IFE Proposition: “No Election Fraud in 2006″

AMLO book: note tousled rock-star cover treatment for the man from Tabasco. Had it been me, I would have used a screenshot from the infamous Hildebrando117 case. Focus on the hard information, not the infotainment personality.

El Financiero (Mexico) reports: “Federal elections authority (IFE) repeats that there was no fraud in 2006.”

See also

• Mexico: “The Mafia Stole the Presidency”
• Mexico: Repercussions in Elections Fraud Case?

At the very least, IFE has not successfully refuted the proposition that the election was fraudulent. Which is what taxpayers pay it to do.

Most notoriously, its efforts to block any “vote by vote” recount were scandalously absurd and defended with loud bouts of surrealistic quacking and not especially clever or competent FUD.

Likewise for the technicialities used by TRIFE to disqualify numerous credible and concrete complaints of fraud for “lack of standing” on the part of the complainant.

Upon which basis — the basis of deciding to disqualify those who invited them to determine whether there was a basis or not — TRIFE ruled that there was no evidence of “systematic” fraud on which to base the argument for a full recount.

See also

• The Iffiness of IFE: You Saw the YouTube Videos, Now Read the Book
• Mexico: (Michael) Hammering IFE
• Mexican Elections Defended by Idiots: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Critique of Pure Polling
• Ugalde: Apologia Pro Bureaucratic Survival Sua
• Ugalde Tells a Whopper
• Mexico’s IFE: Open-Ended Exceptions to Transparency
• Felipe.org: Democracy 2.0
• El Mapache: A Veteran Mexican Election Fraudster Narrates the Infamous IFE “Taking Out the Trash” Footage
• Mexico: The Iffiness of IFE, Part III

I have recently moved over, as you know, from the weak thesis — “recount the votes or else we will never know” — to the strong thesis: The 2006 Mexican election was a swamp of flagrant mapacheria, backed by a filthy ratfuck campaign in the monopoly mass media and awash in dirty money (The Teacher Reaches for the Golden Apple). It was as phony as a $3 bill. The official results were utterly meaningless.

At any rate, a large rally is planned for this weekend on the Zócalo in which the losing candidate and “legitimate president,” López Obrador, will lay out his case for the other side of that question.

Workshops are planned at which evidence that has reportedly been gathered by the “vote by voters” in the meantime will be boiled down into new PowerPoint. I will have a look at all that this week to see if I want to continue maintaining the strong thesis.

I have a couple of reviews of that AMLO book in the pipeline at the moment as well, one breathlessly supportive (Proceso), one oozing histrionic disappointment at what it terms a lack of sufficient evidence on concrete evidence (El Universal).

I think I might just have to try to read the book for myself. To come.

First, this:

México, 30 de junio.- El consejero presidente del IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, sostuvo categórico que en la elección presidencial de 2006 no hubo fraude y que las acusaciones en ese sentido que se han hecho desde entonces hasta ahora constituyen sólo retórica, pues no se ha aportado una sola prueba que lo demuestre.

The president of IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, remains categorical in his insistence that there was no fraud in the presidential election of 2006 and that accusations that there was are mere rhetoric, not based on a single bit of evidence to prove the case.

“Todas las ideas que han salido han sido de retórica, han sido de suposiciones, han sido de aseveraciones sin sustento”, dijo Ugalde Ramírez en una entrevista.

“All the ideas that have come out have been mere rhetoric, speculation, statements without foundation,” said Ugalde in an interview.

“Cicarelli Assets Still Hanging Out Online”: YouTube Gets Bent But Stays Unborked

Nonsensical Net pseudolibertarian noise campaign: “Boycott Cicarelli: Brazil Without Censorship.” Source: Pravda in Portuguese, a fully-owned subsidiary of Gazprom.

Tato Malzoni wanted the São Paulo court to rule that the entire site be interdicted until means were found to prevent the exhibition of the video with the images of him and Cicarelli [doing it] on a beach in Cádiz, in Spain.

Yeah, well

You can’t always get watch you wa-ant
You can’t always get watch you wa-ant

Consultor Jurídico reports that the infamous “sex on the beach” video involved in the notorious “blanket censorship” of YouTube.com by a São Paulo court last year — nothing of the kind ever happened — is as undead as the latest 21st-century sequel to the popular George Romero movies about brain-eating zombies.

Gist, as I understand it: Blocking the entire YouTube.com domain for the sake of Tato’s assets is an absurd proposition. But Google should try to do more than just comply with orders to block specific URLs pointing to specific copies of the video. It should try harder to find a way to identify any new copies of the video being uploaded to new URLs and bork them preemptively.

Which could be technically doable, I guess –a pattern recognition algorithm designed to flag all possible 2D manifestations of the unique Cicarelli bubble butt? — but also no doubt hackable, like everything else.

It is always interesting to see technology companies whose marketing departments rely so heavily on the “technology can work miracles!” pitch — what I call “the rhetoric of the technological sublime” — arguing “technical unfeasibility.”

So I guess the bottom line is that Google does, under this decision, need to try to find a way to do more than just respond to “this URL shows Cicarelli’s assets, block it please” letters submitted by armies of third-party Cicarelli asset managers.

Google has announced it will roll out a local edition of YouTube, freeing up Mountain View from having to import Brazilians to sort through e-mails from Brazilian lawyers. That might help.

But then again, IANABL [Brazilian lawyer, or indeed any kind of lawyer.] So somebody explain to me what the intellectual property implications are here? This lawsuit is a strategic maneuver of some kind, in the armed media monopoly wars, but I am not quite sure exactly what Google’s competitors are after here.

Background:

 

• Brazil: YouTube Beats The Bishop (in a similar case, the head of the Universal Church is refused a request to take down an embarassing clip aired on Globo in 1995)
• The Veejay Vadia Is Not to Blame
• What “the Brazilian Judge Who Changed His Mind” Actually Said
• Cicarelli Assets Still Hanging Out Online
• Who is Renato Bialystock & Blum?
• I Write to Red Herring (John Palfrey disinforms)
• In a São Paulo Court, Vandals Pull a YouTube Switcheroo
• YouTube in Sampa: One Flea Dooms The Whole Dog

The volume of lurking lobbyist-driven disinformation that got into the content pipeline on this story makes it a strong candidate for the NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNNBS FUD Campaign of the Year.

Risk management takeaway: People admitted to the bar in the jurisdiction in question are far less likely to be blowing smoke out their asses than quango-tangoing Harvard Law professors. See also

• Brazilian Blawger: “YouTube Case Runs Counter to Trend”

I translate, hastily, for later recollection in tranquillity (Wordsworth) and pra inglês ver. The amicus briefs are the really interesting part of this case, which otherwise, as our Blawger friend notes, does not seem to run “counter to the trend” that the invalid garbled ruling that caused all the fuss in the first place ran counter to.

O Tribunal de Justiça de São Paulo vetou a exibição na internet do video com as imagens picantes do namoro da modelo Daniella Cicarelli numa praia da Espanha. O site de videos YouTube está obrigado a instalar um sistema de rastreamento e eliminação dos vídeos com imagens da apresentadora flagrada em uma praia da Espanha em cenas de sexo com seu namorado à época Tato Malzoni, o empresário Renato Malzoni Filho. O site tem prazo de 30 dias para fazer o rastreamento e, no caso de descumprimento, estará sujeito a multa diária de R$ 250 mil.

The São Paulo [state supreme court] banned the exhibition on the Internet of a video showing spicy images of model Daniella Cicarelli [doing it in the road] on a [public] beach in Spain. The YouTube video Web site is obliged to install a system for tracking and eliminating the videos with images of the TV host, who was caught on a Spanish beach [doing it] with then-boyfriend Tato Malzoni [a Merrill Lynch investment banker with a B.A. in fashion design whose daddy -- "I am a legitimate businessman!" -- owns half the Av. Paulista, go figure.] The site has 30 days to perform the tracking and, in case of noncompliance, will be subject to a daily fine of [US$120,000].

The almighty gringobuck is down to something like R$1.92. Our glory days are over. From now on, when we travel, we travel by São Geraldão — Brazil’s funkiest bus line.

A proibição vale só para o Youtube. O video continuará livremente em circulação em centenas de outros sites da internet onde foi copiado e colado.

The prohibition only applies to YouTube. The video will continue to circulate freely on hundreds of other Internet sites where it has been copied and posted.

I have never seen it.

Good News from Rio de Janeiro: TV Globo Coverage Features Responsible Adults

White-collar perp walks: “The people like it that way.” Cover of the latest Caros Amigos. Your infotainment is loading. Please be patient. Your infotainment is now ready:

… we must dare to be free, even as we weep at the pain of those who offer up their own flesh to the hot steel, as have the police who have fallen these last months, watering the soil with blood and honor so that the seeds of peace may be sown. — Lt. Col. Mário Sérgio de Brito Duarte, former BOPE commander and current head of strategic planning, state public security department, Rio de Janeiro, writing on his Web log yesterday.

As you know, I am taking copious notes on the reporting on the latest outbreak of bloody chaos in the northern suburbs of Rio this week.

Today, a postmortem on the reporting from one of TV Globo’s other nightly newscasts.

The “why don’t they report the good news?” meme is very common these days. See

• “The Good News About South Africa”
• “Business-Friendly”: Civita and Murdoch

But there actually is genuine good news on the journalistic front in the midst of all the blood and guts and chumbo quente and “Rio is Baghdad” alarmist bunkum.

It is not the Second Coming of St. Walter of Cronkite by any means (and the most trusted man in America in his day, for all his virtues, was no saint either, to be honest. Sainthood is not necessary to the preservation of one’s professional self-respect).

But it does, I think, represent appreciable gains for the reality-based community in the struggle for the million-megawatt megaphone in Brazil.

As I noted the other day, critics, in the YouTube comments thread, of this example of TV Globo news reporting thought the Jornal do Globo coverage was remiss in only hearing from official sources.

And it is true that in this report, only the state public safety secretary and the chief of the state judicial police — and pointedly (I thought) not the third man in the triumvirate, the commandant of the state military police — are heard from.

I also thought that was less than ideal, and still do.

The specific complaint was that responsible critics of the operation from a human rights angle were not heard.

That is a fair criticism, I think

On the other hand — and this is not chopped liver — the “let us not rush to judgment” defense for this editorial decision is not spurious, either.

I am willing for the news media to let that hot-blooded story — Rio: “11 of 19 Alemão Dead May Have Been Innocent” — cool on the windowsill before trying to eat it. But I do expect it to be covered eventually.

The barring of OAB representatives from the autopsies is a disturbing development. Just look at what happened to old Mrs. Ascencio in Veracruz, Mexico.

What did happen to old Mrs. Ascencio?

Exactly my point.

On balance, however, I found this JN report a far cry from the kind of outrages on professional ethics regularly perpetrated by Fantástico and the Jornal Nacional — even if, on some of the hard facts, its factual reporting diverged dramatically from facts stated by other news agencies. See Rio: “How Many Dead at the Complexo Alemão?”

Did the operation start at 9 a.m. or 10? And so on.

Still, let us focus on the positive. The Kremlin demands it.

A Gazprom-controlled radio station — Gazprom has bought up some 90% of the Russian media — recently ordered its news writers to make at least 50% of the stories “positive,” according to the Harper’s Index.

Okay, so how about this: This is another news team inside the Globo empire, doing another kind of journalism — and apparently thinking carefully about it, finding room for maneuver within the boundaries of the hackneyed formulas imposed from above by the likes of Ali Kamel, and trying to do their job in a manner befitting responsible adults.

So if we must always have a good news angle to the story — I tend to believe that the vast majority of news, to most people, is neither good nor bad, but rather relevant or irrelevant, useful or not useful — I would say that is it: There are plenty of signs that the responsible adults at Globo are beginning to assert themselves, and not just on the Internet, either.

I say more power to them.

And I will try to be more careful in the future not to throw the responsible adults out with the bathwater when I blast the Ali Kamel-run Globo Journalism Central as an insanely banana-republic font of gabbling, hysterical, propagandistic, often viciously racist FUD and infowar.

As I will continue to do whenever I see examples of it. Which are legion. See

• O Jornal Nacional (Brazil) x O Jornalismo: A Case Study
• NMM(-TV)SNB(B)CNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE

Colombia: “U.S. Democrats Want To Hear From Mancuso”

Product placement: Salvatore Mancuso and his Sony laptop of parapolitical doom. Just like in 007: Casino Royale (See my review, 007 카지노로얄).

