“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
Brazil's Supreme Court released explosive plea-bargain testimony on Friday accusing President Michel Temer, along with former presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, of receiving millions in bribes.
The testimony raises serious doubts about whether Temer, who replaced the impeached Rousseff last year, can maintain his grip on the presidency amid the string of corruption scandals that has engulfed vast swaths of Brazil's political class and business elites.
The bombshell revelations came from testimony given by executives at JBS SA (JBSS3.SA), a meatpacking company that grew quickly through acquisitions funded by low-cost loans from Brazil's development bank during 13 years of government by Lula and Rousseff's leftist Workers Party.
The testimony implicates both ruling and opposition parties and indicates that Temer, a conservative, took 15 million reais ($4.6 million) in bribes from JBS, which ranks as the world's largest meat processor.
It also alleges that Lula, who is already facing five corruption trials, received $50 million in bribes in offshore accounts from JBS, while Rousseff took $30 million in bribes, also in offshore accounts.
In the recording, secretly made by Batista in a March visit to Temer, the president appeared to condone the payment of hush money to former lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, who last year orchestrated Rousseff's impeachment and was later convicted for corruption.
Many politicians fear that if Cunha should turn state's witness, his testimony could implicate scores of congressmen and members of the executive branch.
Angry demonstrators in Brasilia have started a fire inside the ministry of agriculture and have damaged several other ministerial buildings.
Brazilian authorities estimate around 35,000 are marching in the capital.
Troops are being deployed to defend government buildings and there is a heavy police presence on the streets.
Protesters are demanding the resignation of President Michel Temer, fresh elections, and for economic reform plans to be withdrawn.
Mr Temer has faced new corruption allegations in the last week, and is facing growing pressure to step down.
According to reports, several ministries are being evacuated because of the protests - but not before the agriculture ministry was damaged.
"There was an invasion of the ministry's private entrance. They lit a fire in a room, broke photos in a gallery of ex-ministers and confronted police," a spokesman told the AFP news agency.
Brazil's president ordered soldiers to restore order in the country's capital Wednesday after some government ministries were evacuated during clashes between police and protesters who are seeking the leader's ouster.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched to Congress to protest economic reforms that President Michel Temer is pushing through and to demand he step down amid a corruption scandal.
Small scuffles between police and protesters who tried to jump a cordon mushroomed into a series of clashes in which officers fired tear gas and pepper spray to contain the crowd. Protesters set fires and used portable toilets as barricades.
A fire broke out in the Ministry of Agriculture, and demonstrators smashed windows and doors at other ministries. Some government agencies were evacuated in response, the president's office said.
In a brief national address during the unrest, Defense Minister Raul Jungmann said troops were being sent to guard federal buildings, including the presidential palace. The weeklong deployment was authorized by a presidential decree which left open the possibility that soldiers could be used more widely in Brasilia. The decree said Jungmann would decide the scope.
His unusual decision to call in the military could heighten anger against the government if it is seen as the last gasp of a president trying to maintain his hold on power. ...
Brazil is bracing for a fresh bout of political turmoil after the president, Michel Temer, became the country’s first sitting head of state to be formally charged with a crime. (... tRump will be joining him shortly)
... These allegations followed the release of a secret recording of a late-night conversation earlier this year between Temer and the JBS executive Joesley Batista, in which the president appeared to endorse hush money payoffs to former house speaker Eduardo Cunha, a member of Temer’s party who is serving a 15-year sentence for corruption. Police have since confirmed the authenticity of the recording and said there is sufficient evidence to indict the president.
“The circumstances of this meeting [with Batista] – at night and without any register in the official schedule of the president of the Republic – reveal the intent not to leave traces of the criminal actions already taken,” Janot claimed.
Brazil’s former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was convicted of graft and money-laundering for his part in the country’s sweeping corruption scandal, potentially removing him from the political scene just as his prospects of returning to the presidency were gaining momentum.
Sergio Moro, the lead judge in the multi-billion dollar corruption probe known as Carwash, sentenced Lula to 9 and a half years, according to a document from the federal court in Parana. The judge has not asked for the former president’s immediate arrest. Lula’s lawyers were not immediately available for comment.
The ruling marked a stunning fall for Lula, Brazil's first working-class president who left office six years ago with an 83-percent approval rating. The former union leader won global admiration for transformative social policies that helped reduce stinging inequality in Latin America's biggest country.
