells me I just missed something good. A resident was spotted carrying bags of food up into the forest, presumably to supply the drug warriors still out in the jungle. Apparently, it made excellent TV.

I strike up a conversation with Globo’s man on the scene, in this case a woman in her 40s with pretty pink sandals, smoker’s teeth and an intimidating aura of competence. She fills in most of the missing facts and figures I need; there’s little about Rio’s drug wars she doesn’t seem to know. I manage only to surprise her with the news – gleaned from William – that the vice-governor, who on Tuesday suggested blockading the community behind Gaza-style walls - is coming to pay a visit to Rocinha on Thursday.

The truth is, she tells me, this sort of thing has happened many times before in Rio; one drug gang taking away a favela from another gang. But always before it’s happened far away in the Zona Norte. It’s only now, because we’re next to Gavea and Sao Conrado that it becomes news.

It’s the thing I love about reporters. So many are so often so keenly aware of the biases – political, or class, or race – that skew their coverage. They almost never do anything about it, tis true - but at least amongst themselves, they’re honest about its existence.

There’s a press conference happening downtown, she adds. The word is that Garotinho is going to ask the federal government to send in the army.

// posted by Shawn @ 8:06 AM

Actually published first last week:
Odd happenings in Rio. These I know only from TV. The public security minister is the husband of the governor. He’s a failed presidential candidate with a mouth full of platitudes but little administrative skill. In his two years as public security minister, crime in Rio has gotten noticeably worse. The police now kill about 1200 people a year. Armed gangs kill some 120 police each year. So 10 to 1. This is a jump of 20-30% since Anthony Garotinho (the name means Little Boy, and also Little Glass) took office. To counter crime, he has announced a series of new measures and new police units and new toughness. He gives great press conferences. But when the dog and pony are put back in the PR stable, it always turns out that Little Glass’s new programs have been left empty of funding.

This past week topped all. In January a rich American couple were murdered in their suburban mansion. The crime was a shocker both because they were American and because crime in Rio is usually a street thing; home invasions and botched kidnapping are more in fashion in Sao Paulo.

The police investigated and got nowhere, but that didn’t stop Little Boy from publicly speculating in a way that would get any First World politician turfed, then tossed in jail. It was a hit, said Garotinho. Then later, he said it was the couple’s eldest child. (Yes, he publicly accused a grieving 16 year-old of having off’ed his parents). Then later after the FBI came down and looked around, Little Glass said that they knew who the killer was, they were just waiting to make an arrest. Which of course didn’t come.

What did happen is that the security guards at a nearby condo arrested a 18-year old boy trying to break in. He worked nearby as a groundskeeper. The boy promptly confessed to the Shell murders, and lead police to a cache where he had stashed away the murder weapon – a crowbar – and some bloodstained clothing. Police filmed his confession. Garotinho them jumped in, called a press conference, and on live TV had the boy repeat his full confession, with Garotinho himself acting as Phil Donahue host and facilitator. No one thought to get the boy a lawyer. So when a judge reviewed the evidence later that night, she tossed the confession and turned the boy loose, saying that there wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest, much less a conviction.

Little Glass boiled over. He frothed and fumed. Police re-arrested the boy, who in the presence of a lawyer gave a different confession. He had facilitated access to the American’s house for two bad guys who had done the killing, he said. Police searched for but could not find these two supposed killers. DNA tests on the blood-stained shirt showed no match to the dead Americans. The crowbar did not match the victim’s wounds. Little glass is quiet. For now.

// posted by Shawn @ 8:04 AM

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Tuesday, April 6, 2004 8:47 AM
Some expressions of Brazilian Portuguese (from now on, simply Brazilian) that I like.
Não é a minha praia – not my thing, not my cup of tea, but literally , not my beach
cortar a minha onda – to rain on my parade, but literally, to cut off my wave
abacaxi – a mess, a tricky difficult problem; as in abacaxi parlamentar, a parliamentary mess; literally, a pineapple.
lagarto – a lizard
lagarteando – to lie immobile the sun like a lizard; a phrase I learned while describing Alex’s reptilian body temperature to a friend in Curitiba.

What else have I seen:
Truly cheap labour makes many things possible. Men are willing to trudge the beach all day in the sun to sell bottles of water or coke; women will wander the boutequins at night to sell rolled sleeves of roasted peanuts. Stores have lots of sales staff. However, while stores are happy to hire lots of salesmen, they can’t be bothered with training. So walk into any shop and you get swarmed by uniformed, commission-hungry ignoramuses. A couple weeks back I wandered in to the Casas Bahia – a Brick or Furniture Warehouse kind of cheap electronics and white goods retailer – in search of a cell phone. Two white-coated clerks tried to jump me at the entrance. I slipped past, turned left at the love seat and ran into another. No, I didn’t want furniture. Cell phones. Back up, around the TVs and boom, I’m stalled behind two more clerks walking away from me towards the back of the store. Finally arrive at cellphone counter and discover that none of the six clerks hovering within two arm spans know anything about the cell product on offer. There’s one cell-phone clerk, and he’s on lunch. Come back later.

Went to Curitiba. Something I’ve always felt I should do. It’s the world poster child for urban planning, elegized by the likes of Bill McKibben and David Eng-Wicht, not to mention city planning gnomes everywhere. It’s the anti-Brazil. People are gringo-white – paler than pale. They don’t like sun. Curitibans hide from it, like Canadians would, seeking out the shade of trees and buildings. Streets and parks and sidewalks are kept clean. You can wander around at night without fear. People are polite and reserved. It’s cold at night. People use odd formal Portuguese. Disponho – at your service; con gentileza – be so kind as to; as in, be so kind as to count your change; esta servido? – have you finished dining.

It’s a small city by Brazilian standards – just over a million. Similar sized provincial cites in Brazil – like Cuiabá, Campo Grande – are horse towns. Curitiba feels like cultured as Melbourne. Dozens of restaurants. Clubs. Cafes. Pedestrian streets. Parks. Lots of lovely green, safe, clean parks.

// posted by Shawn @ 11:32 AM

Monday, April 05, 2004

Okay,

So the idea was to blog regularly, to use the blog as a repository for all those piquant little observations that writers make, that newspapers are too uptight to use. So where's the piquant posts? Too damn lazy to write them, I guess. That may change in the next few days. For all 0.7 people who have been tuning in, keep tuning in.

Published another newspaper piece yesterday, on the on-going tape recorder crisis afflicting the Brazilian government. There's a bookie who tapes everyone he talks to - cabinet ministers, prosecutors. Each time he unveils a tape, it's a major new scandal. Anyway, the story appeared in the Globe and Mail, and it's on my NEW WEBSITE as well (www.shawnblore.com). The GLobe copyeditor's trifled with it somewhat, in the interests it seems of making a complicated situation as lucid as possible. They're normally very good, but in this case I think my piece as written had more flavour. Here it is for posterity. If you want to compare it to the published version, click over to http://www.shawnblore.com/Pieces/Globe/Brazil/Cachoeira.htm

Monday, April 5, 2004

Forget the bullet or the ballot box, it’s the pocket tape recorder of big-time bookie Carlos Cachoeira that seemingly determines the fate of Brazil’s government and its charismatic leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Forty-eight days after a recording of a senior government official soliciting bribes and campaign funds from Cachoeira sent Brazil’s government into a crisis, a second recording made by the same bookie appears to have pulled the administration into the clear again, by suggesting the investigation into government corruption was itself corrupted by politics.

Broadcast on the TV news program Jornal Nacional, the second tape records a 3 A.M. meeting between Cachoeira and federal assistant prosecutor José Roberto Santoro, at that point in charge of investigating possible corruption within President Lula da Silva’s administration. In the tape, prosecutor Santoro is trying to convince Cachoeira to turn over the first recording, in which a senior aide to the president’s chief of staff solicits under-the-counter campaign funds plus a 1% commission for himself. The prosecutor seems to relish the political implications of his investigation, and fears only the interference of his boss, the chief prosecutor.

“In a little while the chief prosecutor is going to arrive.…” Santoro is recorded as saying. “He’s going to come here to my office, and see me taking a deposition to, pardon the expression, screw the chief of staff of the president of the republic, the most powerful man in the government, that is, [a deposition] to destroy the Lula government.”

In Brasilia, congress broke from sitting so the senators and representatives could crowd around the lunch-room TV to listen.

President da Silva himself said only that the prosecutor’s comments were a ‘very grave’ matter. His senate leader Aloizio Mercadante was less circumspect. “The [tape] suggests political motivations and an intention to conspire, not [just] against the government, but against democracy,” Mercadante said in April 2nd press conference in Brasilia.

Assistant prosecutor Santoro denied any political bias, saying he was simply using the tricks of the investigator’s trade to pressure a recalcitrant suspect into turning over important evidence. Santoro has since been suspended and put under investigation.

According to political scientist David Fleischer, the revelation offers Mr. da Silva’s party a heaven-sent opportunity to get out from under a scandal that had seemingly paralysed the government. “They were looking for anything, and this just fell from sky,” says Fleischer, a Brazil expert and associate professor at the University of Brasilia.

The supposed paralysis of the government was more a matter of perception than reality, according to Fleischer. “If you look at the congress, there was a lot of work getting done, ” he says. However, the weakening of the president’s chief of staff – the man in charge of pushing through government legislation – has meant a lot more demands for patronage and pork-barrelling from smaller parties in the government’s coalition.

What the lengthy scandal has also done, Fleischer believes, is point up President da Silva’s weaknesses as a leader. “This shows quite dramatically that [President] Lula is the charismatic figurehead of this government. He does not have the day-to-day political management skills to run a government or push through legislation. In that sense, the king has lost some of his clothes.”

A national poll taken since the scandal broke showed a nine-point drop in the president’s approval rating, from 69% to a 60%. Only a bare majority, 54%, approved of the way in which Mr. da Silva is running the country.

The 48 days of scandal also brought to the surface a simmering discontent within the governing Worker’s Party (PT). Leftist credentials aside, since coming to power Mr. da Silva has stuck rigorously to a conservative economic policy. Spending has been held in check. Interest rates have been kept in the double digits to stamp out inflation. Growth in Mr. da Silva’s first year in office was essentially zero.

This poor performance has lead to frequent calls for the resignation of the finance minister, many from disgruntled members of the governing PT party. Party members have also expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s much-trumpeted new social programs, many of which have been announced but then left partially or fully un-funded.

Speaking at a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Brazil’s 1964 military coup, former Education Minster Cristovam Buarque said that the tape-and-bribery scandal has only captivated the public because his own PT party had failed to captivate them with their own project of social development.

According to political scientist David Fleischer, the disappointment of the party’s left wing was inevitable. “They’ve only just woken up and found they were dreaming the wrong dream,” says Fleischer.

President da Silva responded to these complaints in recent speech at a car factory near São Paulo, “Don’t expect me to be anything more than the president of the republic,” Mr. da Silva said. “I don’t have the powers of God to work miracles.”

// posted by Shawn @ 3:06 PM

Thursday, March 04, 2004

Thursday, March 4, 2004 8:41 AM

I now live in Ipanema. It’s not the absolute trendiest neighbourhood in Rio. That title now probably goes to Jardim Botanico or Gavea, areas that snuggle in amongst the Atlantic rainforest on the slopes of the Floresta da Tijuca. But Ipanema remains a strong runner up, one of those enclaves of first world shops and high end restaurants that – just by coincidence— is almost exclusively white.

It’s a beach neighbourhood, a arc of flat land about 4 blocks city wide, sandwiched between the ocean on one side and either mountains or a vast, occasionally fragrant lagoon on the other. The streets are laid out in a grid- long streets paralleling the beach, short ones running perpendicular between the sand and the hills or lagoon. My street is Teixeira de Melo, near the less-trendy Copacabana end of the beach. I live about as far from the beach as one can, which in Ipanema is about 3 and a half blocks. According to every map I’ve ever seen, the end of my street dead ends against the mountain.

In real life, the end of the street there’s a stair cut into the hillside, that wends its way back and forth up a short cliff to an agglomeration of ramshackle cinderblock shanties, that seem to spill down the hillside like an old lava flow. It’s a favela, an illegal mountainside shantytown. I’ve never been up there. It’s not a place where middle class flatlanders venture. What I know of it I read in newspapers— sensational stories with a whole new vocabulary – tiroteio – exchange of gunfire; balla perdida – stray bullet; those words usually followed by matado – killed, or ferido – injured, followed again by competing claims as to whether the dead or injured were drug dealers or innocent bystanders.

Yesterday morning on my way out to do my obligatory run along the waterfront, I spent a few minutes watching the entrance to the favela. An old black woman – favelados are predominantly black or dark brown nordestinos, dressed in a kind of Southern Baptist Sunday church dress was working her way up the cliffside, one arthritic step at a time. It took her a good five minutes to struggle up two of the ten or so switchbacks.