You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. — Vice President Dick Cheney, Sept. 16, 2001

Congresistas demócratas de E.U. están interesados en escuchar versiones de Salvatore Mancuso (EL TIEMPO, Bogotá): “U.S. congressional Democrats are interested in hearing Salvatore Mancuso’s side of the story.”

As I noted on April 2, 2007:

Also in El Tiempo this weekend: El Alemán says that payoffs to paramilitaries from multinational fruit companies were common knowledge. See also Yes, Nos Temos Bananas, on the Chiquita admissions.

Ohio-based banana-republican Chiquita (Public, NYSE:CQB) has admitted to having a problem — if I may engage in some consultantspeak here — with an imperfectly transparent strategic alliance in which the co-opetition dynamic got somewhat, er, out of hand, overrunning its business ecosystem like swarms of African killer bees.

It [Chiquita subsidiary Banadex] also collaborated in bringing more than 3,000 AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds in to Colombia, weapons later used in various massacres in the Northeast.

Ouch. Worse:

According to US court documents, Chiquita told the [U.S.] justice department in April 2003 that it was funding the paramilitaries, and then kept paying them for another 10 months with the department’s knowledge.

Compare Adult Supervision for Mexican Narcs?

Sergio Gómez Maseri, El Tiempo‘s Washington correspondent, files this yesterday:

El representante William Delahunt no descartó que una comisión viaje a Colombia a escuchar al jefe ‘para’ en la cárcel. Vienen más audiencias.

Rep. William Delahunt did not rule out sending a delegation to Colombia to interview the “para” warlord in jail. Other interviews are in the works.

Rio: Carnival of Indignation!

No Mínimo (Brazil) Web poll: Do you think Carnaval 2007 was fixed? Top answer: “Of course it was! In Rio, corruption runs hog wild.”

Time will tell whether the emergence of the quasi government is to be viewed as a symptom of decline in our democratic government, or a harbinger of a new, creative management era where the purportedly artificial barriers between the governmental and private sectors are breached as a matter of principle. — Kevin R. Kosar, “The Quasi Government: Hybrid Organizations with Both Government and Private Sector Legal Characteristics” (Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2007)

CPI do Carnaval vê contradições em depoimentos de jurados (O Globo Online): The jurors from this year’s (internationally televised) competitive Carnival parades in Rio de Janeiro start to testify before a municipal parliamentary commission of inquiry, or CPI, into an allegedly bribery (and extortion) scheme designed to rig the results.

What was in those “kits” distributed to jurors, the ones discussed by a LIESA official on a federal wiretap in Operation Hurricane? Police say, based on their analysis of other conversations unrelated to Carnaval, that “kits” is mafia code for bribes.

The CPI will shortly adjourn until August, after the Pan-American Games.

For some background, see

• Brazil: “Hurricane II” Targets Police Corruption
• Rio: Carnaval Carnage Goes on the Record
• Rio: Carnival Carnage is Political Circus!
• Brazil: Hurricane Blows Lid Off Hummingbird Hype?
• Hummingbirds Roar Like the Lion King at Sapucaí

You will also recall that the Rock in Rio event, also organized by a public-private partnership, was allegedly used to funnel public money into political slush funds through publicity contracts managed by the infamous Belo Horizonte Baldy.

The former president of the PSDB, Sen. Eduardo Azeredo, has admitted his 1998 run for governor of Minas Gerais received dirty money — a lot of dirty money — through this mechanism.

Former governor Geraldo Alckmin of São Paulo is under investigation for a similar scheme; see São Paulo: Did Harvard Man Love The Second Superpower Too Much?

RIO – A Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito (CPI) da Câmara Municipal, que investiga as suspeitas de fraude no resultado do carnaval, já ouviu nove dos 40 jurados do desfile das escolas de samba do Grupo Especial.

The muncipal legislature CPI investigating suspected fraud in the Carnaval results has now heard 9 of the 40 jurors who judged the parades of the Special Group.

Um dos chamados para depor se negou a falar, o produtor cultural William Taranto. Os vereadores consideraram contraditórias as informações sobre o conteúdo dos kits recebidos antes dos desfiles. Também houve contradição sobre o número de reuniões de que eles participaram.

One of the jurors summoned to appear, producer William Taranto, refused to testify. City lawmakers consider contradictory the testimony they received about the content of the “kits” received by jurors prior to the parades. Also contradictory was testimony about the number of meetings they participated in.

On June 13, LIESA held a press conference to express its “indignation” over the charges (text of the release translated below).
Taranto was one of the more indignant ones, according to documentations of the event on the LIESA Web site. At the event, according to a photo caption, “Ana Maria Maia spoke in the name of the Mayor.”

Jornal do Globo: 1,350 in the Complexo do Alemão

YouTube: The TV coverage of the battle of the Spartan 1,350 in Rio’s Complex do Alemão is starting to get posted. This is the Jornal do Globo from June 28, 2007.

Comment on the YouTube posting: “They interview tons of cops and nobody else.”

Noted for later comment.

Rio: BBC Newbie on Belfast & Rio

Take a look where you’re livin’
You got the Army on your street
And the RUC dog of repression
Is barking at your feet
Is this the kind of place you wanna live?
Is this were you wanna be?
Is this the only life we’re gonna have?
What we need is
An Alternative Ulster
–Stiff Little Fingers, 1979

Repórter irlandês compara violência entre Rio e Belfast: The Folha de S. Paulo carries the impressions of Gary Duffy, a new BBC reporter in Brazil, on the War of the Spartan 1,350 in the Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro.

It’s like Belfast, he commented.

Which is exactly the comparison that comes first to my mind as well.

Hence one of my first posts on the “army in the streets” debate in Brazil: ‘Take a Look Where You’re Living, You Got the Army on the Streets’

Which is why I like to use the expression “the hard men in their hog heaven.”

“The hard men” being an Irish euphemism for the IRA.

A statement from UNICEF compared the situation to the Gaza Strip.

Globo, meanwhile, continues to pound on the talking point it has beaten to death for months now: Rio de Janeiro is Baghdad. The Estadão‘s Moonie squad continues to insist that Rio is Port au Prince.

The Rio government exchanged visits earlier this year with the police in Bogotá, meanwhile, but the Governor then backed off on promoting parallels between the two cases.

According to public health analyses that I read, the relative success in bring down the levels of violence in Colombia was due to one factor: Gun control. A 2005 national gun control referendum in Brazil failed. By a landslide. In an e-voting election that, given subsequent events, probably needs a thorough governance post-mortem.

As fellow discourse-taxonomist Non Sequitur notes:

The art of historical analogy is tricky and as such subject to dishonest manipulation. On that score, historian Victor Davis Hanson writes: “The Bush administration can also use history to show that, despite what detractors say, its techniques aren’t so unreasonable. It’s worth reminding the American public that Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus  …” Coming from a professor, such straw man arguments are shameful.

But I do tend to think the BBC man’s historical analogy is the most fitting. Why? The pernicious synergy between State power and informal (criminal) paramilitary forces, and the erosion of equal justice before the law, would be the decisive factor.

Diante desse cenário, durante a cobertura da megaoperação policial no Complexo do Alemão, no Rio de Janeiro, o correspondente na BBC no Brasil Gary Duffy lembrou do conflito na Irlanda do Norte.

While covering the megaoperation in the Alemão, Duffy was reminded of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Irlandês de nascimento, Duffy –que está baseado no Brasil há apenas três meses– cobriu a disputa entre católicos e protestantes na Irlanda do Norte de 1984 a 1998.

Irish born, Duffy — who has been based in Brazil for only three months — covered the dispute between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland from 1984 and 1998.

Actually, it was a dispute between (Catholic) Nationalists and (Protestant) Unionists, with the British Army on the streets to back up the Royal Ulster Constabulary in keeping the peace protecting one side from (having its dominance and privilege challenged by) the other.

“Foi impressionante ver que em muitas áreas católicas não havia muita confiança na polícia, havia um certo ressentimento em relação à polícia, e dava para sentir uma atitude nas favelas de que a polícia não era muito bem vista, que não havia muita confiança na polícia. Havia uma certa simetria com a Irlanda do Norte”, disse o correspondente, sobre a experiência no Complexo do Alemão.

“It was impressive to see that in many Catholic areas there was not much confidence in the police, there was a certain resentment toward the police, and you could also feel in the favelas that the police were not well regarded, that there was not much confidence in the police. There was a certain resemblance to Northern Ireland,” the correspondent said of his experience in the Complexo do Alemão.

Rio: BOPE Blogs the Alemão

Astillero (Julio Hernández) on the atypical scenario currently unfolding in the Mexican drug wars

If a similar dynamic — broken deals that mean the fix is no longer solidly in — is discussed as a possible factor in recent waves of attacks on Brazilian police, it gets discussed quietly.

BOPE’s gonna getcha
BOPE’s gonna getcha
Hey, man in black?
What is your mission?
I go to the favela
And leave corpses on the ground.
– A current underground funk carioca hit

Segurança Pública: Idéias e Ações is the Web log of Lt. Col. Mário Sérgio de Brito Duarte, former commander of BOPE, the “trooper elite” of the Rio military police — unofficial but highly publicized motto: “We kill to create a better world” –  and currently in charge of strategic planning, he says, for Rio de Janeiro’s state department of public safety.

Strategic approach recommended here:

… we must dare to be free, even as we weep at the pain of those who offer up their own flesh to the hot steel, as have the police who have fallen these last months, watering the soil with blood and honor so that the seeds of peace may be sown.

Mauro Malin of Observatório da Imprensa reported in May 2006 on Duarte’s response to the publication of Elite da Tropa (“The Trooper Elite”) — a semifictionalized account of deep corruption and entrenched criminality in Rio’s military police by former BOPE officer Rodrigo Pimentel and two co-authors.

I will put that in the translation queue as well. But you have seen City of God, I assume?

Set in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Rio de Janeiro?

Police muscling in to take a slice of the action? Stuff like that. That film was based on actual events.

On BOPE, see also

• Funk Carioca: “The Hot Lead is Flying”
• NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE
• “Difficult to Investigate Rio Militias”: Military Police
• Geneva Convention Out the Window in Rio Free-Fire Zones?
• “News of a Private War”: Pra Inglês Ver

The strategic planner’s post today: “Freedom for the Alemão.”

O Alemão is also an underworld slang term for military police officers. “The Germans” — as in Nazis, as the drug underworld calls them, in a not particularly affectionate manner.

At the moment, I just trying to jot down fairly thorough notes on this whole incident, which gets more and more confused.

And after all, you cannot have a media-driven Rashōmon without hearing from the samurai — whose resume I will translate for you below.

Nos últimos vinte anos a escalada da violência perpetrada por criminosos envolvidos com o tráfico de drogas no Rio de Janeiro, tem preocupado tanto o cidadão comum, quanto estudiosos, governantes, jornalistas e agentes da lei. Os efeitos do descontrole histórico da segurança pública são tão dramáticos, que já não podemos dizê-los próprios de tal campo.

In the last twenty years, the Colonel writes, the escalation of violence perpetrated by criminals involved in the drug traffic in Rio de Janeiro has worried common citizens, researchers, elected officials, journalists and law enforcement officers. The effects of the historical lack of control of public safety have been so dramatic that it is no longer a question of security alone.

Uma observação atenta ao que tem se passado em nosso Estado, com destaque para as áreas onde estão localizadas as favelas, irá revelar que a evolução do medo abarca alguns vetores comuns aos “conflitos armados”, semelhantes aos ocorridos em países e territórios envolvidos em guerras internas, com significativo número de mortos entre contendores e inocentes. No caso carioca, cuja cidade até o início da década de oitenta ainda apresentava uma regular normalidade no seu aspecto segurança, uma combinação explosiva de fatores foi determinante para a proliferaçào de criminosos em nova faceta.

A close observation of what has happened in our state, with an emphasis on the areas where the favelas are located, would reveal that the evolution of the fear touches upon such common factors as “armed conflicts,” similar to those that occur in countries and territories involved in civil wars, with a significant number of dead among both combatants and noncombatants. In the case of Rio, which up until the beginning of the 1990s still presented a perfectly normal appearance in the security aspect, an explosive combination of factors was decisive in the proliferation of criminality of a new kind.

