Rasheed's World

Expansion of the GCC: Besieged monarchs

2011-05-21T11:41:00.005-03:00

The announcement last week in Riyadh that the Gulf Cooperation Council welcomed bids by Jordan and Morocco to join the organisation was met first with grunts of derision and then guffaws of mockery across the Arab world. But analysts are now realising that this is serious initiative by the six-nation member states of the GCC to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region and to find alternative ways of defending their common interests, following successful popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, without having to rely on the United States.
"The timing of this announcement has all to do with the upheavals around the Arab world, and this expansion request, whether initiated by the GCC or by the countries concerned, would not have been countenanced under so- called 'normal' circumstances," said Mohamed Ramadi, a professor of economics at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Spurring this announcement has been the growing feeling of insecurity on the part of GCC states, which saw their once-staunch ally Hosni Mubarak unceremoniously driven from office by popular street protests in Egypt, with the US seen as having stood by without doing anything, as well as violent street protests by Shia in Bahrain, which were put down by a Saudi-led GCC force of soldiers and policemen, and ongoing street protests in Syria.
"Saudi Arabia will not allow the political unrest in the region to destabilise the Arab monarchies. In Yemen, the Saudis are insisting on an orderly transition of power and a dignified exit for President Ali Abdullah Saleh (a courtesy that was not extended to Hosni Mubarak, despite the former Egyptian president's many years as a strong US ally)," wrote Nawaf Obaid, a security adviser to the Saudi government, this week in the Washington Post.
The benefits of allowing Jordan and Morocco into what has been until now a club of oil-rich Gulf states, would be manifold: the Gulf states would benefit by having access to the political and military capabilities of these two countries, while Jordan and Morocco would benefit from the massive amounts of economic aid that the Gulf countries could pump into their economies.
"Jordan and Morocco are in need of capital investment and both regularly run fiscal deficits, whereas the GCC as a bloc is a significant capital exporter," explained Jane Kinninmont, a senior research fellow on the Middle East and North Africa at Chatham House in London.
Indeed, Samer Al-Tawil, a former minister of tourism in Jordan, told Al-Arabiya that his country's military troops could be deployed in the Gulf if Jordan were allowed to join the GCC.
"Both countries have economic potential, but what makes them more attractive is the fact that they have well-trained Sunni armies which the GCC can use to counter what it sees as the Iranian threat, emanating from local Shia," said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli analyst. "The priority for the GCC countries is bolstering security forces with Sunni soldiers, from countries which are headed by monarchs, much like them. Neither Iraq nor Yemen are monarchical. They are also populated by Shia, which makes them much less attractive for the GCC."
If this proposed expansion goes ahead, many observers have pointed out that the regional grouping will become a club of Sunni monarchies (with the exception of Oman which practices the Ibadi form of Islam) versus the Arab republics. But many doubts remain on whether or not the GCC will have the political will to pull off this plan.
Established 30 years ago to group the six Arab monarchies that rim the southern shores of the Persian Gulf, namely Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, the GCC was as much a reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the revolution in Iran, that both took place in 1979, as it was to the eight-year long Iran-Iraq War that started in 1980.
Long on rhetoric but extremely slow in actually achieving much, the GCC set itself ambitious goals of having visa-free travel for its citizens between member states, a common currency and harmonised trade tariffs. Military cooperation was also high on the agenda, with a much-touted Peninsula Shield force composed of soldiers from all six countries, that was supposed to be a quick-reaction force to defend against external and internal threats.
Unfortunately, the GCC never achieved many of its lofty goals. GCC citizens do enjoy visa-free travel in the region, and can invest and work in each other's countries without any red tape. Customs tariffs have also been harmonised, but until the intervention in Bahrain in March, the Peninsula Shield force was by all accounts dead, and a monetary union that was supposed to happen last year has not come to pass. Rivalry between member states is blamed for many of these failures. The UAE and Oman refused to join the common currency, and Saudi Arabia, by far the most influential member of the GCC, has ongoing border disputes with Qatar and the UAE.
The only other country in the Arabian Peninsula that is not a member of the GCC is Yemen, which because of its poverty and political instability has been given only observer status in the GCC. It has formally applied to join the group, and at least on paper, it is poised to become a full member in 2016, but many observers doubt this will ever happen.
"The economic disparities between Yemen and the wealthy GCC states would be too great for financial and monetary union to take place, unless there was a huge amount of fiscal redistribution," said Kinninmont. "Yemen's membership bid has never been thought very likely to succeed and the announcement about Jordan and Morocco makes it seem even less likely. The GCC should see it in their interest to help develop Yemen's economy, as the country's poverty and resource depletion will only contribute to regional instability."
To continue reading my article on the Al-Ahram Weekly website click here.

Many questions remain over death of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-05T12:59:00.011-03:00

EARLY Monday morning I woke up to the fantastical news that the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, had been found and killed by US Special Forces in Pakistan. Not only that, but that his body had been flown to Afghanistan and then taken to the USS Carl Vinson warship in the north Arabian Sea where his body was buried at sea following the Islamic washing of his body and prayers.

Scenes of jubilant Americans at Ground Zero in New York and gathered outside the White House in Washington, DC, showed them chanting patriotic slogans and holding up signs that read, among other things, “USA 1, OBL 0”. I found this outbreak of patriotism rather distasteful but fully understandable given the 3,000 people killed in the Twin Towers and at the Pentagon when the jets hijacked by the Al-Qaeda terrorists slammed into them on Sept. 11, 2001. (Click here to read Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy’s feelings at Ground Zero following OBL’s death. Click here to read Leon Wieseltier's case for American joy at OBL's death.)

Immediately the media began reporting that OBL had used his youngest wife as a human shield when the Navy Seals burst into his master bedroom on the third floor of a large house inside a fortified compound in the military-town of Abbotabad, just 50 miles north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. This later turned out to be false. What does seem to be true is that the US Special Forces flew in under the radar from their base in Afghanistan, landed just outside OBL’s compound and shot their way in a 40-minute gunfight. One of the three helicopters used in the raid was destroyed and left behind after it experienced a mechanical malfunction.

The White House then later released a dramatic photo (above) supposedly showing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other officials watching a live video feed of the raid on OBL’s compound. Obama is frowning and Clinton is covering her mouth with her right hand as if in horror. It was as if real life were imitating an episode of “24”. This photo was later proved to be staged, as CIA chief Leon Panetta told the press that there was a 20-25 minute blackout in the live video feed from the raid in which he and others at the CIA waited anxiously in a windowless operations room at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, waiting for news on the raid.

President Obama’s decision on Wednesday not to release any photos or video of the dead OBL, because the images were too gruesome and could incite further hatred and violence against the US and Americans in the Muslim world, of course immediately raised the suspicions of conspiracy theorists around the globe that perhaps OBL was not really dead or that he had actually died years ago. Indeed, it was reported as early as 2002 that he suffered from kidney failure and needed regular dialysis of his blood. In a strange interview that former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto gave to David Frost in 2007, only months before her brutal assassination, she claimed that OBL had been murdered in Pakistan by a Pakistani militant.

The most worrying aspect of this whole episode is the level of Pakistani involvement in concealing the presence of OBL in Pakistan for so long. Some accounts say that the Saudi terrorist had been living in that compound in Abbotabad since 2006, right under the noses of a nearby elite military academy and the many retired military officers who live in the area. The support of terrorist groups in Pakistan and of the Afghan Mujahideen by key elements in the Pakistani ISI intelligence services has been well known for years now. The US has provided Pakistan with $7 billion in military and economic aid over the past decade, and the US Congress is surely now going to try and cut back this aid following the discovery and death of OBL deep inside Pakistani territory.

The death of OBL of course does not mean the end of Al-Qaeda. Far from it, the terrorist organization has many cells and commanders. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who knew OBL when he was fighting the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan in the early 1980s, says that OBL had very little involvement in the daily running of the group’s terrorist actions, and that he functioned more as a charismatic figurehead and fundraiser. Yet it is also a fact that Al-Qaeda has lost much of its support in the Islamic world, especially following its bloody attacks in Saudi Arabia in 2004 and in Iraq. The wave of Arab revolutions this spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria, led mostly by non-militant youths, suggests that Al-Qaeda and its intolerant and religious ideology has been left behind.

The Republican hawks in the US, while being forced to admit that Obama did good in capturing and killing OBL (watching former Vice President Dick Cheney squirm on TV while praising Obama’s win was priceless!), are now trying to link the US success in Pakistan to the intelligence gathered by torturing terror suspects around the world and in Guantanamo Bay. John Woo, the former Justice Department under the Bush administration who gave the legal cover for waterboarding and other forceful methods of interrogation of terror suspects, wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal that the death of OBL at the hands of American forces was indeed due to US interrogation tactics that Obama no longer uses. I find that hard to believe, as it was the tracking of one of OBL’s couriers for several years that finally brought them to the 12-foot high walls of OBL’s compound in Abbotabad, and not torture.

Woo also claims that Obama specifically told his military commanders that OBL should not be captured alive as this would pose a problem in terms of where to hold him while he was being questioned. As Woo points out, Obama certainly did not want to have to place a captured OBL in Guantanamo Bay, and as the US found out, no country wanted OBL when he was dead, let alone alive.

The Obama administration has now admitted that some of the details they initially provided the press about the raid on OBL’s compound were wrong. Some Republican politicians in Washington have pointed out that administration officials should have said they didn’t know for sure when asked questions that they did not have sufficient information to answer correctly.

This whole affair leaves US-Pakistani relations in tatters, with American distrust of Pakistani intentions at a record high. Pakistani officials are now claiming that they have put their government in a difficult position by so openly supporting US military strikes against targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And indeed there is much anti-American sentiment in Pakistan, especially in the border areas near Afghanistan. The fact that the Obama administration has tripled the number of drone attacks on targets in Pakistan compared to under the Bush administration, according to Woo, surely does not boost the Pakistani government’s popularity in the more conservative and religious areas of the country.

Obama and the Pakistani government now have a very delicate task of moving forward without relenting on the war against Islamist terrorists, while at the same time winning minds and hearts in the Islamic world by convincing Muslims around the world that the war against terror is not a war against all Muslims but is just against those fanatics who are against the West and the freedoms of pluralistic societies. That has been and will continue to be the hard part.

Viva generic medications!

2011-04-30T10:34:00.004-03:00

I WAS pleasantly surprised on Thursday (28/04/2011) when I discovered at the pharmacy that my anti-cholesterol medicine Crestor is now available in a much cheaper generic form!

I had been paying around R$120 ($76.40) a month for 30 pills of 10mg Crestor, which is manufactured by Astra-Zeneca in Puerto Rico and imported into Brazil. This week I bought the generic brand of rosuvastatina calcica for only R$56.30 ($35.80) a box, a huge savings of R$63.70 ($40.50)!

Astra-Zeneca claims that its patent on Crestor is valid until at least 2016, and had succeeded in getting a preliminary judicial injunction stopping local companies from breaking the patent in order to manufacture generic versions. But the Brazilian government thought otherwise and got the injunction overturned, allowing local drug companies to manufacture generic versions of the drug starting in March. I bought generic rosuvastatina calcica made by Germed, but at least three other drug companies will soon have their own versions on the market. Astra-Zeneca said it will take further legal measures to try and protect its patent, but it seems unlikely that any Brazilian court will rule in their favor.

I understand the argument made by big drug companies that they have to be able to charge premium rates for a guaranteed number of years, by having an exclusive patent on drugs, in order to be able to finance the research and development of new drugs, which is expensive to undertake. But I also think that consumers should not be forced to pay through their noses for essential drugs that help them stay healthy just to pad the profits of these firms.

Brazil is on the right path by ending the exclusive patents on drugs that have already been on the market for at least five years. Viva generic drugs!

35-year-old pine tree comes down

2011-04-27T21:58:00.003-03:00

The 98-foot-high pine tree (30 meters) in our garden was chopped down today after my mother decided it had become a danger to us and our neighbors.

More than 30-years-old, our pine tree towered above us with its many branches and pine cones, that used to fall on our grounds and also on our neighbor's property. We often have small, localized wind storms that knock over many trees in Brasilia, so there was the real danger of this tree being blown over, or at the very least losing some large branches in strong winds.

Tiao, the man we hired to cut it down, first lopped off the top 20-feet. Once that was done, he made a large cut near the base of the tree. Ropes were attached to the tree in order to pull it down in the right direction. The first round of tugging on the tree by three men made the tree sway but not come down. It took the added strength of our maid Silvania and another guy to finally bring the tree down. I'll miss the tree and the pretty cones it produced.

Gasoline hits $7.30 a gallon in Brasilia!

2011-04-23T10:40:00.007-03:00

AS you can see from this picture to the right, residents of Brasilia woke up this morning to yet another hike in gasoline prices. According to the Correio Braziliense newspaper some gas stations are already charging from R$3.02 a liter ($7.30 a gallon) for regular gasoline, to R$3.17 a liter ($7.66 a gallon) for "aditivada" gasoline.

Just four days ago I wrote that Petrobras' distribution arm had promised not pass on additional costs to gas station owners given that the new crop of sugar cane was being processed all across the country. Petrobras blamed rising costs of gasoline on the high price of ethanol (made from sugar cane), that by federal law it must blend into all gasoline sold in Brazil. Obviously they cannot be trusted nor believed.

The Correio said that all gasoline stations across the Distrito Federal would be raising their gasoline prices above the R$3 a liter level by next week. With nearly 40 percent of the cost of a liter of gasoline going to federal and local taxes, both the federal and local governments could do something to ease the pain of motorists at the pump. Unfortunately for us, that is highly unlikely as neither wants to see a reduction in revenue that these gas taxes help rake in. Shame on them!

Brazilians in shock at gasoline prices: $7 a gallon!

2011-04-19T11:57:00.004-03:00

GASOLINE prices rose again last week in Brasilia to an eye-watering R$2.94 a liter, or $1.85 a liter. In US gallon terms, that’s a whopping $7.03 a gallon, something that American drivers would never accept.

Here in Brazil, the public has grown accustomed to heavy government taxing of fuels, despite a government program started in the 1970s to use alcohol as fuel for cars in an effort to reduce dependence on petroleum products. All gasoline in Brazil has alcohol added to it, in a 75% gasoline to 25% alcohol mix, and most cars built here have flex engines that can run on either gasoline or alcohol.

Brazil has long touted its self-sufficiency in oil production, importing oil only occasionally to meet spikes in demand. Indeed, its recent find of offshore oil below a four-kilometer wide layer of salt in the seabed, has been heralded as a chance for the country to become an oil exporter.

In the meantime, however, greedy sugar cane growers have been busy exporting huge amounts of Brazil’s sugar and alcohol production because they realized they could get more money for them on the international market than at home. This has pushed local sugar prices to extremely high levels, with a 5-kilo package of refined sugar selling for R$10 ($6.30) in supermarkets. This also pushed alcohol prices for cars to R$2.84 a liter at the pump, making it uneconomical to use in flex cars. Alcohol burns faster in car engines than gasoline does, so to make it worthwhile for car owners to use alcohol as a fuel its price must be less than R$2 a liter.

The administration of President Dilma Rousseff has said that it intends to reclassify alcohol as a fuel so that it can regulate it better. Alcohol is currently classified as an “agricultural” product. It also said it was thinking of taxing sugar exports at R$4 a kilo as a possible emergency measure to force sugar cane growers to export less sugar. Incredibly, Petrobras, the national Brazilian oil company, was forced to import alcohol from the United States this year to mix in with the gasoline it sells in the country. By law all gasoline has to have at least 20% alcohol in it, so fuel distributors were blaming this requirement for the escalating price of gas at the pump.

The price of gasoline in Brasilia has already been hiked three times this year, and gasoline station owners had warned that prices would reach R$3.03 a liter this week. Thankfully, the main fuel distributor in the country, which is owned by Petrobras, announced today (19/04/2011) that it was not going to pass on another increase in gasoline prices to fuel station owners because the new crop of sugar cane has begun to be processed at sugar mills around the country, easing supplies that had been stretched because of record exports and the inter-crop period.

There are two solutions to ending the sky-high prices Brazilians pay for gasoline: Either take out the alcohol that is mixed in to it, or cut the hefty federal and state taxes that are levied on gasoline. According to the Syndicate of Fuel Station Owners of the Distrito Federal, 37.75 percent of the cost of a liter of gasoline sold here goes to taxes: 24.58 percent in local taxes and 13.17 percent in federal taxes. Cutting those taxes would certainly ease the pain at the pump that consumers are feeling, but I doubt that there is any political will to forgo this revenue either on the federal or local level. As for taking the alcohol out of the gasoline, a federal law would have to be amended to do so, which means that Congress would have to agree to this, which would take time and be politically-fraught.

Brazil needs to rethink its commitment to renewable sources of energy, such as alcohol, and make it a national priority it once was. The first step is reclassifying alcohol as a strategic fuel. Then they need to discourage sugar producers from exporting so much sugar and alcohol. Certainly, the strength of the national currency, the real, has to be reigned in by lowering the interest rate, which at 11.75% a year, is sucking in huge amounts of dollars from overseas, further weakening the exchange rate with the US dollar. Higher fuel and sugar prices are already pushing the inflation rate up, and Brazil is therefore not expected to contain inflation to the rates it predicted it would at the beginning of the year.

A Arábia Saudita está ardendo, mas não pegou fogo

2011-04-03T18:50:00.012-03:00

Sauditas xiitas discutam com um policial durante uma passeata

em Al-Qatif, Arabia Saudita, no dia 11 de marco, 2011. (Reuters)

A família real da Arábia Saudita parece estar contendo a onda regional de revoltas contra governos autocráticos, ainda que permaneça a questão: “por quanto tempo?”, escreve Rashid Abualsamh

O “Dia do Ódio”, convocado em 11 de março na Arábia Saudita por ativistas pró-democracia exigindo uma monarquia constitucional, um parlamento eleito, uma constituição escrita e várias liberdades, terminou se esvaindo quase sem qualquer estrondo. Uma presença maciça da polícia nas ruas das principais cidades sauditas, incluindo helicópteros sobrevoando-as, e uma campanha agressiva de relações públicas pelo governo, alertando que potenciais manifestantes enfrentariam a prisão e possível chicoteamento, garantiram que quase ninguém aparecesse nas ruas.

“Acho que os manifestantes estavam enfrentando o desafio de realmente sair para as ruas. Trata-se de uma experiência que eles nunca haviam tido, e eles poderiam ter imaginado que seria como no Egito ou na Tunísia, mas havia uma perversa campanha demonizando qualquer um que ousasse pensar em protestos”, disse Abeer Mishkhas, uma jornalista saudita que mora em Londres.

Outros duvidavam da autenticidade dos organizadores do “Dia do Ódio”, que haviam formado diversos grupos no Facebook para angariar apoio. “Foi difícil, para mim, levar a sério as chamadas para protestos, já que as duas comunidades do Facebook responsáveis por elas simplesmente pareciam muito amadoras. Ninguém sabe quem estava por trás desses grupos. Os grupos também possuíam muitos membros não sauditas”, disse Ahmed Al-Omran, um popular blogueiro saudita, atualmente estudante de pós-graduação em jornalismo em Nova Iorque.

Com efeito, muitos sauditas que apóiam a família real tentaram explicar os não eventos do dia 11 de março como provas da lealdade e amor que a maioria dos sauditas sentiria em relação ao rei Abdullah Ibn Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud, o monarca absoluto do reino. Tareq Al-Homayed, editor-chefe do jornal Asharq Al-Awsat, escreveu em sua coluna que os sauditas mostraram sua aliança com o rei e o país ao não saírem às ruas para protestar na última sexta-feira.

“A realidade é que não houve caos antes de sexta-feira, mas o que vimos de fato foi uma forte onda de incitamento e confusão, bem como uma tentativa desesperada por parte de alguns – que agora foram expostos – em promover uma mentira, qual seja, o ‘Dia do Ódio’ na Arábia Saudita. Todos ficaram surpresos quando este dia do ódio se revelou uma silenciosa bayaa (cerimônia realizada em sociedades islâmicas em que o público endossa formalmente o domínio de um líder), na qual se viu o povo saudita expressar, sem palavras, o apoio à sua liderança”, escreveu Al-Homayed.

No entanto, o rei Abdullah está preocupado com a possibilidade de que as revoluções recentes na Tunísia e no Egito, bem como os violentos protestos xiitas em andamento no vizinho Bahrein, afetem o reino, tanto assim que anunciou um pacote de auxílio econômico de 37 bilhões de dólares após retornar ao país, algumas semanas atrás, de um período de três meses de tratamento médico em Nova Iorque. Funcionários do governo receberam a promessa de um aumento salarial de 15% e bilhões de riais foram destinados para ajudar os sauditas mais pobres a financiarem a construção de novas casas.

Entretanto, muitos sauditas criticaram esse pacote de auxílio econômico como insuficiente e tardio, ressaltando que o que vários sauditas de classe média desejam é um maior poder de fala e influência no modo como o país é administrado, a transparência no governo e a responsabilização de oficiais corruptos.

“O rei Abdullah não percebe. Comprar lealdade é algo que ele cresceu fazendo e continua a fazer a despeito do fato de que já recebeu pressões, muitas vezes antes e desde que se tornou rei, em prol da monarquia constitucional, prestação de contas (accountability), transparência, eleições, liberdade religiosa e direitos para as mulheres”, disse Ali Alyami, diretor executivo do Centro para a Democracia e Direitos Humanos na Arábia Saudita, localizado em Washington.

Mishkhas afirmou ser cético quanto ao pacote de auxílio econômico: “As pessoas descobriram que há muitos furos nesse pacote e, ao final, se deram conta de que ele não dava a elas o que havia sido prometido. O aumento salarial para os funcionários do governo era algo que alguns deles já vinham recebendo ocasionalmente como ajuste de custo de vida. Mas, agora que ele se tornou permanente, as pessoas foram informadas de que deduções seriam feitas em suas pensões e em outras coisas, de maneira que, no fim das contas, o aumento não aconteceu efetivamente”.

A maioria dos protestos recentes no reino foi levada a cabo por membros da minoria xiita na província oriental do país, onde está a maior parte das suas reservas de petróleo. Tais protestos exigiam a libertação de suspeitos de terrorismo há anos presos sem julgamento, bem como a melhoria das condições de vida. Respondendo por cerca de 10 a 15% da população saudita de 27 milhões, os xiitas têm tradicionalmente enfrentado preconceito contra suas práticas religiosas e no acesso a cargos públicos no país de maioria sunita.