The guilty verdict on Lula, one of the most popular presidents in Brazilian history, weakens his chances of leading the Workers’ Party back into power in the 2018 elections. (... ya think)
SAO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil’s federal police have announced that they are shutting down the task force behind Operation Car Wash, a behemoth corruption probe that has sent dozens of top politicians and business executives to jail.
The task force, which has been operating as an independent unit, will be absorbed into a larger anti-corruption division. Federal police shrugged off the move as bureaucratic reshuffling, but critics labeled the decision an attempt to undermine an investigation that is redefining Brazil’s political landscape.
In three years, Operation Car Wash ballooned from a money-laundering probe focused on a Brasilia gas station into the country’s biggest corruption investigation. Through plea deals, the task force was able to trace bribery and corruption to the highest echelons of government. Today, the probe threatens to topple the country’s president, Michel Temer, who is being investigated along with a third of the members of Brazil’s senate, dozens of representatives in its house and more than half of the president’s cabinet.
The decision is the latest blow to the task force, which saw its budget halved in May. Prosecutors working on the cases say the move will limit the scope of investigations the task force is able to take on.
The Brazilian Supreme Court Justice overseeing the investigation of a billion-dollar bribery scandal that has implicated dozens of the country's most influential politicians and business leaders, was killed in a plane crash Thursday.
The body of Justice Teori Zavascki was recovered from the wreckage of a small plane that crashed near the coastal town of Paraty, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state, state firefighters said.
The late Justice, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by former President Dilma Rousseff in 2012, was in charge of the probe known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash, the massive kickback and corruption scheme involving many of Brazil's biggest companies, including state-run oil giant Petrobras.
His death will likely raise concerns about how the investigation will proceed. Zavascki was widely seen as an impartial figure in a case that has shaken Brazil's political class to its core.
Flight recordings suggested there was no equipment malfunction, fuelling intense speculation over the cause of the incident that killed Teori Zavascki
Communications by the pilot suggested there was no sense of panic inside the cockpit before the small-turbo prop plunged into the sea off Rio de Janeiro State last Thursday, killing all five people aboard.
Zavascki had just returned from vacation and was shortly due to rule on the eligibility of plea bargain testimonies by 77 Odebrecht executives, which are thought likely to implicate many of the most powerful figures in Brazil and its Latin American neighbours.
There is also the question of why the judge was travelling with a business associate of a financier who is being investigated by Lava Jato prosecutors. Carlos Alberto Fernandes Filgueiras, who also died in the crash, was a partner of BTG Pactual, a bank whose former president André Esteves is among those who have been arrested.
The Brazilian armed forces have begun deploying 10,000 troops in the state of Rio de Janeiro to help the fight against organised crime.
On Friday trucks rolled through Rio as 8,500 soldiers were mobilised. They will be joined by police and highway patrol officers.
Violence has been on the rise in Rio since the end of the Olympics nearly a year ago. More than 90 police officers have been killed in Rio state so far this year.
The defence minister said that the troops are carrying out intelligence operations and are preparing a number of operations against criminal organisations involved in drug trafficking, cargo theft and other activities.
A decree signed by President Michel Temer allows the troops to stay in Rio until the end of the year.
An average of three people were killed each day by stray bullets in the first six months of this year in Rio, many of them during shootouts between police and drug traffickers.
Trump to police: 'Don't be too nice'
US President Donald Trump appeared to support police brutality towards those suspected of crimes during his remarks to police officers outside New York City on Friday.
Brazil is now well past peak.
...one of the risks we face is societal collapse, and a still mild but ominious version of it seems to be happening around here in this last week.
Telling the story from the begining:
Brasil’s diesel and gasoline (and most of our bio-combustibles) are mostly sourced by Petrobrás, a partially state-owned company. Since Brasil’s petroleum production is not optimized for combustible production, most of the petroleum used in Brasil to produce gasoline & diesel is imported (almost 70% of it).
Petrobrás is a huge enterprise, moving vast amounts of money, and its directors are government appointed. It was a hotbed of corruption. Lava-jato (Car-wash), the big police/judicial operation that is shading light into Brasil’s corrupt circles and arresting corrupts of well-breed and fine reputation (like Brasil’s richest man, an former president, a former leader of the house of representatives, and many many more corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs) started by investigating corruption in Petrobrás. It was revealed that corruption had brought the enterprise to its knees, by syphoning billions out of it to corrupt pockets.