TV Globo: “Bitter Medicine for the People of Rio de Janeiro”

Globo’s Fantástico: Pumping up the hysteria.

In Baghdad that week, 75 deaths were registered. In São Paulo, 161. The scope of the disruption was visible in the public buses burned, the schools shut down, the 22 shopping malls that closed in a panic, the 17 bank branches assaulted, and the 73 state prisons, with their nearly 130,000 prisoners, in revolt. A stunned (interim São Paulo governor) Claudio Lembo could only respond, uselessly, with cheap philosophizing: “We have a really malevolent bourgeoisie here, a perverse white minority. The pocketbooks of the white bourgeoisie will have to be opened up for the sake of lifting the rest of Brazil out of abject misery.” –Alan Rodrigues, Época magazine, 2006 year in review issue (Jan. 2007), on the PM-PCC wars of May 2006.

A reader writes in to O Lobo (Fausto Wolff) (linked from The Incredible Army of Blogoleone) on the TV news coverage of the Complexo do Alemão invasion in Rio de Janeiro this week.

Since Globo.com’s chiclete com banana validation Javascript is pleased to inform you that non-Windows computers “do not meet the minimum requirements for viewing Globo video online,” we will have to take their word for it for the time being.

The gist: The major national TV newscasts were dedicated to amplifying, shoring up and cheering on the official version of recent events in the Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro.

Which wouldbe nothing new.

See NMM(-TV)SN(B)BCNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE.

O pacto da morte. Banal. Dos pobres. Da gente mais criativa e lutadora. Morte do futuro. No início a força bruta das armas de fogo. Mais de mil homens. Subindo e atirando. No meio a gente. Mesmo não atingidos no corpo, perfurados na alma. No fim a mídia inteira. Vingativa, desde que Tim Lopes, a soldo da TV Globo, foi preso, torturado e morto no morro do Alemão.

The pact of death. Same old same old. Death to the poor. To people who are more creative and struggle harder than they do. Death to the future. At the start, the brute force of firearms. More than 1,000 men. Going up and opening fire. In the middle of the people. Who even if they were not hit bodily had their souls pierced. Following on, the entire media. Vengeful ever since Tim Lopes, on the TV Globo payroll, was captured, tortured and killed on an Alemaõ hillside.

No final a tragédia pulava amarelinha. Às 17 horas eram 18 mortos. No Jornal Nacional eram “apenas” 13 mortos. Na manhã da quinta feira a Manchete: foram 19 mortos. O gráfico irregular das estatísticas da morte era menos crível do que os 120 mil brasileiros que são milionários. Nem um milhão de mortos desdirão a verdade: o mais pobre entre eles tem o poder de decidir em grande escala. Construir 67 moradias a 30 mil reais cada, ou 124 moradias a 15 mil. O menor dos milionários poderia educar 400 crianças, por um ano de estudo, a 5 mil cada. Na hora de dormir: os caveirões desceram como um rabecão, pingando sangue, com os corpos amontoados qual um frigorífico. Foram 40 mortos.

On the debage over the burden of responsibility in the Lopes case, see also Rio: FENAJ, Globo Blasted Over Death of Reporter.

In the end the tragedy becomes a game of hopscotch. At 5 p.m., 18 are dead. On Globo’s primetime Jornal Nacional it was “only” 13 dead. On Thursday morning, the headline: 19 dead. The phony graphics on the death statistics was less credible than the one on the 120,000 Brazilian millionaires. Not even a million dead bodies would contradict the truth here: even the poorest millions have the power to get things done on a grand scale. Build 67 houses at 30,000 reals ($15,000) per house, or 124 houses at 15,000 reals each ($7,500). The least of our millionaires could educate 400 kids for a year, at R$5,000 a head. When bedtime rolls around: The “big skull” armored vehicles come down like a giant hearse, blood dripping, corpses heaped up like on a meat truck. There were 40 dead.

Rio: Mr. Emerson on the Headlines of the Day

The local press rewrites the press release in lockstep: “These actions will continue”

Carlos Emerson is a carioca blogger I ran across at random once upon a time and posted about. He’s sort of in the general ballpark of being a Brazilian version of me (though I, I am proud to say, still have more hair.)

Carlos has a nice, crisp summary of major newspaper coverage of the Complexo do Alemão incident.

I shut up and translate.

Esses sãos 4 principais jornais do Rio de Janeiro. E todos trazem a mesma visão da operação policial no Complexo do Alemão. Uma divergência aqui e ali, mas em essência, a história é a mesma.

These are the four principal newspapers of Rio de Janeiro. They all take the same view of the Complexo do Alemão operation. The diverge here and there, but essentially, the story is the same.

Já os dois grandes jornais de São Paulo mudam completamente o foco, olhem só:

And just look at the two big São Paulo newspapers, which have an entirely different focus:

A FOLHA DE SÃO PAULO: “Entidades acusam polícia de abusos em ação no Rio”;
O ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO: “OAB suspeita de execuções”.

The Folha: “Organizations accuse police of abuses in Rio action.” The Estado: “OAB suspects executions.”

In Brazil, newspaper coverage often marches in lockstep.

To a startling degree. Often in lockstep with what The Authorities have to say, too.

Ou seja, enquanto a imprensa carioca dá destaque à operação em si, a imprensa paulista denuncia possíveis execuções e desrespeitos aos direitos humanos.

That is to say, while the Rio press focuses on the operation in itself, the Paulista press denounces possible executions and human rights violations.

São Paulo journalists do not have to try to live and work in Rio. I tend to think explains that, partly. There is also a cultural and commercial rivalry that enters in.

I sometimes imagine a sort of journalistic swap of chores between the two cities: Rio journalists exposing the seamy underbelly of São Paulo, whose dark powers do not know where they live, and the paulistas returning the favor.

O que os jornais de São Paulo ignoraram completamente foi o aparente apoio de parte dos moradores da região. Em entrevista hoje pela manhã, na rádio Band News Fluminense, o Coordenador de Direitos Humanos da OAB amenizou suas críticas e confessou que as informações passadas por pessoas da comunidade ainda deveriam ser confirmadas.

What the SP papers ignore completely, however, is the apparent support of area residents. In an interview with Radio Band, the OAB rights coordinator softened his criticisms and confessed that the information passed to him by people in the community must still be corroborated.

He was still complaining pretty loudly about being barred from attending autopsies at the IML, however.

As he should.

Barring the independent corroboration of official information is … well, you know exactly what that is. It’s Dick Cheneyism.

Rio: “11 of 19 Alemão Dead May Have Been Innocent”

“I feel supported because I can count on my Fourth Brigade.” Billboard, Medellín, Colombia. The 4th Brigade reportedly (cooperating witness testimony) shot random donkey-drovers along the road and dressed them up in fatigues in order to claim them as “guerrilla” kills.

… state government sources who spoke today with the Estado admit the death toll could rise to 30. The commander of the 16th PM Batallion, Marcus Jardim, also does not discard the possibility of finding more bodies in the rainforests.

In other words, the police still do not know how many people they killed.

The record to go for here — the Waco standard for killing people while trying to arrest someone for a noncapital, though serious, crime — would be 74.

OAB suspeita de execução: 11 dos 19 mortos podem ser inocentes (Estado de S. Paulo): “OAB suspects [summary] executions; 11 of 19 Alemão dead may have been innocent”

However, the leadership of the Rio OAB chapter seems to be issuing press statements at odds with what its human rights committee is saying. The statement is not timestamped:

29/06/2007 – A OAB/RJ está acompanhando de perto a operação da policial no Complexo do Alemão. Apesar de lamentarmos profundamente as mortes, até o momento não temos confirmação de denúncias veiculadas em jornais de que estaria havendo matança indiscriminada ou chacinas. Reafirmamos, porém, que se porventura constatarmos abusos na operação seremos os primeiros a denunciar publicamente tais procedimentos. A OAB/RJ reitera, ainda, que quem fala pela entidade é seu presidente Wadih Damous.

The OAB/RJ is closely watching the police operation in the Complex do Alemão. Although we deeply lament the deaths, at this moment we have no confirmation of the accusations noticed in the papers that there have been been indiscriminate killing or massacres. We repeat, however, that if we do confirm any abuses we will be the first to denounce them publicly. The OAB/RJ reiterates that president Wadih Damous speaks on behalf of the organization.

Different “official” police spokemen saying different things. Different OAB spokesmen saying different things. Total loss of message control is not conclusive evidence of massive maracutaias, but then again you hardly ever see a massive maracutaia without total loss of message control.

As we have watched the story unfold today, we have seen (1) the rights committee of the Brazilian bar association, Rio chapter starting to coordinate investigations into the deaths reported — and still unreported, but rumored — during Wednesday’s operation at the “shantytown” complex in northern Rio, and (2) Rio mayor Cesar Maia ferociously mocking the notion that people are “innocent until proven guilty.”

Investigating every police shooting with all the CSI:Miami bells and whistles as a matter of routine is for pussies.

The Brazilian jeitinho on display here is a more “innovative” way of winning the hearts and minds of the general population. Including the looting of shops and homes. By cops. It sounds garish, and could be disinformation, but the fact that such behavior has frequently been documented in the past, unfortunately, lends it plausibility. Plausible disinformation being the best kind, of course.
Still, the sinister — and incompetent, from a professional PR perspective — rhetoric of “no one dead was innocent” is second only to “resistance followed by death” as a red-flag phrase to be hearing from Brazilian police and elected officials.

Cesar “The Naked” Maia is now officially on my shit list.

See also

• Rio: “The Doubts That Came Back Down The Hill”
• “Resistance Followed By Death”: Truths, Partial Truths and Statistics

On unresolved cases suspected of being summary executions, see also

• Sampa Diary: The PM-PCC Wars, One Year On
• The PM-PCC Wars, One Year On: Who Killed Lindomar?

Two special correspondents to the Estado — ALEXANDRE RODRIGUES and PEDRO DANTAS — are reporting that the OAB is questioning 11 of the 19 deaths reported so far in the “megaoperation” at the Complexo do Alemão.

And why the hell the cops were declaring that these were the corpses of bandidos — all of them shot to death — before the autopsy reports came out.

The death toll “may rise as high as 30,” a BPM officer goes on the record as saying.

The Estado is in there putting names to corpses.

And I say good for the Estado. Keep up the good work.

We militant beancounters insist on our having double-entry body count balance without resort to any 2+2=5 or “no one dead was innocent” nonsense.

A doméstica Rosa Goulart da Silva, de 38 anos, reconheceu ontem no Instituto Médico Legal (IML) o corpo do sobrinho Emerson Goulart, de 26 anos, uma das vítimas da operação policial de anteontem no complexo de favelas do Alemão, na zona norte do Rio. A Secretaria da Segurança garante que todos os mortos tinham ligação com o crime. Rosa diz que o jovem apenas morava na região. Denúncias recebidas pela Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB) indicam que pelo menos 11 dos 19 mortos seriam moradores sem ligação com o tráfico.

Domestic worker Rosa Goulart da Silva, 38, yesterday identified the body of her nephew, Emerson Goulart, 26, at the Legal Medical Institution (IML; coroner’s office). Emerson was one of the victims of the police operation on Wednesday in the Complexo Alemão in the northern district of Rio de Janeiro. The state public safety secretary stated that all the persons killed were involved in crime. Rosa said the young man merely lived in the area. Complaints received by the Order of Brazilian Attorneys (OAB) indicated that at least 11 of the 19 killed may have been residents without ties to the traffic.

Let me go straight to the OAB huma rights committee and see what it is saying. If the OAB Webmaster has not revoked their posting privileges. When I get a chance.

‘O Emerson era chaveiro, tinha dois filhos e trabalhava havia quatro anos no mesmo ponto lá no morro’, declarou Rosa. Ela disse que a mãe de Emerson passou mal e não conseguiu ir ao IML. Até o fim da tarde havia sido divulgada a identificação de oito corpos. Na lista parcial, além de Emerson, havia quatro adolescentes (de 13, 14, 16 e 18 anos), dois jovens (de 21 e 22) e um adulto de 41 anos.

“Emerson was a locksmith, he had two kids and worked in the same shop for four years up there on the hillside,” Rosa said. She said Emerson’s mother was sick and could not come to the IML. By the end of the afternoon, eight bodies had been identified. On the partial list, along with Emerson, were four adolescents (13, 14, 16 and 18), two young adults (21 and 22) and an adult of 41 years.

Is The Naked Maia High? Rio Mayor Scoffs at Due Process of Law!

Capt. Guimarães (l.) with Rio mayor Cesar Maia (second from left): Fat Tuesday and the Rede Globo meet the hog heaven of the hard men.

Although some worry about the implications of vigilante justice, the militias have powerful sympathizers, among them Mayor Cesar Maia, who calls them “self-defense groups” and says that compared with the drug gangs, the vigilantes are the lesser evil. — Associated Press, May 6, 2007 (“Vigilantes Impose Peace in Rio Slums”)

Rio’s “ex-blogging” mayor, Cesar “The Naked” Maia, blasts the federal government for incendiary rhetoric today.

The incendiary and utterly foolish remark in question:

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Given how many photos of the Naked Mayor being extremely cozy with accused serial felons, death-squad operators, and political slush-fund parapolitician financiers — who are also presumably to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise — are floating around on the Internet, you would think the Naked would be a little more grateful to be living under the democratic rule of law.

I used to be fairly skeptical about speculation that The Naked could wind up in jail some day.

I am more actively interested in the possibility these days, however. Enough to want to know more about what the Naked gets up to when he hangs out with Capt. Guimarães, for example (Carnage and Carnival: The Curious Career of Captain Guimarães).

The Naked goes on today to predict failure for the state government’s plan to follow-up on current actions in the Complexo Alemão, contrasting it unfavorably with the PFL plan for the state from the mid-1990s.

Last year, the president of the PFL, Jorge Bornhausen, said that the PCC murdered São Paulo police in order to help Lula get reelected — with support from Colombia’s FARC.

Geraldo Alckmin just recently repeated the same gabbling nonsense (absent the FARC connection): Geraldo Alckmin Repeats Vicious, Gabbling Nonsense.

These are people who tell psychotic lies in order to try to get themselves elected.

The party immediately resolved to rename itself the DEM, or “Democratic” party — to general derision. I have tried to keep an open mind, but I am feeling a hint of a cynical smirk coming on myself lately. The habit of psychotic lying can be a lot like a crack jones — hard to kick, especially overnight.

Rehab can help, but relapses are to be expected.

I translate, complete with punctuation overkill reminiscent of Mexican tabloid headlines (and notes passed in class by the kind of teenage girls who dot their i‘s with smiley faces).

O QUE É ISSO LULA????!!!!!!

What the heck, Lula?????!!!!!!!

Em boa parte dos casos, a justiça decide apenas qual a pena. Não, haver ou não condenação. Aliás, é assim em todos os crimes com flagrante. Esses marginais que espancaram a trabalhadora doméstica? Ainda não foram condenados. Servem como exemplo, Lula? Pare de falar besteira. O que antes passava como arroubos e improvisações, cinco anos depois é grotesco. Vai se perdendo o respeito!

In a good number of cases, the courts are only involved in handing down the sentence. Whether or not there is a finding of guilt. That is how it works in in flagrante delicto arrests, for example. These bums who beat up the housemaid? They have not been convicted yet. Do they serve as an example, Lula? Stop talking nonsense. After five years, these off-the-cuff remarks are just getting grotesque. You are losing your respect!

Maia refers to the young men in question as marginais — the term has a strong class connotation similar to our “trailer trash” — but in fact they were upper middle-class private schoolers, as I read. Engaged in a little Clockwork Orange action.

TODOS OS JORNAIS: Todos são inocentes até julgamento, diz Lula.

ALL THE NEWSPAPERS REPORT: “Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, Lula says.”

Not being a Brazilian lawyer, I cannot report to you with any certainty on the status of in flagrante delicto arrests in Constitutional and jurisprudential terms these days, but did manage to google up this “for dummies summary”:

Fujimori: The Paris Hilton Defense

Cartoonist Carlin of Lima’s La República daily consistently cracks me up.

Fujimori: “Plan A is to get let off by a court in Chile. Plan B is to get elected Senator in Japan. Plan C is to get let out after three days in jail with lice and claustrophobia, just like Paris Hilton, then take it on the lam.” She: “Genius!” He: “How globalized!”

As Homer Simpson once said, “It’s funny because it’s true.”

The head of the Brazilian tech consortium who was detained for investigation into election fraud in the last election in Ecuador?

Let out on a “humanitarian consideration” provision in the habeas corpus law.

Never to be heard from again. See

• Ecuador: Electoral Fraud Squads Gear Up for Constituent Assembly?
• Another Election Dissection in the Horse Latitudes

On the case referred to here, and some related issues, see

• Japan: “Alberto Fujimori For Senate”?
• Peru: “Total Bork of Fujimorist Court-Packing Plan”
• Peru: “Internet Borked the Fujimorist Trojan Horse!”
• Peru: Supreme Court Justice Borked for Parapolitics
• “Fujimori Authorized Targeted Assassinations”
• Peru: How Fujimori Gonzalezed the Judiciary
• Peru: Giampietri Runs Cheney-Style OVP?
• YouTube and PeruTube: Media and Monstrosities in the Trans-Andean TAZ

“No One Dead Is Innocent”: Brazilian Bar Association Helps Beg To Differ

This young woman was reportedly pistol-whipped by drug traffickers on Wednesday for being slow to deliver lunch. Who said so? The police. Did reporters interview the young woman herself, and quote her words to that effect? No. Could it be true? Certainly. Is it plausible? Certainly. The Traffic are a nasty bunch. Can we trust this reporting? No. No way, no how.

G1 > Edição Rio de Janeiro > NOTÍCIAS > OAB recebe denúncias sobre excessos em megaoperação no Alemão (“OAB receives complaints of police excesses during Alemão ‘megaoperation’”).

The OAB is Brazil’s bar association equivalent.

O presidente da Comissão de Direitos Humanos da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil do Rio, João Tancredo, disse que a entidade recebeu denúncias de que os policiais cometeram excessos na megaoperação realizada no conjunto de favelas do Alemão, no subúrbio carioca.

The president of the human rights committee of the Order of Attorneys of Brazil (OAB), João Tancredo, said his organization has received complaints that police committed excesses in the megaoperation conducted in the Alemão shantytowns on Wednesday, in the Rio suburbs.

Segundo Tancredo, que esteve nesta quinta-feira (28) no local da ação, moradores procuraram a OAB dizendo que três menores mortos durante a operação não teriam envolvimento com o tráfico. A Secretaria de Segurança Pública do estado afirma, no entanto, que todas as 13 pessoas mortas, incluindo os menores, eram traficantes.

According to Tancredo, who was at the scene of the operation on Thursday, residents sought out the OAB saying that three minors killed during the operation had no involvement with the drug traffic.

Summary executions for the crime of existing while young, gifted and black is a touchy subject, as São Paulo residents know all too well.

It happens often enough that the kind of “no one dead was innocent” rhetoric we heard from official spokespersons yesterday constitutes a public relations gaffe of astonishing — and disgraceful — proportions.

Um pequeno grupo de moradores do Alemão também foi à sede da Secretaria, localizada no Centro do Rio, nesta quinta-feira protestar contra a ação policial e apresentou denúncia de que, entre outros mortos e feridos, há gente inocente.

A small group of Alemão residents also went to the state public safety headquarters downtown on Thursday to protest the police action and file charges that there were innocent persons among the dead and wounded.

Em entrevista à TV Globo e à Rádio CBN Rio, o secretário estadual de Segurança Pública, José Mariano Beltrame, reconheceu que a intervenção é traumática, mas garantiu que, aos poucos, a comunidade vai ter tranquilidade.

In an interview with TV Globo and Radio CBN Rio, the state secretary of public safety, Beltrame, acknowledged that the intervention is traumatic, but guaranteed that little by little, the community will have peace.

Rio: Feds Respond to Chaos in the Complexo

Jesus chorou: Members of the FNSP covered the bust of the Judas gang.

In Rio, the problem was never the Red Command, but the “Blue Command,” the military police. The problem is police corruption. There is this impression that crime is high in Brazil. It’s not. Police corruption is high. Criminality flows from the corruption of the police. When the police stop being corrupt, crime goes down. When kids [interviewed in Falcão: Children of the Traffic] say they pay part of the cop’s salary, that’s true. The traffic, in reality, is a partner of the Brazilian police. –Hélio Luz, former chief of the Rio state judicial police (he lives in France now, for some reason), to the Zero Hora newspaper, May 2007. See Top Rio Cops: “Their Priority Was to Protect The Mafia”

Força Nacional de Segurança será ampliada, anuncia Tarso (Estado de S. Paulo): First signs of a federal response to the samba da policia doida going on in the northern suburbs of Rio de Janeiro this week.

The conservative daily Estado — mirabile dictu! — even cites the official Agência Brasil (sort of the Brazilian Notimex) as a source.

The Globos and Vejas of the world tend to treat the AB and Radiobrás as Orwellian propaganda organs, but they really are not.

They publish their journalism standards, which — though flecked here and there with veins of  blogging-industrial “Journalism 2.0″ memes cultivated like a psychoactive fungus by the likes of Murilo the Moonie — are not by any means patently absurd or 1967 Press Law-reminiscent.

They have a ombudsman to make sure they adhere to them, who seems to actually show up for work. They have a policy. While debatable, like everything in life, the policy is not nonsensical or slapped together pra inglês ver. They do seem to make a real effort to do what they say they want to try to do.

And, by the standards of Third World government news agencies — which, as a Fourth Estate-brainwashed gringo and stranger in a strange land, I admit I cannot help still finding, as a matter of knee-jerk reflex, an exotic and potentially dangerous idea — they are actually well worth reading as sources of reasonably balanced coverage of the day’s events.

These are not U.S. DoD video news releases run unattributed as real news by Fox subsidiaries, by any means. They do not pretend to be from other than a government source, for example. Their licensing specifies that they must be properly attributed. Which you cannot say of other Brazilian government agencies, by the way. See:

• “The People Have Faith in E-Voting, II”: Fake News in Prime Time, Brazilian Style

RIO – Um dia depois da operação que deixou 19 mortos e nove feridos no Complexo do Alemão, na zona norte do Rio de Janeiro, o governo federal anunciou, na quinta-feira, 28, que vai aumentar o contingente e a atuação da Força Nacional de Segurança no combate à violência. Na quarta, 150 agentes da FNS atuaram no conflito e deram apoio a 1.200 policiais Civis e Militares do Rio.

One day after the operation that left 19 dead and nine wounded in teh Complexo do Alemão in the northern district of Rio de janeiro, the federal government announce (June 28) that it is going to increase the troop-strength and level of activity of the National Public Security Force in the fight against violence. On Wednesday, 150 FNSP troopers took part in the conflict, supporting 1,200 military and state judicial police.

The FNSP supervised the closing off of access points to the sprawling complex, I read — much as they supervised the patrolling of the Red and Yellow Line highways during Carnaval after the PM publicly screwed the pooch on that assignment.

See also Brazil: What Is the FNSP?

The FNSP contingent in Rio recently swapped commanders — naming a Rio PM colonel to the post. Which I am curious to know more about. The theory is that the FNSP represents federal adult supervision. Is it being supervised by a responsible adult now? The Rio PM is not without its reponsible adults, even if we dwell principally on the hard men in their hog heaven.

If there is a legitimately critical question to be asked about the federal role here, it is why the FNSP has not yet acted more decisively on a number of quiet but firm promises made about federal resolve to investigate police corruption and violence. See Rio: Federal Prosecutor Will Look Into Cop Conduct.

On the editorial pages, at best, the feds tend to get lumped in with the state government in the area of failed promises (Cabral: The Caveirão is History).

“SEC In Terror Error!”

Outrage over SEC terrorism ‘blacklist’ (FT): Having just been reading Prof. Warde’s The Price of Fear — Current Content Downloads No. 4: Recent Readings in Reality-Based Community — I am tuned into this story, which after all I used to track for my last full-time gig.

Warde’s book is an effective jeremiad against bogus triumphalism, gabbling FUD and massive rewarding of failure in the “financial war on terror,” but I still think there is another book or two still to be written on the subject.

A book or two of detailed business case studies in which the poor bastards who have to try to figure out how to comply with, and manage the risk inherent in, schizogenic rules shrouded in legal uncertainty, talk in plain English, Studs Terkel-style, about how they talked themselves into getting out of bed every morning to face the arbitrary absurdities of the day.

And I imagine there were other sane, responsibly adult civil servants in that position as well, on the other side of the fence, who should also be heard from.

 

Some of the world’s biggest companies are outraged by a website link launched by US regulators aimed at exposing which of them could be “indirectly subsidising a terrorist state”.

As a copy editor and multilingual terminologist with a strong prescriptivist bent, I still prefer “Web site.” The Wired style guide is a weak-minded apology for gabbling sociolinguistic nonsense.

The Securities and Exchange Commission this week linked to a list of five countries – Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria – designated by the State Department as “sponsors of terrorism”.

What, no Saudi Arabia?

By clicking on each country, investors see a list of companies that mention that country in their latest annual reports. The companies are mostly non-US and include Unilever, Cadbury, HSBC, Nokia, Siemens and Total.

What, no Chiquita Brands International (Public, NYSE:CQB)?

“The Jordanians Did It”: The Parallel Universes of Rio and Port Au Prince

Embassy cable, July 5, 2006: Official body count was 6-10; human rights groups reported 50-70. MINUSTAH made no effort to clarify the body count, saying only it had not “intentionally” targeted civilians with any of the 23,000 rounds expended. Brazilian commanders later attributed deaths to subsequent “gang reprisals against suspected informants.” Nothing was revealed.

The Cite Soleil Massacre Declassification Project has obtained 10 U.S. State Dept. cables on the controversial June 2006 invasion of the massive Port au Prince shantytown.

It is an operation that has been heralded incessantly in the Brazilian press as “a model for Rio de Janeiro” in terms of public security police. See especially

• “Haiti É Aqui”: Embedded Reporter on the Army in Rio
• “Haiti is a Laboratory For Rio”: Estadão
• Haiti Não É Aqui: Cabral on Port au Prince and Rio
• “Haiti É Aqui”: The Brazilian Army Takes Sun City

According to a declassified cable from professional State Dept. staff, there do seem to have been quite a few operational similarities between longstanding Rio police practices — visible this week once again in the Complexo Alemão, with the customary fluctuating body counts and contradictory, ad hoc press relations da policia doida — and the military raid on Sun City.

According to the cable, in which State assesses claims by human rights groups about massive overkill, the Brazilian military (1) fired off 21,000 rounds in the space of a few hours, (2) lied about who had fired off all those rounds, and (3) “did not remain in the area to do an assessment of civilian or gang member casualties.”

Want to see Brazilian police shooting randomly into the dark then not bothering to see what they killed?

Have a look at NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE.

Get your uncle the cop to tell you how long he would keep his job — and stay of out jail — if he conducted himself that way on the job. In front of television cameras, especially.

According to the U.S. ambassador, James Foley (replaced by a career diplomat in 2006), in a separate cable, the Brazilians were “insufficiently transparent”:

“MINUSTAH has allowed rumors of a massacre to continue by not countering with a sufficiently transparent account of the resistance they encountered in carrying out the operation; resistance that included coordinated ‘fire and maneuver’ tactics by gang members and at least 4 molotov [sic] cocktails (a Chilean engineering truck emerged from the operation with 41 bullet holes).”

On the 21,000 rounds, from “Human Rights Groups Dispute Civilian Casualty Numbers from July 6 MINUSTAH Raid.” Cable from US Embassy Port au Prince to State Department Headquarters. July 26, 2005. Cable Number: Port au Prince 001919. Confidential. Source: Freedom of Information Act release (2005-05-081) to Keith Yearman.

MINUSTAH’s After Action Report offered a sharp contradiction to what the Department of Peacekeeping Operations had been reporting. In this cable from Ambassador James Foley, “MINUSTAH’s after action report stated that the firefight lasted over seven hours during which time their forces expended over 22,000 rounds of ammunition and received heavy fire in return.” A MINUSTAH “acknowledged that, given the flimsy construction of homes in Cite Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings, striking unintended targets. As the operation was a raid, MINUSTAH did not remain in the area to do an assessment of civilian or gang member casualties…”

Mexico: “Calderón’s Fist-Pump and the Yanking of Hank”

Above: Felipe Calderón of PAN receives crucial support from Brozo the Televisa ambush interview clown. Note Calderón’s trademark “Mussolini fist pump” gesture. Source: YouTube. In terms of journalistic integrity, Televisa makes those greasy little infowarriors at Rede Globo — “Beyond Citizen Kane” — look like the producers of PBS’s Frontline.

… the younger Hank brother is driven by a crusade to control such important issues as energy policy and the licensing of casino gambling everywhere in Mexico

[UPDATE: The federal elections tribunal has recently ruled that Hank can still run.]

As a translator, a global press enthusiast and a longtime fan and amateur scholar of the Mexican corrido, I have a fondness for the subtle art of the Mexican editorial — even, and maybe even especially, when it is selling snake oil.

As it is in this case, I think.

Editorializing in El Observador Diario on behalf of the “América Multimedios Agencia de Noticias” (whose corporate Web site does not google up all that readily for some reason) Claudio F. Orenday — screenwriter of the 1991 film The Mafia of Nuevo Laredo — is helping to sell a major two-headed talking point in Mexican political marketing these days:

1. Calderón is not Fox, and
2. Calderón is not the creature of the ultrarightist El Yunque

The point seems to be to counter the analysis according to which

1. The Mexico military men would like to be political generalissimos
2. Calderón is all for it so long as he gets to keep his name on the brass plate

See Mexico: “PAN, Yes; El Yunque, No,” but also “From PAN to neo-PAN” for the origins of Calderón’s rise through the ranks of the neocon sect of the old-time Christian Democrats.

I do not really believe that premise. For one thing, as you recall, the national defense ministry has remained virtually unchanged from Fox to Calderón.

Also, I have studied Calderón’s very studied rhetoric for nearly a year now, and have come to the provisional conclusion that the body language does not lie.

Calderón’s fascist fist-pump throughout his campaign for the presidency spoke volumes and, while perhaps adopted for purely pragmatic political purposes, nevertheless signaled deep, deep promises to constituents who now expect him to keep them, I tend to think.

And I do think he is keeping them, too. What do you think the Ernestina Ascencio affair was all about?

The right arm held down at the side, elbow at a 90-degree angle, clenched fist, pumped up and down for emphasis. Watch the videos and review the photo galleries. He’s like a poseable fashion Barbie. He is never, ever not rigorously on-message in this regard. Even when being interviewed by the ambush interview clown (above). Even, incongruously, when declaring outright at a press conference that he is not a mano dura.

That gesture is about as spontaneous as the way U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry consistently appeared in debates and campaign rallies with his iron fist half-morphing into the “thumb’s up” sign, or the way Bob Dole clutched that pen in his war-wounded hand.

Dick Morris has admitted to getting paid for advising Calderón.

Was this his idea? See Dicking Democracy, Down South American Way

I translate for future reference and annotation, nevertheless.

The effort to distinguish Calderón from the figure of those fabulous flying burrito brothers of Tijuana, the Hanks, Carlos and Jorge, is especially interesting here — considered purely as an exercise in reverse-engineering an image-building campaign that appears designed to counter the analysis you read about yesterday in my translation, Mexico Pundits: Armed Forces Role Is “Militarized Mapacheria.”

The impression that Calderón is now a wholly-0wned subsidiary of his own military.

Considerados como una de las familias más ricas del mundo, los Hank – Carlos y Jorge – contrario a su suerte en el mundo de los negocios, en política no las han tenido todas consigo; En 2006, Carlos Hank Rhon, el hermano mayor y con más dinero –mil 300 millones de dólares — intentó ser el candidato del PRI al gobierno del Estado de México, en donde su padre Carlos Hank González nació, gobernó y fundó el controvertido grupo político Atlacomulco. Sin embargo, el poderoso empresario no logró alcanzar la candidatura a pesar de que tenía todo el apoyo del líder nacional del PRI, Roberto Madrazo.

Considered one of the richest families in the world, the Hanks — Carlos and Jorge — contrary to their good fortune in the business world, have not gotten all the breaks in the political realm. In 2006, Carlos Hank Rhon, the older, richer brother — $1.3 billion — tried to stand for governor on the PRI platform in Mexico State, where his father was born, governed, and founded the controversial Atlacomulco political group. The powerful business mogul was not able to win the nomination, however, despite the full support of Roberto Madrazo.

TV in Ecuador: No Whores Before Nine

Meanwhile, in Brazil, “The Authoritarian Temptation: The PT’s attempts to monitor and control the press, television and culture.” Translation: “Holy freaking cow, Dilma could decide those zero-down spectrum concessions we got were the fruit of crooked dealings! Get rid of her, I don’t care how!”

Violators will be fined $10 or $20 and given a warning, “but repeat offenders may be subject to losing their license.”

Hoy Online (Ecuador) reports: President Correa wants a ratings system, with fines, applied to television content.

And unlike RCTV in Venezuela, television broadcasters are not screaming “totalitarian temptation.” Yet. Reporters Without Borders has not, to my knowledge, mobilized the European Parliament.

Compare the current battle over content ratings in Brazil: “Não É Bem Assim”: Fact-Checking Globo’s Censorship Claim.

Governance on the issue seems a wee bit on the weak side, however.

La programación de algunos medios de comunicación ha sido criticada por el presidente que los llamó “pornografía visual”.

The programming of some broadcasters has been criticized by the president, who called them “visual pornography.”

Por disposición del Consejo Nacional de Radiodifusión y Televisión (Conartel) se iniciarán los trámites para dar cumplimiento al art. 58 de la Ley de Radiodifusión, la cual estipula la ilegalidad de transmitir programas que promuevan la violencia, discriminación, comercio sexual, pornografía etc. Además controlará que no se difunda el sexo explícito en el horario de protección al menor que termina a las 21:00.

By order of CONARTEL, the National TV and Broadcasting Council, rule-making will commence for Article 58 of the Broadcasting Law, which makes it illegal to promote violence, discrimination, prostitution, pornography, and so on. It will also prevent explicit sex from being shown during the family hour, which ends at 9 p.m.

São Paulo Diary: Sundown on the Bingo Matarazzo?

São Paulo: Deputy mayor Matarazzo evangelizes a plastic surgery-enhanced local Oprah.

Bingo fechado vira oficina de caça-níqueis: “Shuttered bingo hall becomes a workshop for electronic gambling machines” (G1/Globo).

700 of them.

Here’s a timely news item from our own home turf, the Western Zone of São Paulo, where the Bingo Matarazzo, finally closed down in the wake of a major mafia corruption scandal in the judiciary — judges selling favorable verdicts and injunctions that allowed them to continue operating, in return for pots and pots and pots of under-the-table money — got busted again.

The deputy mayor for the downtown area, Andrea Matarazzo, has been the target of scrutiny lately because a police corruption case in that area has turned up that a number of gambling joints there continued to operate on Matarazzo’s watch. See

• Hard Men. Hog Heavens. A Latin American Corruption Newsreel
• Sampa Diary: More on Matarazzo
• Sharp Threads: Amorim on Matarazzo and Mangabeira

The name of the joint could, naturally, be a mere coincidence, or a bit of broad mafia irony. There is a Cesar Maia housing complex in Rio, for example, that has allegedly been taken over by a “militia” — mafia-style “protection” racket.

The Associated Press, for example, recently cited Maia as “a powerful supporter” of militias, on the theory that their ties with non-narco vice makes them “the lesser of two evils.”

The Matarazzo clan is a venerable, Medici-like Italo-Tupi São Paulo gens with roots in the cream of the 19th century coffee baronage, I believe.

So anyway, we shall see.

You recall that a lawyer named Mr. Chokri was recently busted with a little black book that indicated regular payoffs to virtually every state judicial police precinct in Great São Paulo by gambling mafias. The state judicial police immediately did what? Launched a bloody little improvised jihad on drug dealers to great fanfare. See São Paulo Crime Blotter: “Operation Mansion.”

On caçã-níquel (“nickel-hunter”) technical repair shops, see also

• São Paulo: One-Armed Bandit Army Busted
• Rio: One-Armed Bandits Are Rigged! Safadeza Lab Busted!

On why illegal gambling operators might not be just a lovable mob of fun-loving, misdemeanor-committing scamps with “innovative” lawyers, as I swear to you some newspapers have an editorial policy of referring to them as, see also Rio-Sampa: “The Italian-Colombian Connection.”

Attack on the clones: 10,000 gambling machines in an ABC Paulista warehouse.

A Polícia descobriu uma oficina usada para montagem e conserto de máquinas caça-níqueis em um bingo desativado, na Zona Oeste de São Paulo. Mais de 700 máquinas foram apreendidas, além de 60 mil dólares, 2 mil euros e R$ 110 mil, encontrados em uma sala secreta.

The police discovered a workshop used to assemble and repair “nickel-hunter” machines inside a deactivated bingo hall in the Western Zone of São Paulo. More than 700 machines were seized, along with US$60,000, €2,000 and R$110,000 (US$55,000) in cash discovered in a secret room.

Rio: Invasions Open-Ended, But Crime Hotline Might Be Made Toll-Free!

When the enemy is dug in on the high ground, parade down the middle of the street and fire blindly up the slope when shot at.

‘Alemão é só o começo’, diz secretário de Segurança do Rio (G1/Globo): “Alemão is just the beginning, says Rio security chief.”

On the bright side of the news, the state is now thinking about making the crime hotline toll-free so that people without a telephone at home, or money to buy a payphone credit card, can call in.

Yes, the Rio de Janeiro anonymous tipster line is currently a toll call. (Which would mean that if you called from your home phone, the call could be traced, am I right? Recall that a Telefónica technician in São Paulo was arrested recently for tipping investigation targets about federal wiretaps he was in charge of installing.)

Another triumph of innovation and strategic foresight.

O secretário de Segurança Pública do Rio, José Mariano Beltrame, informou que a operação realizada no conjunto de favelas do Alemão, no subúrbio do Rio, é apenas a primeira de muitas outras ações que a polícia fará contra o tráfico de drogas. Beltrame falou à Rádio CBN do Rio.

Rio state public security secretary Beltrame said that the operation realized in the Complexo do Alemão shantytown complex is just the first of many police actions against the drug traffic. Beltrame was speaking to CBN Radio in Rio.

“A operação realizada no Alemão é apenas a primeira de muitas outras que faremos em outras favelas do Rio. A polícia não tem condições de fazer intervenções em todos os morros do Rio todos os dias. Por isso, definimos em janeiro que começaríamos pelo Alemão porque os índices de criminalidade dessa região são muito grandes. Mas também faremos operações em outras favelas. A Inteligência da polícia é que vai definir a data e local dessas ações”, disse.

“The Alemão operation is just the first of many others we will conduct in the Rio shantytowns. The police is not able to intervene in alll the Rio hillsides every day, so in January, we decided we would start with Alemão, because the indices of crime in that region are very high. But we will also conduct operations elsewhere. Police intelligence will define the date and location of these actions,” he said.

In my observations, Beltrame seemed completely surprised and bewildered by the invasion of Alemão on May 2, which the PM high command insisted loud and long was a “reactive,” not a planned or routine, operation.

So I am going to have to register some skepticism here about the months of planning allegedly involved in an operation that has besieged hundreds of thousands of people in their homes and then, from the looks of it, sent columns heavily armed men just sort of wandering around shooting things up, LERP-style. “Advance to contact.”

I am just not sure that we are seeing many signs of tight coordination and “shock and awe” decisiveness here. This is not microsurgery. It looks an awful lot like the moral equivalent of carpet bombing, in fact. There is little credible information so far to differentiate it from any preceding samba da policia doida stretching back decades.

But then again, I am not a military tactics experts.

Beltrame informou que a secretaria vai definir na semana que vem as formas de policiamento no Alemão.

Beltrame said his department is doing to define next week what form of policing will be used in Alemão.

The heavy planning they have been doing since January has apparently not yet resolved that issue.

In the meantime, you will recall, the Governor of the state effectively tried to cut Beltrame out of the loop by petitioning to have the armed forces implement martial law for the Pan American Games.

That request was substantially and effectively denied.

Rio Media Zeitgeist Newsreel: Fact & Fiction, Morro & Asfalto

Time [and the criminal trials of Jack Abramoff --Ed.] will tell whether the emergence of the quasi government is to be viewed as a symptom of decline in our democratic government, or a harbinger of a new, creative management era where the purportedly artificial barriers between the governmental and private sectors are breached as a matter of principle. — Kevin R. Kosar, “The Quasi Government: Hybrid Organizations with Both Government and Private Sector Legal Characteristics” (Congressional Research Service, February 13, 2007)

Rio Media Zeitgeist Newsreel: Fact & Fiction, Morro & Asfalto:

One serious translation error here to correct: The Rio No Ar talking head says, not “get the police out of here” but “think about social programs.” This is a familiar talking media point of the “The MINUSTAH model for Haiti was tailor-made for Rio” crowd, which is getting heavy play in the mainstream media. See also “Haiti É Aqui”: Embedded Reporter on the Army in Rio.

I believe that Viva Rio, the funder of the study whose research head — who works embedded with the Rio PMs — in interviewed in that article is a GONGO — or to use the phrase apparently coined for a recent Congressional Research Service study, one of those “instrumentalities of indeterminate character.”

Let me see if I can make that hypothesis fly.

Rio: The “Big Skull” Busts Back In

Morro da Mineira, April 22: BOPE brings the bodies back.

PMs are not discarding the possibility of finding more corpses of criminals inside the shantytowns. … To make progress in the occupation, the state government is studying a strategy similar to that used by the Brazilian army in Haiti: Winning over the population as an ally. To that end, Beltrame has been insisting on the need of having the population collaborate with the police. “The idea is that they will provide information so that the intelligence work can be more successful.”

Tiroteio quebra manhã de calma no Complexo do Alemão (Estado de S. Paulo): “Gun battle shatters morning of calm in Complexo do Alemão.”

Rio governor Sergio Cabral, running as the anti-Garotinho (albeit a continuity candidate for the same party, the PMDB) made it a campaign promise to rein in the use of the “big skull” armored vehicle in residential areas.

• Cabral: The Caveirão is History
• Rio: Cabral Backs Off On Bogotá

He is widely perceived to have broken that promise.

RIO – A situação de aparente tranqüilidade no Complexo do Alemão nesta quinta-feira, 28, foi quebrada com a incursão de um carro blindado do 16º Batalhão de Polícia Militar, apelidado de “caveirão”, na favela da Fazendinha, local da morte de pelo menos quatro dos 19 traficantes durante os confrontos de quarta-feira, 27.

The situation of apparent calm in the Complexo do Alemão region of suburban Rio de Janeiro this morning was shattered by an incursion of an armored car from the 16th PM Batallion, of the kind known popularly as “the big skull,” into the Fazendinha shantytown, were at least four of the 19 drug traffickers killed in yesterday’s confrontation died yesterday, June 27.

The notion that “everyone dead was guilty” cited here has not yet been attributed to an official source speaking on the record that I can see.

Bodies are being policed up off the streets and thrown into trunks in some instances. As always. None of the dead have been identified by name yet, as far as I have been able to read.

Os policiais militares foram recebidos com fogos e alguns disparos de tiros. Sete escolas e uma creche continuavam fechadas nos arredores do conjunto de favelas. De acordo com a Secretaria Municipal de Educação, 4,6 mil crianças permanecem sem aula.

The PMs were received with fires and some gunshots. Seven schools and a day care center remain closed in the area of the shantytown complex. According to the state education secretary, 4,600 students have no classes to attend.

Policiais militares não descartam a possibilidade de encontrar mais corpos de criminosos dentro das favelas. O chefe do tráfico local, conhecido como Tota, estaria ferido na perna. As operações policiais já duram 59 dias e já deixaram 84 feridos e 46 mortos.

PMs do not discard the possibility of finding more corpses of criminal inside the shantytowns. The head of the local Traffic, known as Tota, is reportedly wounded in the leg. Police operations have lasted 59 days and left 84 wounded and 46 dead.

Pelo menos 19 pessoas morreram e nove ficaram feridas por balas perdidas em uma das maiores operações de combate ao tráfico no Rio, realizada na quarta-feira, 26, por 1.200 policiais civis e militares e 150 agentes da Força Nacional de Segurança (FNS) no Complexo do Alemão. Segundo a Secretaria da Segurança, todos os mortos são criminosos.

At least 19 persons died and 9 were wounded

The last toll of wounded I saw — not clear what the source was — was 68. Add 9 and you get 77. The Estado is reporting 84. It does not source the number or say how it guesstimated it.

Roraima, Brazil: Judge Borked on Child-Fucking Charge

Droit du seigneur in action. Advertising manager: “Running that story will cost us advertisers.” Editor: “If that story is spiked, I quit.” Advertising manager: “So be it.” See also Brazil: Editor Fired Over Frías Anti-Hagiography.

Juiz acusado de violentar menina de 13 anos é condenado (G1/Agência Estado, Brazil): In the northern state of Roraima, “a judge accused of raping a girl, 13, is found guilty and sentenced.”

You will excuse the crudeness of my headline here, but I think there are times when crude facts should be described using crude terms.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Brazilian judiciary is shot through with defenders — I mean this quite literally — of droit du seigneur. (Shot through like an otherwise healthy body riddled with cancer, I hasten to add, because the Brazilian body politic is not without a lot of healthy tissue trying to pump out antibodies.) Vestiges of a certain old-time political culture that, hopefully, is going the way of the dinosaur, if I may say so.

See also Sampa Diary: “Teenaged Hookers Are Good for Business!”

Recall that a journalist from the interior of São Paulo was assassinated recently, sicário style — possibly by military police moonlighting as death-squadders — after having reported on a child prostitution ring that led to the conviction of several elected officials.

See

• “Military Police Suspected of Assassinating Porto Ferreira Journalist”
• Barbon Case: Nothing is Revealed
• Rural São Paulo Journalist Murdered; Outed Lurid Corruption Scheme

So was a Mexican federal investigator. See Scenes From the Sicário City Post: “Tabledance Mafia Takes Out Top Prosecutor.”

Risk-management takeaway: The non-narco vice lords can be just as vicious as any Bolivian marching powder import-export baron, and also use corrupt police as force multipliers.

The Brazilian national journalists union, FENAJ — which is presided over by an editorial manager from TV Globo’s Jornal Nacional newscast, I understand — denied that the Barbon case should count as the murder of a journalist.

Invoking a body of law prior to the current Constitution of 1988, including the infamous Press Law of 1967, FENAJ argued that Mr. Barbom was not a journalist because he had no university degree in journalism and was not licensed by the Ministry of Labor to practice the profession, a provision of labor legislation dating back to 1946.

See also

• Brazil: Was Barbon a Good Journo? Does It Matter?
• Brazilian Media Union: Slain Journo Was “Not a Real Journalist”
• Rio: FENAJ, Globo Blasted Over Death of Reporter
• Managing Knowledge Without A License: Retro-Ditadura is the Fashion in Brazil

No, that was not a typographical error: Brazil’s national union for journalists is reputedly controlled by representatives of Globo management and lobbies to uphold dictatorship-era controls on the exercise of free speech rights.

Controls very similar to those ratified by a Florida court in the case of FOX News reporters whose reporting on a case involving Monsanto and the FDA was adulterated, and ultimately spiked, by business-side management.

In the scheme of things, the Roraima case itself is banal, though sensational — fucking children is an emotional issue for a lot of people (the NMMist, known to Tupi-Chilean nieces and nephews as Uncle Dude, among them), but stories about crooked judges tend to run on page A-30. It will not cause a national uproar in the major metro press, which tends to take the line that equal access to justice is a partisan political talking point of “fiery leftists.”

But I think it also speaks volumes about what I call “the hard men in their hog heaven” factor in Brazil. The fact that the AE and Globo’s G1 Internet news portal are injecting it into the newsflow is a hopeful sign, however.

Acusado de ter violentado uma menina de 13 anos em 2005, um juiz foi condenado, na quarta-feira (27), durante sessão no Tribunal de Justiça de Roraima (TJ-RR), a nove anos e nove meses de prisão. O réu também foi afastado de suas funções por conduta incompatível com o cargo de magistrado. Há possibilidade de recurso e, por causa disso, ele não será preso.

Accused of having violated a 13-year-old girl in 2005, a judge was found guilty and sentenced on June 27 to 9 years and 9 months in prison by a court in Roraima. The accused was also removed from his duties as a judge for conduct unbecoming a magistrate. The accused will remain free pending appeal.

What is his name?

“News Corp. Awaits Reply From Bancrofts”

Murdoch: Did Pump Yield Undue Bump?

News Corp. Awaits Reply From Bancrofts (W$J): After reading countless headlines yesterday about how a reported breakthrough on editorial independence had “paved the way for an imminent deal,” I now read that the W$J says that Reuters says that Rupert Murdoch — a source close to the negotiations who is willing to go on the record — told the news service with the blogging CEO:

News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said any deal with Dow Jones & Co. would likely be resolved in the next two or three weeks, or “not at all.”

What did he mean by that? Once again — see also “Business-Friendly”: Civita and Murdoch — the News Corp. flack corps has to scurry around behind their elephant with a hermeneutical push broom to take the hard edges off the oracle.

What, to use the jargon of speech-act theory, was the “speech genre” of this declamation? A prediction? A fact about the terms agreed to? A threat?

“Everything is done. We are just waiting for a final approval of the Bancroft family,” Mr. Murdoch told Reuters during a visit to Warsaw. “The final approval is in the next two, three weeks’ time or not at all,” he added. Although the prospect of Mr. Murdoch walking away from a deal has always been present during these negotiations, a person close to News Corp. said the comment wasn’t meant as an ultimatum.

An anonymous person “close to News Corp.” has a comment on the comment.

The Dow Jones has no comment.

Rio: “How Many Dead at the Complexo Alemão?”

Walking around out in the open drawing fire from a dug-in enemy who holds the high ground, pointing in general directions and trying to look good on TV.

Megaoperação deixa ao menos 19 mortos no Alemão (Estado de S. Paulo): “At least 19 dead in Alemão megaoperation.” This is by far the most detailed reporting I have seen on the subject so far.

The Estado apparently decided to send out the responsible adults to learn the facts. When it wants to be, the Estado can be a damned good paper.

The Rio government’s difficulty accounting accurately for corpses has been the lede in quite a bit of the coverage I have seen today.

RIO – Pelo menos 19 pessoas morreram e 9 ficaram feridas por balas perdidas numa das maiores operações de combate ao tráfico no Rio, realizada nesta quarta-feira, 27, por cerca de 1.200 policiais civis e militares e 150 agentes da Força Nacional de Segurança (FNS) no Complexo de favelas do Alemão, na zona norte da cidade. Segundo a Secretaria da Segurança Pública, todos os mortos são criminosos.

At least 19 persons died and 9 were wounded by stray rounds in one of the largest anti-narco operations in Rio, carried off on June 27 by some 1,200 military and state judicial police and 15 agents of the federal FNSP at the Alemão shantytown complex.

And the kicker:

According to the state public safety department, all the persons killed were criminals.

Who at the SSP said this, by the way? I did not read that the head man, Beltrame, said this.

Show me a transcript of this press conference, please.

“No one dead was innocent” is becoming something of a sinister mantra from these (always anonymous but nevertheless “official”) sources.

One of the first security crises of the Cabral government, for example, was the reported discovery of a plot to assassinate the new state public health secretary.

He had apparently been poking around in the morgue asking about misplaced paperwork in old gunshot deaths. The Rio police tend not to be sticklers for due process of law.

See also “No One Dead is Innocent”: Virgina Tech and Catumbi.

O secretário José Mariano Beltrame chegou a dizer à tarde que havia de 18 a 20 mortos, mas, por volta das 20 horas, após nova contagem, diminuiu o número para 13. Às 23 horas, a 22ª DP, que registrou o caso, confirmou que havia pelo menos 19 mortos em confrontos.

Beltrame, head of the SSP, had said in the afternoon that there were 18 to 20 dead, but around 8 p.m., after a recount, lowered the number to 13. At 11 p.m., the 22nd Police District, which booked the case, confirmed that there were at least 19 killed in armed clashes.

Por volta das 22 horas, uma kombi chegou à delegacia carregando seis corpos. O motorista disse aos policiais que foi parado por um grupo de pessoas na Rua Canitá, um dos acessos à Fazendinha, e recebeu a ordem para tirar os corpos do morro. O motorista contou que chegou a pedir orientação a um dos policiais que continuam patrulhando os acessos às favelas. Eles disseram que os corpos deveriam ser levados à delegacia. Lá, o motorista foi orientado a seguir para o Hospital Getúlio Vargas.

At around 10 p.m., a VW van arrived at the 22nd DP carrying six corpses. The driver said he was stopped by a group of persons on Canitá St., one of the access points to Fazendinha, and was ordered to take the corpses out of the area. The driver said he even asked for guidance from police who were patrolling the access points to the arera. They said the corpses should be taken to the police precinct. There, the driver was directed to continue on to the Getúlio Vargas Hospital.

Colombia: News of a Botched Hostage Rescue Foretold?

Once diputados en poder de las Farc habrían muerto en fuego cruzado (El Tiempo): “11 state legislators captured by FARC may have died in crossfire.”

The newspaper gives the story the Web site equivalent of huge, screaming headlines.

Families of FARC hostages have been very militant on the question of attempts to rescue FARC hostages by force. They are generally against it.

The reason: in the past, the Colombian armed forces have been known to inadvertently liquidate the hostage in order to save her.

El anuncio fue hecho por las Farc a través de la página de internet Anncol que distribuye los comunicados de esta organización guerrillera.

The annoucement was made by FARC through the ANNCOL Web site, which distributes its press releases.

Los hechos se habrían registrado el 18 de junio, cuando el campamento en el que se encontraban detenidos fue atacado “por un grupo armado que no fue identificado”, según el comunicado publicado por Anncol.

These events allegedly took place on June 18, when the camp where the lawmakers were detained was attacked “by an unidentified armed group,” according to the ANNCOL communiqué.

El ministro de Defensa, Juan Manuel Santos, fue informado de la situación e inmediatamente se reunió con los altos militares en la sede del Ministerio para analizar la situación.

Minister of Defense Santos was informed of the situation and immediately gathered with the military high command at the ministry to analyze the situation.

A las 3 de la madrugada, una alta fuente del Gobierno le dijo a EL TIEMPO que “sobre este anuncio cínico de las Farc, el Gobierno tiene que verificar. Y la verificación se hace sobre la base de que las Farc deben mostrar los cadáveres y entregarlos para establecer lo que ocurrió”.

At 3:00 a.m., a high Government source told EL TIEMPO that “regarding this cynical announcement by FARC, the Government needs to verify it. Verification will be based on FARC showing us the bodies and handing them over to establish what happened. 

Agregó que “en todo caso, esta es una versión de unos asesinos, las Farc, que son los únicos respoinsables por la vida de los secuestrados. Las Farc deben responder”, puntualizó.

The source added that “in any case, this is the version of the story of murderers, FARC, who are solely responsible for the life of the hostages. The FARC must answer,” the source said.

New York City: Apocalyptic Chaos on a Dog Day Afternoon!

New York City is a dystopian nightmare!

If anything characterizes our times, it is a sense of pervading chaos. In every field of human endeavor, the windstorms of change are fast altering the ways we live. Contemporary man is no longer anchored in certainties and thus has lost sight of who he is, where he comes from and where he is going. — The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, quoted in my Spinning the World Backwards.

Provoca apagón en Nueva York caos vial e interrupción del metro: “Power outage in New York creates traffic chaos and interrupts subways service.”

I wind up reading the story first in La Jornada of Mexico City while sitting not two miles from the events in question.

I read nothing at all about the story in the New York Times, which seems to thinksI am more interested in rioting at two gas stations in Iran today.

Yes, I suppose if I were commuting from Brooklyn to downtown freaking Tehran, I might care more about that, sure. Why not just rename the paper the Metrosexual Island in the Sky and be done with it?

I assume that La Jornada picked the “chaos” angle up from the Associated Press, whose coverage Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post headlines:

Blackout causes chaos in NYC, but power is restored quickly

From that AP coverage, gabbling nonsense:

Power was fully restored within an hour, but that did not stop the city from experiencing some of the confusion it endured during blackouts last year and in 2003. “All the traffic lights were out. It was chaos,” said motorist Edward Ankudavich, who spent an hour traveling 20 blocks in the Bronx.

Hell, I have spent an hour traveling 10 blocks in crosstown traffic even without apocalyptic failure of basic infrastructure. Best thing to do? Get out of the taxi and walk.

Chaos? I gotcha chaos right here, as we say in Brooklyn.

I had to walk home to Brooklyn from the Port Authority bus terminal during the 2003 blackout myelf. It was like a giant Grateful Dead concert in the streets with 7 million people wandering across the bridges and the deli owners going “Hell, this ice cream is just going to melt, you might as well eat it, on me.”

Once we all figured out it was not another 9/11, everybody was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. Barbecues were fired up.

Queens residents were without power for over a week last year.

An hour of blackout affecting 385,000 people may represent “some” of that chaos, but then again, a martini glass full of seawater represents “some” of the ocean.

My personal Brooklyn-tuned chaos scale would rate that a fairly standard, government-issued minor to lower middling pain in the ass, quite a few notches below total chaos. Wake me when the undead are in the street, looking to eat brains.

Hell, if you were on the streets during 9/11, you know that even that was not really total chaos. Not in the way you see in dystopian action thrillers.

We all hung out at a friend’s apartment in Little Italy to drink wine, watch TV and share notes.

The national guard was not shooting looters. The liquor store was open. The hippie Chinese joint was delivering. The subway was running. The cellular network was throughly borked, but the Internet connectivity was on, so we had managed to figure out fairly quickly that everybody we could think of who might be dead was not.

NY1, as always, has coverage that does not invoke apocalyptic chaos.

Brazil: “Northeastern Death Squads Share Modus Operandi”

Woodcut from a Pernambucan cordel.

Official government news agency Agência Brasil has this note (June 20):

Brasília – Os grupos de extermínio de Bahia, Ceará e Pernambuco agem de forma semelhante, segundo perfil traçado pelos secretário de Segurança Pública dos três estados. “Verificamos uma relação com o tráfico de armas e assaltos a bancos”, afirmou o secretário pernambucano, Romero Menezes, durante reunião do Conselho de Defesa dos Direitos da Pessoa Humana, hoje (19).

Death squads in Bahia, Ceará and Pernambuco all operate in a similar fashion, according to a profile drawn up by the public safety departments of the three states. “We verified a relationship with the arms traffic and bank robberies,” said Pernambuco’s state security chief, Romero Menezes, during a meeting with the Human Rights Comission on June 19.

O envolvimento de policiais, relação com tráfico de drogas e a participação de presidiários no comando das ações são características comuns dos grupos de extermínio.

Participation by police, ties to the drug traffic and the role of imprisoned criminals in commanding the actions are common characteristics of death squads.

Somente em Fortaleza, foram registrados 145 assassinatos de 1º de janeiro a 11 de junho deste ano, segundo o secretário cearense, Roberto Monteiro. Na Bahia, entre 2004 e 2005, foram desmontadas 13 organizações criminosas no estado, com prisão de 76 suspeitos.

In Fortaleza (Ceará) along, 145 murders were registered between January 1 and June 11 of this year, according to the Ceará safety chief, Roberto Monteiro. In Bahia, between 2004 and 2005, 13 criminal organizations [of this type] were broken up, with 76 arrested.

Na Bahia, os grupos de extermínio estão principalmente nas regiões metropolitanas, afirma o secretário Paulo Fernando Bezerra. O perfil desses grupos mudou nos últimos anos, hoje eles são majoritariamente ligados ao tráfico de drogas, de acordo com o secretário. “Hoje temos um outro perfil dos grupos de extermínio. Em regra, na região metropolitana são traficantes eliminando concorrentes ou pessoas que têm dívidas de tráfico”, afirma.

In Bahia, death squads principally operate in metropolitan areas, says Bahia safety secretary Paulo Fernando Bezerra. The profile of these groups has changed in recent years. Today, they are principally tied to drug trafficking, Bezerra said. “Today we have a new profile for death squads. In general, in the urban areas they are traffickers eliminating competitors or people with debts to the traffic,” he says.

War in the Alemão: Video From Daily Motion and Other Imagery

Dailymotion blogged video
Favela Alemao 270607.wmv
Video sent by digdigger

Just a snippet so far. Searching.

