Adventures in the Brazilian Mediasphere; Mendes Forfends

We take a stroll on the Internet of dogs — Lamarca, our German shepherd, downloads her olfactory e-mail from all the telephone poles in the neighborhood here — and in the process stop by the local newsstand, boteco and padaria.

In the process, we come up with an update to Extra-Large Pizza With Everyone On It? when we finally get around to picking up last week’s Carta Capital magazine, along with a few other items on our analogue content acquisition budget.

We also discover that we have constantly repeated a very stupid unfact: Antonio Palocci, who, as a politician accused of misconduct, would benefit from a Supreme Court decision overturning a 1993 law allowing the federal prosecutor to charge elected and appointed officials and other public servants with criminal misconduct related to their official functions, was the mayor of Riberão Preto, here in São Paulo, not Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais.

Once again: do not bet the farm on factoids you find on blogs or Wikipedia. Consult professionals with the time, experience, organization and motivation (getting paid helps, as the folks at Editora Três will tell you) to do things right and stand by their work.

Leandro Fortes’ report on the case, which turns on a punishment meted out to recently appointed Anatel commissioner Ronaldo Sardenberg, who headed Science and Technology under Pres. Cardoso, is eye-opening. See also How To Hook Crooks: A Backgrounder on the Jungmann Blues Case.

The kicker, and I paraphrase: The Supreme Court justice pushing the case, Justice Mendes — whose tirade against the Ministério Público during the session was widely reported, including the charge that the MPF uses its power “to conduct political witch hunts” — wouldhimself benefit from the tabling of 10,000 administrative misconduct cases.

This, Fortes writes, pursuant to a finding that government officials should answer, not to the 1993 law, but instead to a 1950 law which carries few if any fines or penalties, and no requirement that any money misappropriated be reimbursed, as Sardemberg was required to, to the tune of R$20,000, forhaving the Air Force fly him and his family to Fernando de Noronha.

(He also lost his right to stand for election for eight years, however, note, which I find a bit fascistoid: If Brazil had direct elections rather than mixed direct-proportional, you could simply get the money back, which seems fair enough, put the facts on the the public record, and then let voters decide whether the guy still merits trust. No one is howling about the Anatel appointment, for example, and the guy’s ambassadorial service at least seems quite distinguished.)

Minister Mendes (above), appointed by FHC, was charged in a federal court with sitting on a report containing evidence of acts of fraud in a now-defunct national highway agency (DNER) by FHC’s minister of transportation, Eliseu Padilha, rather than passing it to the federal prosecutor, as prescribed by law, Fortes reports.

More on that later.

But note: this was some of the first reporting I have seen in a Brazilian news publication that actually explains the internal makeup of the court — Lula appointments, Cardoso appointments, Collor-Sarney appointments (including Collor’s first cousin, currently presiding over the federal elections authority with a great deal of, er, rhetorical flamboyance and procedural creativity) — and contains first-hand reporting from the court itself.

This allows us to see, for example, the Lula I appointees were responsible for the procedural maneuver that thwarted the Mendes gambit — which tried to force through a decision based on the votes of four justices that no longer sit on the court.

Including Nelson Jobim.

If you ever find yourself inclined to entertain, for argument’s sake, the Federalist Society line on why it might be a good idea to abandon life tenure for gringo federal judges, consider the case of Nelson Jobim.

Why is that coverage strategy so unusual here?

This, and other standard elements, such as quoting colloquies and testimony — along with trotting out dueling think-tank talking heads and the like, which is resorted to in spades here, so long as those dueling talking heads all belong to the Fundação Getúlio Vargas — is a standard feature of legal reporting in the U.S. Justice in action.

The good, the bad, and the ugly. Your tax dollars at work. Are the guardians of the law really worth the big bucks? How about that Lance Ito, anyway? Crooked FIFA ref or honest broker?

The judiciary here, for example, has recently managed to reinstate its “supersalary,” by the way, which means, I read, that entry-level judges will now receive R$20,000 a month rather than R$10,000 — 50 minimum salaries.

The president makes a little under R$9,000 a month. There is an anachronistic legal principle at work here called isonomia that the Brazilian press has done a piss-poor job of explaining to its public, preferring to engage in flacking for the various factions in the dispute, who seek to justify their own paycheck increases while blaming other branches of governments for theirs. The problem, however — like corruption, to a great extent — seems to be structural and systematic.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Post-Gutenberg Sea of Noise

Logging off the Internet of dogs, then, we flop down on our thrift-store couch in preparation for liftoff on Rocket No. 9, the first thing smoking out of the print-driven Gutenberg Galaxy. That is, we turn on our cheap but serviceable Gradiente flat-screen TV set and find TV Bandeirantes airing the infamous daily Datena “newscast.” (below)

The man is screaming that a posse of 25 ROTA squad cars are currently fanning out across the city to seize drugs and heavy weapons, including “two pieces of antiaircraft artillery,” some of them assembled by representatives of revolutionary movements from other countries.

I have the impression that this is a live broadcast, but who knows.

We see a helicopter shot showing a line of ROTA red, white and black SUVs — they always remind me of the SUVs in Jurassic Park, for some reason — traveling in a caravan with all the bells and whistles going. A PM helicopter — the familiar Bell Huey, it looks like — hovers overhead, moving slowly sideways, shot from above by the news helicopter.

