Marissa Tjartjalis “The problem is that in Brazil you don’t convict. I’ve been in court for seven years, yet this is the second time we attempt to reach conviction. This course of action is still very novel to me and to other judges.” Judge Joaquim Barbosa is unhappy with his court’s conviction rate. He is closer to the rule than to the exception in a region that has suffered from a tainted judicial system since the establishment of its first i...
On Monday, March 11, the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs hosted a panel discussion on the issue of political corruption and impunity in Brazil. Panelists included: Albert Fishlow, Economist and Director of the Columbia Institute of Latin American Studies; Luiz Felipe d’Avila, Political Scientist and President of CLP (Centro de Liderança Pública); and Indio de Costa, Lawyer and Secretary of Sport of the City of Rio de Janeiro....
I am a ten minute walk from arguably the most famous, certainly the most expensive, beach in the world, but you would never know it from first glance. Young men, barely teenagers, tote assault rifles festooned with glow sticks as they dot around the crowd. And no one bats an eye. Whenever I am asked about Brazil, my mind immediately jumps to those glow sticks and AK-47s. In the middle of a crowded party and a capirinha-induced haze, I look out...
...fixed. The question, of course, is how. It might be helpful to first look toward public policy elsewhere that has succeeded in reducing inequality and involving citizens more in governmental deliberations. In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a municipal policy called participatory budgeting (PB), which has democratized the process of city budgeting, has succeeded in accomplishing just that. Beginning in the late 1980s, several large Brazilian cities inst...
...01. Immigration has proven to be a ‘third-rail’ of late, and President Obama is unlikely willing to take up such a sensitive topic so close to a presidential contest. Another rising power we don’t seem to hear enough about is Brazil. To the outside eye, Brazil and the United States seem to be made for each other. Comparable in size and mineral wealth to the US, Brazil, which has a staggering variety of peoples contributing to its national identit...
...Internet barrages of the celebrity-crazed media, the largest of these projects have been given the go-ahead – often over the impassioned pleas of environmentalists and indigenous groups alike. The Belo Monte Dam in the remote Brazilian state of Pará and the HidroAysén Dam (actually a compilation of five different dams) to be built in Chilean Patagonia are the most visible of these projects. They represent the greatest challenge faced by states to...
Standing on the beach in Brazil, a Portuguese speaking country, my friends and I roll our eyes and strain to stifle our laughter as the family of American tourists behind us attempts to brush away a persistent beach peddler. How bad were they? Frankly, typing a tilde over the “n” in their pronunciation of español would be quite generous. As the joke goes, “What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who...
...for us to adopt a hard-line stance against any and all perceived crimes committed during military rule. However, Latin America complicates this position. Many of these regimes are recent history; a democratic constitution in Brazil was only re-instituted in 1988. Furthermore, opening up any debate about the military era necessarily stirs a larger debate in the national consciousness. Although Latin American dictators often took and held power by...
...t that even in 2006, when anti-US sentiment in the Americas was perhaps at its highest point, most Latin American leaders still did not perceive Chávez’s Bolivarian “revolution” as a suitable model for their countries. Today, Brazil and Colombia’s relationships with Venezuela are marked by tenuous pragmatism rather than ideological harmony. Just as Chávez’s rhetoric exaggerates the anti-US tendencies of his government, Chávez’s sway over the regi...
...world is in the midst of a carbon-based energy revolution. Dramatically large carbon-based energy resources—oil and gas—have been discovered over the past decade or so around the world in unexpected places: off the coast of Brazil and Argentina far below the sea bed and in very deep waters in the Santos Basin; within the deep shale formations in the United States in the Bakken, Utica, and Marcellus regions; trapped in sand in Western Canada; an...
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