What if they put on Carnaval, and nobody came? A short work of fiction By James Young It was a glorious Saturday morning in Recife. A statue in the form of a multicolored rooster, the Galo da Madrugada, towered over the Duarte Coelho Bridge, streamers hung from the lampposts and on every street corner someone was(…)
A bad week for Brazil’s powerful women
Not long ago, Dilma Rousseff and Maria das Graças Foster were widely praised as the new faces of Latin America. Now, the billion-dollar corruption scandal has finally brought down Petrobras CEO Maria das Graças Foster (above). She had to go. But with President Dilma Rousseff also against the wall, 2015 is shaping up to be(…)
Brazil’s PT, part 4 – lagging enthusiam
By Mauricio Savarese Brasília If you want a sense of how difficult the beginning of President Dilma’s fourth term will be – both for her, and for Brazil – you only need to compare her inauguration to the three previous times her Workers’ Party assumed power. In better days, Lula and Dilma managed to oversee(…)
Brazil’s Morality League – Football owners behaving badly
In 2014, while Brazil’s players struggled on the field, owners were just as often removing their feet from their mouths. The rich men who run Brazilian football tend to be outright disasters, offending everyone and running their clubs like private fiefdoms. In the video above, Confederation President Jose Maria Marin pockets and steals a medal from(…)
Brazil 2014 – in photos
Brazil is large and complicated, and 2014 was big and complicated too. So instead of trying to summarize it, we asked From Brazil friends and contributors to submit photos – any photos – that they thought caught a slice of life in Brazil in 2014. The captions are in the gallery, and they are also(…)
The Angry Brigade and the São Paulo Bienal
Political and social engagement has been a dominant theme at this year’s São Paulo Bienal. Claire Rigby on participating British artist John Barker, who was a member of an armed urban guerrilla group in the UK in the 1970s. By Claire Rigby As the São Paulo Bienal draws to a close this Sunday, and visitors hurry for a(…)
Discovering Brazil through literature
Nathan Walters asks why so few foreigners recently have chosen to capture Brazil in letters, and takes us through the rare exceptions that open up the country to international readers. Above, the cover of a recently published book by From Brazil contributor James Young. Nathan Walters So much of Brazil’s literary treasures remain locked in the(…)
A corrupção está no setor privado
Os políticos não são o centro da corrupção. Hoje, ela é protagonizada por grandes empresas que conseguem dominar o Brasil. Acima, veja as consequências da corrupção. A imagem de corrupção que domina o imaginário do brasileiro é: um político, normalmente um homem acima do peso e de meia-idade, que pega dinheiro dos cofres públicos, enfia em um(…)
A visit to Brazil’s reddest city
The city that voted most heavily for opposition candidate Aécio Neves in last month’s election is in the United States – Miami, specifically. But the city that would be the darkest Dilma red on Brazil’s electoral map is the poor town of Belágua in Maranhão, where the vast majority of residents rely on government assistance.(…)
Brazil divided – big surprise
We’ve been told since the end of the election that Brazil has been split in two. But all that really happened last month was that citizens voted largely according to rational self-interest. And for those who have been paying attention – or those who come from the less fortunate half of the rift – the(…)