Alguns observadores estrangeiros teorizaram que as revoltas populares no Egito e na Tunísia poderiam representar uma ameaça similar à família real no poder na Arábia Saudita. Essa incerteza, somada à perda de 1 milhão de barris produzidos diariamente pela Líbia, que está passando por sua própria rebelião popular, levou os preços do petróleo para acima de 110 dólares por barril nas semanas que passaram. Ainda sim, o apoio ao rei Abdullah é forte entre a maioria dos sauditas. No entanto, muitos estão frustrados diante do rígido código moral mantido pela polícia religiosa com apoio do governo, um índice alto de desemprego que alcançaria 40% dos homens sauditas entre 18 e 25 anos e a falta de liberdade de expressão.

Mas, mesmo com estes significativos problemas, alguns jovens sauditas se ausentaram das ruas por temer o possível caos que acompanha protestos públicos. Eles acreditam que o país não tem uma tradição de manifestações públicas e afirmam que os ativistas pró-democracia estão imitando o Ocidente sem adaptar suas demandas aos costumes locais.

Um deles é blogueiro de Jeddah Qusay Fayoumi, 36 anos, que escreveu recentemente que “os ‘jovens ativistas online’ estão desconectados da realidade. A maior parte deles não mantém relações com as pessoas comuns... Imaginem se Martin Luther King tivesse seu sonho, mas nenhum seguidor…Ainda que alguns ativistas online estejam fazendo um trabalho bom e admirável, a maioria está pressionando por um estilo ocidental de liberdade (o que quer que isso seja), influenciados por aquilo que viram e leram, daí o rótulo de ‘taghrebi’ para aqueles que têm vontade de ser ocidentalizados, uma versão saudita do Tio Tom americano. Entretanto, não é a isto que o saudita comum está exposto, não é isto que ele ou ela desejam, não é isto que o/a atrai”.

Alyami acredita que os sauditas estejam assustados demais para protestarem publicamente devido a décadas de domínio rígido da família real e de seus aliados religiosos. “Medo, segurança pesada e falta de confiança entre manifestantes potenciais desempenharam um papel fundamental no fracasso dos protestos. Os sauditas estão aterrorizados, temerosos quanto a reprimendas governamentais brutais”, disse Alyami.

Os governantes sauditas têm mais uma carta na manga de que devem fazer uso em breve. As eleições municipais, realizadas em todo o país em 2005 em resposta à pressão do governo de Bush pela introdução de alguma democracia no reino, poderiam ser anunciadas para esse ano. Há seis anos, homens sauditas elegeram metade dos conselhos municipais para o que deveria ter sido um mandato de 4 anos. As eleições para a escolha de novos membros em 2009 foram silenciosamente canceladas e pouco foi dito a respeito delas desde então. São abundantes os rumores de que as mulheres terão o direito de votar nessas novas eleições, embora, como nas anteriores, não poderão se candidatar.

Mas a sinceridade da família real no desejo de implantar reformas políticas democráticas é questionada por alguns. “Abdullah não é um reformador. Tudo que ele fez foi legitimar seu comando através da implementação de nomeações e decretos cosméticos”, disse Alyami. “Dada a ampla reforma árabe, Abdullah não terá escolha senão dar alguns passos para apaziguar seu povo irritado e excluído. Sim, penso que as eleições canceladas serão ressuscitadas e que as mulheres terão o direito de votar e permissão para dirigir. Esses passos serão suficientes para aplacar as aspirações de milhões de jovens homens e mulheres sauditas? Não."

Mishkhas tem dúvidas quanto à possibilidade de realização das novas eleições. “Não creio que acontecerão. Parece que o governo está determinado a subornar as pessoas com dinheiro. Não ouvimos nada sobre reforma política, e meu palpite é o de que há uma forte oposição quanto a esta”, explica ela. Um número relativamente pequeno de sauditas continuará a protestar pela libertação de prisioneiros políticos e por reformas políticas. Mohammed Al-Qahtani, fundador da Associação de Direitos Civis e Políticos dos Sauditas, disse a um programa noturno da BBC na semana passada que há 30.000 prisioneiros políticos no reino. O governo saudita afirma haver apenas um terço desse número. “O ódio ainda está lá, e vimos isso em Riade no domingo, quando centenas de cidadãos sunitas se reuniram diante do Ministério do Interior para exigir a libertação dos seus parentes. Eles decidiram se encontrar lá todos os domingos”, disse Ali Al Ahmed, diretor do Instituto para o Golfo, Washington, DC.

Portanto, uma revolução na escala daquela que aconteceu recentemente no Egito e na Tunísia não deve ocorrer em um momento próximo na Arábia Saudita, ainda que, com uma juventude crescentemente conectada e sedenta por um melhor governo e por menos corrupção, o potencial para a revolta permaneça. O fato de que o rei Abdullah está com 88 anos, o príncipe herdeiro Sultan nos seus 80 e poucos e o terceiro na fila para a Coroa, o príncipe Naif, que é também o ministro do interior linha-dura no país, com 80, significa que muitos observadores estão preocupados com quem irá suceder estes homens após sua morte. A família real diz possuir um plano de sucessão bem definido, mas o quão tranquilamente ele será levado a cabo, quando chegar o momento, continua a ser o palpite de cada um.

Traducao: Gabriel Peters

Para ler o texto original em ingles no Al-Ahram Weekly Online, clique aqui.

Bahrein: Revoluções param aqui

2011-04-01T10:45:00.005-03:00

Homens xiitas no Bahrein protestam contra o governo. (AFP)

A hipocrisia dos EUA no Golfo é clara para todos, diz Rasheed Abualsamh

A visão de sorridentes soldados sauditas fazendo o sinal de paz enquanto entravam no Bahrein em veículos blindados leves, no dia 14 de Março, deve ter surpreendido muitos sauditas e bahreinitas, que provavelmente nunca tinham sonhado que iriam testemunhar uma cena dessas em suas vidas.

Mas o rei Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Eissa, o governante sunita do Bahrein cuja família está no poder há 200 anos, havia chamado os estados membros das seis nações do Conselho de Cooperação do Golfo (CCG) para ajudar a sufocar os longos e frequentemente violentos protestos de membros da maioria xiita, que, a essa altura, haviam passado da Praça Pérola para o distrito financeiro.

O Bahrein sempre se orgulhou de sua abertura relativa e de sua facilidade para fazer negócios. Que multidões de manifestantes, compostas de seus próprios cidadãos insatisfeitos, tenham transformado a pequena ilha-estado em algo decididamente menos favorável às empresas foi demais para alguns membros da família real. O fato é que, nos bastidores, uma luta emergia entre o príncipe mais reformista Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, e futuro rei, e o primeiro-ministro linha-dura Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa. A chegada das tropas do CCG (os Emirados Árabes Unidos contribuíram com 500 soldados, somados a reforços do Catar e do Kuwait) e a subsequente remoção violenta dos manifestantes do distrito financeiro não deixaram dúvida de que a facção linha-dura estava ganhando.

As cenas televisionadas de manifestantes xiitas sendo baleados à queima-roupa e, em alguns casos, tendo acesso negado a cuidados médicos imediatos mostrou o conflito em sua forma terrível: a elite sunita rica contra os mais pobres e discriminados xiitas, que reclamavam melhores empregos, uma monarquia constitucional e um parlamento totalmente eleito. No início, o rei fez algumas concessões, trocando alguns ministros de seu gabinete, prometendo novas eleições no futuro e concedendo somas de dinheiro para o povo. Mas os partidos xiitas de oposição rejeitaram tais ofertas como insuficientes, e logo os radicais de ambos os lados endureceram suas posições. Mesmo a oposição xiita parecia dividida entre o Partido Wefaq e Mushaima Hassan, que havia recentemente retornado ao país após ser perdoado pelo rei e agora clamava pela abolição da monarquia e formação de uma república.

Essa radicalização das demandas xiitas com certeza enviou ondas de choque através de Riade, Doha, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi e Muscat, as capitais dos países do Golfo que possuem governantes hereditários que nunca tiveram de compartilhar muito poder com ninguém. Mushaima e cinco outros líderes da oposição foram imediatamente detidos e encarcerados.

Estes tristes acontecimentos levaram xiitas no Iraque e no Líbano a realizar comícios para mostrar sua solidariedade em relação a seus irmãos no Bahrein e para pedir a retirada das tropas da Arábia Saudita. No Irã, 700 manifestantes jogaram pedras no Consulado da Arábia Saudita em Mashhad no dia 18 de Março. Na semana passada, em Teerã, o clérigo radical aiatolá Ahmed Jannati exortou os xiitas do Bahrein a resistirem "contra o inimigo até que você morra ou vença". O Irã retirou posteriormente seu embaixador do Bahrein e a ilha-estado, em seguida, expulsou um diplomata iraniano. Finalmente, no dia 20 de março, o rei do Bahrein, numa clara alusão ao Irã, anunciava que seu país havia frustrado um plano de três décadas que uma nação estrangeira havia arquitetado para desestabilizar seu país quando seu exército apertou o cerco contra os manifestantes pró-democracia.

Muitos observadores têm, portanto, caracterizado o confronto no Bahrein como uma batalha por influência na região entre a Arábia Saudita de maioria sunita e o Irã de maioria xiita. Com os xiitas tendo chegado ao poder recentemente no Iraque e no Líbano, o Bahrein tornou-se uma linha vermelha na areia diante da influência crescente do Irã na região, linha que nenhum dos estados governados por sunitas no Golfo permitirá ser cruzada.

"O Bahrein é visto como o quintal da Arábia Saudita, e uma possível derrota dos Al-Khalifa abriria a porta, mais amplamente do que antes, para a influência iraniana", disse Christopher Davidson, pesquisador em política do Oriente Médio na Universidade de Durham, no Reino Unido, e autor de vários livros sobre os Emirados Árabes. "Mais importante, trata-se tanto de uma linha vermelha geopolítica quanto de uma linha vermelha para os regimes autocráticos do Golfo: se os Al-Khalifa forem derrubados, a ‘bolha de invencibilidade’ dos xeiques do Golfo será quebrada."

Toby Jones, professor assistente de história do Oriente Médio na Universidade de Rutgers, em Nova Jersey, e especialista em assuntos da Arábia Saudita, destacou em uma entrevista que os protestos no Bahrein estavam sendo transformados em uma questão sectária pelos governos do Golfo e não pelos próprios manifestantes.

"Nenhum dos países árabes do Golfo quer ver a queda de um vizinho próximo, especialmente com os vários elementos sectários em jogo. Quero deixar claro aqui, porém, que acho que são os governos árabes sunitas do golfo, e não os manifestantes em Bahrein ou em outros lugares, que estão jogando a carta sectária. Minha sensação é que os manifestantes, e eu conheço muitos deles, são sérios quando falam sobre democracia", disse Jones.

Dos seis países do CCG, o Bahrein é o único com uma população de maioria xiita.

Contudo, apesar da retórica inflamada vinda de Teerã, muitos analistas acreditam que o Irã está sendo cauteloso na forma como vem se envolvendo no conflito do Bahrein, ciente de que tem muitos problemas internos para administrar e também porque teme entrar em conflito direto com a Arábia Saudita ou os Estados Unidos.

"Apesar do que disse o rei do Bahrein, não há provas conclusivas de que o Irã esteja se armando ou mesmo de que seja o principal fator por trás da oposição. A retórica anti-Khalifa do Irã intensificou-se, no entanto, e isso é de se esperar. Num momento em que os xiitas no Oriente Médio estão visivelmente irritados pela intervenção saudita contra seus irmãos, calar-se não é uma opção para Teerã, autodeclarado protetor dos xiitas no mundo. Dito isto, ainda não vejo nenhuma prova de que o Irã seja logisticamente a força crítica por trás dessa agitação no Bahrein", disse Alex Vatanka, um estudioso do Middle East Institute, em Washington, e especialista em política iraniana.

"Uma razão importante pela qual o Irã não faria isso é porque tal medida iria aproximá-lo de um conflito com os EUA ainda mais do que já foi o caso nos últimos anos. Os EUA não vão cruzar os braços com a sua 5 ª Frota no Bahrein e deixar o Irã executar um campanha armada pró-Teerã. Como no Iraque, o Irã poderia ajudar as forças locais xiitas no futuro, mas não chegamos ainda nesse estágio ", acrescentou Vatanka.

Autoridades sauditas estão alarmadas diante da possível propagação da agitação do Bahrein para a minoria xiita de sua população, que fica a apenas 22 quilômetros de distância ao longo da ponte que liga os dois países, na província oriental onde está a maior parte do petróleo saudita. Xiitas já realizaram protestos reclamando a retirada de tropas sauditas no Bahrein, mas a mensagem vinda de importantes xiitas sauditas tem sido, até agora, de calma e diálogo.

O líder religioso xiita saudita Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar divulgou, em seu site, um comunicado em que denuncia a violência no Bahrein e pede uma solução política e a reconciliação nacional.

No entanto, permanece o irônico fato de que a chegada dos Sauditas e de outras tropas do CCG no Bahrein levou ambos os lados a polarizarem-se, deixando muito menos espaço para concessões. Quanto tempo essas tropas estrangeiras vão permanecer no Bahrein também não está claro, com alguns analistas prevendo que sua presença pode se estender por tempo indeterminado, já que a oposição poderia reivindicar vitória caso elas fossem para casa mais cedo.

"A estratégia de saída das tropas da Arábia Saudita e do CCG não é clara. Também não é claro como o Bahrein vai definir vitória. A partida das tropas nas próximas semanas ou mesmo nos próximos meses seria provavelmente percebida como uma abertura pela oposição bahreinita. Os sauditas e os bahreinitas sabem disso, e minha intuição é a de que as forças do CCG permanecerão por algum tempo", disse Jones.

"Os Al-Khalifa não estão interessados no diálogo, já que qualquer concessão aos manifestantes será vista como um sinal de fraqueza. Além disso, os Al-Saud e outros xeiques do Golfo também estarão relutantes diante da possibilidade de que os Al-Khalifa se prestem ao diálogo", disse Davidson.

Jones, o professor da Rutgers, concorda, afirmando que a violência desencadeada contra os manifestantes no Bahrein mudou toda a equação. "Nenhum dos lados mostrou-se disposto a ceder. A intransigência da oposição é um resultado direto de como o regime do Bahrein administrou o levante, especialmente de seu recurso à violência. Houve um tempo em que havia mais espaço para o acordo. Wefaq parece preparado a ceder algum terreno quanto a este ponto, mas se Mushaima, Haqq e outros farão o mesmo é uma questão importante", disse Jones.

A administração Obama foi pega em um ato de malabarismo, apoiando publicamente a revolta popular na Líbia e liderando os ataques militares aliados ao regime de Muammar Khadafi, ao mesmo tempo em que permanece solidamente comprometida em apoiar as famílias Al-Khalifa e Al-Saud.

"Os EUA têm garantido confidencialmente para os bahreinitas que desejam que os Al-Khalifa permaneçam no poder, deixando muito claro que, embora não apóiem publicamente a repressão e denunciem a ferocidade desta, eles também não abandonariam os Al-Khalifa a curto prazo", explicou Jones. "Mas os EUA também têm demonstrado um padrão duplo na forma como vêm definindo resultados “justos” – atacando Kadafi na Líbia, mas fechando os olhos para os manifestantes no Bahrein e na Arábia Saudita. Com isso, os EUA continuam a projetar um confuso conjunto de valores para o resto da região e para o mundo".

A bola está agora firmemente na corte dos Al-Khalifa. Será que eles realmente querem compartilhar mais poder com os seus cidadãos? No passado, eles disseram que sim, mas isto acabou por se mostrar retórica vazia.

"Nas primeiras duas semanas de manifestações, a demanda principal dos manifestantes era a restauração da Constituição de 1973, que permite uma monarquia semi-constitucional. Creio que o sentimento de traição por parte do povo foi o principal motivo por trás dos protestos. Uma década atrás, o rei havia prometido uma transição gradual para a democracia. Na realidade, ele agarrou todos os poderes e tirou do conselho eleito quaisquer poderes significativos", disse Tawfiq Alsaif, um dos principais intelectuais xiitas em Dammam, na Arábia Saudita.

O que começou como um inverno de descontentamento árabe na Tunísia e no Egito parece agora estar se transformando em uma primavera de descontentamento na Líbia e no Bahrein, que pode bem se estender para o verão.

Traducao: Gabriel Peters

Para ler o original em ingles no Al-Ahram Weekly Online clique aqui.

Revolutions stop here

2011-03-28T21:35:00.008-03:00

The sight of smiling Saudi soldiers flashing the V-sign of peace as they rolled into Bahrain in light-armoured vehicles on 14 March must have surprised many Saudis and Bahrainis who probably had never dreamed they would witness such a scene in their lives.
But King Hamad bin Eissa Al-Khalifa, the minority Sunni ruler of Bahrain, whose family has been in power for the past 200 years, had called upon fellow member states of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for help in quelling the unending protests of the majority Shia, which have resulted in the deaths of protesters and were forced from Pearl Square, and are now blocking the entrances to the financial district.
Bahrain has always been proud of its relative openness and ease of doing business. Having mobs of its own dissatisfied citizens turning the tiny island-state into something decidedly less than business-friendly was too much for some in the royal family. For behind the scenes a struggle was emerging between the more reform-minded Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa and the hardline Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa. The arrival of GCC troops (the United Arab Emirates contributed 500 soldiers, as well as Qatar and Kuwait) and the subsequent violent removal of the protesters from the financial district left no doubt that the hardliners were winning.
The televised scenes of Shia Bahraini protesters being shot at close range and in some cases being denied access to prompt medical care cast the conflict in a horrific light: The wealthy Sunni elite versus the poorer and discriminated-against Shia who were asking for better jobs, a constitutional monarchy and a fully-elected parliament. At first the king made a few concessions by reshuffling his cabinet, promising new elections down the road and giving cash handouts to the people. But the Shia opposition parties rejected these as not enough, and soon hardliners on both sides had dug in their heels. Even the Shia opposition seemed split between the Wefaq Party and Hassan Mushaima, who recently having been pardoned and let back into the country by the king, was calling for the monarchy to be abolished and a republic to be formed.
This radicalisation of Shia demands must have sent shock waves through Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait City, Abu Dhabi and Muscat, the capitals of Gulf countries with hereditary rulers that have never had to share much power with anyone. Mushaima and five other opposition leaders were promptly arrested and jailed.
These sad events caused Shias in Iraq and Lebanon to hold rallies to show their solidarity with their brethren in Bahrain, and to call for Saudi troops to be withdrawn. In Iran, 700 protesters threw stones at the Saudi Consulate in Mashhad on 18 March, and in Tehran last week radical cleric Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati called on Bahraini Shias to "resist against the enemy until you die or win". Iran later withdrew its ambassador from Bahrain, and the island-state then expelled Iran's charge d'affaires. Finally on 20 March, the king of Bahrain, clearly alluding to Iran, announced that his country had foiled a three-decades long plot by an unnamed foreign nation to destabilise his country when his army clamped down on the pro-democracy protesters.
Many observers have therefore cast the showdown in Bahrain as a proxy battle between Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shia- majority Iran for influence in the region. With Shias having come to power recently in Iraq and Lebanon, Bahrain has become a red-line in the sand for Iran's expanding influence in the region that none of the Sunni-ruled Gulf states will allow to be crossed.
"Bahrain is seen as Saudi Arabia's backyard, and an overthrow of the Al-Khalifa would open the door more widely than before for Iranian influence," said Christopher Davidson, reader in Middle East politics at Durham University in the UK, and the author of several books on the UAE. "More importantly, it's a red line for autocratic Gulf regimes as much as a geopolitical red line: if the Al-Khalifa fall, it will break the 'bubble of invincibility' of Gulf sheikhs."
Toby Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and a specialist in Saudi affairs, stressed in an interview that it was the Gulf governments that were turning the Bahrain protests into a sectarian issue and not the protesters themselves.
"None of the Arab states in the Gulf want to see a close neighbour fall, particularly with the various sectarian elements at play. I want to be clear here, though, that I think it is the Arab Gulf Sunni governments and not the protesters in Bahrain or elsewhere that are playing the sectarian card. My sense, and I know many of them, is that the protesters are serious about democracy," Jones said.
Of the six GCC states, Bahrain is the only one with a Shia- majority population.
To continue reading this article click here.

Why Obama’s trip to Brazil was a success

2011-03-24T14:52:00.011-03:00

US President Barak Obama and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia
on March 19, 2011. (All photos copyright the US Embassy in Brasilia)

US President Barak Obama’s first official trip to Brazil this past week was a resounding success because most Brazilians love all things American, but more importantly because Obama is the first American president of African descent.

Brazil is a melting pot of ethnicities, with a much higher level of intermarriage between the races than in the United States. And that despite the fact that Brazil was the last country in the West to abolish slavery in 1888!

Unfortunately, Obama did not once mention his blackness in Brazil, perhaps because, as this American commentator wrote here, he’s afraid of the right-wing backlash that would accuse him of favoring ‘black’ Americans over white ones if he did. It is indeed sad that the president felt restrained from fully reveling in all of the joy and pride that Brazilians felt in seeing him everywhere he went in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro. A 46-year-old businessman in Rio told the New York Times that Obama was “an inspiration”.

Even Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, in the joint press appearance with Obama in Brasilia last Saturday, mentioned the fact that he was the first US president of African descent, and that she was the first female president of Brazil.

Rousseff looked nervous in this her first hosting of a head of state after her swearing in as president on Jan. 1. Obama, an old pro, smiled warmly and waved at everybody. The difference in body language between the two was noticeable.

The first lady Michelle Obama as usual was noted for her at times dubious fashion choices, such as when she stepped off Air Force One at the Brasilia air base wearing what looked a red and black, sleeveless cotton dress. It looked like she was going to a picnic and not arriving on an official visit! Later she redeemed herself wearing a cream-colored tailleur to the presidential palace, and then later removing the jacket to reveal a one-shoulder top when she went to watch Brazilian students perform capoeira.

President Obama was distracted by the beginning of the coalition air strikes in Libya, which he announced officially in a televised broadcast from Brasilia last Saturday. This caused most major Brazilian newspapers to headline the next day: “Obama launches Libya attacks from Brazil”.

What is really important about Obama’s visit to Brazil, is that it marks a new chapter in US-Brazil relations which had reached a low point last year when then Brazilian President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva instructed his ambassador at the UN to vote against further sanctions against Iran. This infuriated the US, which already was not happy with Lula’s close relationship with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his support of the Castro brothers in Cuba.

President Rousseff immediately began to distance herself from some of Lula’s policies last year by publicly criticizing the mistreatment of women in Iran and sending signals to Washington that she wanted a new start to their relationship.

