A Brazilian truth commission is questioning José Maria Marin, president of the Brazilian Football Confederation, about his involvement in crimes committed during the country’s last dictatorship.

José Maria Marin, current president of the Brazilian Football Confederation and former governor of São Paulo. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

The coordinator of the truth commission, Attorney General Claudio Fontelles, expressed that Marin is suspected of having been involved in violent acts during the country’s last dictatorship. Fontelles added that Marin had made his “horrible attitude” apparent at the time while serving in public office under military rule.

Fontelles’ comments come after the truth commission reviewed tape recordings in which Marin makes hostile declarations against journalists, specifically threatening of one of the country’s major broadcasting networks, TV Cultura. The recordings were made several days before journalist Vladimir Herzog, who was in charge of TV Cultura at the time, was detained and subsequently assassinated.

In relation to these events, Marin is accused of serving as an accomplice in the torture and assassination of Herzog during Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964-1985.

According to Fontelles, although the truth commission is working with a “reprehensible discourse” that points to Marin’s involvement, the recordings themselves may not be enough to accuse Marin of human rights violations.

Marin, who also serves as the current president of the Organising Committee of the 2014 World Cup was invited to appear before the truth commission of São Paulo tomorrow, where he has been asked to explain his conduct as a state representative during the decades of 1970 and 1980.

Marin began his political career as a city councillor in 1960, later becoming the state deputy and then vice-governor of São Paulo. He served as governor of the Brazilian department between 1982-1983.

Several human rights organisations and congress representatives have called for Marin’s resignation from the Brazilian Football Confederation.

Story courtesy of Agencia Púlsar. 

The Brazilian government has opened the bidding process for the project of the construction of a ‘bullet’ train between Río de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

The project will link Brazil’s two largest cities in 85 minutes, against the six hours it currently takes to make the 510km trip, and a branch will extend to Campinas, near Sao Paulo. The line will also have stops at the international airports in Rio and Sao Paulo. The head of the Brazilian National Agency for Land Transport (ANTT) had announced in August of this year that “a ‘bullet’ train between Rio and Sao Paulo would be 100% operational by 2020”.

A 'bullet' train in France (Wikimedia: Bernard Pépellin)

ANTT announced the procedure for companies to be considered for the exploitation of the line. Companies planning to bid will have to present any queries concerning the project until 16 April 2013, and until 13 August 2013 to present their proposals. The bidding process will end on 13 September 2013 when a company will win the right to exploit the projected train line for the following 40 years.

So far, companies from France, Spain, Germany, Japan, and South Korea have expressed their interest in providing the technology necessary for the project. The cost of the railway is estimated at US$17.5bn and one of the conditions of the concession is that the company that wins will not be allowed to charge more than US$0.25 per kilometre (meaning a maximum cost of US$125).

While the concession will be given for the construction of the trains and the exploitation of the line, the actual construction of the railway will be defined in another bidding process that hasn’t yet been scheduled.

Amnesty International (AI) concluded this week that “São Paulo authorities fail to ensure public safety.” AI also noted the difficulties in meting out punishments for human rights abuses committed by public officials.

According to official data of the Ministry of Public Security, 329 murders were registered in the São Paulo metropolitan area alone in October of this year.

This marks an 80% increase in homicides since the same month last year.

In the capital of  São Paulo alone 176 people were killed last month, while the same month last year registered 82 murders.

AI also suspects police involvement in killings motivated by revenge. According to the international organisation, these cases have not been investigated adequately “for many years.”

According to the report of the Homicide and Protection of Persons Department, 62 people were killed  in only 27 days by military police in the metropolitan region. This equates to two deaths per day.

Story courtesy of Agencia Púlsar, the AMARC-ALC news agency.

Saõ Paulo mayor Geraldo Alckmin accepted former Public Security Secretary Antonio Ferreira Pinto’s resignation yesterday as a rash of intense violence that has claimed over 3,500 lives in the area this year rages on. Former state prosecutor Fernando Grella replaced him today at the helm of the city’s anti-crime efforts.

“Grella will commit all his resolve to guarantee Saõ Paulo’s security to protect the population and combat organised crime,” Alckmin stated. “We recognise the difficulties, but measures are being taken and we are going to work doubly to ensure that Saõ Paulo continues to be one of the most safe states in Brazil.”

Government sources indicate that Alckmin had been considering Ferreira Pinto’s replacement for several weeks. Last month, Ferreira Pinto found himself in a verbal spar with Federal Justice Minister José Eduardo Cardozo when he denied that the federal government had offered its assistance to the state of Saõ Paulo and claimed that Cardozo’s statements to the contrary had “exclusive electoral political aims.” The remarks, which resulted in President Rousseff calling Saõ Paulo governor to clarify that her intentions were purely collaborative, seem to have sealed Ferreira Pinto’s fate.

The administration has also been criticised for its choices to employ military police over civil police in the city’s alarming swell of violence. For his part, Grella says he plans to increase the role of civil police intelligence and adds, “This wave of violence is a big problem. A lot of work will be required to revert the picture.”

Bloody surge of killings that descended upon the state of Saõ Paulo in September continues to ravage the state capital, growing ever more deadly. So far, 2012 has seen more than 1,000 killed in the Saõ Paulo metropolitan area, 253 in the past month alone, an average of more than ten per day. Among them are 95 military police and prison guards murdered since the beginning of the year, most of them while off-duty. Just within past 24 hours, another ten lost their lives in shootings and a bus was set on fire.

“We remain alarmed at the deaths in Gaza, but the statistics show that only in the great Saõ Paulo area are there more people killed that in the attacks in Gaza,” lamented General Secretary of the Presidency, Gilberto Carvalho.

Two weeks ago, President Dilma Rousseff’s administration offered Alckmin federal assistance in his anti-crime efforts. Together, they established an integrated command centre with both state and federal security forces and increased cooperation between federal and state intelligence agencies. Joint forces reinforced roadways, continued heavy-handed patrol ‘Operation Saturation’ in southern favellas, and transferred incarcerated leaders of the First Capital Command (PCC), a criminal organisation suspected of involvement in the violence, to prison facilities elsewhere in the country.

Saõ Paulo is the most populous, largest, and wealthiest city in Brazil.

São Paulo’s military police launched “Operation Saturation” on Monday, designed to crack down on drug trafficking, robberies, and assaults in and around the city’s largest favela, Paraisópolis. The campaign comes during a bloody wave of violence for Brazil’s largest city, during which police officers have been especially affected; some say the prison-based criminal organization, First Capital Command (PCC), is responsible for the officers’ deaths.

The southern neighbourhood of 80,000 residents has since been subject to heavy surveillance, including searches and horseback patrols, by 600 heavily armed military police officers. “The object is to face organized crime, to destroy its structure,” explained mayor Alexandre Gasparian, who oversaw the mission. The one-month operation will extend through other favelas as well.

So far, the operation has yielded 17 arrests and confiscated 170 kilograms of marijuana, ten kilograms of cocaine, 50 packets of synthetic drugs, five illegal firearms, and ammunition. The police have also discovered what they say is a 15-metre tunnel connecting several homes-turned-cocaine-refineries.

Suspicious documents have also been seized, including a letter instructing its addressee to make retaliation murders and a list of names, which some believe to be a death list for police officer victims. Authorities are investigating whether those names are actually those of military police officers and for what purposes they would have been used.

Crime is a charged topic in São Paulo’s as it copes with a bloody wave of killings, many of them of military police officers. With 144 deaths, September’s city homicide rate was more than double that of the previous month. At least 40 have died since Thursday alone, according to the Security Secretary, many of them by armed men in cars or motorcycles. In the past year, 98 police officers have been killed, most of them while off duty. Those killings have been followed by shootings of individuals suspected to be linked to robberies and drug trafficking, which the victims’ family members claim were acts of revenge from military police.

Lucas Tavares, spokesperson for the São Paulo city police, which investigated those crimes, says that Operation Saturation is not a reaction to the surge in violence. Rather, it was based on intelligence that indicated that criminals, weapons, and drugs were located in the favela. “It’s one of those operations that the military of police conducts periodically and it doesn’t have anything to do with the recent wave of murders. There will be more actions of this kind in the next few days.” However, on Monday, state Security Secretary Antonio Ferreira Pinto said that some of the police killings were instigated in Paraisópolis.

The press has suggested that the operation is linked to a power struggle between the military police and the PCC. The organization, which trafficked drugs and supported families of the incarcerated, arose in the 1990s. Some sources say it is the largest organized crime entity in Brazil and poses the greatest threat to the Sao Paulo police.

Law enforcement authorities deny that it holds any power at that scale. In an interview with Folha de São Paulo, Ferreira Pinto denied that more than 1,300 members working in 123 Brazilian cities. “The faction is much smaller than what they say. They don’t even have 30 or 40 individuals, who were imprisoned long ago and dedicate themselves to selling drugs. We have drowned that traffic with huge arrests.”  Ferreira Pinto added that there is no proof of any link to between police killings and the PCC.

Among the detainees is Edson “Nene” Santos, 31, a suspected PCC member and assistant to Francisco Antonio Cesario da Silva, “Piauí”, an incarcerated drug lord who Tavares insists has no proved association with the PCC.

Fernando Haddad, the candidate of the governing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), was elected mayor of São Paulo yesterday with 56% of the vote, against 44% of opponent José Serra from the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), on the second round of the local election.

Brazilians went to the polls on 7th October to elect local authorities, however no candidate was able to obtain the majority of the votes in 50 cities, which had to hold a second round yesterday.

The victory in São Paulo places the PT third on the list of parties with most elected mayor candidates, with 634. Ahead of PT are Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB) with 1,027 and the PSDB with 704. São Paulo is the largest Brazilian city, with 11m inhabitants, and this victory means that mayors belonging to PT will govern over 27.6m people, or 20% of the country’s population.

Haddad was not a favourite going into the election, and in fact came second on the first round, two points behind Serra. However, the support of former president ‘Lula’ Da Silva is thought to have contributed greatly to his victory.

The São Paulo election is considered a bellwether for the 2014 presidential election, in which Lula is expected to be the PT’s candidate. Serra, former mayor of São Paulo city and former governor of São Paulo state, is the national leader of the opposition and was president Dilma Roussef’s main rival on the 2010 election.

Brazilian analyst André César, told news agency AFP that winning São Paulo “is like winning the crown’s jewel for PT”, and added that “Lula is the big winner here, and now his voice will be heard even louder for the 2014 presidential election”.

Seventeen of the country’s state capitals elected their mayors in the second round yesterday, whilst nine had done so on the first round three weeks ago. The PT, PSDB, and Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB) won in three capital cities each, whilst the remaining eight were split amongst smaller parties.

Yesterday morning Brazilian military police evicted thousands of families from the Pinheirinho community just under 100km from São Paulo.

Around 9,000 people, including at least 2,600 children, were forcibly removed from their makeshift homes on Sunday morning when military police moved in. They had been given judicial orders to evict the community who had settled illegally on land left empty by a company that filed for bankruptcy eight years ago.

At 6am around 2,000 military police arrived in the neighbourhood with two helicopters, a number of ground vehicles, horses and dogs and began the aggressive eviction process.

The military police used pepper spray, teargas and rubber bullets to remove the residents who set up barricades and started fires in an attempt keep the authorities out. It is reported that some arrests were made when members of the community fought the military police, however the total number of arrests is unknown. Similarly, the number of people wounded in the operation remains unconfirmed.

The lawyer representing the residents, Antonio Ferreira, who himself sustained sustained injuries from rubber bullets, has questioned the legality of the move and said that the community will lodge an appeal.

Local media is reporting that people from nearby communities are pulling together to help those who have been evicted. Quitéria de Freitas, the director for Social Development in neighbouring São José dos Campos said that the people from Pinheirinho are being well looked after. “All of these people are being helped out with food, water and accommodation.”

The authorities are completely sealing off the houses today. They are also labelling the residents’ belongings so that they can get them back once the process has been completed, according to Brazilian officials.

The eviction was the culmination of a long legal battle between the private company and the local residents that has dragged on for years. To make matters more complicated, the case has caused a rift between the state and federal tribunals whose orders are believed to have contradicted each another.

A scheme to deliver mobile telephones to prisoners in a model helicopter was thwarted yesterday in the São Paulo region of Brazil. Suspicions were raised at the maximum security Presidente Vencislau prison, some 600km southwest of the city of São Paulo, when officers on patrol noticed a parked car in the prison’s environs. Four people have been arrested and the metre-long helicopter, a model from Taiwanese brand Align, with an internet retail value of around US$500, was confiscated.

The Associated Press reports that the ingenious scheme involved placing nine mobile phones, wrapped in a disposable nappy, in a basket attached to the helicopter. Five more cellular phones are also said to have been found in the boot of the vehicle which prompted suspicions.

One of the four connected with the plot is a seventeen year old male who confessed to driving the helicopter via remote control. He admitted that he had been paid 10,000 reales (around US$5,000) to rent the car and buy the phones. He was due to receive a similar amount again if he managed to fly the small craft over the five metre high prison walls and into one of the open areas, where they would be collected by prisoners.

In March of last year, São Paulo police intercepted two carrier pigeons who had been trained to fly over the walls of a Sorocaba prison with small bags attached to their legs. Officials attracted the birds with food and found that the bags contained the component parts of a small mobile phone.

Brazilian police sergeant Ricardo Jock was today quoted in The Washington Post, explaining: “The cell phones were obviously for jailed gang leaders who would use them to coordinate bank robberies and kidnappings and set up drug deals.”

It is thought that São Paulo’s notorious ‘First Capital Command’ prison gang use contraband mobile phones to coordinate attacks in the outside world. They have been blamed for a wave of assaults on police, banks and buses, which left more than 200 dead in 2006.