Money disappeared, going to NGOs with links to the minister’s political party, the PCdoB, Communist Party of Brazil.

The new minister of Sports, Aldo Rebelo also from the PcdoB-SP, in his first comments following his appointment, declared that he will avoid contracts with NGOs.

Rebelo is also expected to make many personnel changes in the ministry, where aides to the former minister are accused of being involved in the embezzlement scheme.

However, Rebelo made it clear that the changes were not because anyone was considered guilty of criminal activities. “Changes do not mean that anyone is being condemned. Investigations will continue and the ministry will cooperate,” he declared.

Rebelo denied receiving campaign contributions from companies with commercial contracts with the Brazilian Soccer Federation (CBF) and added that they would not affect his work at the Ministry of Sports, anyway.

He concluded by saying that he would be independent in his relations with FIFA, the International Soccer Association, that will hold the World Soccer Cup in Brazil in 2014, and intends to defend the General Law of the Cup and other interests of the Brazilian government.

As expected, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff appointed a Communist Party congressman as the country’s new Sports minister Thursday, replacing Orlando Silva, an official from the same party who resigned as he fights corruption allegations.
 
Rebelo will be the government’s point man for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

Rebelo served as former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s minister for political coordination and institutional relations in 2004 and 2005 and he was president of the lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, from 2005 to 2007.

“I received an invitation and I accepted,” said Rebelo after meeting with President Rousseff.

Rebelo, 56, started as a student leader and journalist, joined the Communist party in 1977 and was first elected to Congress in 1991. Currently he was steering through Congress the new Forestry Code which basically regulates occupation of land and use of soil in the Amazon basin.

The original Executive text has had several chapters modified which allegedly favor big landowners and loggers and thus clashing with president Rousseff. At the time Rebelo went as far as to suggest that “the President is misinformed and influenced by radical environmentalist groups.”

Candido Vaccarezza head of the government’s group in the Lower House downplayed the conflict to which he referred as ‘normal’ in the political debate: “he is a very much respected lawmaker and you can’t judge a person committed to peoples’ causes on an episode”.

Orlando Silva resigned Wednesday after Brazil’s Supreme Court said it had opened an investigation into allegations he had taken kickbacks on sports-related projects. Silva has denied the accusations before a congressional panel.

Silva is the sixth minister forced from Rousseff’s government. Five of the others also had faced corruption allegations.

FIFA’s top administrator, secretary general Jerome Valcke, said Thursday that he regrets the situation that forced Silva to resign.

Meanwhile, the IOC said its relationship with Brazilian government officials “remains excellent,” and that it is “confident the changes will not impact preparations for Rio 2016.”

ABr/MP

These groups often work with indigenous groups in the Amazon and say their main concern is to help indigenous people to secure and protect their rights. Environmentalists on the other have long been decrying deforestation of the region be it for farming or cattle raising.

Brazilian officials and the Armed Forces have often voiced concern that the foreigners are a front for efforts to take control of the Amazon land.

The Brazilian minister of Justice, Tarso Genro, has come in defense of the bill saying that the new legislation "will separate chaff from wheat. This is a way to back the true NGOs and at the same time protect the country's sovereignty. We need to have special rules to control the entry of NGOs in the Amazon, especially the foreign ones but not only the foreign ones."

According to the prestigious daily "O Estado de S. Paulo," the Lula administration in tightening its siege around the NGOs wishes to fight biopiracy, as well as international influence over the Brazilian Indians and the sale of land inside the Amazon jungle.

And Genro went on: "We actually wish to strengthen and to support NGOs being very rigorous with them and, therefore, fortifying those that are authentic. But at the same time denying them the right to use property of the State, territory of the Union, and environmental spaces for purposes that do not belong to our national project or the wishes of the Brazilian people."

The minister told reporters that the Brazilian government has been receiving praise for fighting biopiracy. "We will carry on and intensify this work. This makes sense not only to the nation but also is related to another question: when the rule of law is not applied against this kind of irregularity, it gradually starts to lose its legitimacy."

Deputy André Costa from the PDT party of Rio de Janeiro is sponsoring a bill that would make oversight of NGO activities in the Amazon the norm.

Costa says most of the NGOs are well-intentioned, but "some of them serve the geopolitical interests of other countries. They use foreign financing to engage in activities that are not always in the interest of the people of the Amazon."

Ealier this month, Minister of Defense and Vice President, José Alencar, said that there should be a greater presence of Brazilian Armed Forces in the Amazon region, along with more funding for Army, Air Force and Navy activities there.

Alencar called the Amazon the Ministry of Defense’s most important area. Speaking to an audience of military personnel and students at the First Seminar on National Defense in the Amazon he declared he would discuss the issue with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Alencar said the development of the Amazon was urgent and that the 13 million inhabitants of the region get little assistance.

He said the nation and the Congress must recognize that a large part of what assistance there is in the Amazon comes from a small group of dedicated men and women in the Armed Forces.

"We need to provide more funding so that those who care for the Amazon can work with efficiency," said the vice president.

Resistance Strategy

The Armed Forces of Brazil are capable of handling the threat of foreign military occupation in the Amazon. Nevertheless, they remain "in need of reoutfitting."