The whole time this Datena fellow is screaming, repeatedly, over and over and over: “150,000 illegal weapons in this country! That’s an army! An army! I do not know the inventory of the Armed Forces arsenal, which is a secret, but that must be rougly equivalent, don’t you think? An army! Revolutionary movements from other countries are arming the drug traffic! THE ARMED FORCES NEED TO INTERVENE RIGHT NOW!”

I am quite serious. But see also “The Army Will Not Patrol the Streets of Rio de Janeiro”: Pan-American Games Edition.

Military-issue ammunition keeps showing up in federal police seizures, by the way. You are starting to hear muted questions about how secure military ammo dumps are. When an AR-15 or FAL goes for something like R$20,000 and a depot sergeant makes $R400 a month …

At one point, the PM cavalcade of SUVs is seen stuck in rush-hour traffic for several minutes like all the other poor schlubs trying to get home this evening.

As I have said before, it is often difficult to different “ostentive” policing from “ostentatious” pseudo-policing here. See Order and Progress, Sampa-Style.

But more on that as it comes in. A series of anti-drug operations were announced early in the week by the state public safety secretary.

If you have read Rota 66 — I keep recommending this book, and it is too bad it has not been translated into English — about the activities of this PM unit in the 1980s and early 1990s, you remember that the reporter, Caco Barcellos, in hopes of observing a ROTA operation at first hand, hangs out with a radio broadcaster whose metier is precisely this sort of broadcast — monitoring the police radio, conducting ad hoc infowar as an informal ROTA auxiliary, taunting bandidos and celebrating righteous ROTA kills.

The broadcaster is blind. Life. Fiction. All that jazz.

And The Horse of Another Collor He Rode In On

Meanwhile, speaking of traffic nightmares, Bush arrives tomorrow. The headline of the principal editorial in the Estado de S. Paulo, literally translated: “Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s Puny Little Plan.”

I should translate that for you, but the import: Bush’s interview with five Brazilian reporters, including an Estado reporter – covered extensively in a special section inside the paper — was an insult to everyone’s intelligence.

Seriously: They really blasted the brush-clearing, active-duty shirking, Harvard B-school legacy admission, “I answer to a higher Father” Texas fazendeiro. I was a bit suprised.

On TV Senado, the live C-SPAN floor debate, Sen. Heraclito Fortes (PFL-Piauí) blasted Sen. Eduardo Suplicy (PT-SP) for the fact that PT is encouraging activists to attend street protests in São Paulo on March 9, and for a speech in which President Squid blasted critics of condom distibution and sex education.

It continued a memorable sound bite: “We must teach people about sex and how to do it!”

Insert your own jokes about Lula teaching us how to do sex. So to speak.

Fortes also railed againt letting Venezuela into Mercosul and the government’s opposition to forming a congressional panel of inquiry into NGOs. For some background on which, see Dilma: ‘All Quangos Are Created Equal’.

The guy is sort of a giant barking Toad of Toad Hall.

Piauí is sort of a Rhode Island-size feudal kingdom, hauntingly beautiful, and a poster child in the past for world-class underdevelopment, grinding poverty, and nasty medieval coronelismo. Kind of a less civilized Alagoas, I guess you could say, in the Northeast. It was the first target of the Fome Zero program back in 2003, as I recall.

The Estadão editorialist thinks that Bush made it abundantly clear that he is principally here to counter the influence of Chávez, and that this is a diplomatic insult of staggering proportions. Not to mention that none of the talk is backed by substantial action. It states that the total value of the aid package amounts to 5 days operating expenses in Iraq.

I am half-assedly paraphrasing. The famous Disney cartoon in which Zé Carioca meets Donald Duck (1943) is worked in cleverly. The Brazil-U.S. partnership against Nazi-Fascism is cited.

This evening, around 7:15 pm, news comes over the boob tube — Globo News with Eduardo Grilo and that standard Barbie doll from the São Paulo plastic-surgery boutiques, I forget her name — that the power is out in many parts of the city.

The Usina Furnas hydroelectric plant is mentioned. Jardims — land of the bacanas — and the Zone Leste are among the affected areas. Reportedly.

Line 1 of the Metrô — the north-south, Tucuruvi-Jabaquara Blue Line — stopped running for a while today. Is back up now.

Can we blame the Texas energy firms involved in the privatization of Eletropaulo? I am trying to track that one down. But that would make a great ironic meathook for more scathing editorials.

Lula in São Paulo should be a fun blogging experience.

Unfortunately, I am not sure I have the time to really plan out a campaign and do it full blogging justice. Whatever that might mean. But I will try to find a Brooklyn-Brazilian jeitinho. Watching the local press watch the gringo parachute press watch the locals should be interesting.

I would give anything for a guest pass to get me into Larry Rohter’s hospitality suite with a voice recorder and videocam.

Elza Soares is singing on the TV right now. Elza Soares is a treasure. I am going to go watch. The one redeeming feature of some of the Brazilian C-SPAN equivalents: When they need to fill time, they put a camera on some great musicians and let them play. The son of Baden Powell the other week, wow. Talking. Playing. Talking. Simple. Groovy.

More of that, please. I am also a big fan of Viola Minha Viola, a sort of low-key Grand Old Opry filmed in one take on more of a Grand Old Oprah scale.

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