She was entering a world in many ways completely isolated from mine here in the flats. Live in a favela and you can’t get mail. You don’t have an address, because you’re not on the official street plan, because officially your street does not exist. So mail is out. You can’t get a pizza delivered, or drugs (did I mention drugstores deliver in Brazil?) or an ambulance. Electricity they have – during the energy rationing period two years back the only part of the city with lights on at night were the favelas. If you’re stealing the power anyway, you don’t really need to worry about consumption levels. Water comes from wells, or sometimes central pipes. Sewage is a mystery, at least to me, at least for now. I suspect they just let it run downhill to us folks here in the flatlands.

The old woman had made it about a quarter of the way up when two teenage boys came tumbling down, dressed in microthin neoprene and carrying swim fins and bodyboards, off for a hour or a morning or a day at the beach. In some ways favelados are just like regular Cariocas.

Two men neither entered or left the favela, but just hung out wandering around by the favela entrance. A week ago I would have said they were bored or lazy. Now I’m pretty sure they’re the local drug supply. As in Canada, marijuana usage is widespread in Brazil. Unlike Canada, good middle class people don’t grow BC Bud in their basements. Instead, flatlanders drive to spots near the local favela, where there’s always someone with a supply to sell.

The one man noticed me watching, so I moved off to the beach for my run. All seemed peaceful.

Yesterday evening, the police raided the other side of this favela, the slope of the hill that drops down into Copacabana. They entered in a large squad, flak-jackets over their vitals, assault rifles at the ready. According to favela dwellers quoted in the paper, they entered guns blazing. Four favela dwellers were killed.

Here on the other side of the hill, we didn’t hear a thing.

// posted by Shawn @ 8:35 AM

Published my first article on Brazil as a Brazil resident. It's a Globe and Mail piece on Lula's first major scandal (sniff!).

The Globe kills its links at odd times, so here it is in full: There's only one factual error: 1) I'm not a Toronto-based freelancer

Brazil's President may lose big on the lottery
A corruption scandal involving one of his party officials and a high-level bookie threatens Luiz da Silva's moral crusade. SHAWN BLORE reports

By SHAWN BLORE
Saturday, February 28, 2004 - Page F3
RIO DE JANEIRO -- His office is a crate on the sidewalk, in a part of Rio de Janeiro where the street vendors gather by day and the prostitutes stroll by night, yet this wheezing 50ish man has done what Brazil's financial and political elite could not: He has stopped reformist President Luiz Inacio (Lula) da Silva in his tracks, at least for the moment.

The man known as Albino, for his shock of white hair, is a bicheiro, a bookie for Brazil's incredibly popular and illegal jogo do bicho, the "animal lottery." Like hundreds of other bicheiros across Rio, and thousands of others in Brazil, Albino sells small slips of paper offering the chance to win up to 4,000 reals (about $2,000) in one of three daily draws.

"Everybody plays," Albino says. "Businessmen. Engineers. Bus drivers. Maids."

On a daily basis, he brings in about 500 reals ($250), 90 per cent of which he has to pass up the food chain to a mid-level bicheiro, who controls about 25 stands throughout the city. Assuming Albino's sales are typical, this one network is collecting about 12,000 reals a day, some of which gets passed up to a higher-level bookie, whose daily take from his network is probably closer to 200,000 reals. Assuming conservatively that there are just 10 high-level networks across Brazil, the animal lottery brings in at least two million reals daily, and likely much more.

It is this large pool of ready cash that has turned the animal lottery into a nightmare for Mr. da Silva and his socialist Workers Party (known by its Portuguese acronym, PT).

Looking for campaign funds in the run-up to the 2002 presidential election, a PT official named Waldomiro Diniz, then serving as the head of the Rio de Janeiro state lottery corporation, solicited a donation from a high-level bicheiro, Carlos Augusto Ramos, a.k.a. Carlos Cachoeira (Charlie Waterfall in English). Mr. Diniz planned to take 1 per cent of the money as a personal commission, and promised to use his influence on the bookie's behalf once in government.

Unknown to both, the incident was caught on videotape, a copy of which was recently obtained and broadcast in a nationwide exposé by Brazilian newsmagazine Epoca.

For a President who styled his campaign as a moral crusade against corruption, the revelation was a disaster, made worse when it was revealed days later that in 2003 Mr. Diniz, by then a senior aide to the President's powerful chief of staff, had attempted to steer a huge lottery contract into the hands of his generous bicheiro friend.

Mr. Diniz was fired. PT officials tried to claim that his attempted influence-peddling had nothing to do with the government, because the incident took place before Mr. da Silva and the PT took power.
Unconvinced, Brazilian opposition parties began calling for a wide-ranging parliamentary inquiry into alleged connections between bicheiros and PT candidates. Under the Brazilian system, a parliamentary inquiry requires the support of 27 members of the 81-member senate. So far, 21 senators have said they support calling an inquiry.