In order to save the company from bankruptcy, a technical director was appointed to manage the company. He actually succeeded in that one mission, and last trimester was the first one in which Petrobrás stayed in the green (monetary, obviously) side of its balance in more than a decade. To do that, one of the measures used was to immediately raise gasoline and diesel’s prices each time the dollar went up.
That was working… until the American Fed raised interest rates, making investors flee from emergent countries to a more secure and lucrative USA. That made dollar prices spike (from 2,halvish to 4, in 2 weeks). As per policy, gasoline and diesel prices also spiked, being raised four times, in a single week.
Now, Brasil basically doesn’t have trains (a few relic lines from imperial times can’t do much), hidroways have been abandoned for centuries and almost all transportation in the country is done by truck.
Diesel trucks (I’ve complained of our government refusal to allow eletric transportation in other comments).
And crossing Brasil’s highways can take more than a week (and yes, this long distances are commonly transversed). And freight is negotiated beforehand, with truckers being paid low and expected to fuel their own trucks… and 4 raises in diesel price in the same week meant truckers were paying to work, instead of being paid.
Truckers revolted. They decided to stop the flow… both by not trucking and by barricading roads. They stopped delivering goods to harbours, airports and markets.
The first thing that disappeared was combustibles: gasoline, diesel, ethanol ( my husband stayed on line for 3h yesterday to fuel our car with ethanol, and we were lucky. All gas-stations in my city and the closest 3 neighboring cities are, right now, empty. Memes joking about gasoline existing in Walking Dead after 10 years of zombie apocalipse and gone in Brasil after 3 days of truck lock-out abound).
Food in restaurants is gone and most of them are closed.
Supermarkets are closing with empty shelves.
The public transport system (buses, also, not eletric) is almost closed (in São Paulo, only 30% of buses are still circulating).
Airports are mostly closed, without fuel for the planes.
Police don’t have fuel for cars, and is reducing operations.
Hospitals are having trouble, with lack of medicines (specially highly used things like saline solution) and doctors (almost everyone is having trouble getting to their jobs.
I count myself lucky: I was in medical leave. If I wasn’t, I don’t know how I’d get to work: the roads I’d need to use are being blocked, with trucks, buses and burning tires).
We’re in the 5th day of the strike. There’s actually wide popular support to the truckers cause, as constantly hearing of political corruption, of how politicians accused of crimes were trying to fudge the laws to escape prison, of the golden excesses of those corrupts.
But at the same time, the lock-out results are terrible. I’m calculating how much food and water we have at home (about a month, if the electric grid doesn’t fail) and hoping that the eletric system doesn’t fail (the eletric company already reported that they are not being able to give maintenance to the grid now.).
It’s quite a slap in the face about how fast chaos can ensue.
Link to article in Portuguese, but mainly photos:
https://veja.abril.com.br/galeria-fotos ... 3-05-2018/
Here in the US we repurposed 1mbpd of corn liquor to be "petroleum". The Brazilians have done the very same. With rum lol
You need to keep up. This is 2018, going on 19.
Lest we forget, this giant country of 207 million has nowhere to go for additional oil.
dohboi wrote:This is from someone who lives there who posts over at robertscribbler blog, umbrios27. Any ground truthing or other insights on this situation would be most welcome:
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A truckers’ strike that has thrown Brazil into chaos entered its sixth day on Saturday, with protesters blocking traffic on hundreds of highways, supermarkets rationing fruit and gas station pumps running dry.
Brazilian president sends in army as truck protest paralyzes country
São Paulo, the biggest city in South America, in state of emergency over fuel shortages while markets run out of food
Brazil economy advances in first quarter, set to accelerate
May 25, 2018, 01:30:00 PM EDT By Reuters
Reuters
By Bruno Federowski
BRASILIA, May 25 (Reuters) - The Brazilian economy likely expanded for a fifth straight quarter in the first three months of 2018, a Reuters poll of economists showed, suggesting fears of a slowdown may have been overblown.
Forecasters largely expected economic growth to accelerate in coming quarters, decisively turning the page on the nation's deepest recession in decades.
On the fiscal side, Brazil’s budget is a study in how not to develop a country. In 2016 it spent 16 per cent of its budget on interest payments on government debt, which is held by investors, business and upper middle class savers. This was more than on education (12 per cent) and health (12 per cent). In fact, interest payments were the second biggest outlay in the budget, beaten only by social benefits (35 per cent), which were mostly pensions
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