Lula was invited to the official luncheon that President Rousseff held for Obama last Saturday at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, but did not attend claiming a prior engagement, which was probably best for all concerned. For while there are still many disagreements between Brazil and the US, especially on trade and tariff issues, both presidents seem intent on building a better relationship than the one left by their predecessors.

Saudi smoulders but is not on fire

2011-03-17T22:17:00.004-03:00

Saudi Shiite protesters wearing masks chant slogans during a protest in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, on March 10, 2011. (AP)

The "Day of Rage" called for 11 March in Saudi Arabia by democracy activists demanding a constitutional monarchy, an elected parliament, a written constitution and various freedoms fizzled out with barely a bang A heavy police presence on the streets of major Saudi cities, including helicopters flying above, and an aggressive public relations campaign by the Saudi government warning would-be protesters that they faced imprisonment and possible flogging, made sure that hardly anyone appeared in the streets.

"I think the protesters were facing the challenge of actually going out on the streets. It is an experience they have never had before, and they might have imagined it to be like Egypt or Tunisia, but there was a vicious campaign vilifying anyone who dared think about protesting," said Abeer Mishkhas, a London- based Saudi journalist.
Others doubted the authenticity of the organisers of the "Day of Rage", who had set up several groups on Facebook to gather support. "It was hard for me to take the calls to protest seriously because the two Facebook groups that called for them simply looked too sketchy. Nobody knows who was behind these groups. The groups also had many non-Saudi members," said Ahmed Al-Omran, a popular Saudi blogger and currently a graduate student of journalism in New York.
Indeed, many Saudis supportive of the royal family tried to spin the non- events of 11 March as proof of the loyalty and love that most Saudis feel towards King Abdullah Ibn Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud, the absolute monarch of the kingdom. Tareq Al-Homayed, editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, wrote in his column that Saudis had shown their allegiance to king and country by not appearing on the streets last Friday to protest.
"The reality is there was no chaos prior to Friday, but rather what we did see was a strong wave of incitement and confusion, and a desperate attempt by some -- who have now been exposed -- to promote a lie, namely the Saudi Arabian 'day of rage'. Everybody was surprised when this day of rage turned into a silent bayaa (ceremony performed in Islamic societies where the public formally endorse the rule of a leader), which saw the Saudi public wordlessly express their support for their leadership," wrote Al-Homayed.
Yet King Abdullah is worried that the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the ongoing violent demonstrations by Shias in neighbouring Bahrain, will affect the kingdom, so much so that he announced an economic aid package worth $37 billion upon his return to the country a few weeks ago after undergoing medical treatment in New York for three months. Government workers were promised a 15 per cent pay rise and billions of riyals were earmarked to help poorer Saudis finance the building of new homes.
Yet many Saudis have criticised this aid package as too little and too late, noting that what many middle class Saudis want is a greater say in how the country is ruled, transparency in governance and accountability for corrupt officials.
"King Abdullah is not getting it. Buying loyalty is what he grew up with and continues to do despite the fact that he has been petitioned for a constitutional monarchy, accountability, transparency, elections, religious freedom and women's rights many times before and since he became king," said Ali Alyami, executive director of the Washington-based Centre for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia.
Click here to continue reading my article on the Al-Ahram Weekly site.

Hip replacements, moving to Georgia and chocolate-dipped strawberries at the Qatar national day

2010-12-19T21:51:00.007-02:00

ON FRIDAY night my mom and I went to the Qatar national day reception at the Naval Club in Brasilia. The club is beautiful, with a huge swimming pool and cascading waterfalls that lead down to the main function hall at the shore of the Paranoa Lake.

The invitation arrived a week earlier addressed as usual to "Sr. Rasheed Abualsamh e mae", which tickled my mother no end. Driving up to the entrance of the club, military police waved us in when I stopped to ask if we were going in the right direction. Free valet parking right at the entrance took the drudgery of having to find a parking place and walking down the slope to the venue.

Now, the invitation said full regalia/national dress, which was obviously totally lost on many of the Brazilian female guests, some of whom arrived as if straight from their offices or else were shockingly too casual. I spied two women wearing sleeveless dresses, which I thought was totally inappropriate for such a formal event given by a conservative Muslim nation. But then Brazil is a country where women often wear short-shorts and skimpy tops to school and to work, so nothing much here shocks me anymore.

The waiters at this affair were quite aggressive and kept asking us every 30-seconds or so if we wanted another soft drink, cod fish salad, or a couscous salad with shrimp, which they were carrying around the room on trays.

"This looks just like the same food they had at another event I went to recently," my mother observed as we plunged into our cod fish salad.

"They must be using the same caterers," I said.

Huge maroon and white flower displays were placed at the center of all the round tables that were set for dinner. Video screens had images of a Qatari man displayed vertically which was strange, and a small area had been set-up to serve dates and Arabic coffee.

An elderly Brazilian woman with hair dyed a deep maroon-red color waved at my mother and hobbled over with the aid of a cane to say hello to her.

"Is Estelle on vacation?" she asked my mother. When she noticed my mother's puzzlement, she added, "you know the American ambassador's wife."

"Oh I don't know," my mom said.

"But you are American and are a member of the American Women's Club aren't you?" she protested.

"Yes, but I'm not a close friend of the ambassadress," my mom tried to explain.

It seems she had had a hip replacement, and explained to us that her unoperated leg was hurting now because of the extra pressure she put on it after her other hip was operated on.

To kick off the event the Brazilian national anthem was played, forcing all of us to stand up. And they played the full, extended version of the anthem, which most Brazilians don't even do nowadays. The ambassador and his Spanish wife stood on a stage facing their guests while the anthems played. When the Qatari one was played, the ambassadress sang along heartily, and near the end of it the recording of the song abruptly stopped and we heard her mellifluous voice continue singing for a few words.

"She should have sung the anthem acapella," I whispered to my mom.

After the Qatari's envoy's speech delivered in Portuguese, and a raffle of tickets to Qatar and souvenir nicknacks, of which we won a bag, we rushed over to the dinner buffet and were disappointed by the food. "The food was much better last year, wasn't it?" I said to my mother, and she readily agreed. I had some ravioli stuffed with dried tomatoes and another pasta dish, taking advantage of the fact that I was off of my usual low-carbohydrate diet that I follow during the week.

After eating I went over to say hello to an Iraqi friend who also graduated from the American School here, though many years after I did. She has been working as an assistant at the Embassy of Georgia here, and half-way into our conversation she stunned me when she said that her parents and herself had decided to move to Georgia in March.

"Georgia? Why Georgia?!" I asked, failing to see any connection between them and that former territory of the Soviet Union. It isn't even an Arab country.

"No, I mean Jordan," she explained.

"Oh, as in Amman, Jordan, right?" I said.

"Exactly!" she replied.

Which is a totally logical choice for them. Several of her aunts, a grandmother and various other relatives live there, along with at least one million Iraqis who have fled Iraq since the 2003 invasion by the United States.

Shortly after 9pm, with no sign of dessert being served, my mother and I made our way to the exit to go home, stopping at the little coffee bar at the exit where my mom had a cafezinho and I dipped strawberries into a vat of melted chocolate.

People think that diplomatic receptions are glamorous and exciting, but the truth is rather more mundane. The best parts for me were people-watching and talking to my Iraqi friend. The rest quite frankly was rather a bore.

Many twists and turns in 113 Sul murder case

2010-11-27T11:33:00.009-02:00

Adriana Villela: She remains the main suspect in the brutal murder
of her parents in August 2009.

THE INVESTIGATION into the brutal August 2009 murder of the rich elderly Villela couple and their maid in their sixth floor apartment in the 113 Sul quadra of Brasilia, has so many twists and turns that it is becoming hard to follow at times.

The case remains unsolved more than a year after it was committed, and four police chief investigators have handled the case, the latest one bringing back to Brasilia a surprise confession from the former doorman of the Villela’s building, saying he had murdered the couple because he held a grudge against them.

Leonardo Alves, the former doorman in question, but who was no longer working in Brasilia when the murders took place, initially told police that he had committed the crime with his two nephews, that they had not used gloves, and that they did not clean up the crime scene afterwards. Given that Jose Guilherme Villela, 73, a former judge on the Superior Electoral Court, his wife Maria Carvalho Mendes Villela, 69, and their maid Francisca Nascimento da Silva, 58, had all been savagely stabbed more than 74 times, and that police found the bodies in the apartment without pools of blood, puts his testimony into serious doubt. Investigators at the time said the crime scene had looked like it had been professionally cleaned up, and that they did not find the fingerprints of the murderers in the apartment, which means that gloves were most likely used.

Alves, 44, was tracked down in a small town of Minas Gerais after a police investigator listening into a wiretap overheard two prisoners in the Papuda jail talk about the murders. Police found that the former doorman had opened several shops and allegedly sold some of Mrs. Villela’s gold jewelry to persons in that state.

The 46-year-old daughter of the Villelas, Adriana, who is an architect, has been the main suspect as the mastermind of the murders from the beginning, though she maintains her innocence. Police investigators found out that she was receiving a monthly allowance of R$8,500 a month (around $5,000) from her parents, and that she often argued with her mother over money when she would ask her for more. Her father headed his own law firm, which was a lucrative practice that made millions for him in legal fees from famous clients, which included former Brazilian President Fernando Collor, who was impeached in 1992 for corruption only two years into his term.

Now in a new twist, the ex-doorman Alves this week told police that Adriana had indeed paid him and his accomplices to murder her parents, and most horrifyingly, had been present in the apartment when they were executed. The police say they believe him and are trying to put together a case against the daughter. She had been previously arrested and held for a few weeks during the course of the investigation, but was eventually let go for lack of evidence against her.

The civil police of Brasilia have bungled the investigation from the start, with the first police investigator being yanked off the case by her superiors after she listened to a fortune-teller and followed false clues that she had planted. Police later found out that the fortune-teller was a friend of Adriana, and that the daughter of the Villela’s had told her to go to the police with her clues.

Police investigators say that Alves and his two accomplices used at least 15 mobile phones in conjunction with stolen SIM cards, to cover their tracks. Knives that were supposedly used in the murders have never been found; with police even diving in a river in Minas that one of Alves’ nephews said he had thrown it in.

Adriana’s lawyers have insisted that Alves was motivated to kill the Villela couple because he had several heated arguments with them when he was still the doorman of their building, with an especially heated one after he brought a locksmith to break into their apartment, without their approval, to fix a leaking pipe when the couple were away on a trip.

But police investigators have a long list of suspicious behavior committed by Adriana, and the rebuttal of these doubts by her lawyers has not been very convincing.

Police say they found a partial fingerprint of Adriana’s from her parent’s apartment that will be able to place her having been there between the 28^th and 31^st of August, 2009, when the murders took place. Adriana emailed the Correio Braziliense newspaper last week to insist that she had never been to her parent’s apartment during that period. She claims her last visit to the apartment was on Aug. 13, 2009, to have breakfast with her parents and give her father a birthday present.

Investigators also point out that Adriana went out of her way to create an alibi for herself on the night of Aug. 28 by calling several friends at night to have dinner with her, and they also noted her absence that night a party that she had been invited to. Adriana claims that she did eat dinner with a friend in the Vila Planalto, but that she went home at 8:30pm because she was tired.

Adriana’s strange behavior in relation to her daughter Carolina was also noticed by the police, who said that Adriana tried to dissuade her daughter from going to her grandparents’ apartment to have lunch with them as she did once a week, after Aug. 28 but before the bodies were discovered. Carolina had repeatedly asked Adriana where her grandparents were since they were not answering their phones. Investigators note that Adriana did not call her parents or attempt to visit them in their apartment from Aug. 28 to 31.

Adriana’s lawyers have pointed to the changing testimony of Alves as proof that the police are coaching him in what to say in order to bolster their premature conclusions. Unfortunately for Adriana, her alibis are not very good ones and she continues to be the main suspect as she remains to benefit the most financially from the brutal murder of her parents if she is found innocent.

Erik de Castro talks about his new film ‘Federal’

2010-11-25T11:45:00.011-02:00

SOME cinema-goers in Brazil were surprised last month when Erik de Castro's new film “Federal” was released just days after the blockbuster “Tropa de Elite 2” had opened. They rightly believed that “Federal” would be unfairly compared to “Tropa”, which had a much bigger budget and opened on nearly ten times more screens than Castro's film.

In the following interview, Castro, who studied filmmaking in Los Angeles in the 1990s, talks about the timing of the release of his film; what it was like working with Selton Mello, one of Brazil’s most popular actors; why he thinks the sex scenes in “Federal” were not excessive, and why he thinks Brasilia is the capital of cocaine.

QUESTION: Why was your movie released shortly after “Tropa de Elite 2” in Brazil? Didn’t your distributor realize that it would face stiff competition since it is a police/action movie too?

ANSWER: That's a long story. To make it short: we had no option. “Tropa” is a blockbuster. “Federal,” which was called "a masterpiece" by a film critic in Rio shortly after its first screening at the Rio International Film Festival, is more in the path of a cult movie now. That's okay, though. “Blade Runner” was indeed one of my influences!

Q: Why did it take so long, from the inception of the script in 2001, to the filming of “Federal” in 2006, and then finally to its release this year? Was it because of a lack of funds?

A: Film production in Brazil is a tough endeavor. Also “Federal” was a completely independent production, from a first time feature filmmaker, out of the Rio/São Paulo axis — and it had a lot of action. We shot in 2006, than it took us a few years raising the money for its conclusion and proper release.

Q: At the beginning of “Federal”, the opening credits say that the movie was made with the support of the Prefeitura do Rio, which confused me. For a moment I thought I may have come into the wrong room and was about to watch “Tropa de Elite 2”. Was your movie edited in Rio?

A: No, but the whole sound editing and mixing process was done in Rio. Riofilme invested in the production, as a co-producer. Jose Wilker was the president of the company and he liked the screenplay a lot.

Q: How was it as a director to work with Selton Mello, who is considered a star in Brazil? Was he difficult to direct? Why isn’t he promoting the film right now? Is it because it took so long after the film was finished for it to be launched that may have lessened Mello’s enthusiasm?

A: The same as it was with any of the almost forty actors and actresses that I had on my cast on “Federal”: a creative collaboration. Also, I just didn't see him as a star. I've known Selton since 1995 when I invited him and he accepted to be in my first short film shot in Brazil — I had a few others shot during my student period in Los Angeles — called "Reason to Believe" (1996). I showed 'Federal's script to him in 2001, right before the Sundance Lab Institute selection, and he promptly accepted. He was not difficult to direct at all. Like I said, filmmaking is all about creative collaboration.

As for the last question, why don't you ask him about it? He's currently dedicated to his own projects that he is producing and directing and that is happening at the same time of “Federal's” release.

Q: Some viewers of “Federal” have complained about the various sex scenes in the film, saying they were gratuitous and too explicit. Did you include them on purpose to “spice” up the story?

A: To me they're very organic. Sex is something that is part of our lives. So some cops in “Federal” do have a lot of love to give to their ladies...and vice-versa! I think people should relax more with sex scenes in films — and enjoy it. Truth is I've heard a lot of people who loved them in “Federal”!

The “spiciest” one, the scene of the character Rocha (Christovam Neto) and his “blonde” is the favorite of a lot of people, including my film professor Tom Stempel who defined it as: “My kind of sex scene: fast, funny and keeps the story going.”

Q: In the movie one of the characters says that Brasilia is “the capital of the powder,” a reference to the trafficking and consumption of cocaine here. Don’t you think that cocaine as a drug was more widely consumed here in the 1980s, and that nowadays, at least among the younger generation, ecstasy and crack have taken over as the drugs of choice?

A: Other drugs come and go, but cocaine is always there. I don't see a character like the diplomat Sophia consuming crack or ecstasy. Cocaine made our point. Cocaine is the classic drug. And that phrase (“the capital of the powder”) didn't come from me. It came from UnB Professor Argemiro Procópio, PhD, one of the consultants of the script. He's the author of many books about drug trafficking and how it affects our society. One of them “O Brasil no Mundo das Drogas” (“Brazil in the World of the Drugs”) points out Brasília as one of the cities where drug consumption, especially cocaine, has grown more than elsewhere in the entire country.

And that has a reason: cocaine is an expensive drug and Brasilia has a lot of rich people. Period. Big shopping malls brands come here, great fashion stores, hip and very expensive concerts, and cocaine too. That's historical in this city but no one seems to care or talk about it. Professor Argemiro dared me: “I dare you to put that phrase in your film.” Well, it's there.

Q: I found many of Michael Madsen’s lines as a corrupt DEA agent to be very cliché! Him saying that Brazil has the best coffee in the world and that he needed to “fuck” a Brazilian woman made me squirm. Were these the original lines in the script or did he improvise?

A: Original lines and Michael loved it! Sam Gibson originally was a one-scene character, who was supposed to be a kind of a comic relief in the story, with all those lines and purposely cliché. His character grew in the story and some of the cliché lines stayed. That's all. We had a ball on the set with Michael.

I've heard different opinions about Sam's sense of humor and for me that's what “Federal” and any good film — or art form for that matter — is all about: Not having consensus.

Q: Some viewers of “Federal” have complained that the storyline is not coherent, and that you failed to adequately link the various scenes. How do you respond?

A: I don't. Others have congratulated me for the script and the way that the edited film kept them tight in their sits, waiting for what was going to happen next. These people understood the film thoroughly.

I had as an editing consultant on this film — and who is also a dear friend — Roman Polanski's editor, Academy Award nominee Hervé deLuze (“The Pianist”). He had read the script and appreciated very much the way Heber Trigueiro (“Federal's” editor) and myself were conducting the rhythm and pace of the film.

Again, film is a very complex art form. Either it hits you, or not. If everyone understood it the same way, it would be too boring. That's why cinema is so great: cinema is disagreement. I might like a film that you hate and vice-versa.

Q: In the scene of “Federal” where the federal police surround the chacara of the head of the NGO, the police shoot a stream of bullets into one of the cars trying to escape from the scene. Is this standard procedure for the police? To me it seemed like overkill. I would have thought that they would just shoot out the tires to get the car to stop so that they could get the passengers alive. Instead, they stop the car but have also killed everyone in it!

A: Come on, give me a break! It's a cop movie! They were being shot at. So, let's kill the bastards!!

At some point in a movie like this, it is a matter of kill or be killed. This was one of those moments. It's like a modern Western.

Q: What was the reaction of the Federal Police to your film? I read the comment of one policeman online who said that your movie shamed the Federal Police for showing them to be so corrupt.

Do you agree with this, or do you think “Federal” showed them in a more nuanced light?

A: Again the arrow hits you according to your own perceptions and thoughts. If this guy felt this way, who am I to disagree?

There were a lot of people at the Federal Police who knew about this project ever since its screenplay was written back in 2001. One retired deputy, to whom I showed the script in 2002, said to me that everything that was there was true.

I've heard about federal policemen who saw it and liked it very much. I just think that I've shown the cops, their wives and even the criminals in a humane way.

The Federal Police Department is a very big place and I'm sure you would get a lot of different opinions there.

Q: What are your next projects that you are working on?

A: I'm working right now on a romantic vampire thriller called “A Lenda de Cândida” (“Candida's Tale”), which I wrote with my “Federal” co-writer Érico Beduschi back in 1999. Diler Trindade will produce this one.

Also, I have yet another police story called “BR-306” (“Route 306”), written by myself, which is being developed with producer Marcus Ligocki, from Brasilia, for his company Ligocki Z Entretenimento.

Currently I'm finishing my production company's (BSB Cinema) third World War II documentary, called “Brazil and the Battle of the Atlantic”.

The previous ones were “Senta a Pua!” (directed by myself), about the first Brazilian fighter squadron in WWII and “A Cobra Fumou”, about the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB) in WWII, directed by Vinícius Reis.

Selton Mello in a scene from "Federal"

‘Federal’ fails to make plausible link between drug traffickers and politicians

2010-11-23T14:25:00.010-02:00

By Rasheed Abou-Alsamh

THE new Brazilian film “Federal” by Erik de Castro, that opened nationwide on more than 70 screens across Brazil on Oct. 29, is a labor of love that had been percolating in the head of its director since he was 16 in 1987.

Twenty-three years later and after several rewrites at the Sundance Institute in the US, “Federal” has finally made it to the big screen. It is the story of a small group of federal and civil police officers in Brasilia who are hot on the trail of international drug trafficker Carlos ‘Beque’ Batista (Eduardo Dussek). Led by a serious yet affable Vital (Carlos Alberto Riccelli), the group includes a young and idealistic federal agent Dani (Selton Mello), a street cop called Lua (Cesario Augusto) and a feisty federal agent named Rocha (Christovam Neto).

De Castro is wildly ambitious in trying to set out telling a story that will illustrate how drug dealers are linked to corrupt politicians in high places, but he fails to paint a convincing picture. Instead, he has produced an interesting look into the lives of policemen, some good others corrupt, in their daily fight against the menace of drugs.

The opening scenes of policemen looking over the body of a murdered drug dealer in the garden of a posh house could have been filmed anywhere in Brazil, but soon De Castro has policemen chasing after another suspect in the satellite city of Ceilandia in an action sequence that involves the traditional dance/martial art that originated with Brazilian slaves called “capoeira”.

The director, who is a native of Brasilia, filmed the entire movie on location in super-16mm that was later blown-up to 35mm. This shows. At the Parkshopping cinema that I watched “Federal” at, the screen was left with a blank space on either side, as the projected film did not fill up the screen entirely. The use of traditional film, instead of digital video, gives the film a cinematic feel that De Castro was aiming for. One reviewer of the film however complained that the scenes looked washed-out and monochromatic, compared to the sweeping and brighter shots of Brasilia’s famous skyline that the director scatters throughout the movie to constantly remind us just where this police thriller is taking place. I found his lighting to be very naturalistic, giving the film a realism that is often missing from other Brazilian films, especially those produced by Globo Filmes that tend to be super-glossy and perfect looking.

Unfortunately, the film’s acting and script deserve less praise. Some of the actors either overacted their parts, such as Michael Madsen as the American Drug Enforcement Agency agent Sam Gibson, or under-acted their parts such as Selton Mello did with Dani. Here the script is also very much to blame, with Madsen saying such clichéd things as: “Brazil has the best coffee in the world!” and “I’ve been in Brazil for several days now and I haven’t even fucked a Brazilian woman yet!” His forced hilarity was over the top and made me squirm in embarrassment. He came across as the stereotypical obnoxious American: Loud, tacky and over-confident.

On the other side of the spectrum, Melo played Dani so low-key that at times it seemed like he was on tranquilizers and sleep-walking his way through the story. Melo is a big star in Brazil, so having him in an independent and relatively low budget film like “Federal”, which was produced on a budget of R$5 million (approximately $2.9 million), is considered a coup of sorts. But not only is Dani moping throughout the movie, he also has an annoying conversation with Vital near the beginning of the film after he sees that a suspect has been tortured for hours by his civilian police colleagues.

“How can we justify this torture?” Dani asks Vital.
“I think that if I had been a policeman during the military dictatorship I would have joined the guerrillas and fought on their side,” he says, referring to the 1964-1985 period during which Brazil was under strict military control and Marxist guerrillas robbed banks and kidnapped diplomats.

“This is our job, this is what we do as policemen,” Vital replies.

I felt like Dani needed a slap in the face from Vital, and a good tongue-lashing. While I’m sure the Federal Police is full of principled and honest agents, Dani’s constant whining and depression throughout the movie made one want someone in the film to suggest to him that maybe he wasn’t cut-out to be a federal agent after all!

Script problems aside, it is clear from seeing “Federal” and from talking with the director (see my interview with him in the next entry), that De Castro loves Brasilia and is trying to showcase the city in this film. I like the capital too but it would have been better if De Castro had been subtler in including shots of the city in the story.

For instance, twice in the film Dani is shown standing next to his motorcycle at the JK Bridge that links the Plano Piloto to the Lago Sul district of Brasilia. This is the most beautiful bridge in Brasilia, and one of the most unique in the world. Its graceful white arches stretching across the Paranoa Lake have become an iconic landmark of the capital. But we already know that Dani lives in a small apartment, which if you live here would know that the superquadras that house most apartments here are not really near the bridge. Which brings me to my point: The shots of the bridge seem gratuitous and do not appear as a convincing part of the narrative.

De Castro also finds it necessary to show us just how human each of our policemen are by showing that each one either has a vigorous sex life or not. At the cinema that I watched “Federal” at, I heard teenagers behind me groan in desperation at some of the protracted and rather explicit sex scenes, which seemed gratuitous and did not do much to advance the story.

I did not mind those scenes so much. What bothered me were the rather sketchy performances of the bad guys: The head of the NGO, Eliezer Gallo (Adriano Siri), who also funded a church (in which he hid a drug manufacturing lab in its basement) seemed to me like a flimsy caricature of shadowy power brokers in the capital. And the reverend of the church, played by Andre Amaro, was cartoonishly funny in the way he led prayers, raising his arms and uttering foolish words. It just made me laugh.

The point that “Federal” makes very well though is that Brazil has become a major trans-shipment point for drugs going from South America to Europe. The country has thousands of kilometers of extremely porous borders with Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Paraguay. Much of that border is in the Amazon jungle, and as such is very difficult to be policed effectively by Brazilian border guards. Just last week, Italian police announced they had seized several tons of cocaine that had been smuggled from Brazil into Italy by sea, hidden in a container of agricultural machines.

While De Castro succeeds in showing us just how corrupt or honest various anti-drug smuggling policemen can be, he utterly fails to paint a convincing picture of the relationship between international drug dealers and political leaders in Brasilia. Which is a shame really. Perhaps he can do that in “Federal 2”.

From left to right: Selton Mello as Dani and Carlos Alberto Riccelli (Vital), with Christovam Neto (Rocha) in the middle, and Cesario Augusto (Lua) behind him, in a scene from "Federal".

Brazil election goes to 2nd round as Marina Silva bags 20 million votes!

2010-10-04T11:18:00.008-03:00

THE Brazilian presidential elections will go to a second round on October 31 after Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party (PT) failed to win an absolute majority of 51% of the popular vote in yesterday's nationwide elections. The final tally gave her 46.8% of the vote, with her runoff opponent Jose Serra winning 32.6% of the vote. Marina Silva of the Green Party (PV) did exceptionally well, garnering nearly 20 million votes across Brazil. Surprisingly she came in only third place in her home state of Acre, but came in first in the Federal District (home of the capital Brasilia) with 41.9% of the votes.

Dilma spent Sunday night holed up in the presidential palace with President Luis Inacio 'Lula' da Silva watching the election returns. She and the president were reportedly disappointed that she didn't make it in the first round, but Lula had repeatedly said during the campaign that he would not be surprised if she did not make in the first round, noting that he too had never made it in the first round the two times he was elected. Dilma delivered a statement to the press at around 11pm last night, thanking her opponents for a good fight and said she would reply to questions today at a press conference in Brasilia at 4:30pm. A last minute corruption scandal involving Lula's now former chief of staff, Erenice Guerra, which was brought to light by Veja magazine just two weeks before the elections, is thought to have put off some voters who were going to vote for Dilma. The big question now is who are the voters who voted for Marina in the first round going to vote for next?

Marina Silva's political trajectory has been nothing if not amazing. She grew up in the Amazon jungle, the daughter of a poor rubber tapper. She only learned how to read and write at the age of 16, and then worked as a domestic helper to support herself as she put herself through university. She became an environmental activist alongside her friend Chico Mendes, who would later be murdered on the orders of a rich farmer who disliked their activism. Elected first as a city councilor in Rio Branco, the capital of Acre, Marina was eventually elected senator. Lula then picked her to be his environment minister, where she often clashed with big land owners who wanted to be able to cut down more trees to make more pasture land for their cattle. She eventually resigned from her post after clashing with Dilma Rousseff, who at the time was the chief of staff of President Lula. Marina then left the PT and joined the Partido Verde. She will definately go far, so look for this fighter to be a candidate in Brazil's next presidential elections in 2014.

In the Federal District, the race for governor is also going to a second round after Agnelo Queiroz of the PT won 48.8% of the vote and Weslian Roriz (PSC) won 31.5%. Mrs Roriz is the wife of the disgraced former governor of the DF Joaquim Roriz, and has zero political experience. Her husband dropped out of the gubernatorial race just days before yesterday's elections after the Brazilian Supreme Court came to a tie when voting on whether or not he could run this year based on a new anti-corruption law called Ficha Limpa which disqualifies candidates who have been found guilty of corruption, or who have in the past resigned from positions in order to avoid losing their political rights to run for office in the future. Roriz resigned from his position as a senator in 2002 when it looked like he was about to be found guilty by the Senate of corruption and would have been banned from holding public office for eight years. His wife Weslian performed so badly in the only televised debate she participated in with other candidates for governor before the election, that clips of it have become a hit on YouTube.

While Joaquim Roriz will be remembred for encouraging thousands of poorer Brazilians to come to the Federal District by giving them land to live on, and which have now become full-fledged satellite cities of Brasilia, he is also known for building the JK bridge and the metro system in Brasilia, which both had significant cost overruns (or superfaturamento in Portuguese).

The fate of other corrupt politicians in these elections is also uncertain as they wait to hear whether the Supreme Court will clear them or not. Paulo Maluf of Sao Paulo, who received 500,000 votes on Sunday to return to Brasilia as a congressman for his state, could be barred from being sworn in again if the court rules against him. He is accused of hiding millions of dollars from the tax agency by laundering it abroad through his private company, and for the superfaturamento of chicken for school lunches when he was the governor of the state of Sao Paulo in the 1980s.

On a lighter note, a comedian who goes by the stage name of Tiririca, and whose elections ads on TV featured him saying "vote for Tiririca, as it cannot get any worse," while wearing a blond wig, outraged many Brazilians, with a judge demanding that he submit himself to a literacy test to make sure that he could read and write. Not surprisingly, as the ultimate anti-candidate, Tiririca won 1.3 million votes to be a federal deputy for Sao Paulo in Brasilia, the highest number of votes ever in Brazil's history for such a post!

Mercado Cobogó: Trendy design in Brasilia

2010-09-26T19:34:00.012-03:00

HAVE you been looking for a shop in Brasilia that sells beautiful, design-progressive decorative objects, leather goods, stationary and jewelry? Then look no further than the Mercado Cobogó located in the 704/705 quadra of the Asa Norte.

The store-cum-café will be one year old in January, and is run by the thirty something couple of Mariana Dap and Ph Caovilla.

“I’m an artist and always wanted to have a space like this,” Mariana told me on Saturday when I visited the store for the first time.

Installed in a large and airy space, with exposed concrete beams and high ceilings, the store has many fun and pretty objects to tempt one. Delicate, lace-like necklaces and bracelets made of thinly-cut silicone in gold, silver, green, black and purple hues would make elegant gifts for any woman. A glass stand showcases the avant-garde silver and gold jewelry of a Brasilia-based designer, with prices in the R$200-400 ($117-235) range.

I especially liked a colorful bed throw from India, which in the single-bed size was priced at R$195 ($114), and a pair of black and white ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the form of Miró-esque women with huge breasts and butts for R$35 ($20). I also liked a white woodcarving of Saint George slaying the dragon, which was priced at R$197 ($115).

I bought a Zoot rollerball pen in navy blue resin with canary-yellow accents for R$45 ($26), a cute, pocket-size Monjojo Cahier notebook with a illustration of Little Red Riding Hood on the cover, and a 3-D bookmark with a moose on it.

The store also features a Brazilian line of feather-light necklaces and bags made from recycled fishing nets in a surprising range of colors. I especially liked the small-leather goods of the São Paulo-based Dafna Edery, who had beautifully finished wallets in red, aqua blue, green and brown leathers. I bought a small wallet for R$78 ($45), and highly recommend her goods which rival anything you would find in Europe or the US.

Once you’ve tired of shopping you can sit down at one of Cobogó’s outside tables and order an espresso and a slice of homemade chocolate cake.

In the basement of the store, Mariana showed me the communal workspace that she shares with a web designer, consultants and various other small businesses.

“We decided to try and have a communal work space that we shared with other small businesses,” Mariana told me. “But it was difficult in the beginning because some people were suspicious that the rent for such a work space was so cheap.”

For around R$450 a month ($264), one can get a small workspace in which to put a desk, chair and laptop. The rent includes free Wi-Fi Internet access, electricity, water, a bathroom upstairs, security and a discount at the Cobogó café.

There are only a few spaces left, so if you’re interested contact Mariana on tel. 3039-6333.

“We don’t have any stock, so what you see on the shelves is what we’ve got, so things do move fast here,” explained Mariana. “But we get new things every week, so it’s always worth it to pop in regularly to see what ‘s new.”

— Mercado Cobogó is located at 704/705 Norte, bloco E, lojas 51 to 56, and is open from Monday to Saturday from 9am to 7pm. Driving on W3 Norte, turn into the 704/705 quadra at the intersection with the Carrefour supermarket. Head towards the 900 block and you’ll see one of the biggest trees in Brasilia. The store is to the left of it.

On the gay Saudi diplomat

2010-09-20T20:02:00.011-03:00

MUCH has been written about the Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles, Ali Ahmad Asseri, who has gone into hiding in the US after applying for political asylum for being gay and fearing execution if he returns to Saudi Arabia.

Michael Issikoff broke the story for NBC News on Sept. 11, reporting that Asseri had claimed in an interview by email that he felt his life was in danger after the Saudi Consulate found out he was gay, had a female Israeli Jewish friend and subsequently refused to renew his diplomatic passport. According to the diplomat, employees of the consulate followed him to gay bars and presumably were monitoring his every move.

Issikoff quotes Ali Al-Ahmad of the Gulf Institue in Washington, D.C., who is a Saudi dissident, as saying that Asseri did have cause for grave concern over his own security if he returned to the kingdom because of his criticism of four Saudi princes living in the Los Angeles area and receiving salaries from the consulate, in an open letter to King Abdullah. “This statement is enough to put Mr. Asseri in danger if he returns to Saudi Arabia,” said Ahmad. I disagree because most Saudis are well aware that there are numerous members of the royal family that get stipends and do nothing very constructive with their lives. The fact that Asseri did not name any names in his open letter that he posted online, seems to indicate that he is more desperate to gain asylum in the US, then to cause real embarrassment to the Al-Saud family.

A later story in the Los Angeles Times blog quotes Ahmad as saying that the consulate would probably be more concerned about Asseri's friendship with the Israeli woman, as they would be afraid that she might be a spy for Israel. That makes sense to me.

As former US diplomat John Burgess noted on his blog Crossroads Arabia, "The Saudi government certainly does not want gay diplomats representing the country. It has gay diplomats representing it already. Most are smart enough to not draw attention to themselves."

Asseri claimed in his email interview that he would killed "in broad daylight" if he returned to Saudi. I highly doubt this, as do Berger and Saudi blogger Qusay Fayoumi. The death penalty has been rarely used against gay men in Saudi, unlike in neighboring Iran. The Saudi men who were executed in 2002 for having been in a gay situation were killed for allegedly raping underage boys. But this is not to say that gay men do not get punished in the kingdom. The more masculine and well-connected ones can get away with being gay for all of their lives, mostly by avoiding the notorious religious police who love to prey on poorer Saudi gay men, the more feminine ones and foreign gay workers.

Qusay, like many younger and more educated Saudis of his generation (he's thirtysomething), believes that gay men have it easy in Saudi. "Saudi never went all Cuba on gays..." he wrote in his post on Asseri. Unfortunately, Qusay is mistaken in his rosy-tinted vision of life in Saudi Arabia. Many Filipino, Arab and Saudi gay men are regularly arrested by the religious police, who after torturing them and extracting confessions of being "gay" or "acting like women", are handed over to regular police and put on trial. The average sentence handed down is nine months to a year imprisonment with 90-120 lashes and deportation at the end of the jail term for the foreigners. How this is better than how gays were treated in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s is hard to tell. (For a glimpse of gay life in Cuba watch Julian Schnabel's excellent 2000 film Before Night Falls, which is the autobiography of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who was imprisoned for two years for being gay.)

The Saudi Embassy in Washington claims that Asseri was never fired but merely transfered back to the Minstry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh after his four-year tour (and one-year extension) in the US ended.

If Asseri returned to the kingdom I doubt he would be imprisoned or killed. He could have found himself without a job and had his right to travel abroad revoked. Even so I think the US should grant him asylum. I hardly think that doing so would seriously dent Saudi-US relations. At most it would cause a tiny blip that would soon be forgotten by both sides.

SAUDI ARABIA: Gay diplomat in Los Angeles may have a case, but little support in the Arab world

2010-09-13T19:40:00.000-03:00

SAUDI ARABIA: Gay diplomat in Los Angeles may have a case, but little support in the Arab world

Saudi Rescue Team Saves 136 Pakistanis from Drowning

2010-08-30T20:55:00.000-03:00

Saudi Rescue Team Saves 136 Pakistanis from Drowning

Stupid marketing calls

2010-08-24T10:07:00.007-03:00

EVERYONE has experienced one of those idiotic and highly annoying marketing calls that phone companies and other firms like to torture us with.

The latest one I received yesterday was from Oi, the operator of our two landlines. They charge us R$42 ($24) a month for each line, which is rather expensive. I told my mom that I saw an ad for a TIM fixed-line that was only R$20 a month, and which included 1,000 minutes of local calls.

Now I know that many of you will say that many people today survive with only a cellphone, which is what I did when I lived in Saudi and the UAE. But here in Brazil whenever you make a doctor's appointment, or buy something major in a store, they always ask for a fixed-line phone number. Some doctors' offices even refuse to call a cell number because it costs them more! So having a fixed number is something of a necessity here.

Anyway, here is how my annoying call went, which I've translated from Portuguese:

ME: Hello?

ANNOYING MARKETING WOMAN: Can I speak to Mrs. Joyce Abualsamh?

ME: Who is calling?

ANNOYING MARKETING WOMAN: I'm calling on behalf of Oi and would like to offer her some promotions.

ME: You can talk to me, I'm her son.

ANNOYING MARKETING WOMAN: I'm sorry, I can only talk to the owner of the line. Is she there?

ME: Yes she's here but she lives in the house next to mine. So go ahead and tell me about your offers.

ANNOYING MARKETING WOMAN: I can't, I can only talk to the owner of the line.

ME: But I pay this bill!

ANNOYING MARKETING WOMAN: I can only divulge this information to the owner of this line.

ME: X@!!!!!*&^%$!!!! We don't want your offers!

Upon which I hung up. The woman's tone of voice and accent were extremely grating, which just made the conversation even more annoying. If only she had been kinder, used her mind and told me what offers they had, I could have passed on the information to my mother. But here once again big business fails yet one more time in connecting with one of its customers, creating a negative impression instead of a positive one. Perhaps we may just switch to a TIM landline after all.

Brasilia sunsets, fires and flowers

2010-08-24T10:03:00.002-03:00

2010-07-31T21:14:00.001-03:00

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Emirates goes stingy with economy passengers

2010-07-31T20:16:00.004-03:00

IF YOU'RE going to fly economy class on Emirates Airlines long haul anytime soon be forewarned: They're cutting back on expenses so bring some of your own snacks and drinks.

Despite making a record profit of more than $900 million in their last year of operations, Emirates is cutting back so much in its economy class that its affecting their catering on board long flights. I experienced this a few weeks ago flying with them from Sao Paulo to Dubai and back. The flight is more than 14 hours nonstop and is usually packed. So it is obvious that Emirates is not losing money on this route, but is in fact making a good profit on it.

But one certainly would not think so by the attitude of their inflight crew. When I asked for a second glass of mineral water, both flight attendants who were doling out the drinks said: "Oh! That will be five dirhams extra, please!"

I was so shocked by their bad taste joke that I could only chuckle along with them, but they seemed rather embarrassed to have to say that.

Next, around three hours after dinner had been served I felt peckish and went to the back of the plane to get something to eat. The crew were placing sandwiches, fruit, chocolate and drinks out to allow passengers to eat at their will, as was pointed out in their inflight menu card. I asked an attendant if I could have a sandwich, and she said yes. Around 45 minutes when they were handing out sandwiches down the aisle I made the mistake of asking for another sandwich.

"I'm sorry, but you already took a sandwich, I remember," said the same flight attendant in an accusatory tone.

When I protested that Emirates was becoming stingy, she said she would come back and give me another sandwich if there were any left over. "We have to make sure everyone gets one first before we allow anyone to have seconds," was her weak excuse.

Sure enough, around 20 minutes later she returned to my seat and gave me a sandwich. When I later wandered to the back to get a drink, I saw that there were a good number of leftover sandwiches, fruit and chocolates.

Flying back from Dubai to Sao Paulo it was the same drill. This time I asked to speak to whoever was in charge of the cabin crew. Several hours later a flight attendant came to me and asked if they could use my name and seat number on a form they were filing about my complaint.

"I'm sorry sir, but we need you passengers to complain to the airline or they won't change their policy," said the clearly apologetic and embarrassed flight attendant.

Three hours into my more than 14-hour flight back to Sao Paulo I went to the back of the plane to get a soft drink. The flight attendant served it to me lukewarm without any ice.

"I'm sorry we've already run out of ice," he told me. "We'll try to get some from the front for our next service."

So, it seems its okay to let economy passengers go without ice while not even halfway into the flight, and food must be rationed too. Of course that would never happen to business and first class passengers.

Maybe I will fly on Qatar Airways next time I have to go to Saudi Arabia. It's just a thought.

The headache-inducing heat of Arabia

2010-07-07T10:41:00.007-03:00

JEDDAH — I used to always make fun of Saudis who were wealthy enough to escape the blistering summer heat of Arabia. But on this trip back to Saudi Arabia, I finally realized why they do it: They don't want to have the horrible headaches that the unrelenting heat produces.

Yesterday morning, I foolishly decided to walk from the Red Sea Palace Hotel to the Corniche Center and then on to the Mahmal Shopping Center. The walk only took five minutes, but with the temperature in the 40s, that was enough to leave me with a blazing headache that lasted the whole day.

I told my friend Thiago before I left Brazil on this trip that I always got diarrhea when I lived in Saudi, and he said that it was probably because of the combination of extreme heat of the outdoors and the extreme cold of air-conditioning in cars and buildings. He's probably right.

My friend Angelo kindly gave me two Advils, which helped turn my headache into a dull throb, but I was still left feeling slightly unwell the whole day.

Now that I think about it, I was a Panadol addict when I lived in Jeddah. I had constant headaches the whole year round, as did my friend Marvin. We used to buy boxes of the stuff in all of its variations: Extra, long-lasting, for sinuses, sleep-inducing, you name it, we popped it!

When I arrived in Jeddah on this trip I sent messages to various Saudi friends that I was in town and wanted to see them. One told me that she was in Los Angeles doing a summer course, another said she was in London and the other friend's mobile was shut off. Good for them, they'll certainly be healthier and headache-free far from the heat of Arabia.

World Cup fever is annoying in Brazil

2010-06-09T13:04:00.005-03:00

Even my local supermarket has succumbed to World Cup fever....

WEEKS ago roadside sellers had gobs of the green and yellow Brazilian flags for sale. At first I couldn’t figure out why this sudden burst of verde e amarelo patriotism was taking place. I was used to seeing huge American flags everywhere in the US, but here in Brazil? Then I realized that it was for the upcoming World Cup.

Brazilians are mad about football, beer, curvy women and partying. The World Cup unites two of those passions: football and drinking beer while watching the games. This country is so mad about football, or futebol in Portuguese, that all banks and most shops will close half an hour before a game played by the Brazilian team, and only reopen half an hour after the game ends. Since this World Cup is being held in South Africa, most of Brazil’s games in the first half of the championship will be held at 11:30 am and 3:30 pm local time, wrecking complete havoc on regular business hours and any semblance of productivity.

“It’s going to be like working around prayer times in Saudi,” my mother quipped today when I was moaning to her about the whacky store timings we are going to be subjected to during the World Cup.

The Correio Braziliense newspaper on Sunday said that many companies were setting up large screen televisions in offices and stores so that their employees could watch all of the Brazil games in comfort. Some companies even went further and said they will be providing snacks and refreshments to their workers, with one advertising agency in Sao Paulo even saying it would provide beer for its workers to drink! Employees were warned in the article not to overdo the beer at work, and to refrain from swearing at the TV screen too much as this might affect their reputation.

I usually like watching the World Cup, which is the only time really when I have any interest in football. But the over-enthusiasm of Brazilians vis-à-vis the World Cup is giving me second thoughts about the world championship of football that is held every four years. Businesses of all types are wrapping themselves in Brazilian flags and nationalism to cash-in on this mania. My local supermarket has painted a huge Brazilian flag on its wall (see photo), M&M’s are being sold in green and yellow, and some pet shops are even painting dogs in the colors of the Brazilian flag.

Luckily I am not the only person in Brazil who isn’t gung-ho on the World Cup. My partner Thiago told me that this hyper-nationalism was sickening. “I can’t stand all these Brazilian flags on everything! I hope Brazil loses the World Cup!”

I wouldn’t go that far myself, though I shudder to think what would happen in the streets here if Brazil won the World Cup for the sixth time. And I can’t imagine what it will be like in 2014 when Brazil actually hosts the World Cup for the first time ever. God help us all!

Lame response from Agencia Nacional do Petroleo

2010-05-04T09:24:00.001-03:00

I FINALLY got a response yesterday from the Agencia Nacional de Petroleo, Gas Natural e Biocombustiveis about the Texaco gasoline station in the Lago Sul, where I had filled up my car with Techron Plus fuel that later may have given my car's engine trouble. It was a lame and bureacratic response from their consumer relations unit that informed me that they could NOT share the reasons why they had temporarily closed down that station in 2007, as they only share such information with other government departments (i.e. police, public prosecutors, the fire department and Procon, the consumer watchdog group).

But the ANP did stress in their letter to me that the list they maintain on their website of fuel stations that were shut down for poor quality fuel, should serve as a reminder of the "presumption of culpability" of those fuel distributors even if they have not been found guilty in a court of law. They also said that the public announcement of stations that have committed infractions serves the purpose of alerting the public to such stations and of hopefully inhibiting future infractions.

I still think the public has the right to know specifically what a station was closed down for, and when the ANP did its latest inspection of stations. That would be more helpful than just knowing that a station was closed down on a certain date. The more information we consumers have, the better decisions we can make.

***
In an interesting side note, I also found out recently that the Union of Workers in the Commerce of Minerals and Petroleum Derivatives in the Federal District (Sindicato dos Trabalhadores no Comercio de Minerios e Derivados de Petroleo no Distrito Federal), sent out a warning letter to its members dated April 23, 2010, warning them that some Gasol gasoline station owners are forcing their workers to work overtime without paying them extra. The union claims that owners of the these stations are making workers use the swipe cards of other collegues to activate gas pumps, and then sometimes turning around and using this fact against the workers to fire them.

The union asked its members to immediately contact them if they are asked to work extra hours and use the swipe cards of colleagues. They said that in one week alone in April, 12 gas station employees were fired by Gasol, who claimed it was for just cause after they used the swipe cards of colleagues.

Brazil has tough labor laws that make it quite difficult to fire workers once they are full-time. But forcing workers to use the swipe cards of colleagues, so that they do not have to pay them overtime, and then turning around and using that to fire them, is beyond ugly. It's just vile!

Warning lights and adulterated fuel in Brazil

2010-04-29T09:54:00.009-03:00

The manager at the Texaco station at QL 15 in the
Lago Sul of Brasilia, is seen testing the Techron Plus fuel
last Sunday. (Photos by Rasheed Abou-Alsamh)

SEVERAL warning lights lit up on my car's control panel last Thursday, something that had never happened before with my 2010 Subaru Forester that was only four months old. I immediately looked at my car's manual to see what they meant.

"Take your car immdediately to your dealer to have it checked if this light goes on," warned my manual about a yellow-colored, rectangular shape that had come on. "Serious damage can be caused to your engine if you continue to drive with the light on for a long time."

I decided to have lunch first and then drove my car to the only Subaru dealer in Brasilia, from which I had bought it from. I drove straight to the back of the dealer where the repair garage was located and parked.

"Could you please have a look at my car? Several lights have lit up on the dashboard," I asked a technician in overalls.

"It must be adulterated fuel," said a showroom salesman who had overheard my comment to the mechanic. "Check his car," he told the technician.

A laptop computer was soon attached to my car's onboard computer and the technician stood there fiddling with the keys of the computer. Sure enough, ten minutes later he had finished resetting my car's computer, and told me that it had malfunctioned due to adulterated fuel.

I usually fill up my car at Petrobras gas stations, but last week decided to try Texaco's fuel. I usually use 'gasolina aditivada', which is regular gasoline with chemical additives that are supposed to keep your car's engine clean and improve perfomance. When I pulled up to the pump, the attendant said: "Why don't you try the Techron Plus? It's the same price as the Techron."

At R$2.69 ($1.52) a liter (with more than 60 percent of that in taxes to the federal government), I thought why not? So I filled up with Techron Plus and off I went. Little did I know that when that tank of gasoline was nearly empty the following week, my car's warning lights would light up.

Petrobras is the Brazilian oil giant that is partially owned by the government here. It has a monopoly on all fuel in Brazil, and other oil companies such as Shell and Texaco all have to buy their fuel from Petrobras. The differences come with the various additives that each oil company puts into its fuels for their more expensive types of gasoline.

A problem that has arisen in Brazil is that of adulterated fuel. Since the 1970s, Brazil has had a major ethanol fuel program, made from sugar cane, and has mandated by law that all gasoline sold in Brazil should have from 20% to 25% ethanol mixed in with it. This has allowed some unscrupulous gas distributors to fiddle with the mix, often adding more alcohol than is allowed by law, or even mixing in cheaper solvents to stretch out the fuel. Alcohol is cheaper than gasoline, so mixing it in with the fossil fuel has definite monetary advantages for gas station owners. But putting too much alcohol or solvents in gasoline is bad for most cars' engines, which led to my problems, or so it seems.

Adulterated fuel can lead to engine failure, an increase in fuel consumption, pinging in the engine, and damage to the fuel pump. Globo News found in a investigation done last year in Sao Paulo, that several gasoline stations switched their fuel on the weekends to adulterated blends because the Agencia Nacional do Petroleo (ANP), a government watchdog agency, did not have enough inspectors to check stations on Saturdays and Sundays.

The ANP has the power to fine and temporarily close down gas stations that are caught selling adulterated fuel. They have a very informative website (in Portuguese) where one can denunciar (which literally means 'denounce' in Portuguese) any station suspected of selling adulterated fuel. They also have lists, organized by state, indicating which stations were fined or closed, and on what date. Thus I looked for my Texaco station, which is located at QL 15 of the Lago Sul, and sure enough found that it had been fined and closed in March of 2007.

"Why don't you call and denuciar the station," my mother asked when I told her what happened. "You can do it anonymously."

To my journalistic sense of fairplay and of always allowing the accused the right to defend themselves, I decided against any denunciations, and instead dropped by the Texaco station last Sunday to talk to whoever was in charge about my fuel problem.

"Let me test the gasoline for you right now," said the man in charge that day, as soon as he heard of my problem. "I'm sure that our fuel in fine."

By law, all fuel stations have to perform on the spot density, mass, temperature and purity tests on any fuel they sell if a consumer suspects that they have been adulterated. Bringing out a huge glass test tube, the manager filled it up with fuel from the pump that I remember having filled up and began his tests. (See photos above and below)

The Techron Plus fuel was greenish from all the additives in it, according to the manager.

"You see, it's density is 0,735 and its temperature is 27.5 degrees centigrade, which is within the allowed limits," said the manager looking at his handbook on fuel quality guidelines. He then mixed half of the gasoline with a special solution that causes the alcohol that is mixed in with it to separate. That showed that the 25% limit of alcohol had not been surpassed.

"If you look on the Internet, you will see that this gas station is still listed as having been shut down by the ANP. But that was a few years ago, and it was because the owner was putting less (my emphasis added) than the 25% allowed alcohol. He was actually losing money," he told me.

I find that hard to believe. To try and find out the truth, I emailed the ANP on Monday telling them whatb happened and asked them for their report on that Texaco gas station. I still have not heard back from them, but I somehow doubt that they shut down the station for selling gasoline with less alcohol in it.

I now avoid filling up at Texaco stations, even though the friendly manager invited me to come back and try their fuel again. I don't think I will ever know for sure whether it was adulterated fuel that caused my car's dashboard to light up last week, and for all I know Texaco sells excellent gasoline across Brazil. It's the shady gas distributors and station owners that I don't trust, and for the sake of my car's engine and sanity of my mind, I choose to err on the side of caution!

A test tube half filled with Techron Plus gasoline,

separates out after a solutionwas added to it. The fuel rose

to the top, leaving the alcohol in the bottom.

Getting vaccinated against swine flu in Brasilia

2010-04-24T11:44:00.002-03:00

I HAD wanted to be vaccinated against swine flu for quite a while, so I was excited when the Brazilian government announced earlier this year that it was going to start a vaccination campaign for free this autumn. (Remember that Brazil is in the Southern Hemisphere, so we’re going into winter here, when the outbreak of flu is at its highest point.)

My happiness was short-lived when the Ministry of Health announced the categories of people who could get the vaccine for free at government health centers: Persons above 60 years of age with chronic health problems; pregnant women, and young people between 20 and 29 years of age. The government said that if there were any vaccines left after that, then everyone else would also be vaccinated. After the severe shortages of the H1N1 vaccine that Brazil experienced last year, I was not going to hold my breath for any leftover vaccine.

“Why don’t you just go to a private clinic?” my partner Thiago said one day when I complained to him that I didn’t fit into any of the categories that the government was vaccinating. “I’m sure you can get it done at Sabin,” he added.

So a few days ago I called Sabin and sure enough they did have the H1N1 vaccine. But at a cost: R$140, or around $80. I thought that was an okay, if a little expensive, price to pay to avoid the horridness of having swine flu and perhaps not surviving it. No appointment was needed, the helpful woman told me on the phone. “We even work through lunch,” she said.

Yesterday I drove to Sabin Vacinas and paid the fee for both the H1N1 vaccine and the first of three shots for hepatitis A+B. The nurse assured me that it was okay to take both on the same day, one in each arm, as they were made from dead viruses.

“Look, this one is made in Holland and the other one is made in Belgium,” the nurse said showing me the packaging of the vaccines and pointing out the manufacturing and expiration dates of both. “You get protection from swine flu plus the seasonal flu,” she added.

“Are you good at giving injections?” I asked warily with a nervous laugh, having had terrible experiences with clumsy nurses in the past, who would poke around looking for a vein while trying to extract my blood.

“Yes of course,” she replied with a big smile. “Don’t worry, only the hepatitis shot will burn a little.”

She gave me the H1N1 shot first in my right arm. I didn’t feel a thing. In fact I thought she had not even given it to me. The hepatitis one in my left arm burnt a little, but just for a moment.

“Your arm will be sore for a while,” she said. “But you should be fine.”

Getting up from the chair and walking to the receptionist’s desk I suddenly felt woozy like I was going to faint. I immediately sat down and put my head down between my knees.

“Keep your head up!” a kind woman doctor told me. “Do you feel like fainting? If so, keep your head up.”

She brought me water with sugar, a very Brazilian remedy for anyone feeling faint or upset, followed by coffee and a few pão de queijo (cheese breads).

“Breath deeply in and out,” she said. “You know, men are always weaker than women when it comes to needles and injections. They’re always the ones that faint.”

“Oh my! You look very pale,” said the receptionist looking at me.

“Let me take your blood pressure,” said the doctor.

After listening to my blood circulating she announced: “Your pressure is quite low. Just sit here a little and wait for it to improve.”

After chatting with them for around 15 minutes, and the doctor taking my pressure once more to make sure that it was rising to normal levels again, I bid farewell and walked to my car to drive home.

Both arms are still a little sore, which made it a little uncomfortable to sleep last night, since I’m a side sleeper, but hey, I feel safer now that I’ve been vaccinated against swine flu. Now I just need to get two more shots against hepatitis A+B. I just hope I don’t nearly faint again!

Happy 50th birthday Brasilia!

2010-04-21T16:59:00.006-03:00

The twin towers of the Brazilian Congress being built in 1959. (Photo by Marcel Gautherot)

BRASILIA, the ultra-modern capital of Brazil, is 50 years old today. What started out as a dream of the Catholic priest Dom Bosco in the 1800s, had in fact already been proposed by the Portuguese Marquis of Pombal in 1761, when he suggested that a new city be built in the Brazilian interior to serve as a capital for both Brazil and its colonial master at the time Portugal.

The Brazilian nationalist Jose Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva was the first person to call a proposed new capital in the interior "Brasilia" in 1823. Brazil's first republican constitution in 1891 called for moving the Brazilian capital from Rio de Janeiro to the Planalto Central, saying that an area of 14,000 square kilometers should be set aside for such purpose. The first exploratory expedition was sent in the late 1890s to map out the cerrado of the Planalto Central, and to make sure the land, water and weather in the region were good for a future capital.

It was not until the 1950s, though, that something was done with the idea of actually building Brasilia and moving the capital there. Rumor has it that it was during a presidential election campaign that the candidate Juscelino Kubitschek was asked what he was going to do about the constitutional provision to move the capital into the heartland of the country if he won the election. "I will build Brasilia if I'm elected president," he replied. Kubitschek was indeed later elected president of Brazil, and true to his word, after 43 months of building and an estimated expenditure of $83 billion to $130 billion, the new capital of Brasilia rose on the Planalto Central and was inaugurated on April 21, 1960.

Oscar Nieymeyer's bold architectural lines of the Brazilian Congress' twin towers, bowl and saucer domes, and Lucio Costa's never-before seen urban planning, meant that Brasilia was an ultra-sleek, post-modernistic city that no one had seen the likes before. The city's design was so radical that one either loved or hated it. I'm glad to say that I now love it, but that wasn't my first emotion when I landed here for the first time in 1975 at the age of 11.

In 1975, Brasilia was still only 15 years old, and some parts of it were still unbuilt. Its infamous red dirt was blown everwhere as dust, nothing imported was available, there was only one shopping mall, the Conjunto Nacional, films and TV were heavily censored, and the military dictatorship, which had taken over in 1964, was in full swing.

In 1982, after finishing high school here at the American School I left to study in the US and work for 20 years in the Middle East. I only came back to live here in 2008, and I must say that I truly love Brasilia now. According to the Correio Braziliense newspaper the city has around 5 million trees. It boasts a beautiful lake, hundreds of excellent restaurants serving all types of cuisine, many world class shopping centers, and a vibrant arts and cultural scene. In short, a far cry from the dreary days of the 1970s.

Brasilia's Distrito Federal always had a governor, first appointed by the Brazilian government, and then directly elected by the people after the 1988 Brazilian Constitution gave Brasilia full political autonomy and rights. Unfortunately, the corruption scandal that erupted here last year has taken down Jose Roberto Arruda, the now ex-DF governor, and cast a gloomy atmosphere over the Brazilian capital's 50th anniversary celebrations. The corruption investigation is ongoing, and also includes many DF representatives who were also caught on film accepting huge wads of cash in bribes from companies doing business with the DF. Arruda was placed in custody of the Federal Police for two months last February, and has now been released to be able to prepare to face a corrutption trial along with at least five other people.

Here are some fascinating pictures taken by the French-Brazilian photographer Marcel Gautherot of Brasilia while it was being built in the late 1950s. Enjoy!

Brazilian serial killer found dead in cell

2010-04-19T22:00:00.006-03:00

THE Brazilian serial killer, Ademar Jesus da Silva, whom the media here had dubbed the "Luziania Monster", was found dead in his detention cell in Goiania, Goias, on Sunday afternoon at around 2 pm after having hung himself using strips of cloth that he had ripped off the covering of his mattress and twisted into a rope.

The Correio Braziliense newspaper carried a gruesome police picture of Ademar already dead, slumped over on a concrete bench in his cell with a rope around his neck and the front of his t-shirt stained with a trail of blood, on its front page today. Forensic experts are saying it looks like suicide, but the mothers of his six young victims in Luziania said they were suspicious as they believe that Ademar had an accomplice in his deadly killing spree. The mothers told the Correio that they were angry he died so soon before having been able to suffer and pay for his crimes.

One mother told the paper that she still did not believe that one of the bodies dug up by the police last week, after Ademar confessed to the killings and led the authorities to where he had buried the bodies, was that of her son. She said she would only believe it when the DNA tests came back positive. The results for all six bodies are due by the end of this week.

Prisoners being held in a cell next to Ademar's, told reporters that they remembered hearing ripping sounds coming from the killer's cell and that just before he killed himself he had told them he was going to take a shower.

A police investigator told Brazilian television that Ademar had actually asphyxiated himself to death as the cord was too short for him to hang himself properly.

Brazilian authorities are now investigating his death and are waiting for the report of the autopsy that his being done on Ademar's body. The Ministerio Publico, a watchdog arm of the government, is leading the investigation and has already raised questions as to how police guards could have allowed such a thing to happen. Ademar had been moved from Luziania to the capital of Goias, Goiania, a few days ago as they feared for his safety if he remained in the town where he committed the murders.

Serial killer sparks debate on Brazil’s weak criminal laws

2010-04-16T10:10:00.003-03:00

Confessed serial killer Adimar Jesus da Silva speaking to the
press this week while in police custody.

ALL OF Brazil was shocked last week when a 40-year-old mason confessed to the police in Luziânia, Goias, that he had killed six young teenagers after having sex with them over the course of a month from the end of December 2009 until January 2010.

Adimar Jesus da Silva was shown on television this week, in video filmed by Goias police, calmly pointing to the various places in the countryside just outside Luziânia where he had buried the corpses of each of his six victims. The banality and coldness of his expression left no doubt in the minds of many viewers that this man was indeed a monster with a sick mind.

But the fact that Adimar had previously been arrested in the Federal District in 2005 and sentenced to a ten-year jail term for sex crimes against two young boys, before being released early for “good behavior” in December 2009, is what enraged the mothers of the six victims and advocates for tougher criminal laws in Brazil.

Maria Jose Miranda, a public prosecutor, told the Correio Braziliense newspaper that Adimar’s early release from prison last year was the result of a sequence of errors, the main one being weak legislation. Under current Brazilian laws, there is no death penalty, not even for first-degree murder, and the most anyone can be imprisoned for is 30 years. Even so, most murderers never serve a complete life sentence, being allowed early release from imprisonment for good behavior after having served only 2/5 of their terms. Brazilian Congress is looking into changing the law so that those sentenced for committing serious crimes would have to serve at least 2/3 of their sentences before being eligible for early release because of good behavior. The electronic monitoring of those accused of sex crimes is also being considered.

The outgoing head of the Supreme Federal Court and the National Council of Justice, Gilmar Mendes, has been criticized for having vetoed a new law a few years ago that would have imposed tougher sentences for those found guilty of committing heinous crimes. Pedophile acts would have been included under that definition.

“If minister Gilmar Mendes had not voted for the unconstitutionality of the Heinous Crimes Act, Adimar would have been imprisoned until at least 2013. It’s easy now to blame lax judges for having freed him, but Adimar was freed because he fulfilled the legal requirements that Gilmar Mendes himself ruled were sufficient,” Miranda told the Correio.

Indeed, the Correio Braziliense did an investigation of Adimar’s case and found that although public prosecutors and doctors had several times told the court that the mason needed weekly psychiatric treatments and evaluations while in jail, their recommendations were ignored. This led to Adimar being examined by a doctor in May 2009, who subsequently wrote in her report that he did not appear to have any mental illness and that he did not need prescription medication. This despite an earlier psychiatric evaluation done more than a year earlier by three mental health professionals, that found Adimar showed signs of sadism and a sexual perversion that they concluded led him to find pleasure in the suffering of others.

Adimar was first arrested in 2005 after sexually abusing a boy of 11 and another aged 13 in the Federal District. He allegedly promised his victims money if they helped him in his work as a mason. In February 2006, after a trial, he was convicted to 15 years imprisonment for his sexual crimes. In September 2007, his lawyer managed upon appeal to have Adimar’s sentence shortened to ten years and ten months imprisonment.

Within one week of being released early from jail for “good behavior” in December 2009, Adimar had molested and killed his first victim in Luziânia. He told police that he killed all of his victims by beating them on their heads with shovels and rocks, after he had sex with them and felt revulsion for what he had done.

One critic of his early release pointed out that Adimar would have obviously shown “good behavior” while in jail since he was surrounded only by adults, and that there were no children there who could have tempted him into criminal acts.

As several defenders of the Brazilian justice system pointed out, no judge could have predicted that a sexual predator such as Adimar would have developed into a serial killer. Nevertheless, the mothers of the six murdered victims said they are planning to sue the Federal District court for having released Adimar early from jail without a proper psychiatric evaluation.

It remains to be seen now if the public outrage over the Adimar killings will provide enough momentum to get Brazilian criminal laws toughened or not.

Pipocada, peeing and Beyoncé in Salvador’s Carnaval

2010-03-28T15:08:00.011-03:00

A Carnaval parade in the Pelourinho district of Salvador, Bahia.

“TAKE OFF your shirt now!” yelled my partner Thiago over the sounds of revelers dancing and enjoying themselves to the music of the trio eléctricos passing by.

We were in the middle of Carnaval in Salvador, Bahia, last February, trying to make our way up through the crowds on the coastal road in the Rio Vermelho neighborhood of the city.

“Everyone is looking at our abadás, so take it off!” Thiago explained. He had already swiftly taken off his black and white tank top, otherwise known as an abadá in Portuguese. I struggled with my Mardi Gras beads, and when Thiago saw that I couldn’t extricate myself from them fast enough, he just yanked down on them sharply until they snapped. I quickly took my tank top off, and off we went up the hill, bare-chested but slightly less frightened of being jumped for our abadás.

Every trio eléctrico and camarote, or VIP lounge area, had a different abadá for every day of the seven days of Carnaval in Salvador. This was the easiest and fastest way to see who had paid the required hefty fees to dance behind the musical floats in the Carnaval parade or watch from the safety of the camarotes, where beer flowed freely. Those who could not afford to pay for either had to make do standing on the sidelines of the parade route, squeezed between thousands of people who were often rowdy and many times erupted into fights. These people are referred to in slang Portuguese as the pipocada, or the popcorn, a reference to how they look like corn being popped as they jump up and down to the sounds of axé music.

After twenty minutes of relentlessly pushing our way through the excited crowds of revelers, we finally arrived at our camarote, tired and slightly dazed at having survived the madding crowds.

****

LUCKILY, we arrived in Salvador from Brasilia a few days before the actual Carnaval parades kicked off, which meant we had some time to explore the city and get our bearings. It was my first time in Salvador, the first capital of Brazil and the old port where most of Brazil’s slaves arrived from Africa to work on sugar cane plantations here. For Thiago, this was to be his fourth Carnaval in Salvador, which comforted me by knowing that at least one of us knew the city already.

The historic neighborhood of Pelourinho, with its cobbled streets, historic buildings and colonial churches, was the most interesting for me. Guidebooks claim that there are 365 colonial churches in Salvador, one for every day of the year!

A ghoulish fact of the Pelourinho’s past came to my attention as I leafed through a lavish coffee-table book on Salvador in our hotel room. It said, in almost nonchalant terms, that slaves who misbehaved in colonial times were often strung up in public squares in the district and whipped as a warning to other to slaves not to misbehave.

Brazil was one of the last countries in the world to outlaw slavery in 1888. The fact that Salvador was the port of entry of so many African slaves into the country, means that the city to this day remains the most important center of Brazilian-African culture in the nation.

****

THE NIGHT before Thiago and I went to see the Beyoncé concert at the exhibition center out by the airport, we were eating dinner in the Pelourinho district when I noticed several strikingly beautiful black American women and men who were also eating in the same restaurant.

“Look Thiago,” I said. “Don’t you think these are musicians and backup singers for Beyoncé?”

And sure enough the next night at the concert, we recognized several of them on the stage with Beyoncé.

****

URINATING in public becomes a major issue during Carnaval in Salvador. Thousands of people dancing in the streets at the same time, while swilling down rivers of ice cold beer, leads to one insurmountable problem: Too much pee and not enough public bathrooms.

The city of Salvador tries to cope by putting up chemical toilets along the various parade routes, but this year they were never enough and many times were locked shut.

On one occasion, both Thiago and I had to pee at the same time when we were dancing with a trio eléctrico. In order to battle our way through the pipocada crowd to get to a bathroom and return in one piece, we asked one of the burly security guards if he would escort us on this mission. He readily agreed, and we followed him as he carved a path through the pulsating human river of people in front of us.

After walking through several blocks of side streets, and still not finding any chemical toilets, we finally stopped and just did as others were already doing and peed on the gate of a house on one of the side streets. Once relieved, we were escorted back to the parade, and we gave the guard a generous tip for his help. I can only imagine how horrifying it must be for women who find themselves in a similar predicament. If I were female and dancing in Carnaval, I would avoid drinking most any kind of liquid. The danger there, of course, with the heat and humidity, is keeling over from heat exhaustion and dehydration!

A colonial church on a square in the Pelourinho

district of Salvador, Bahia.

(Both photos by Rasheed Abou-Alsamh)

Brasilia’s political circus/scandal continues

2010-03-12T12:05:00.007-03:00

A view of the windows in the room where Jose Roberto Arruda is being held in at the Federal Police compound in Brasilia. Below, a view of his bunk beds and office desk.

THE political crisis in Brasilia continues with the Federal District Governor Jose Roberto Arruda still being held at the headquarters of the Federal Police, a month after he was accused of trying to obstruct an investigation into massive corruption in his administration.

The threat of federal intervention in the governing of the Federal District has eased for the time being, with the federal Supreme Court loath to intervene in a district that was given political emancipation only in 1988.

Last week the Federal District Assembly voted to begin impeachment proceedings against Arruda. If he does not resign before the process is over, which takes several months, he could see his political rights suspended for up to eight years. Last Saturday, two district representatives tried to serve Arruda with the notice of the impeachment proceedings, but he refused to receive it, later saying in a handwritten letter to the Federal District Assembly that he wanted access to the full report on his impeachment before accepting the notification. The representatives returned last Monday with two witnesses to corroborate that they had informed Arruda of the proceedings against him, and served him with the notice.

Arruda’s lawyers have been trying to get him moved to house arrest, something the Supreme Court justices have not been inclined to allow since this would facilitate his communication with supporters, and thus possibly make it easier for him to interfere in the Federal Police’s ongoing investigation into corruption in his administration.

The governor is currently allowed visits only from his immediate family and his lawyers. His wife Flavia brings him lunch everyday, although she is not allowed to be alone with him in his room. He is being held in a room of approximately 16.8 square meters in the Federal Police headquarters compound in Brasilia. He had previously been held in a room of 40 square meters. He has access to newspapers and magazines, but is not allowed access to television or telephones. His lawyers claimed that he was being held in a “masmorra”, or a subterranean jail, which forced the Attorney General’s office to release pictures last week of his quarters which showed the room had clean white walls, a bunk bed, an office desk, a small refrigerator, a little sofa and a window.

Arruda’s lawyers have also been claiming that the governor is suffering from pains in one of his ankles, which they claim is swollen and is linked to his diabetes. Two visits to a private hospital this week found Arruda in good health, taking away yet another reason his lawyers were trying to use to push for house arrest.

The three-time former governor of the Federal District, Joaquim Roriz, who is now 75 years old, has been running political ads on television showing himself talking casually about the “shame of corruption” that is currently rocking Brasilia. Roriz is expected to run in the October elections for governor again. He has been embroiled in several corruption scandals in the past, which make his criticisms of Arruda extra ironic. Will voters here remember that when they go to the polls in October? One can only hope so.

Brasilia in crisis as governor remains jailed

2010-02-25T11:57:00.006-03:00

Jose Roberto Arruda, left, and Paulo Octavio in happier times.

THE capital of Brazil, Brasilia, remained in a deep political crisis this week with the Distrito Federal Governor Jose Roberto Arruda still being held by the federal police for obstruction of an investigation of massive corruption involving the governor and at least 11 district representatives.

Arrested on Feb. 11, at the beginning of Carnival, Arruda is being held at the headquarters of the Federal Police in Brasilia after he allegedly tried to bribe a local journalist to testify in his favor in the ongoing corruption investigation called “Pandora’s Box”.

The vice governor of the Federal District, the enormously wealthy and successful real estate tycoon Paulo Octavio, took over as acting governor when Arruda was arrested. But he too has been linked to the corruption scheme, and impeachment proceedings have been filed against him, as well as Arruda, by several district representatives.

Octavio found that he had little support in the DF legislature and after only 11 days in office decided to resign last week. After a hurried meeting with Brazilian President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva last week, he announced that he was holding off on resigning until this week, claiming that President Lula had asked him to wait a few more days. This was promptly denied by the presidential palace, which did not want the public to think that the president was supporting a politician under suspicion of corruption.

Arruda was arrested upon request of the Attorney General Roberto Gurgel, who has repeatedly warned that there could be federal intervention in the governance of the Federal District if the local government does not get its act together. If the federal government stepped in, they would need to appoint someone to manage the capital at least until October when national elections are scheduled to take place and a new slate of politicians can be voted into office. The problem here is that the leading candidate expected to win the governor’s race is Joaquim Roriz, a former three-time governor of the DF and federal senator, who had to resign from the Senate in 2007 in a corruption scandal in order to not have his political rights suspended for several years if he had been found guilty.

The Pandora’s Box investigation by the federal police came to public knowledge last year when hours of secretly filmed videotape was released by the police showing Arruda and several district representatives in different instances accepting large cash bribes and stuffing the money into their socks, underwear and handbags. The police claim these were regular kickbacks made over several years by businesses that had been given lucrative contracts with the Federal District government. These scenes caused a national outcry against such blatant greed and corruption when they were televised, although Arruda still maintains the payoffs were to fund the electoral campaigns of the politicians.

Durval Barbosa, a former official in the DF government, who was involved in all of the payoffs, secretly filmed them in a deal he made with the Federal Police to help them in their investigation. In return he has been promised a reduced sentence.

The Supreme Federal Court was originally scheduled to rule today on a habeus corpus motion by Arruda’s lawyers, but has postponed any decision until next week after Arruda’s lawyers asked for more time to study the original voting of the court which decided in favor of holding the governor. According to today’s Correio Braziliense newspaper, 13 of the 15 justices, who heard the original petition to have Arruda arrested, voted in favor of his arrest.

A district representative, Wilson Lima, is now the new acting governor of the Federal District. He was described by Octavio in an interview with the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper yesterday as “a simple man”.

What remains to be seen is if Lima can stave off a federal intervention until the elections in October, and if Arruda, Octavio and the 11 district representatives will be tried in court for corruption. For too long disgraced politicians in Brazil have been able to cry on TV begging for forgiveness and then make a political comeback several years later as if nothing had happened. One can only hope that the memory of voters in the Federal District is not so short that they re-elect politicians that have proven in the past how rotten they really are.

Knee-jerk reactions to terrorism give false sense of security

2010-01-05T21:35:00.004-02:00

THE HASTILY announced new security measures implemented soon after the bungled Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (photo at right) to bomb a Delta jetliner approaching Detroit, of not being allowed on international flights to use the bathroom one hour before landing in the US or having a blanket on one’s lap, were laughable despite the seriousness of the threat.

One does not deny that there are growing numbers of Muslims around the world who are being radicalized and pushed into hating and wanting to harm the United States and its citizens. This is due to two reasons: The rise of radical and ultra-conservative Islam, fueled in large part by Saudi money, and the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It is amazing that so many Americans still insist in solely viewing American imperial adventures abroad as do-good missions, swallowing hook, line and sinker the lie that America just wants to improve things in the Middle East.

How can so many intelligent Americans not realize that in invading other countries, citizens of those countries just might harbor feelings of ill-will and resentment towards the invaders? It seems to be a logical and very human reaction to such a situation. Would Americans like it if Russia or China invaded the US to supposedly improve life for oppressed Americans? I hardly think so.

The chorus of criticisms of the Obama administration’s reaction to the failed bombing were right in pointing out the stupidity of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s comment that “the system had worked” when passengers and flight attendants overpowered Abdulmutallab, and in slamming President Obama’s seeming lack of concern when he initially sent out advisers deal with the aftermath before finally holding a press conference himself.

Napolitano had to quickly backtrack in the days following her inauspicious comment, especially when it became known that Abdulmutallab’s own father had gone to the US Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria, months ago to warn them about the radicalization of his son. An intelligence report was telegraphed back to Washington from the embassy and the Nigerian’s name was placed on a watch list of half a million people. But he was not put on the much smaller no-fly list, and worst of all his two-year US visa was not cancelled immediately as it should have been.

All passengers flying to the US have their names and passport details sent ahead when they check-in for their flights so that security checks can be made before someone believed to be a threat can even board a flight to the US. If his visa had been cancelled, and if the pre-flight verification system had worked, then Abdulmutallab would have never been allowed to board that Delta flight.

It was the fast thinking action of a Dutch passenger which saved the day on that Delta flight when he leaped across rows of seats when he saw that Abdulmutallab was trying to set off a bomb, and grabbed the explosive device out of his hands, thereby saving the lives of nearly 300 people. Alert passengers and flight attendants on flights to and in the US are indeed the last line of defense between a terrorist and their success or lack thereof in blowing up or crashing a plane.

The extra security measures announced this week for passengers flying to the US from 14 countries considered to harbor many potential terrorists with anti-US feelings, including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Algeria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, seem unfair to me and are certainly not foolproof. Al-Qaeda or any other group could get around these new restrictions by recruiting disaffected American, French or British Muslims to carry out attacks on the US and Americans. Or they could use Indonesians, Indians, Filipinos or Chinese to carry out attacks.

Americans and Europeans have to think strategically and cleverly in how to outfox the terrorists. Installing those huge imaging full body scanners at all major European and US airports would be a good beginning. They have hardly been used so far because of objections from privacy activists. But in this age of underwear bombers, these scanners have become more necessary than ever. Who cares if security screeners can see the outline of your entire body? Especially when the images are not stored and are deleted soon after being taken? Objections that screening all passengers with these machines would take far too much time could be remedied by randomly screening a certain number of passengers from each flight, no matter their nationality.

In addition, Western countries need to be adept at sorting through and actually analyzing intelligently the avalanche of data and information that they are buried under on a daily basis. Firing a US intelligence analyst, who spoke fluent Arabic, just because he was gay, has to stop too. Apart from being homophobic and wrong, firing someone just because they are gay is silly when there are so few Americans who actually speak and write Arabic fluently.

Western countries have to think outside the box and at the same time support progressive and moderate forces in Muslim countries so as not to alienate whole nations. Pulling out of Afghanistan would be a good first step. That war is unwinnable, and it is a shame that hundreds of young Americans and Europeans have given their lives for a country that does not want their help and an Afghan government that is riddled with corruption. And that too just so that Obama and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown can save face and not be accused of abandoning the fight. Afghanistan was never a good fight to begin with. Bush got us involved in that, Obama should now get us out.

Brazilian military up in arms over possibility of amnesty law being revoked

2009-12-30T12:28:00.006-02:00

THE Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim and the commanders of the three major branches of the military all signed a joint resignation letter addressed to President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva last week over a proposed law that would have created a National Program of Human Rights and set up a truth commission that would have had the power to try military officials for human rights abuses committed during the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

A sweeping amnesty law passed by Congress in 1979 gave protection from prosecution for any crimes committed by members of both the military and left-wing guerrilla groups during the dictatorship. This was the major condition that the military demanded in return for allowing the country to be returned to civilian rule.

According to the O Globo and O Estado de São Paulo newspapers, President Lula had an emergency meeting with Defense Minister Jobim on Dec. 22 at the Brasilia Air Force Base, where the minister handed in the collective resignation. Lula rejected their resignations and promised to stop the proposed bill from being sent to Congress. According to press reports, the president claimed he was not aware of some of the provisions of the new bill.

The mentor and coordinator of the proposed National Human Rights Program is Lula’s own Minister of the Secretariat of Human Rights Paulo Vannuchi. According to the Estado de São Paulo paper, the military was extremely alarmed that the proposed reappraisal of human rights abuses during the military dictatorship mentioned only state actors, and did not include the various armed, left-wing guerilla groups that kidnapped, killed and robbed during that same period.

“If they want to put a colonel or a general in the defendant’s seat, then let’s also put Dilma and Franklin Martins there,” one active general told the newspaper. He was referring to Lula’s chief of cabinet Dilma Rouseff, who is his handpicked candidate for next year’s presidential elections, and the head of government communications, both of whom participated in armed struggle against the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is obvious that Lula, the first left-wing president that Brazil has had since João Goulart was overthrown in 1964, is pushing the envelope on abuses committed during the dictatorship. He is testing the waters to see how the military will react. Their reaction was quite strong, causing Lula to backtrack and say that he and his Partido dos Trabalhadores, will not support the passage of the new law in Congress.

But it is also a sad fact that the whole military dictatorship period of twenty years is hardly talked about in Brazilian schools or in public discourse. I asked several Brazilian friends if this period was studied in detail in high schools and they told me “no”, that it was just mentioned in general terms.

Brazil is still suffering the effects of those years of dictatorship. Not talking about what happened during those dark years leaves questions unanswered and several generations of Brazilians without knowledge of crucial part of their history. A National Truth Commission, like the one set up in South Africa to deal with the aftermath of apartheid, would do a world of good to the country. Yes it would be traumatic in some cases, and yes, I think left-wing guerillas should be criticized as well, but I also think that confronting the many demons from that era would be cathartic and healing for the whole Brazilian nation.

Do Começo ao Fim tackles controversial subject with compassion

2009-12-13T14:02:00.004-02:00

João Gabriel Vasconcellos, left, and Rafael Cardoso in
a scene from Do Começo ao Fim

I WATCHED Do Começo ao Fim, a much-awaited Brazilian film with a gay theme, on Friday night at Park Shopping, and was a little disappointed with the script and some of the acting.

Directed and written by Aluisio Abranches, From Beginning to End is the love story of two half-brothers, Francisco and Thomás, who grow up together in Rio with their mother Julieta (Julia Lemmertz) and become lovers. The first half of the film shows the two when they are six and 11 years old each. Played by Lucas Cotrin (Francisco) and Gabriel Kaufmann (Thomás), the young actors are much more convincing and natural as the young brothers than João Gabriel Vasconcellos (who is a Ford model in real life) as the grown-up Francisco and Rafael Cardoso as the grown-up Thomás, who come across as being too self-conscious and thus irritatingly corny.

The veteran actress Lemmertz is excellent as the mother of the two boys. She notices the intimacy that develops between the two half-brothers, but does nothing to stop it. Instead she has a heart-to-heart talk with Francisco and tells him if he ever wants to talk about his feelings for his brother that she will be there to listen to him, and that he shouldn’t be ashamed of his feelings.

The director Abranches had trouble getting financing for the film because of its controversial theme of gay and incestuous love. Some producers offered support only if he made the two brothers heterosexual or if they became cousins in the script. He refused and was still able to get enough backing to finish the film. The director says he is not trying to raise any flags with the film, but that he only wants to tell a love story without making any judgments on it.

Vasconcellos as the grown up Francisco kept laughing too much in his scenes, which I found annoying and seemed to be a byproduct of his feeling nervous and the fact that he is a neophyte actor. Lapses in the script also left me and other viewers wondering how the two brothers could live together as lovers and never seem to encounter any hostility from friends and relatives.

Nevertheless, Do Começo ao Fim is a fine film that tackles a potentially controversial subject with dignity and compassion.

— The film is being shown in Brasilia at Park Shopping and at the Academia de Tenis.

Arruda leaves party before being thrown out

2009-12-11T11:43:00.006-02:00

Mounted military police attack a lone protester on

the ground in Brasilia on Wednesday.

THE embattled governor of the Federal District, Jose Roberto Arruda, announced his departure from the Democratas party yesterday at a press conference during which he read from a prepared statement. He did not take any questions from the press.

Accused of running a vast bribery scheme by the Federal Police, video surveillance tapes were broadcast on national television showing him and several other political allies accepting wads of cash from private companies that had been awarded lucrative contracts with the Federal District’s government.

Arruda’s move was a strategic one to preempt his former party from meeting today to vote to throw him out. He had asked the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to stop the Democratas from holding that meeting, but the court ruled yesterday morning that it could not stop what was essentially an internal party matter. In his prepared statement, the governor emphasized that he was withdrawing himself from the election next year, but that he intended to stay on and finish the 2,000 projects that his government has ongoing in the Federal District, home to Brazil’s capital of Brasilia.

Some observers have noted that Arruda will try to hang on for dear life, but that the amount of corruption evidence against him is vast and that ultimately he will be forced to resign from the governorship.

Anti-corruption activists have been holding anti-Arruda protests in Brasilia everyday this week, with the most violent one taking place on Wednesday when 600 anti-riot military police on horseback essentially attacked more than 1,500 peaceful demonstrators with their horses, billy clubs, tear gas and rubber bullets. Horrifying pictures of policemen ganging up on lone demonstrators kneeling on the ground were printed in newspapers and shown on television. Col. José Belizário Silva Filho, who was in charge of the battalion unleashed against the demonstrators, hotly defended his men’s actions at a press conference on Thursday, even after video footage showed him rolling on the ground as he tussled with a protestor. “Did I hurt him deliberately?” he asked defensively. “Our actions were perfect!”

The head of the military police in the Federal District, Col. Luiz Henrique Fonseca, admitted that the troops under Silva Filho’s command had committed excesses in trying to contain the protesters and has opened an investigation into the incident. But he noted that initially he saw no reason to put Silva Filho on administrative leave. The Public Ministry of the Federal District took a less sanguine view of the incident, with Mauro Faria Lima, a public prosecutor, saying that it was opening its own investigation of the event by interviewing the injured protesters and the policemen involved.

Lima said the military police’s actions against the protesters were “bestial”. “A protester that had fallen down was surrounded by policemen mounted on horses. The policemen threw their horses against the protester. These were shocking scenes, unworthy of a civilized country,” the prosecutor said according to O Globo newspaper.

“We want Arruda to resign as governor now, in December,” one student protester told Globo television last night in an interview. “We’re not willing to wait until next year. We are going to keep protesting every day until he leaves.”

There are six impeachment requests currently being evaluated by the Legislative Council of the Federal District, which has 24 elected representatives. But analysts have noted that Arruda has enough allies on the council to have all impeachment requests turned down.

‘Broken Embraces’ not Almodovar’s best work

2009-12-08T20:56:00.002-02:00

Warning: Contains spoilers!

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, Broken Embraces, or Abraços Partidos, as it is called in Brazil, is not his best work. I watched the film on Sunday in Brasilia after the film opened in Brazil on Friday.

Starring Penelope Cruz as Lena, a young secretary at a large company who occasionally works as a high-class escort to make some extra money, the film shows her father dying from cancer of the stomach that has metastasized. Her boss at the company, played creepily well by Jose Luis Gomez, is in fact the rich industrialist Ernesto Martel who owns the whole company. He’s a lecherous old man, who jumps at the chance of helping Lena when she calls him up to ask for help in getting treatment for her ailing father. Before we know it, Lena is his lover living in luxury with him in his large mansion. But of course, ennui soon sets in and Lena goes looking for work as an actress. She visits the office of movie director Mateo Blanco played by Lluis Homar, and sparks fly. Blanco hires her for one of his films and they fast become lovers.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. All that I have just described occurs in flashbacks. At the beginning of the film, Blanco is blind and has been reduced to writing film scripts. He is taken care of by his agent Judit Garcia (Blanca Portillo) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas). A surprise visit by a certain Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), who wants to produce a film with Blanco, sets in motion the flashbacks that tell the twisted story of what really happened between the main characters.

Ray X is in fact the gay son of Ernesto Martel who wants revenge for what his father did to Blanco and Lena. Blanco turns him away and during a ten-day period when he is left in the care of Diego, tells the young man what happened so many years ago with him and Lena. It turns out that Martel agreed to finance the film that Lena was starring in as a way to keep her under his control. To find out if she is being faithful or not, Martel sends his son out with a video camera to make a documentary of the making of the film. The son trails Lena everywhere, on set and off, filming everything and handing in his daily shots to his father who watches them at night and employs a hilarious lip-reader (Lola Dueñas) to help decipher what is being said since his son’s shots mysteriously have no sound.

The secret affair unmasked, Lena decides to leave Martel but he pushes her down a long staircase and then drives her to a hospital for treatment. She recovers but decides to run away with Blanco to Famagusta. They stay there for a month, but Martel manages to track them down and sends his son after them. Tragically, Lena is killed when a SUV smashes into the car she’s in with Blanco. The director is blinded in the accident.

The problem with this film is that I could not manage to care about what was happening to the characters in the first hour of the film. Cruz is amazingly flat in this film, with a determined look on her face most of the time that just makes her look like a gold digger. Homar walks around acting like an oversexed man going through a mid-life crisis, while Portillo just seems to constantly frown throughout the movie. The only character with some semblance of sweetness and naturalness is Tamar Novas as Diego.

The other problem is with the script that allows Judit Garcia to tearfully admit at the end of the film that she helped Martel track down the two lovers and even helped him re-edit Blanco’s movie so that it would be a critical flop. Blanco hardly flinches at such revelations of betrayal, which was not very believable. All in all, it is sort of a relief when Lena is killed off near the end of the film, which does not say much about the quality of Cruz’s acting, the direction she got from long-time friend Almodovar, or the script that they worked with.

Tropical flowers, a watercolor and Kuwaiti kabsa

2009-12-07T20:35:00.006-02:00

LAST Thursday, December 3, I attended the annual Christmas bazaar of the American International Club of Brasilia at the Portuguese Embassy.

My mother has been a member of this club for many years, so I decided to tag along this year since I had never been before. The club was founded in 1971, when Brasilia was only 11 years old. It’s original name was American Women’s Club of Brasilia, but that was changed a few years ago to accommodate the husbands of diplomats who were posted to the Brazilian capital and wanted to be members of the group.

The bazaar was a slightly interesting mishmash of a bake sale cum jewelry and embroidery sale. Tables were set up to display the goods of both club members and outside vendors. I bought a beautiful arrangement of tropical flowers grown right here in the Distrito Federal in Brazlândia for only R$15 (around $8.60).

I also got a beautiful watercolor of a cashew tree for R$80 ($46) painted by Therese von Behr, a talented artist originally from Romania and who has been living in Brasilia for many years. I also won a jar of Marmite from the UK in the raffle section. Unfortunately, although I do like the saltiness of the dark brown yeast spread, I cannot eat it because it will inflame the gout I have in my left ankle.

What really caught my attention though, was the Asian section of the bazaar that had steamed Chinese dumplings, Indonesian dishes and a rice, kabsa dish from Kuwait. A Brazilian man came in bearing the Kuwaiti dish. I looked in vain for a Kuwaiti woman accompanying him and later had to laugh and point out to my mom that a Brazilian maid in a well-pressed uniform was standing next to the Kuwaiti dish ready to serve anyone a plate of the good-looking dish for R$5 a pop.

“How typical of Kuwaitis,” I told my mom, chuckling. “They can’t even be bothered to show up, instead they send their dish with a maid!”

With that we called it a day and left with our goodies to have lunch at the Gilberto Salamão shopping center in the Lago Sul.

New corruption scandal rocks Brasilia

2009-12-03T00:03:00.005-02:00

Federal District Governor Jose Roberto Arruda

THE SECRET video recordings shown on Brazilian television this week show Federal District politicians, including the governor, Jose Roberto Arruda, accepting wads of cash and stuffing them into their underwear, socks and jacket pockets.

In a sweeping anti-corruption sting led by the Federal Police, code-named Pandora’s Box, and the Ministério Publico, a ministry in the federal Brazilian government charged with tracking down corruption and indicting those engaged in it, the videos were released to the press this week after months of investigations. The Supreme Court of Brazil authorized the secret video and audio recordings, most of which were taken by the former secretary of institutional relations of the Federal District, Durval Barbosa.

According to the Federal Police, the scheme involved various private firms giving monthly bribe payments to the governor, the vice governor Paulo Octavio, and at least eight Federal District legislative council members. In return, these officials allegedly steered juicy contracts to these firms.

Gov. Arruda has vehemently denied the accusations saying that the payments were election campaign contributions, some of which he claims were used to buy panatones (Italian-style, sweet Christmas bread) for poor families last year in the Federal District. The O Globo newspaper calculated that the amount in that questionable transaction alone could have bought 3,333 panatones.

Around 150 anti-corruption protesters invaded the Federal District’s legislative council building on Wednesday afternoon at 3 p.m., crashing through a glass door, knocking over a metal detector and slightly injuring one of the six guards that were unable to stop them from coming in. They chanted slogans calling for Arruda’s impeachment and his imprisonment at the local Papuda jail. They occupied the actual legislative chamber, which has 24 members, but later left. They returned again at night, vowing to spend the night sleeping there.

Arruda is no stranger to charges of shady dealings. In 2001 he had to resign as a senator in the federal Senate after he tearfully admitted to rigging the voting results of the chamber. A member of the opposition Democratas party, Arruda is hanging onto to his job for dear life. His party is split between those who want him to be immediately thrown out, and those who have been receiving financial aid from him to help pay off outstanding debts from the previous election. The party has decided to do an internal investigation in eight days, and said that Arruda would not be questioned, admitting that the whole process and resulting outcome would be a political one.

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva was initially extremely cautious when asked about what he thought of the broadcast video footage. “The images do not speak for themselves,” he told Brazilian TV reporters two days ago while attending the Ibero-American Summit in Portugal. By Wednesday he had dramatically changed his tune, saying that he had seen some of the images and that he thought it was a “grave” situation. But he stressed that he as president was not going to prejudge anyone, and that a formal investigation and judging process would determine who was guilty or not.

Many analysts pointed out that President Lula was going extra easy on the Democratas scandal because of his own PT party’s mensalao illegal payments scandal in 2005 that when uncovered threatened his presidency and led to the resignation of several key government officials.

With public anger at the ongoing corruption in Brazilian politics it seems certain that Gov. Arruda and his deputy Octavio have their days in power numbered. Without an affiliation to a political party for at least the previous 12 months, Arruda and Octavio will not be able to run in the elections next year, guaranteeing that their political ambitions will be over at least for another four years. But never say never in Brazil. In this country, voters seem to have very short memories, and regularly re-elect corrupt politicians. Just look at Paulo Maluf, who is accused of having siphoned off millions of dollars from public works while he was governor of Sao Paulo state. He is currently a deputy in the House of Representatives and has not spent time in jail for the crimes he committed.

Looking for my father

2009-12-01T09:24:00.006-02:00

I STOOD in the middle of the Islamic section of the Campo da Boa Esperança cemetery in Brasilia last Friday and looked for my father’s grave. My cousin Yasser was visiting from Saudi Arabia and he wanted to pray for “Uncle Mohamed” as he put it.

Tomorrow, December 2, will be the one year anniversary of his passing. I still remember the day we buried my dad: It was raining like mad and there were small rivers of mud as we placed his cotton-wrapped body into a hole in the ground and workers sealed it off with a concrete slab on top.

But now a year later I couldn’t remember exactly where we had placed him. I walked around the other grave markers, beautiful pieces of dark granite slabs and engraved markers with the names of the deceased, their birth and death dates, and some with quotations from the Holy Qur’an. There were several unmarked graves, but I still could not figure out which one was my father’s. In my grief on the day he died and that we buried him, my mind had been a blank on noticing such things.

“That’s normal,” said Valdete, a Brazilian friend, when I tell her later on the phone that I couldn’t remember where we had placed my dad. “You were so upset with grief. It’s normal not to remember such details.”

The Islamic section of the Brasilia cemetery is fenced off from the rest of the cemetery and a large marble pillar with a golden crescent on the top stands at the entrance to the section next to a huge cement sign that says “Cemitério Islamico”. When I had stopped at the cemetery’s administration office at the entrance to ask them if they knew where my father was buried, an employee had handed me a map to the whole place and showed me how to reach the section where Muslims were buried. He was sorry he told me, but only the Islamic Center of Brasilia would be able to tell me where my dad was resting. Ironically, the map showed the “Israelites”, or Jews, as being buried just a short distance away from the Muslims, the bodies of Catholics separating the two.

Just like the Jews, Muslims are not supposed to put flowers on the graves of their loved ones. At the entrance to the cemetery I saw a woman selling a huge wreath of flowers, so I stopped, just out of curiosity, to ask her how much.

“One hundred and fifty reais,” she said, quoting an absurd price. “And I can write anything you want on it.” I politely declined.

The lack of a marker for my dad’s grave does not mean that my mother and I have forgotten him. Far from it. There are pictures of him all over our house, and little reminders that he was with us until just recently. Boxes of his books are in the spare bedroom of my little house, as are brand new pairs of cotton underwear still packaged that my dad used to like to buy in large quantities.

I had been reminding my mother over the past year that we should visit my dad at the cemetery and make sure his grave is okay.

“Don’t say ‘visit’,” my mom finally snapped at me one day in more of a weary tone than an angry one. “He’s gone to another place now and that’s not him in the cemetery.”

I’ve always been the more sentimental one of the family, so worrying if his grave were okay and planning a marker for him came naturally to me.

Not finding my father’s place in the cemetery spared me any tears this time, though I did feel a little tightness in my throat when I stood next to Yasser as he prayed, standing up, for my dad, reciting the Al-Fatiha verse from the Qur’an. I drew comfort from the fact that a blood relative came all the way from Saudi Arabia and was praying for my departed father and his soul.

When my father had died we had washed his body at the Islamic Center and then prayed over his body at the mosque. But there were no relatives there except for myself and my mom. I would have felt much more comfort if all of his relatives had been there to pray and grieve with me.

I now have to find out exactly where he is buried and have a nice granite cover and marker made up for him. That’s the least I can do for his memory.

Silly DF law restricts Internet access

2009-11-15T17:32:00.006-02:00

I NEVER thought that Brazil would have laws that were more police state than Saudi Arabia or China, but I was proved wrong a few weeks ago.

My friend Thiago and I were looking at laptops at FNAC, the French chain of electronics and book stores, in ParkShopping when we decided that we needed to check the Internet to find the closest Peugeot dealer. We walked over to the cell phone section where various mobile phone carriers had laptops on display with matching mobile Internet modem sticks. No one was around to help us and the computers were shut off, so we continued walking towards the in-store cafe that had a few computer terminals set-up for Internet access.

"We'd like to access the Internet please," Thiago told the cashier.

"Okay, but you have to register first with us before we let you access the Internet," she said.

In Brazil, registering for anything involves showing a government photo ID and giving ones CPF number, which is a tax payers number that everyone living in Brazil, native or foreign, is required to have. Since Thiago didin't have his ID with him, I volunteered to register to get access to the Internet. I handed over my UAE driver's license and my CPF card.

"You're going to have to give me your home address, phone number and birth date," the cashier warned me, perhaps sensing that this wasn't going to end well.

"Okay," I said.

"Father's and mother's name?" she asked me.

"What?! Why do you need that? I'm not 10-years-old," I protested.

"Ah no! That's too much. Let's go Rasheed," Thiago said.

"Do you also want my grandparents' names?" I asked sarcastically. "Even in Saudi Arabia they don't ask for this much personal information!"

"I'm sorry sir, but I have to collect all of this information, because if I don't my company could be fined R$3,000 and they would take it out of my salary," she explained.

According to the cashier it is a Distrito Federal law that requires them to collect so much personal information from each Internet user. A piece of paper she let me look at said it was law no. 3,437 that was passed on the 9th of September of 2004.

"I can't believe they have such a law here," I told Thiago as we walked away. "It's worse than China."

We eventually got a Claro saleswoman to let us use Google on her laptop to find the car dealership. And that too without giving her our parents', grandparents' or even our first names.

American romantic film is more S&M than Japanese film

2009-11-09T21:39:00.011-02:00

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in a scene from 500 Days with Summer.

Warning contains spoilers!

I WATCHED two films over the weekend that could not have been so different in both content and quality. Ironically the American romantic comedy/drama 500 Days with Summer was a torturous experience to watch because of the real sadomasochistic relationship it portrayed between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.

In contrast, the Japanese light comedy/drama I watched, entitled I Am an S&M Writer, was much more real and less perverted in essence than 500 Days ever could be.

How could that be, one might ask, especially with the squeaky clean Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel in the lead roles? Well 500 Days seems like a great, quirky movie if you just watch the trailer. But we all know that trailers are often extremely misleading. "This is not a love story," the trailer intones seriously. But hey guys, guess what? It is. One in which Gordon-Levitt, playing greeting card writer Tom Hansen, falls totally and sickeningly in love with his co-worker Summer Finn (Deschanel). That would be fine if only Deschanel did not spend the whole movie with one stupid expression on her face the whole time, grinning stupidly at first, then sneering at Gordon-Levitt for being so hopelessly smitten with her.

The first feature film of music video director Marc Webb, and written nonsensically by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, 500 Days, as my friend Ana Claudia told me, tries to cast Summer as the mature one and Tom as the immature sop. They are shown dating, eating out, browsing at a record store (Summer loves Ringo Starr), and even playing house in an Ikea showroom. "Oh how sweet," we're all supposed to coo. But then Summer starts going cold on Tom, pulling her hand away from his and skipping dinners together. She finally tells him that she just wants to be friends and resigns from her job. Tom is left crushed and heartbroken, utterly dumbfounded at what has happened. Weeks later he runs into her and she casually invites him to a party in her building, which turns out to be her engagement party to another hunky dude! What a bitch! Why she never tells him that she's found a new guy is never explained, and she never apologizes for her nasty behavior. Her constant justification is that she told him from the beginning that she did not want a serious relationship. Come on! What bullshit, as Tom says in the movie.

A much more honest movie is Ryuichi Hiroki's 2000 I Am an S&M Writer, which is being shown at the ongoing 11th Brasilia International Film Festival at the Academia de Tênis, along with his more recent Vibrator, and follows a long Japanese tradition of pornographic and sadomasochistic literature. Ren Osugi stars as older male writer Kurosaki, who has a beautiful and much younger wife Shizuko played by Yoko Hoshi. The writer churns out cheap pornographic novels that involve much light S&M which usually involves tying up a naked young woman with rope. To make his scenes as realistic as possible he hires a young woman to be tied up in his office by his assistant Kawada (Jun Murakami) and poked by him too if needed. Of course, as I noted to Ana Claudia, only the women in this movie are tortured, fully naked and act as if they love what's being done to them. The men are invariably sleazy, fully clothed and in control.

The director Hiroki was flown in from Japan to attend the film festival here in Brasilia, and he was on hand to answer the questions of the 10 people who actually showed up to watch the first screening of the film. He looked like a DOM to me, or Dirty Old Man, who got smutty pleasure from making such films. But I must note that I Am an S&M Writer does not have very explicit scenes, much more is implied than actually shown. And its lighhearted approach to the story gives it a feel of the pornochanchadas, or sexual comedy films, that were very popular in Brazil in the 1970s.

After watching both movies I concluded that Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel's dysfunctional relationship was far more sadomasochistic than anything depicted in I Am an S&M Writer. How ironic.

A scene from I Am an S&M Writer:

Iranian tale of lies and tragic consequences at Brasilia Intl’ Film Festival

2009-11-07T14:37:00.004-02:00

Golshifteh Farahani, left, in a scene from About Elly.

LAST night I went to see the 2009 Iranian film About Elly at the 11^th International Film Festival of Brasilia at the Academia de Tênis. Directed by Asghar Farhadi and starring the extremely talented and beautiful actress Golshifteh Farahani, the film is about a group of young, middle class Iranians who spend the weekend at a Caspian Sea resort with tragic consequences.

About Elly won the Silver Bear for Direction at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival and was also shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It had its Middle East debut at Abu Dhabi’s Middle East International Film Festival in October. It is Iran’s official entry for the 2010 Best Foreign Film category at the Oscar awards.

You may remember Farahani as the alluring nurse in the 2008 Leonardo DiCaprio thriller Body of Lies. She got into trouble with the Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinijad for appearing in that Hollywood film without prior government permission. For a while there were rumours that she had been banned from leaving Iran, but Iranian authorities must of thought better and she appeared at the film’s US premiere last year. She has since, understandably, because of the restrictions in Iran, moved to Paris, France.

Her latest film has won praise from Western critics, with Screen International critic Lee Marshal calling it “one of the most remarkable Iranian films to surface in the last few years.” I have to disagree. I found About Elly trying my patience at times, the actors and screenplay unable to make me really bother about what was happening on the screen. What is good about the film though is that it gives Western audiences a much-needed look at the lives of ordinary young Iranians, and hopefully make them realize the many similarities with their foreign counterparts.

You can still catch About Elly. It’s being shown today at 7:20 pm, and on Nov. 11 and 12 at 8 pm in Persian with Portuguese subtitles.

Other interesting films being shown at the Brasilia International Film Festival include: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist; Apology of an Economic Hitman; Blind Pig from Indonesia; A Fuga da Mulher Gorila, a Brazilian road movie/musical about two women driving a van across the country, and Outrage, a documentary that outs closeted gay politicians in the US.

For a complete guide to the movies and show times visit the festival’s website by clicking here. It has both Portuguese and English versions. The festival opened on Nov. 4 and runs until Nov. 15.

Verger book of Philippine photos launched

2009-11-05T10:29:00.008-02:00

THE much awaited book of Philippine photographs taken by the French photographer Pierre Verger in the 1930s was finally launched last night here in Brasilia at the residence of the Philippine Ambassador to Brazil Teresita Barsana.

The 187-page book showcases the black and white photographs taken by Verger on two trips to the Philippines in 1934 and then 1937-38, during which he traveled from the northernmost tip to the Muslim south. Many of the photos included have never been published before. Verger was a prolific picture-taker, a true photojournalist who wanted to document day-to-day life wherever he went. This explains the mountains of negatives that he left behind at the foundation named after himself in Salvador, Bahia. Barsana told me that after she had the idea of producing a book just of his Philippine pictures, she spent days at the foundation pouring over his photographs to choose the best ones out of nearly 2,000 alone on the Philippines.

"Many of the negatives were in very bad condition, ravaged by heat and humidity," said Brazilian photographer Alexandre Magno, who was in charge of designing the book. "We had to use Photoshop to improve the quality of many of them."

Ambassador Barsana told me that the Pierre Verger Foundation was initially hesitant in producing the book. "'How many people will be interested in photos of the Philippines?', they asked me, and I said I would make people interested!" she told me as she happily autographed copies of the book for guests at the launch.

This career diplomat is very happy that she was able to produce this book before she leaves soon to set up the first ever Philippine embassy in Lisbon, Portugal.

The book was being sold for R$65 ($37.70 or P1,795) at the reception, and was printed in a limited-edition run of around 1,000 copies. Hopefully, the book will give Brazilians an intriguing look into what the Philippines and Filipinos looked like in the 1930s, just before World War II and their subsequent independence from the United States.

The book launch that didn’t quite happen

2009-10-29T10:14:00.010-02:00

Philippine Ambassador to Brazil Teresita Barsana speaking at the swearing-in of the Brazil-Philippines Parliamentary Committee on Wednesday in Brasilia.

YESTERDAY afternoon my friend Ana Claudia and I eagerly arrived at the Brazilian Congress to attend the supposed launch of a book of photographs of the Philippines taken by Pierre Verger, a French photographer who ended up living and dying in Brazil, entitled Pierre Verger-1934-1937-1938: Filipinas.

Making our way to the Salão Nobre of the House of Deputies, I marveled at how easy it was to enter Congress, especially if one were dressed up the way we were. We went through one metal detector and that was it. We were in.

Since all of Brasilia was built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the inside of the Congress building is modern in that 1950s sort of way. Just next door they have completely gutted the Palacio do Planalto, the presidential palace, in a much-needed reforma that is being overseen by the original architect of Brasilia Oscar Niemeyer, who at 101 years of age is still working despite recent health problems. This visionary capital is celebrating its 50^th anniversary next April, and everyone is hoping that Niemeyer will make it.

But back to the supposed book launch. When we were finally seated in the rather smallish Salão Nobre, which is like the lobby of a slightly faded luxury hotel, Philippine Ambassador to Brazil Teresita Barsana announced that the actual launching of the Verger book would be on Nov. 4 at her official residence. Instead, we all witnessed the swearing in of the new members of the Brazil-Philippines Parliamentary Group. Deputy Nelson Marquezelli (PTB-Sao Paulo) is the head of this group, and he said that a group of Brazilian deputies are scheduled to visit the Philippines early next year.

From the huge floor-to-ceiling glass wall we had a lovely view of the grassy slopes in front of the Congress, where a large group of protesters had gathered and whom we heard screaming during our event.

After the swearing-in, Ana Claudia decided to take me on a walking tour of both houses of Congress. We saw a huge tiled wall in the lobby of the Senate made by the famous Athos Bulcão. There we saw a rather tall man in sunglasses wearing a jacket with a huge plastic sunflower stuck on it, smiling and posing for photographs with the public. He was obviously some celebrity, but I didn’t recognize him.

“Oh my God! That’s the singer Falcão,” blurted Ana Claudia. “He’s a singer from the Northeast of Brazil who always sings about cuckold men.”

We watched him for a few minutes. “Do you want your picture taken with him?” she asked me.

“No, that’s okay,” I replied.

The Brazilian Congress is famous for its various underground tunnels that link various parts of this large complex. Ana Claudia and I were looking for the especially futuristic looking one that has recessed lighting, that gives the completely carpeted tunnel an outer space sort of vibe.

When we finally found it in the House of Deputies, Ana Claudia told me it had always reminded her of something out of an episode of the TV series “Time Tunnel”. To mark our visit to Congress and the famous tunnel we took pictures of each other in the spooky glow of the underground passage that has moving sidewalks just like in airports. It was a suitably modernist end to our frustrating expedition in search of that book of photographs.

My friend Ana Claudia posing in the futuristic tunnel under

the House of Deputies.

A strange but spiritual birthday

2009-10-23T11:54:00.002-02:00

I KNEW I was going to be the first person at my friend Camille’s birthday party on Wednesday night, as I’m always early while she is always late.

I rang the doorbell of the apartment of her friend S and was surprised when a slightly overweight, middle-aged woman opened the door. I knew S was around the same age as Camille and I, but she just looked so much older than us.

“Good evening, I’m Rasheed, Camille’s friend,” I said as I extended my hand to her. She invited me in, and after saying hello to her 12-year-old daughter we sat down in the living room and chatted about Camille, my life as a journalist and Saudi Arabia.

S and Camille had studied together, just as Camille and I had too. She was now a housewife with three children and a husband who traveled a lot. Later Camille told me that she spends all of her free time doing charity work. It also transpired that she is an Espiritualista, or Spiritualist. This religious movement has many members in Brazil, its mixture of Christianity and a belief in reincarnation a magnet for many people here.

Camille and her husband are also interested in Spiritualism, so we spent the evening discussing various aspects of it, in between having a debate on whether drugs should be legalized in Brazil, in the context of the ongoing drug turf wars in Rio de Janeiro which saw the dramatic and fiery shooting down of a police helicopter by criminals last week.

I felt a bit strange discussing the merits of legalizing some drugs, to take the business out of the hands of organized crime, in front of S’s young children. But it was she who had brought up the subject as we ate pizza and birthday cake.

Spiritualists believe that everyone is reincarnated many times in a quest to become better beings and to learn from past mistakes. They also believe that people can be reincarnated on other planets, not just here on Earth. But reincarnation for them is an educational process and not a vengeful one. At their prayer meetings, mediums communicate with the spirits of people who have passed on, relying messages from both the living and dead in two-way traffic.

“Spiritualism is the quest for love in everything we do, following the example of Jesus Christ,” explained S when I asked her about her religion.

As we left, I could not help feeling how S was on a completely different planet than Camille and I. Not a better or a worse one, just a very different one.

I seized the day with much salt!

2009-10-18T13:24:00.004-02:00

I MUST have swallowed a whole day's worth of a human's recommended daily consumption of salt in the single meal I ate last night at the Carpe Diem restaurant at Pier 21 in Brasilia.

