Leao survives the Brazilian floods alone

'Neath her hind feet as rushing on his prey, The lordly Lion greets the God of day.'
- Aratos

This dog is Leao. His custodian Cristina Maria Cesario Santana died in the landslides in Brazil that killed hundreds a week ago. Leao has been beside her grave for two days waiting for his owner to return. Santana and Leao lived in Teresopolis near Rio de Janeiro where the latest human death toll from the landslides is 785 with two in five from Teresopolis.

Founded by the Swiss burghers of Friburg in 1819, the nearby city of Nova Friburgo fared even worse with 365 deaths. Both cities are in the Região Serrana of Rio de Janeiro state in south eastern Brazil some 60km north of Rio itself. Região Serrana means mountain district and many dwellings in the region are exposed to landslide hazards due to the steep terrain. On 11 January it started to rain in the region, heavily. In Teresopolis it rained 144mm in 24 hours, more than the average for the month of January.

The downpours caused rivers to break their banks and triggered landslides. It knocked over bridges, houses, churches and the entire downtown area of Novo Friburgo. 6,000 people were made homeless and another 8,000 had to leave their houses and go to shelters while authorities assessed the risk of more mudslides. The death toll rose to make it Brazil’s worst ever natural disaster. Further rainfall over the weekend slowed rescue efforts. Army troops, police forces and thousands of volunteers searched for survivors and recovered bodies while air force helicopters transported food and water to families stranded in rural areas without communications.

The San Antonio river burst its banks, submerging buildings, while the rainfall set off several mudslides sending entire shantytowns washing through the city streets below. Brazil’s saturated urban centres are littered with poor-quality homes built informally on precarious inclines. As the Christian Science Monitor said the correlation between Rio’s favelas and its jagged hills is so strong that morro (hill) is a common synonym for “slum,” and asfalto (asphalt) stands for the higher-quality neighbourhoods below. Teresopolis Mayor Jorge Mario Sedlacek called it a huge catastrophe. It was, but it was a human-made one.

According to watchdog group Contas Abertas, the federal government budgeted $263m for disaster prevention last year but only spent $82m. And only 1 percent of that went to Rio state while a whopping 54 percent went to Bahia, a state that had no major disasters because the minister in charge of disbursing funds was running for governor there. It is part of a long tradition of political corruption in Brazil.

While little is spoken about corruption, even less is known about Cristina Maria Cesario Santana, a citizen of Teresopolis. She was one of the town’s 138,000 inhabitants and she was one of 316 people who died there. Television images from the town showed cars submerged by water, buses and trucks with water up to their windows, homes destroyed and tearful survivors surveying the carnage. One resident described the scene as being "like a horror film" and said she saw a baby "carried away by a torrent like a doll" as the child's mother tried in vain to save it. Christina presumably was also carried away in the torrent. Her tan crossbreed dog Leao somehow survived. And his picture mourning Cristina has reverberated across the media world.

The promises of new Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff have reverberated less but are more important in the long run. Rousseff pledged a swift relief effort but will have to confront major flaws in emergency planning and disaster prevention. She said the disaster was caused by decades of lax oversight by municipal authorities who allowed poor people to build houses on hillsides vulnerable to landslides. “Building houses on high risk areas is the rule in Brazil, not the exception,” said added. “You have to get people away and into secure areas. The two fundamental issues are housing and land use and that involves putting proper drainage and sewage systems in place.” But many people living in flood-prone areas say they have nowhere else to go. Like Leao, the problem of the favelas is not going to go away any time soon.

Death in Manaquiri: A time bomb in the Amazon

While the world’s leaders haggle and prevaricate in Copenhagen, real and devastating climate change is happening in many countries across the world. The third world is bearing the brunt of the problem and the story of Manaquiri, in Brazil’s Amazon Basin is a microcosm of a much larger problem. Producing one fifth of the world’s oxygen, a quarter of the world's fresh water and home to the world’s largest rainforest, the Basin is often described as “The Lungs of the World”. But these lungs are now struggling to breathe as the region is crippled with the worst drought since records began. (photo: Reuters)

Manaquiri is a small sleepy town in the Brazilian State of Amazonas. It is not on the highway, but the state capital Manaus is a short trip three hours downstream where the Parana de Manaquiri River eventually flows into the mighty Amazon. The river that shares the name of the town is the area’s lifeblood. 800 of the town’s population of almost 20,000 are fishermen. And 14,000 people rely on the river as an economic lifeline. All are suffering as the river loses its grip on life.

Manaquiri is the centre of a drought that has last a month. It has not rained in 25 days which does not sound like much but it rarely happened before recent times in this lush rainforest region. The length of time without rain is enough to have a devastating effect on the local river. All the tributaries that supply water to the Manaquiri have choked up and have deprived the water of oxygen. As a result, the drought is killing tonnes of fish. Their rotting bodies are polluting the water and leaving thousands of people with no clean water.

Al Jazeera quoted a local scientist who says the problem is directly attributable to climate change. Philip Fearnside is a research professor in the Department of Ecology at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA) in Manaus. Fearnside has lived in the Amazon for 33 years and he says the drying up of the Manaquiri may signal similar droughts occurring with higher frequency as the climate continues to change. "[Climate change] is something we have experience with and know from the data, it's not something that depends on the outcome of a computer simulation," he said.

A photo essay on the petroleum.berkeley.edu site shows the extent of the devastation in Manaquiri. Boats are stranded in dry lakes and whole lagoons have evaporated. The parched conditions have triggered forest fires killing off fish and crops. As the waters receded, many people were trapped in their home without access to food or medical treatment.

The current drought is happening just four years after Manaquiri suffered “its worst drought in 40 years”. The 2005 drought lasted for over two months and local officials were forced to close 40 schools and cancel the school year because of a lack of food, transport and potable water. Cases of diarrhoea rose in the region as wells became poisoned and stagnant water caused a rise in malaria. One local, 39 year old Manuel Tavares Silva was quoted at the time saying "I've never seen anything like this."

But now Silva is seeing it again. Manaquiri is a microcosm of a wider problem. The New York Times noted that in mid-October, the governor of Amazonas State, Eduardo Braga, decreed a "state of public calamity” which remains in effect two months later. Many boats cannot reach Manaus as the river level in Amazonian tributaries drop to near zero. The drought also affects neighbouring states and other Amazonian Basin countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

Many scientists say the drought is most likely a result of the same rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that caused Hurricane Katrina. If global warming is involved as they suspect, it is likely to mean more severe and frequent droughts in the region. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace are less circumspect and say the problems in Manaquiri and in the Amazon region are a direct result of deforestation and global warming. "If you compare the rainfall averages over the last five years, you see that there have been growing rain deficits each year," said Manaus-based Greenpeace activist Carlos Rittl about the 2005 drought. "It will be extremely worrying if this becomes a tendency." Whether those meeting in Copenhagen like it or not, that tendency has now arrived.

Lula wins again

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has won a second term of office. He retained his position in a landslide election win on Sunday. Silva beat his challenger Geraldo Alckmin in a run-off election after no candidate achieved a majority in the first election on 1 October. In a victory speech, Lula said he would govern for all Brazilians and intensify efforts to alleviate poverty during his second four-year term. "We will give attention to the most needy. The poor will have preference in our government," he said.

Popularly known as “Lula” (a nickname he acquired in childhood) he was first elected to the post in October 2002. The latest victory represents a great comeback for the President who was staring defeat in the face after a cash-for-votes scandal last year and allegations in this election that his Workers Party had engaged in dirty tricks.

Luiz Inácio da Silva was born in October 1945 to a poor family in the town of Garanhuns in the north-east Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The name Lula, in Portuguese, means “squid”, but is also a common nickname for people called Luiz. Soon after Lula was born, his father moved south in search of work. He settled in the coastal city of Guarujá, a holiday resort one hour’s drive from Sao Paolo. His wife and eight children joined him six years later. Lula had a tough upbringing and quit school after the fourth grade. By age 12 he was a shoeshine boy and street vendor and two years later he got a job in a copper factory. Lula eventually went back to night school to get his high school diploma. By age 19, he was working in Brazil’s largest metropolis, São Paulo. He became involved with unions in the factories he worked in and risked the wrath of the authorities who clamped down on union activities.

Silva’s first wife died in childbirth in 1969 and he remarried five years later. He rose through the ranks of the unions and was elected president of the Steel Workers Union by the end of the decade. He also travelled to the US during this period to attend trade union courses sponsored by American anti-Communist unions. Lula was jailed briefly in 1979 after organising a massive strike of 170,000 metal workers.

He formed a new political party “the Workers Party” (PT - Partido dos Trabalhadores) and spent much of the 1980s getting involved more involved politically and campaigning for more democracy in Brazil. The campaign culminated with free presidential elections in 1989, the first to be elected by popular vote in 29 years. Lula himself ran for president in that election having already won a seat in Congress in 1986. He was popular but lost narrowly in the second round after vote-rigging and biased media sunk his chances. He ran another two times unsuccessfully during the nineties.

In June 2002, the Workers Party formed a broad-based alliance with a number of other parties under a platform of social inclusion. And at the age of 57 Lula was elected president with almost 53 million votes (61%). The major program of his first administration was “fome zero” (zero hunger) with an objective to relieve hunger and extreme poverty in the country. This initiative allocates a $20 allowance per month to each undernourished Brazilian household and aims to cut the number of people living in extreme poverty in half by 2015. The US based Council on Hemispheric Affairs has criticised the program for not providing the promised funds to make it successful.

Despite Fome Zero, fears that Lula would embark on major and costly social re-engineering projects proved unfounded. Brazil re-signed its agreements with the IMF and achieved budget surplus in the first two years of his administration. His finance minister Antonio Palocci gained the confidence of the markets and he kept the inflation rate low. Brazil paid off all its IMF debts by 2005. However, that year’s Mensalão scandal claimed the political scalp of Palocci as well as jeopardising Lula’s own chances of re-election. Mensalão means “big monthly” and refers to secret monthly payments that Lula’s Workers’ Party gave to a number of Congressional reps in order to vote for government legislation. However the Brazilian economy was not affected by the scandal and Lula weathered the storm.

In foreign relations Lula is seen as a shrewd negotiator and manages to retain friendly relations with both the US and Venezuela. He was a key figure in the collapse of the 2003 World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations in Cancun, Mexico. Brazil leads a group of 22 developing countries (G22) that challenged the one-sided nature of globalisation and attacked the agricultural subsidies of the wealthier nations. The US tried unsuccessfully to break up G22 in Cancun by offering bribes and issuing threats to smaller members. It was the first time that the global south had resisted the blandishments of the north and Lula was a major stakeholder.

Lula will face some massive challenges in his second term primarily in the area of environment. The impacts of Amazonian devastation will need to be seriously tackled. Environmentalists say interests of agribusiness seem to be trumping any hope of a sustainable future in the Amazon. Brazil is pushing ahead with the plan to pave the Trans-Amazon Highway BR-163 which local media have dubbed “the soybean highway”. Soybeans are a major export and the new road will allow the crop (much of it GM) to be quickly and cheaply loaded onto barges from the Amazon to the Atlantic. Meanwhile pace of deforestation has increased every year for the last decade. Lula argues that he has created new reserves cover more than 80,000 square kms, but critics say it is not enough. Most rainforest clearance is illegal; farmers and loggers either exceed their allocation or they raid public land. The Amazon problem is not the laws, but the lack of resources to enforce them. Lula now has the mandate, but will he have the political will to effect real change?

How Chicken McNuggets are destroying Mato Grosso

Mato Grosso is a state in Western Brazil. The name ‘mato grosso’ means thick jungle in Portuguese and the state is at the heart of Amazonia. Apart from the state capital, Cuiabá, there are few cities. However, Mato Grosso is the site of some of the worst deforestation in the world. In 2005, the Brazilian federal government said that 48 percent of Amazon deforestation that took place in 2003 and 2004 occurred in Mato Grosso. Although some deforestation is part of the country’s plans to develop its agriculture and timber industries, other deforestation is the result of illegal logging and squatters. Because the forest is so large and is difficult to access or patrol, the government uses satellite images to detect illegal deforestation. The images taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Terra satellite can provide an initial alert that tells officials where to look for illegal logging.

Mato Grosso is an agrarian state with economy based on cattle-raising in the land-cleared areas. The area is also the major producer of soybeans in Brazil. The Agricultural Federation of Mato Grosso said Thursday they oppose a decision made last month by the nation's soy crushers and traders, prohibiting purchases of soybeans grown in recently deforested regions of the Amazon biome. On July 24, the Brazilian Vegetable Oils Industry Association announced they would not buy soy from recently deforested Amazon forest for the next two years. The decision comes on the heels of an announcement by the European branch of McDonald's to stop buying soy meal for chicken feed made from soybeans in the Amazon. The company said they made the decision following a report titled "Eating the Amazon" by Greenpeace International, which put much of the onus on Amazon deforestation on McDonald's as well as the US-owned agricultural giants Cargill, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Bunge. Europe is the main export market and imports 18 million tons of Amazonian soya beans mainly for use as animal feed. The Mato Grosso soya beans ultimately ends up inside the British, French and German consumers in the form of McDonald’s chicken nuggets.

In 1977 the state was split into two halves, with Mato Grosso do Sul becoming a new state. Mato Grosso is now the northern half of the region and is sparsely populated with barely a million inhabitants. Most of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, which is marginally more populous, is either seasonal flood plain or open scrubland. The Pantanal wetlands is one of the world’s great swamps and extends into both states. It is one of the largest nature reserves in the world and has the greatest concentration of fauna in the Americas. But it too faces an uncertain future stemming from a series of socioeconomic pressures. United Nations University experts warn that the Pantanal is at growing risk from intensive peripheral agricultural, industrial and urban development – problems expected to be compounded by climate change.

Some of the local indigenous tribes are fighting back. For decades, the 7,000 strong Kayapó nation have defended their 113,000-square kilometre, Cuba-sized homeland in Mato Grosso and Pará from incursions by speculators, ranchers, gold miners, loggers and squatters. Today the Kayapó fight two new threats: five huge hydroelectric dams planned on their lifeline Xingu River, and completion of the second half of BR-163, the road that slices through Amazonia north to south. Brazil's government is preparing to let private companies embark on a $417 million paving project to turn BR163 into a modern two-lane toll highway stretching 1,800kms. That would link Brazil's most important soy-growing region with a deep-water Amazon River port.

The 1,000 strong Bororo tribe also live in Mato Grosso. They been constricted to an ever-shrinking territory but the agricultural and ranching activities of the settlers have altered the environment so much that the former subsistence activities of the Bororo have become increasingly less productive. With many of the old cultural traits no longer practiced or forgotten, and with a dwindling population, the modern-day Bororo bear little resemblance to their forebears.

The flora and the fauna and the indigenous tribes all face the same rapacious enemies. With the combined threat of roads and dams for farmers, and soya beans for Chicken McNuggets, it is unlikely to be too long before Mato Grosso becomes a thick jungle in name only.

