A Brazilian anti-GM campaigner has been murdered at a Syngenta GM crop trial in Paraná, Brazil. Via Campesina (The International Peasant's Movement) camp at the experimental farm was shot at by security, killing Valmir Mota de Oliveira, [from the] Movimento Sem Terra (the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement).

President Lula da Silva has promised billions of dollars to improve housing problems in Brazil's cities. Conditions for the poor are so grim that the Homeless Workers' Movement has mobilised thousands of families to occupy and improvise housing on waste sites, particularly those that are empty because of land speculation.

Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Brazil seems to have done little to shore up the Catholic Church's declining power in its Latin American heartland. It went a long way, however, towards confirming Benedict's reputation as a reactionary bigot.
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Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict's "arrogant and disrespectful" comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and a revival of their religions would be a backward step.

Brazil's landless and homeless movements have been on the march in April, bringing renewed attention to their demands in a month of protests...In the countryside, protest action is led by the controversial and better known organisation of landless workers, MST, or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra.

When President Lula relieved U.S. Marines in Haiti by having Brazil take the lead of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) in early 2004, he got Bush, whose troops were spread thin, out of a tight spot...MINUSTAH['s]...true purpose was to consolidate the February 29, 2004 coup against the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide...In order to fulfill its mission of supporting the illegitimate, unpopular and brutal Interim Government of Haiti...MINUSTAH was forced to join the dictatorship's attacks on poor neighborhoods that would never accept the overthrow of their democracy.

In Sao Paulo, some 10,000 people spilled out along one of the city's broadest avenues...banging drums, waving red flags and carrying banners reading "Bush Go Home"...Demonstrators threw rocks, fireworks and homemade "potato bombs" - made from gunpowder wrapped in foil - at some of the 4,000 police patrolling the streets during Mr Bush's visit.

Three blasts have torn through a police warehouse used to store weapons in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, killing one officer and hurting three others.

Police in the Brazilian state of São Paulo summarily executed scores, possibly hundreds, of people in May of this year as part of their response to a wave of attacks by a criminal network against the state.

[A] commission will say the evidence shows many of these deaths were summary killings of people with no link to organised crime, apparently selected because they had previous police records or because they were residents of neighbourhoods long subjected to police violence.

By Daniel Howden | 11 August 2006

The uruku red lines painted on her cheeks change shape as she draws a sharp breath. Arms outstretched, she blows into the palms of her hands and lifts an invisible weight into the night sky. Katia Luisa Yawanawa is standing on an open ship's deck, thousands of miles upstream on the Amazon, where the great river divides into the black water of the Rio Negro and white water of the Solimoes.

Katia is offering a prayer called a Shuanka. It involves singing to the Yawanawans' ancestors for guidance and protection. Although only 26, Katia is among the most important members of her tribe. She is a wise woman, a xinaya, and the Yawanawan tribe's first female shaman.

Hundreds of landless Brazilian farm workers have stormed a congressional building in the capital, Brasilia...The protesters, carrying sticks and farm tools, smashed windows, tables and doors, overturned a car and clashed with police and security guards...They said they had planned a peaceful protest but the police had attacked them.

SAO PAULO - Move over the "axis of evil". The time is ripe for the "axis of gas". Meet the Gran Gasoduto del Sur (the Great Gas Pipeline of the South) - the South American entry into Pipelineistan, soon to join networks from Siberia to both Europe and Asia as well as the American-inspired Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. In terms of political will applied by the new axis of Caracas, Brasilia and Buenos Aires, the pipeline is already a done deal.

"AIDS campaigners have welcomed a decision by Brazil to turn down US funds because of a clause in the agreement condemning prostitution."

"A death squad has killed at least 30 people in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Authorities say they are looking at the possible role of what they call rogue police, in a potential act of reprisal for recent arrests of eight officers.

Rights groups accuse police of carrying out a 1993 massacre in the state.

Twenty-one people were killed."

"Rio de Janeiro. The murder of Dorothy Stang, a 73 year-old American nun who helped peasants engage in sustainable agriculture in the Amazonian rain forest, comes as oligarchic interests and the parliamentary right are on a political offensive against the government of Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva. This takes place as fissures are opening up within Lula's governing Workers Party while social organizations are mobilizing to demand the implementation of reforms Lula aligned himself with before he became president."

"In hopes of cementing what both Venezuela and Brazil have referred to as a strategic alliance and a model for South American integration, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian President Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva signed 20 agreements in oil and energy projects as well as in defense yesterday."