Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brazil. Show all posts

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Olga Benário Prestes (1908-1942)

Olga Benário Prestes is an extraordinary- but not broadly known- case of a Brazilian communist hero. Olga was born in Munich, Germany as Olga Gutmann Benário, to a Jewish family. At the age of 15, In 1923, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 she helped her husband and comrade Otto Braun's escape from Moabit prison. She went to Czechoslovakia and from there, reunited with Braun, to Moscow. As an active figure of the Communist Youth International, Olga undertakes several missions; in one of these she was briefly arrested in Britain accussed as a spy. 

In 1934 she was tasked with helping the return to Brazil of Luís Carlos Prestes, the leader of the Communist Party of Brazil, to whom she was assigned as a bodyguard. In order to accomplish this mission, false papers were created stating that they were a Portuguese married couple. After a failed insurrection in November 1935, Benário and her husband went into hiding, and after barely escaping a police raid at Ipanema, they were both eventually arrested in January 1936, during the harsh anti-communist campaign declared after dictator Getúlio Vargas had proclaimed martial law and was already plotting the 1937 coup that would eventually lead to the institution of the fascist-like Estado Novo régime.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Rio Olympic Games- A celebration for the capitalist elites and multinational corporations, not for the people

COMMENTARY:

These days, the beautiful city of Rio De Janeiro is divided by a wall- on one side are the new, luxurious Olympic venues which are ready to host athletes from all over the world; on the other side, there is a complex of multiple favelas where poverty, misery and gangs dominate. This divided face of Rio mirrors the immense class-based inequalities in Brazil; a capitalist country of over 200 million people which is the world's ninth largest economy by nominal GDP. 

More than 20% of Brazil's population lives below poverty line and less than 2 million brazilians (1% of the total population) owns 13% of the total household income. According to Forbes, the 15 richest families in Brazil are worth an estimated $122 billion- that means approximately 5% of the country's GDP. This is the social and economic framework of the country which hosts the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. 

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

On the developments in Brazil - The dilemmas of bourgeois management and the necessity of the anti-capitalist struggle

The people must disentangle themselves from the dilemmas of bourgeois management.
Source: Rizospastis, 22/5/2016 / Reproduced from inter.kke.gr.

The developments in Brazil, the escalation of the political crisis have been at the centre of attention internationally.
This is not strange, as we are talking about the 7th largest economy in the world, the 5th largest country in terms of area and population, and the largest country in the planet's southern hemisphere. A country that in previous years witnessed high levels of capitalist growth, indeed in 2011 it replaced Britain as being the world's 6th largest economy.
It plays a significant role in the framework of the BRICS alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as well as in important inter-state capitalist unions (.e.g.Celac, Mercosur/Unasur) that are being promoted in the American continent. We should also bear in mind that since 2004, i.e. in the period of the "progressive" governments, it has been the head of the military intervention in Haiti, which is being carried out under the mantle of the UN.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

José Reinaldo (Partido Comunista do Brasil): "Coup opens a new phase of the political struggle in Brazil"

Source: Solidnet.org
The legislative-judicial-mediatic coup d’etat in Brazil is going on. On April 17, under authoritarian and farcical driving, the House of Representatives approved the admissibility of impeachment proceedings against the President of the Republic. In the coming days, the Senate welcome the decision, by simple majority, authorize the opening of the procedure and immediately result in expulsion for up to 180 days of President Dilma Rousseff from the post to which she was democratically elected, with 54 million votes.
By José Reinaldo Carvalho (*).
In few months, the Senate will took the predicable final decision, converted to the Court, under the Presidency of the Supreme Court. The traced and executed script in both congressional houses showed so far that there is a game of marked cards and the exercise of a relentless power of the majority made up of reactionary parties. There are not worth logic, rationality or the truth of the facts. It is an abominable counterfeit trial, led by disgusting politicians. A ritual used to give a false constitutionality to something that is already decided. . A judgment made as an expression of a coup, which does not take into account consistent legal criteria.
In recent days, another throw into unbelievable coup plot, aimed at medium-term future: the request of the Attorney General to the Supreme Court to investigate President Dilma Rousseff and former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva for "obstruction operation Lava Jato[1]". Invested of Torquemada powers, the attorney general has denounced Lula as "head of a criminal organization" in the operation of the so-called "petrolão[2]".

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Brazilian Communists: The People will defeat villainy and the coup (English / Português)

Source: Solidnet.
Infamy and villainy were the main characters this Sunday (April 17th), in the House of Representatives. A session to fill with opprobrium those responsible for this hateful plot weaved by the Vice President of the Republic, Michel Temer, whose memory will bring shame to Brazilians for many generations.
By Socorro Gomes*.
He, who wants to usurp the mandate given to President Dilma through the vote of 54 million Brazilians, will have a place in history as a man who used his post as Vice President to plot and conspire and, going through the odious path of treason against the Constitution he swore to uphold, reach power without votes, trashing democracy and the people's will.
Driven by an uncontrollable ambition, Michel Temer has chosen those promoting the coup to offer his service as a hunting hound in a criminal gear. The master of ceremony in this fraudulent act masked as a trial for an inexistent crime against the fiscal order, the so-called “pedaladas”, was the House's President, Eduardo Cunha, who is a criminal defendant facing a process of destitution run by the House's Ethical Council, in trial for corruption in the Supreme Court. Just like buffoons are Representatives Jovair Arantes and Rogério Rosso. The alleged fiscal maneuvers (so-called “pedaladas”, a derogatory term) were not even mentioned by the Representatives while they declared their votes, in a clear demonstration of how unimportant for those “judging” is the subject of the report being voted.