Candomblé

Candomblé is a Brazilian religion of African origin with over two million adherents.
Also called Macumba (though some see this as a pejorative term used only by non-adherents) in the Rio and Sao Paolo areas, it took root when black slaves were shipped to Brazil from the 16th century onwards bringing with them the worship of African orishas. The orisha or Orixá is commonly translated as "god". A more accurate representation would perhaps be "saint". Candomblé posits a monotheistic supreme being -- usually referred to as Olodumaré -- with the orixás being called upon as intermediaries between humans and God, much as Christians will pray for a saint's intercession on their behalf.

Derived from the Yoruba people of West Africa, Candomblé is a form of Vodun (“spirit”). Vodun is more commonly known as voodoo by the greater public. Vodun is the Haitian equivalent and like Candomblé can be directly traced to the West African Yoruba people who lived in the 18th and 19th century Kingdom of Dahomey (modern day Togo, Benin and Nigeria.) Its roots date back 6,000 years in Africa. The image of Vodun has been greatly tarnished by the imagination of Hollywood whose version of voodoo involving violence, bizarre rituals and pins in dolls has little basis in reality.

The home of Candomblé is the ancient Brazilian capital of Salvador (in Bahia state). The Spanish were the first Europeans to arrive here under the command of Vicente Yáñez Pinzón. On January 26, 1500, he landed to the north of Bahia, near present-day Recife. The Portuguese arrived later that year with the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral, on his way to India before heading east around Africa's Cape of Good Hope. Cabral claimed the area for Portugal. Salvador became Brazil's main sea port and was the colonial capital of Portuguese Brazil until 1763. The Portuguese set up a governorship for Brazil in the middle of the 16th century and institutionalised slavery to support the massive sugar plantations that proved to be the wealth of Brazil. Thus started a 300 year tradition of slavery. An estimated 1.3 million slaves were imported into Salvador before slavery was abolished in 1888, double the number of slaves imported into the US. The salves kept their African culture alive through their religion.

Candomblé is a syncretic religion and has incorporated many elements from Christianity. During the slavery days, the African religions were banned and often existed under the cover of Catholicism. Christian devotional altars were used in early slave houses to hide African cult icons and ritual objects. Although the practice came into the open after the end of slavery, some of the Christian aspects were maintained. Candomblé temples display crucifixes and many Orishas are identified with Catholic saints.

Although syncretism still seems to be prevalent, in recent years the lessening of religious and racial prejudices has given rise to a fundamentalist movement in Candomblé, that rejects the Christian elements and seeks to recreate a purer form based exclusively on its African roots.

Candomblé shares many characteristics with Umbanda, another syncretic Brazilian syncretic religion worshiping African spirits with some European influences. Apart from their geographic isolation, (Umbanda is more prevalent in Southern Brazil) Umbanda’s chief distinguishing characteristic from Candomblé is the added ingredient of spiritism also called Kardecism from its chief initiator, the 19th century Frenchman, Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail whose pseudonym was Allan Kardec. Besides coining well-known terms such as "reincarnation" and "spiritism", Kardec pioneered the conduct, documention and publication of scientific, evidence-based, systemized studies of the paranormal.

Though both religions have been legal since 1950 in Brazil, recent years have seen evangelical Christian groups attempting to persecute practitioners of Candomblé and Umbanda, sometimes with violence. Practitioners of these religions have taken cases to national courts and achieved a measure of success.

Candomblé seeks harmony with nature. Their ‘temple’ is the terreiro, led by a high priestess, (called a ‘mães de santo’ mother of saints) or priests, (called pais de santo father of saints). Similar to the liturgical cycle of the Catholic Church, adherents worship the pantheon of orixás in an annual cycle. In the religious ceremonies, they dress in the colours of the orixás and place food at the altar before singing and dancing choreographed steps to a sacred drumbeat. The highlight of the ceremony is the epiphany, the moment of possession, when the orixá takes over the believer's body.

This culture has given Black Brazil its heart. As Salvadorean Oni Kòwé puts it “The whites want to be Negroes..now the privilege is to be white with a Negro soul, to have ancestry, "to have a plot, a history with the Saint".