In the meantime, some media clips for sorting and comment.

First, the hypertendentious TV Record Rio in action on the one-month anniversary of the BOPE invasion of the community, which closed schools and businesses and shot the place up all to hell. I will subtitle when I get a chance.

Rio Update: “Only 13 Dead in Complexo do Alemão!”

“Click here to be told that your non-Windows system does not meet the minimum system requirements for viewing free, as in beer, Globo video!”

Secretário corrige informação e diz que são 13 mortos no Alemão (G1/Globo): The state public safety secretary for Rio de Janeiro calls a new press conference and revises the body count downwards in today’s massive invasion of three drug traffic stronghold inside the Complexo do Alemão — which, he says, has no planned end date.

Em entrevista coletiva na noite desta quarta-feira (27), o secretário de Segurança Pública do Rio de Janeiro, José Mariano Beltrame, corrigiu uma informação que havia dado anteriormente e disse que são 13 os mortos na confronto entre policiais e criminosos no conjunto de favelas do Alemão, no subúrbio. À tarde, Beltrame havia dito que o número era mais que 18.

In an press conference this evening (June 27), Beltrame corrected information released earlier and said that only 13 were dead in the clash between police and criminals in the suburban Alemão shantytown complex. In the afternoon, he had stated the death toll was “more than 18.”

No corpses have yet been identified.

Brazil: “Judicial Corruption Case Involves Twice the Vice”

Oscar Niemeyer’s Supreme Court building, Brasília. See also my post Palaces of Justice.

Judge Oliveira says there are strong indications that Justice Medina suppressed the crimnal history of the defendant in order to justify freeing him, or that he may have been deceived by an aide.

EPTV (Brazil) reports this afternoon: the presiding judge of the Rio de Janeiro state supreme court [or the rough equivalent thereof] who was charged with selling verdicts to favor the interests of (militia-funding) gambling mafias in the Operation Hurricane case must now face charges of selling verdicts to favor the interests of narcotraffickers.

In this case, of a drug trafficker who lives in a replica of Elvis Presley’ Graceland mansion.

This is important.

The official version of the story has consistently been that (1) narco violence and corruption and (2) non-narco vice violence and corruption, in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere in Brazil, are two different things entirely.

That’s Larry Rohter’s story, and he’s sticking to it.

See, however, Rio de Janeiro: Did Military Police Free Mineira Marauder?

Após ser acusado pela Operação Furação, da Polícia Federal, de ter vendido sentenças para empresários ligados a bingos, caça níqueis e ao jogo do bicho no Rio de Janeiro, o ministro Paulo Medina, afastado do Superior Tribunal de Justiça (STJ), sofre uma nova denúncia.Ele é acusado de favorecer Fadh Jamil, considerado o maior traficante de drogas de Mato Grosso do Sul.

After being accused by federal police in Operation Hurriance of having sold favorable verdicts to businessmen linked to bingos, “one-armed bandits” and numbers rackets in Rio de Janeiro, justice Paulo Medina, who has been suspended from the Superior Tribunal of Justice (STJ), is facing new charges. He is accused of favoring Fadh Jamil, considered the biggest drug trafficker in Mato Grosso do Sul.

Apesar de o juiz federal Odilon de Oliveira dizer em sua sentença que Fadh Jamil tem um gosto refinado pelo tráfico de drogas, sonegação e lavagem de dinheiro, o STJ concedeu habeas corpus ao acusado.

Although federal judge Odilon de Oliveira said in his sentence that Fadh Jamil has a refined taste for drug trafficking, tax evasion and money laundering, the STJ granted his habeas corpus petition.

This, Oliveira, is the same antimafia judge we also saw in action in the Ball of Fire case — generalized free-range anarchocapitalistic Sino-Paraguayan counterfeit-Marlboro and everything else smuggling, caught on federal wiretaps that also captured talk of sentences for sale in Brazil’s Supreme Court.

On which the other shoe has yet to drop. See

• Brazil: Ball of Fire Flames Get Higher For Paraguayan Marlboro Men
• The Ball of Fire MP3s: Pertence, Publicity and the Perpetual Pizza Oven
• Blackout on Pertence Charge; Mello Also in the Mishegaas?

The Sâo Paulo STJ judge who turned down all the requests for arrest warrants in the parallel Operation Themis judicial corruption case in Sâo Paulo — to the outrage of prosecutors in the case — was recently seated on the Federal Elections Tribunal, by the way.

Fischer.

In his infamous “most corrupt government in history” op-ed in late 2005, Prof. Roberto Mangabeira Unger of Harvard Law carried water for the standard talking points of such persons, calling the federal police “a politicized Gestapo.”

Which I thought was pretty freaking disgraceful.

Para isso, o ministro Paulo Medina alegou que Fadh Jamil era réu primário, tinha bons antecedentes e que o o próprio juiz de Campo Grande reconhecia isso. Medina concluiu que não havia motivos para manter o pedido de prisão.

Paulo Medina said that Fadh Jamil was a first-time defendant, had a clean record and that the judge in the court of the first instance in Campo Grande has said so. Media concluded there was no cause to continue to hold him.

Rio de Janeiro: “18 Dead at Complexo do Alemão”

Complexo do Alemão today: “human cost” is notable new focus of photojournalism from Globo and others, though the Five Ws remain fuzzy as ever.

Midiamax (O Jornal Eletrônico do Mato Grosso do Sul) passes along the report from the Folha news agency: “18 dead in megaoperation at Complexo Alemão.”

An initial official body count published just a couple of hours ago by Globo/G1 was 4, with 4 wounded.

The Estado de S. Paulo‘s latest filing on the story is a dead link at the moment:

The requested URL /ultimas/cidades/noticias/2007/jun/27/264.htm was not found on this server

Photo coverage is starting to come in.

A megaoperação no complexo do Alemão (zona norte do Rio de Janeiro) realizada nesta quarta-feira já deixou ao menos 18 mortos, de acordo com o secretário de Segurança do Rio, José Mariano Beltrame. O detalhamento sobre a circunstâncias das mortes, a identificação das vítimas e também o número de feridos ainda não foram divulgados pela pasta, segundo o secretário. A operação continua na região.

The megaoperation in the Complexo do Alemão (northern district of Rio) carried out today left at least 18 dead, according to the state public safety secretary, José Mariano Beltrame. Details on the circumstances of the deaths, the identity of the victims, or the number of wounded have not yet been made public by his department, Beltrame said. The operation in the area continues.

This is an important point.

Willful negligence in accounting for how corpses came to be corpses is a hallmark of the kind of Brazilian policing that gives Brazilian police their reutation for extreme brutality — and worse.

Mexico Pundits: Armed Forces Role Is “Militarized Mapacheria”

“They all got that expression on their face like, Whaaaat??!!”

The top prosecutor also assured legislators [at the May 24 meeting] that the deployment of the Army will be temporary. On the same day, however, in Gómez Palacio, Durango, the president directly contradicted him: He announced that army troops will combat the narco in a permanent manner. See “They Are Called the Zetas, and They Are Here”

Calderón busca, vía militarización, un liderazgo que no ganó en las urnas: expertos: “Experts say that Calderón seeks a consolidation of power through militarization that he did not win at the ballot box.”

Experts have actually been saying this for some time:

• Militarizing Mapacheria
• Militarizing Mapacheria, II: Calderón’s Praetorian Guard
• Mexico: The Return of the Hard Men With the Dirty Hands
• Adult Supervision for Mexican Narcs?

But perhaps there are some new facts and voices lending additional credence to the analysis — which I tend to myself, for what it’s worth.

The International Relations Center‘s Laura Carlsen, as I recall, was one of the first election observers to express skepticism about the Mexican elections –

• Mexico’s Dramatic Vote Count Lacks Credibility

The Mexican media, of course — the Televisa and TV Azteca duopoly above all — primarily reported on the remarkable unanimity of election observers that there was nothing to be skeptical about.

La militarización de la lucha contra el narcotráfico responde a la política diseñada por el presidente Felipe Calderón con la cual pretende asumir un liderazgo que no obtuvo en las urnas, apoyado, fundamentalmente, por las fuerzas armadas.

The militarization of the battle against narcotrafficking corresponds to a policy designed by Felipe Calderón to provide him with leadership he did not win at the polls — supported, fundamentally, by the armed forces.

Coincidieron en lo anterior la investigadora Laura Carlsen, del Centro de Política Internacional con sede en Washington; el embajador Víctor Flores Olea y el catedrático John Saxe Fernández, al participar en el panel organizado por Casa Lamm y La Jornada sobre el tema Guerra contra el narco o militarización de México.

That was the view taken by Laura Carlsen of the International Relations Center, located in Washington, D.C., a well as Ambassador Victor Flores Olea and Prof. John Saxe Fernández, during a panel organized by the Casa Lamm and La Jornada on the topic “War on Drugs or the Militarization of Mexico?”

Carlsen agregó que el plan México, con el que se pretende combatir el crimen organizado, resulta ser una copia del fallido plan Colombia, el cual ha tenido como consecuencia la pérdida de soberanía y la criminalización de la oposición y de los luchadores sociales.

Carlsen added that “Plan Mexico,” with which Calderón intends to combat organized crime, is turning out to be a copy of the failed “Plan Colombia,” which has brought with it loss of sovereignty and the criminalization of political opposition and social movements.

Calderón to Televisa: “Young man, starting today I am putting my foot down! Go back to your post as a good soldier for the Presidency!”

Rio Update: Rashomon in the Complexo do Alemão

How many card-carrying Rio police are battling it out in the Complexo do Alemão today? How many off-duty police serving in “militias”? Are militias also being targeted for weapons violations? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Mais de mil policiais ocupam Complexo do Alemão; há tiroteio: According to the initial report from the Estado do S. Paulo newspaper, 800 police were involved in a megaoperation in the shantytown complex in northern Rio de Janeiro at this hour.

(Rio’s “ex-blogging” mayor, Cesar “The Naked” Maia, seems to have prognosticated this development, by the way, to subscribers to his daily political newsletter: See Rio: The Naked Maia on the Non-Invasion of the Complexo Alemão)

At 11:57 local time, that headline was changed to “more than 1,000,” but no correction was issued. A note was simply appended saying the story had been “updated.”

The Estado’s own news agency stated that 2,000 police were involved, in a story time-stamped not an hour before this report.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Brazilian news reporting.

O Dia gives more detail and some possible insight into where the 800 number came from:

Cerca de 800 soldados ocupam os principais acessos às favelas já fazem incursões nas favelas da Fazendinha e da Grota. Houve intenso tiroteio no local e explosão de granadas. Ninguém ficou ferido até o momento. Dois helicópteros auxiliam a operação, além de veículos blindados que fazem rondas nas comunidades.

Nearly 800 troopers are occupying the principal access points [and are] now making incursions into the shantytowns of Fazendinha and Grota. There was intense gunfire at the location [which?] and grenade explosions. No one has been wounded yet. Two helicopters are supporting the operations, as well as armored vehicles [how many?] making sweeps through the communities [which communities?]

Can we guess that 800 cops are guarding the access points and the others are “serving warrants”? (The imagery I have seen shows them wandering down the middle of the street pointing large guns in general directions.)

That report is timestamped 10:58 local time, and jointly and anonymously bylined to the paper’s own redação and “news agencies.”

The Estado’s latest statement of numbers, at least, has the virtue of quoting the source of those numbers, which is the official source who presumably gave the order to send in the troops.

RIO – Policiais civis e militares e homens da Força Nacional de Segurança fazem uma megaoperação no Complexo do Alemão, na zona norte do Rio de Janeiro, na manhã desta quarta-feira, 27. Há informações de um policial civil ferido. Segundo a Secretaria de Segurança do Rio, são 1200 homens das polícias Civil e Militar e 150 da FNS. O cerco ao conjunto de favelas, com objetivo de cumprir mandados de prisão, busca e apreensão, além de apreender drogas e armas.

State judicial and military police and troopers from the National Public Security Force (FNSP) are carrying out a megaooperation in the Complexo do Alemão this morning, June 27. There are reports of a state policeman being wounded. According to the state public safety secretary, 1,200 civil and military police are involved, as well as 150 from the FNSP. The siege of the complex has as its objective the serving of warrants and the seizure of drugs and weapons.