Carlos Cachoeira was also revealed to be part or full owner of numerous bingo halls, which it was alleged he was using to launder his jogo do bicho takings. In response, on Carnaval Sunday, Mr. da Silva ordered Brazil's bingo halls closed by special presidential decree.

On Carnaval Monday, in the midst of a national holiday, the President rearranged his schedule to make a radio broadcast in which he reiterated that there was no proof that Mr. Diniz had done anything illegal in his government role. Should further accusations arise, Mr. da Silva promised, the federal police would have complete autonomy to investigate.

Appearances aside, he said, his government was not experiencing a crisis. "At no point could any person in Brazil imagine that any accusation could cause a political crisis in this country," he said, adding that "I have learned in one year as President to never lose my calm, to always retain peace of mind, because my tranquillity is something I can pass on to the people."

Meanwhile, Mr. da Silva's inner cabinet has been recalled from holidays for an emergency meeting. The President, who spent his first year in office dealing with government debt and soaring interest rates, had planned in his second year to move on to core PT issues such as land reform and bringing down Brazil's double-digit unemployment rate. However, the sole topic of the special cabinet meeting is the scandal caused by jogo do bicho.

The animal lottery has been a problem for governments since its invention more than 100 years ago in 1892.

The game was created by the Baron of Drummond, the cash-strapped owner of Rio de Janeiro's zoo, who decided to boost flagging attendance by holding a daily draw. Visitors were given a ticket with a picture of one of the zoo's animals. At the end of the day, the Baron would spin a wheel festooned with animals to select the winner.

Tickets were soon being bought by those who hadn't even visited the zoo. Within months, government authorities made its first attempt to shut down the game. The animal lottery simply shifted to a new habitat in the city centre, an environment in which it has thrived ever since. Rudyard Kipling, visiting Rio in the 1920s, wrote of seeing bookies wandering the streets carrying placards with colourful pictures of animals.

These days, bicheiros have neither placards nor signs. They're identifiable only by the small list of winning numbers posted on a nearby wall or lamppost, or in Albino's case, on the front of his wooden crate.
Whatever the advertising, however, the essence of the game remains unchanged.

There are 25 different animals, each of which is assigned a sequence of four consecutive numbers. Ostrich is 01 to 04, horse 41-44, camel 29-32, and so on up to cow, which occupies 95-99. The most common way to play is to bet one real on an animal. If the last two numerals in the daily state lottery draw form one of the four numbers designated by your animal, the bicheiro owes you 15 reals. For longer odds and higher payouts, you can try to pick the last three or even four numbers exactly, or you can choose a combination of a number and numerals designated by an animal.

Over the decades, superstitious theory has evolved around selecting the proper animal, much of it involving dreams. Horse, for example, can be indicated by a dream of a horse, or by dreams of wheat or milk or naked women.

In the 20 minutes or so it takes Albino to explain the game and its attendant dream theory, three people stop to place a total of 12 reals in bets. According to Albino, the President's political problems haven't affected his business at all.

Shawn Blore is a Toronto-based freelance writer.

// posted by Shawn @ 8:29 AM

Friday, February 20, 2004

Okay, this is the first post, and as such it's really just a test. I have never before blogged, making me a blog virgen or one of the great un-blogged or whatever net-nerd term is currently in vogue.

The purpose of this blog is to give my raw thoughts and impressions of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. I'm a journalist, a freelancer, with credits in most of Canada's better magazines and newspapers. Successful, but not enough that your average joe would recognize the name. Like everyone from Evelyn Waugh onward I always wanted to be a foreign correspondent, but somehow I never managed to join the right paper or schmooze enough managememt types to get that cushy New York Times foreign posting. So I'm doing it my way. The plan is to set up in Rio, then sell my expertise on Brazil to newspapers and magazines in the far-off Gringo-speaking world.

I arrived late Monday. It's now early Friday. In the three plus days I've been here I've found an apartment, seen Caetano Veloso, danced in a 1920s dance hall, and sold a story to Canada's Globe and Mail. Not bad, especially considering Rio is moving into Carnaval, when the entire city and country beyond closes shop for 6 full days of samba-fuelled silliness.

More updates later, as I decide what I want to do with this blog.

// posted by Shawn @ 7:30 AM