The dish in question was chicken breasts in a creamy sauce with various types of mushrooms, accompanied by white rice. On the menu it sounded good: A sauce made with shitake mushrooms, champignons, and fresh mushrooms (that's what it said in Portuguese, which sounded to me like they were just using various languages to describe several varieties of mushrooms). Two grilled chicken breasts were placed on top of the sauce and presented to me. From the first bite, my taste buds were overpowered by the saltiness of the sauce and chicken. I was hungry so I ate one of the breasts with sauce and rice. Then the waiter came by and asked if everything was okay.

"No," I said. "The chicken is much too salty!"

The waiter took my plate and said he would tell the chef and change my chicken. After around 10 minutes I got a new plate of chicken and sauce, but it was still salty. I think the chef must have had the taste buds that detect savory flavors missing from his tongue, as the dish was still briny. Then the chef suddenly appeared at my table and asked me if the dish was better now.

"No, not really," I said as I continued to eat it. After all I was hungry and this was the one day of the week when I allowed myself to go off my diet. I drank two ice-cold Mexican Sol beers to wash down all of that saltiness.

Lucikly, I had Haruki Murakami's novel Sputnik Sweetheart to read while I ate and waited for my friend Ana Claudia to show up to watch Matt Damon's new film The Informant with.

Brazil’s former guerrillas want money and visas to the US

2009-10-15T10:15:00.005-03:00

BRAZILIAN media this past week reported interesting stories about two former leftist guerillas, one asking for restitution from the state for lost wages, and another finally getting a tourist visa to the United States after years of rejection.

The irony in all of this is that the former fighter asking for restitution, Ana de Cerqueira Cesar Corbisier, to the tune of R$70 million ($40.9 million), joined the Açao Libertadora Nacional (National Liberation Movement) group voluntarily, according to a report in Veja magazine, after abandoning her job with the Fundação Padre Anchieta, was never imprisoned or tortured, and now wants her former employer to pay her all of her back wages from income she would have made had she not joined the guerillas!

At the same time, the Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper, reported last Saturday that a former guerilla who participated in the 1969 kidnapping of the US ambassador to Brazil Charles Elbrick, Paulo de Tarso Venceslau, was finally granted a tourist visa by the US Consulate in Sao Paulo after years of rejection.

Venceslau, who is now a businessman in the field of communications, admitted to the Estado that he has no love lost for the US, but that he just wants to be able to visit New York, Chicago and New Orleans to listen to jazz and soak in the cultural life of those cities.

The newspaper speculated that the change of heart in giving Venceslau a US visa was due to the more liberal stance of the Obama administration. The US Consulate in Sao Paulo denied this on Tuesday, saying that American visa regulations had not changed.

Even though the group of guerillas who kidnapped the US ambassador were granted amnesty in 1979 by the Brazilian government, along with other leftist fighters, and the fact that the US supported the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 until the early 1980s, I am not surprised that the US government was not rushing forward to grant these individuals visas to visit America.

As for Corbisier, she took part in two bank robberies, one of which resulted in the shooting and death of a policeman. She was indicted for the crime, but fled the country to Cuba before she could be arrested. There she studied guerilla warfare and then moved to France. She returned to Brazil a free woman following the general amnesty of 1979, and approached the Amnesty Commission of the Ministry of Justice in 2001 asking for a government pension. She was granted one in 2007, amounting to R$2,744 a month, or around $1,600 at today’s exchange rate. Now she wants all of her back pay, which could amount to R$70 million, which is ridiculous to say the least!

As the famous Brazilian cartoonist Millôr Fernandes told Veja: “The armed struggle didn’t work out, so now they want compensation?”

Pet Shop Boys rock Brasilia

2009-10-12T15:38:00.010-03:00

Neil Tennant performs on Sunday night in Brasilia.

I WENT to the see the Pet Shop Boys in concert last night at Marina Hall in Brasilia. It was absolutely packed with Brazilian fans of all ages and gender, though I must admit that I must have seen the most gay men ever per square meter in Brasilia.

Although the concert was supposed to start at 9 pm, it didn't kick off until 10 pm, which didn't stop many people from dancing in the aisles to recorded music while drinking beer and talking to friends as they waited for the show to start.

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe played mostly songs from their new album "Yes", including my favorite Did You See Me Coming? Unfortunately, many in the audience were not familiar with the lyrics of the songs from this album which was released in April of this year. That did not stop me from dancing and singing:

Did you see me coming?
Was I that obvious?
For all of a sudden
there were just two of us

You don't have to be
in "Who's Who"
to know what's what
You don't have to be
a high-flyer
to catch your slot
The night we met
was cold and wet
I needed a drink or two
I saw you standing there
and I knew
I'd love
to be loved by you...

The stage was filled with white cubes that were constantly being moved or thrown around, and onto which various images were projected. The English duo were accompanied by four back-up vocalists cum singers, whose energetic dance moves added energy to the show.

The audience perked up when the Pet Shop Boys played some of their more popular songs such as Go West, It's a Sin and West End Girls.

Tickets to shows in Brazil are quite expensive compared to the US. I paid R$180 ($103) for my seat, but it was in a cordoned-off area and I was just 30 meters away from the stage. I also bought a gray PSB Pandemonium on tour t-shirt for R$60 ($34), which I am wearing as I write this. This was cheaper than my ticket for Cirque du Soleil's Quidam show, R$250 ($143), that I watched the night before.

While I would like to be able to pay less for my entertainment, I am grateful that there is now so much going on in Brasilia that one is often spoilt for choice. I remember growing up here in the 1970s when the only options were the Teatro Nacional with an occasional performance of the Bolshoi Ballet and American film festivals at the Casa Thomas Jefferson. Brasilia, you've come a long way baby!

Bank strike ends in Brazil, money tight and Zelaya still in Brazilian embassy

2009-10-10T17:48:00.001-03:00

THE UGLY red and white posters that screamed: “We are on Strike!” in Portuguese, have finally been taken down from the glass entrances to most banks in Brazil, after unions representing bank workers agreed to a 6 percent salary increase on Friday.

That sounds like a good increase but with inflation this year at 4.5 percent that means bankers will only be getting a “real” increase of 1.5 percent, according to my banker friend Alisson.

All the private banks as well as the state-owned Banco do Brasil and Banco Regional de Brasilia have accepted the negotiated settlement, with the government-owned Caixa Economica Federal employees holding out not on the salary issue but on additional benefits they are asking for.

As the Correio Braziliense newspaper pointed this morning, bankers have walked out of their jobs every year now since 2004. Would it not just be easier to have a guaranteed increase each year that covers inflation and a bit more? With the record profits that Brazilian banks have been making, despite the world economic crisis, it seems certain that they can afford it!

Banks were closed to the public for three weeks or 15 working days. In this electronic age, that meant that all banking had to be done through ATM machines or via the Internet. But can you imagine what havoc it would have wreaked if ATMs and the Internet did not exist? One can only imagine the hardships it would cause. I wanted to send money to a friend abroad via Western Union and could not because of the strike. Since the strike is now over, I was able to this morning.

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IN THE sometimes strange world of Brazilian tax laws, businesses can opt to pay their anticipated income tax to the government in advance and then be reimbursed a year later if it turns out they overpaid.

The bad news is that the Brazilian government announced this week that it was delaying the income tax refunds this year because its income tax collection this year has fallen dramatically due to the economic crisis, and because it does not want to cut back on its huge spending on social welfare and economic stimulus.

That means that anyone who overpaid in income tax and was expecting it back, with interest of course, before Christmas is out of luck. Some analysts are expecting the government to be sued over this, but that could take years in the courts, so most Brazilians will just swallow hard and wait for their refunds, later rather than sooner.

With upcoming elections next year for president, Congress and local officials, some cynics are saying this is a move to help President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva’s handpicked successor Dilma Rousseff in her campaign for the presidency.

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IN HONDURAS, deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya is still holed up in the Brazilian Embassy, and despite negotiating attempts by the Costa Rican president and a high-level delegation from the Organization of the American States, it doesn’t seem like he will be leaving it soon.

The interim president, Roberto Micheletti, is managing to hold on to power until the promised elections in November because he is fully backed by the Congress and the judiciary. Zelaya and his Brazilian backers have been demanding that Micheletti reinstate him as president until the elections. Micheletti has resolutely refused, saying that if Zelaya leaves the Brazilian embassy he will be tried for treason for not upholding the constitution. The OAS diplomats, worried about the cramped quarters of the embassy with so many Zelaya supporters there along with the deposed leader, asked the Honduran government if Zelaya could remain in his own residence under house arrest (with diplomatic immunity), but they refused.

With November just around the corner, we will have to wait to see who wins the election, and if that person will be accepted by all sides to be the new president of Honduras.

Seen in Brasilia...

2009-09-30T21:04:00.003-03:00

THESE wonderfully camp hot pink shoes with white bow ties are currently on display outside my gym in Brasilia. I couldn't resist snapping them with my mobile phone after passing by them several times.

They are part of a display of high-end women's shoes on show in a series of elevated display cubes at the entrance of my academia, as they say in Portuguese, put there by a local shoe store. I just wonder who would buy such shoes and actually wear them in public? Perhaps a Brazilian Barbie?

Brazilian environment minister victim of homophobic attack

2009-09-25T17:48:00.008-03:00

CARLOS MINC, the activist Brazilian minister of the environment (seen at right), was this week the victim of a homophobic verbal attack by the governor of Mato Grosso do Sul, after Minc told President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva that more land in that state should not be given over to the planting of sugar cane.

It seems that Gov. Andre Puccinelli has many rich farmer friends who were pressuring him to allow them to expand their sugar cane farms. The problem is that Mato Grosso is home to the vast pantanal, or wetlands, which are home to thousands of species of birds, fish, insects and other wildlife. Turning over more of the pantanal to such farming would undoubtedly have a negative effect on the wildlife.

The foul-mouthed governor was so angry that he said that"Minc is a weed-smoking faggot and I will run after him and rape him in public if he comes to this state." Soon after his homophobic remarks were reported online by Epoca magazine his aides issued a written apology saying that he was only joking and that he was sorry if his words caused offense. Joking about raping a minister?! That does not sound like a joke to me!

The 58-year-old minister is a co-founder of the Brazilian Green Party and is a professor of geography. A leftist political activist from a young age, Minc was exiled by the Brazilian military dictatorship after being arrested in 1969 for his anti-government activism at the age of 18. He returned to Brazil in 1979 following an amnesty. He's married and has two children. Click here to read his website (in Portuguese).

A strong supporter of women's and gay rights, it is no secret that he is in favor of decriminalizing the personal use of marijuana in Brazil. A close confidante of President Lula, it is obvious whom Lula listened to when the petition for more sugar cane farming landed on his desk.

Minc reacted to Puccinelli's scurillous comments on Wednesday by saying that "many times, people who do not admit their homosexuality try to attack gays, because it's something they cannot accept in themselves. I am a defender of homosexual rights. The governor can relax and come out of the closet."

The minister of science and technology, Sergio Rezende, came to Minc's defense, stating that Puccinelli is "a right-wing troglodyte." A human rights group is also planning a protest in Mato Grosso do Sul on Oct. 11, saying that the governor's ill-chosen words added to the homophobia in that state.

Brazil plays dangerous game in Honduras

2009-09-23T10:57:00.008-03:00

BRAZILIAN President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is playing a dangerous game by giving refuge to deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya (seen right), his wife, son and various supporters at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

The interim leader of Honduras Roberto Micheletti has assured Brazilian President Lula that his government will respect the sovereignty of the Brazilian Embassy grounds, but noted that he would give the Brazilians five to ten days to either hand over Zelaya to Honduran authorities, who would immediately jail him for the charges of corruption filed against him, or give him political exile in Brazil.

For Lula and the Obama administration, neither of these options are solutions that they favor. Both the US and Brazil want Micheletti to allow Zelaya to be reinstated as president, at least until presidential elections in November.

Micheletti said on Tuesday night that he was willing to talk to Zelaya, but the deposed president rejected the offer saying that Micheletti was not being sincere.

Several Brazilian analysts have said that Brazil will only lose in this game of cat and mouse between Zelaya and Micheletti. The former Brazilian ambassador to the UK and the US, Rubens Antonio Barbosa, told the Brazilian website G1 that Brazil had lost the possibility of being a non-biased interlocutor in talks between the two sides as soon as it took Zelaya's side by giving him refuge in the Brazilian Embassy.

Barbosa added that the Brazilian government was giving itself a huge headache by helping Zelaya and that Brazilian authorities had not evaluated the seriousness of the tense political situation Honduras when it gave refuge to him in their embassy. "It's interference in the internal politics of a country," he said.

But President Lula has been resolute in his support of fellow leftist Zelaya, noting in New York on Tuesday that Latin American countries would no longer tolerate coups.

But Lula is playing a dangerous game. On Tuesday thousands of Zelaya supporters were violently dispersed from in front of the Brazilian Embassy by military troops using tear gas, truncheons and rubber bullets. Power and water were cut off to the embassy on Monday to try and force Zelaya out, but were restored on Tuesday. Instead, land telephone lines to the embassy were cut on Tuesday. A curfew was put into effect on Monday, which expires tonight.

The potential for violence and mayhem at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa is great. Brazilian officials keep insisting that their embassy would never be breached by Honduran troops or officials. I say, never say never.

Book of 1930s photos of the Philippines to be launched in Brasilia

2009-09-17T10:43:00.014-03:00

A street scene in Manila. (Photo courtesy of the Pierre Verger Foundation)

A BOOK containing 150 photographs taken by French photographer Pierre Edouard Leopold Verger in the Philippines in 1937-38, is being launched by the Philippine Ambassador to Brazil Teresita Barsana in Brasilia on October 28.

A contemporary of fellow photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Verger was born in Paris in 1902 and traveled the world in the 1930s at the age of 30 with his camera taking photographs of local peoples and their towns and villages throughout Africa and Asia. He eventually settled in Bahia, Salvador, after he became fascinated with the African religion of Candomble. He became a self-taught ethnographer on the influence of Yorouba culture on Brazil, which slaves had brought here in the 1800s, writing many articles on this subject. He eventually became a professor at the Federal University of Bahia in 1973, and also set up a foundation in his name to take care of his more than 63,000 photos and negatives.

He died at the age of 93 in 1996 in Salvador.

1,000 copies of the book are being printed, which has been designed by Brasilia-based photographer Alexandre Magno. During his travels in the Philippines, Verger photographed from Baguio in the north to Zamboanga and Mindanao in the south.

Below: A nipa house on stilts in Zamboanga. (Photo courtesy of Pierre Verger Foundation)

Brasilia agog at brutal murder of top lawyer and wife

2009-09-13T12:07:00.012-03:00

THE BRUTAL murder of a former judge of the Superior Election Court, Jose Guilherme Villela (seen at right), 73, his wife, Maria Carvalho Villela Mendes, 69, and their maid of 30 years, Francisca Nascimento da Silva, 58, on August 28 has left Brasilia residents atwitter.

The boyfriend of their granddaughter found their bodies on Monday, August 31, in their top floor apartment in 113 Sul. They had been savagely stabbed multiple times, a total of 72 stab wounds among the three victims according to investigators. The police said there were no signs of a break-in, and that all doors leading into the apartment were found locked on that day. This led investigators to believe that the murderer (or murderers) was known to the couple and maid. Following a forensic examination of the apartment and the bodies, police said they believed the couple and their maid had been killed on the evening of Friday, August 28.

113 Sul is considered a posh address in Brasilia. The superquadra is home to three current ministers in the government of Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, including one who lives in the Villelas’ building.

Investigators first cast suspicion on the son of one of the many domestic employees of the Villelas, who had run into trouble with the law a few years ago and had been defended in court by Mr. Villela himself. Mrs. Villela reportedly had a large jewelry collection that she kept at home, and police said all of it was missing following the murders. The press initially reported eyewitnesses allegedly having seen a man trying to sell pieces of the jewelry in a satellite city of Brasilia, but no arrests were made. Crucially, dollars kept by the couple in the apartment were not taken.

Globo TV reported that although the Villela’s building had security cameras installed in strategic points, they were not hooked up to any recording device, thus denying police crucial evidence of who had been in and out of the building on that fatal day. Investigators did find surveillance footage from a neighboring building showing two men with backpacks running away from the Villela’s building on Friday evening, but the video quality was not good enough to identify any of the men. After residents and security guards told police they had not noticed any strange people in the area on the day of the crime, investigators put out a public appeal for anyone with information or video footage of the area to come forward. No one has done so yet.

The Correio Braziliense newspaper early on reported that the police made a crucial mistake of leaving the Villela’s apartment unguarded for two days following the discovery of the bodies, and that several relatives went into the apartment to recover various documents. Now, police investigators are saying that close family members are the main suspects in what may have been a murder-for-hire scheme.

The murdered couple’s son, daughter, and granddaughter have been called in several times for questioning, with the daughter being subjected to one round of exceptionally long questioning on Friday that lasted at least 6 to 8 hours.

Reporters have been mobbing chief police inspector Martha Vargas, who is in charge of the investigation. TV crews have been daily filming her arriving at the 1^st Delegacia de Policia every morning, as well as every time she and forensic investigators have returned to the Villela’s apartment to look for more clues. According to the Correio she has been to the apartment ten times already. She has (rightly so) resolutely refused to discuss the ongoing investigation with the press, but leaks from within the police department have been giving crucial clues to the press.

A 15-cm knife found at the scene of the crime was initially thought to have been the weapon used to kill them, but police sources now say that the knife may have been planted at the crime scene to throw investigators off. They also claim the only fingerprints found at the apartment belonged to the Villelas, their maid and close relatives. Investigators were also puzzled by the lack of large amounts of blood at the crime scene, which they would normally expect to find after such a brutal triple murder.

Stumped investigators have looked at the financial records of the Villela couple to try and see if they could have been murdered for their wealth. Crucially, investigators allegedly found that Mr. Villela had recently taken out a large life insurance policy in his name. Police did not say who the beneficiaries were. O Globo newspaper also reported that Mr. Villela had recently won an important case in the Supreme Court here and was being paid 12 installments of R$7 million ($3.88 million) each. Two installments had already been deposited into his bank account.

With no eyewitnesses and no video surveillance footage to help them, police investigators are waiting for forensic laboratory test results which are due to be ready on Monday, September 14, to help them find out who killed the Villelas and their maid and why.

UPDATE: Globo TV this week reported that the autopsy report of all three victims in this gruesome murder said that none of them had defense wounds on their hands or arms, suggesting that they had been drugged before being stabbed to death. Toxicology tests done on their blood found no signs of drugging, so investigators believe that they could have been knocked out by ether, which would have evaporated in the more than two days it took to discover their bodies in the apartment, meaning no trace of the knock-out chemical substance would have been found at the scene of the crime.

The taxing regime of Brazil

2009-09-06T16:35:00.003-03:00

RESIDENTS of Brazil are some of the most taxed people in the world. Between the federal government and state authorities, everything that is industrialized is heavily taxed. That’s why gasoline costs R$2.95 a liter, that’s around US$1.43 per liter! There even used to be a so-called “check tax” that generated revenue for the federal government every time a Brazilian wrote a check.

If you want to import anything into this country, be it books and DVDs from Amazon, to furniture or clothes, the federal Brazilian government and state authorities levy a hefty 60 percent tax on the declared value of the goods being imported! Therefore, it’s no wonder that luxury retailers such as the fashionable clothes store Daslu and the upscale home furnisher Tania Bulhoes, both based in Sao Paulo, have recently been targeted by tax authorities for undervaluing the goods they import in a bid to escape from paying the exorbitant tax rates.

Most Brazilians seem to passively accept these ridiculous tax rates as all prices on consumer goods already include the tax, so the consumer cannot tell how much the same goods would cost with a reduced tax or no tax at all.

To give you an example, I recently searched online for the new Nokia N97 mobile phone and found it for sale in the US for $597. It is being sold here in Brazil online for R$1,987.19 or $1,068. That’s $400 more than the US price! Why? Because of the 60 percent import tax.

But the Brazilian government, burdened with an ever-expanding budget for education, health and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s poverty reduction program called Bolsa Familia, is always looking for new ways to raise more funds by taxing Brazilians even more. The Correio Braziliense newspaper recently reported that the Ministry of Education and Culture was thinking of levying an additional 0.1 percent tax on all sales at book and stationary shops in order to finance a fund that would encourage reading among Brazilians. Book retailers reacted negatively saying they would have to pass on the tax (which they said would actually cost them 0.2 percent) to book buyers, which would therefore make books more expensive and therefore actually discourage more reading!

Now President Lula wants to re-introduce a tax on all checks written in the country to finance a health fund that would improve public hospitals. The opposition Democratas party called it a terrible idea, pointing out that Brazilians are already one of the most taxed people in the world. Globo TV’s Jornal Nacional pointed out that a similar tax on all gasoline sold in the country, supposedly to fund road improvements throughout the country, had never been used for such purposes. Luckily for us, there is not much support for the new tax in the Brazilian Congress, which would need to approve it.

Already the government is under fire by the opposition for releasing a much bigger projected budget for next year, despite revenues having been flat or even fallen in some areas because of a drop in tax collection.

Next year is an election year, so its no wonder Lula and his allies are looking for ways to spend, spend, spend so that they can boast to the electorate of how much they’ve done for the country. But pity the opposition, who have a good chance at winning a majority next year, if they get stuck with the burgeoning debt and have a hard time paying it down.

Brazil says 'pee in your bath' to save water!

2009-09-01T15:37:00.008-03:00

I WAS in Saudi Arabia last May when a NGO called SOS Mata Atlantica launched a TV ad campaign in Brazil encouraging people to pee while they take a shower to save water. Yes, you read that right, pee in the shower!

So it was only recently when I saw the above TV ad and thought that maybe I was hallucinating or that it was someone's idea of a joke. But no, this NGO is trying to save the Mata Atlantica, which is a belt of wildlife and greenery along the Brazil's Atlantic coast that has been steadily disappearing over the last few decades due to pollution and cities using the water resources from this area.

The ad is voiced by children positively encouraging everyone, men, women, children, Brazilians, foreigners, lovers, good people (Mahatma Gandhi), bad people (Psycho killers), King Kong and even aliens from outer space to pee while showering. The ad points out that an average toilet flush uses 12 liters of potable water, which equals 4,380 liters of water in a year.

I've secretly loved the idea of peeing in the shower. Who has time to dry off and run to the toilet to pee when in the middle of taking a bath? Just pee away in the shower and it all gets washed down the drain by the water from you shower. An infectologist on Globo's Jornal Nacional last May said that health-wise there was no danger from peeing in the shower.

So, pee away in the shower. You'll not only be saving a precious thing, water, but you'll be making your life easier too!