"We in the Ministry of Defense consider our forces adequate to defend the Amazon region in a regional conflict. In the case of a threat from a superior power, we shall be compelled to adopt a strategy that the Army has been training very effectively, called the strategy of resistance," the secretary of Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs of the Ministry of Defense, Fleet Admiral Miguel Ângelo Davena, affirmed earlier this year.

The admiral affirmed that the "fleet" (the panoply of Armed Forces equipment) currently assigned to the region is not up to this task, but that the problem can be corrected by transferring vehicles and vessels from other regions of the country.

"I believe that it is common knowledge to all Brazilians that our forces need to be reoutfitted," the admiral observed.

The admiral made these declarations in response to questions by lawmakers and in electronic mail sent by viewers of the TV Senate’s coverage of the public hearing "The Internationalization of the Amazon: Real Risk or Imaginary Fear," held in April by the Senate Foreign Relations and National Defense Commission.

ABr

A number of representatives of the Amazon region social movements at the III Meeting with Mercosur have expressed concern over the relationship between Mercosur and the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The meeting took place in Belém, the capital of the northern state of Pará, last week.

For example, Guilherme Carvalho, of the Federation of Agencies for Social Assistance and Education (Fase), declared that he was worried about the United States smothering trade agreements set up by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

However, the coordinator for integration at the Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade, declared that Mercosur agreements will remain in effect even with the FTAA in place.

The coordinator basically repeated the position taken by Luiz Dulci, the presidential secretary general, who said that “the relationship with the US must be balanced.”

The coordinator added that any commercial benefits conceded to the US could not exceed those given to Mercosur partners.

“What that means is that Mercosur ties are deep and cannot be shunted aside by other agreements with any other countries,” she said.

ABr – www.radiobras.gov.br

Various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) addressed a letter yesterday to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva requesting an effective State presence in the Amazon.

The organizations also staged a demonstration in front of the Presidential Palace in Brasí­lia to recall Sister Dorothy Stang’s struggle on behalf of the peoples of the forest and to call for peace in the countryside.

Sister Dorothy, who was killed by six gunshot wounds on February 12 of this year in Anapu, Pará, in the North of Brazil, would have turned 74 yesterday.

In the document sent to the President, the NGOs urged that federal government organs be beefed up to ensure an end to violence and impunity in the Amazon.

One of the Greenpeace representatives, Carlos Rittl, believes that very little has changed since Dorothy Stang’s death.

“Despite all the commotion over Sister Dorothy’s assassination, things haven’t changed much. The people who live there continue to be persecuted.”

He says that the federal government must adopt more concrete measures. “We are presenting the government with clear demands for it to guarantee people’s security and acknowledge the demands of the communities and the rights of the peoples of the forest.”

The letter asks for the territorial organization and property regularization of community areas in the state of Pará to be carried out, as well as the listing of rural properties, for the region’s conservation units to be implemented.

The document also asks for Rural and Extractive Family Production to be fortified to be able to resist the expansion of entrepreneurial agricultural.

Another request is that Sister Dorothy Stang’s murder trial be transferred to the federal court system.

Today, the Federal Appeals Court is expected to decide whether to transfer the case to the federal sphere.

“The impunity of the crimes that have occurred in Pará give no hope that state courts are capable of bringing everyone involved in the case to judgment. Thus we believe that justice will only be done through federalizing the case,” Rittl said.

Agência Brasil

This month around 80 Brazilian non-governmental organizations launched a platform defending everyone’s right to water and sanitary services. The document, better known as the Global Water Struggle Platform, contains ten demands directed at international agencies and governmental bodies.

The United Nations is asked to recognize water as a human right. Federal governments are urged to pay attention to native and rural populations.

The platform, which was drafted during the V World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, south of Brazil, underscores the risks of granting private companies control over public water supply and sanitation services.

“The privatization of water has proved negative in various countries. In Latin America we have two good examples of failure: Bolivia and Argentina,” declares Jocélio Drummond, represent of the Public Services International (PSI), a organization made up of civil servants.

According to him, the Bolivian government, under public pressure, cancelled the contract with a transnational corporation. The Bolivians were dissatisfied with the rate hikes.

In Argentina, on the other hand, it was the same transnational corporation that took the initiative to break the contract. Its reason: with the devaluation of the peso, profits declined, even with rate hikes.

“Where privatization of water occurred, the number of people with access to quality water fell, there were rate hikes, and a large part of the population, unable to pay, had these services cut off,” Drummond reveals. In the platform, the organizations name the World Bank as one of the instigators of concessions to private firms.

But the PSI representative admits that the Bank has changed this policy in recent years. “The World Bank no longer defends privatization at any cost, as it did in the ’90’s. It now suggests partial participation, with well defined regulation.”

According to Drummond, the Brazilian entities are going to demand that in international negotiations, especially with the European Union, Brazil exclude water supply and sanitation services as an area of investment for European companies.

In the coming months the organizations also plan to mobilize other non-governmental groups to adhere to the platform. Especially those that represent Indians and women, domestic water managers.

“This population is severely affected by the lack of water. It is necessary to place the priority on the supply for humans, not businesses,” the PSI representative contends.

“Many people think about the jobs a company can bring to a region, but they forget that water is a public good.”

Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil