Brazilian Indians were in the spotlight of world media this week and the local blogosphere has much to say about it. From the images of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, which were ‘leaked’ first in a blog that is now claiming attribution rights for its scoop, to the enraged protest caught on camera against the building of dams along the Xingu River in the Amazon basin where an official of Brazil’s national electric company got slashed by traditional machetes and clubs. Bloggers had different takes from the dominant mainstream media narratives.

Here is the Brazilian GLOBO video of the engineer’s encounter with the Indians.

Since the gathering in Altamira, the Brazilian media have focused mostly on the issue of violence. GLOBO included a special report in its extremely popular weekend TV magazine FANTASTICO and here’s the text (computer) translated into rough English. As you can see, the focus is on the engineer and the Indians associated with the confrontation and there is very little about the many consequences of building the dam. While the Brazilian mainstream media are preoccupied with the “hot” story, various blogs and NGOs have been struggling to deliver the deeper messages. Encontro Xingu ‘08 provides great coverage of the whole event with in-depth analysis by David Cunningham and lots of wonderful photos by Sue Cunningham. The Xingu Encounter was also reported by International Rivers along with English translations of the declarations of the Xingu Peoples. And here’s the (computer) translated final statement of the broad coalition of Brazilian grassroots organizations that are opposing building of th,e Belo Monte dam.
Violence - Vision Share

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Brazil is an unusual place. The country is full of unconventional people, capable of performing extraordinary feats, which nowadays can get reported in peculiar ways by an ever-growing crowd of unique bloggers. This time the story is rather sad, but the blogosphere is exploding with humorous takes on the tragedy of a Brazilian Roman Catholic priest who is missing after drifting out to sea while trying to set a record for a flight using helium-filled party balloons.

The goal of Father Adelir Antonio de Carli was to break the 19-hour record for remaining aloft using only party balloons, in order to raise funds for the rest stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products. Brazilian truckers often spend days waiting to unload in the port, especially during the busy soy export season now under way.

Planes, helicopters and boats from Brazilian rescue forces have been out along the coast of Santa Catarina state looking for the balloon-flying priest all week. Surely, a religious person gone missing during a charity stunt deserves the highest respect, but the lack of elementary safety features in Father de Carli’s plan to accomplish his endeavor has unleashed an unstoppable stream of humorous lines, although not without some guilty thoughts about them.

Would it be comic if it were not tragic? I say that it can be tragic and comic. Here we have the ‘tragi-comedies’ that won’t let me lie. Please, agree with me before I go on! — IT IS COMIC! (so here is a bold and gratuitous appeal to share the heavy weight in my consciousness for having seen so much comedy in all this).
Peter Pan Priest - Fossas do Ofício

So, the amount of jokes over this priest who decided to fly tied to balloons filled with helium is not contained in the sacred scriptures…. Moreover, the flying priest’s last feat was the topic-of-the-day in a debate I had with a friend who studies journalism and lives in Rio. The father’s imprudence, from being so bizarre, ends up as risible. How does someone wanting to fly with party balloons in completely unfavorable weather, without knowing at least how to operate a gps — really folks?
How to use a gps?Como usar um gps? - de tudo um pouco

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Twisted information about the discovery of what may possibly be the third largest oil field in the world turned into a hot issue on the Brazilian blogosphere this week. The trigger was a comment from the head of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency [ANP], Haroldo Lima, mentioning that the recently found Carioca [or Sugar Loaf] field in Brazil’s offshore Santos Basin could potentially contain reserves of up to 33 billion barrels of oil and gas. The comment was amplified by the media as an official announcement, which caused a wave of excitement through investor markets from Brazil to New York for Petrobrás [Brazil's state-run oil company] and its partners Repsol-YPF and the BG Group.

Petrobras officials quickly reacted saying that 3 months of further drilling would be needed before any meaningful estimate of volumes could be made. Yet, the day-after local media headlines took on the ‘announcement’ as a deliberate act to boost Brazilian markets and Petrobras’ share price, and speculated about the legal consequences the company could face for making such groundless comments. Meanwhile bloggers found a new gusher of opinions in the theme.

Haroldo Lima, director of National Petroleum Agency, has firmly denied having made any public announcement related to the Santos Basin’s find. He would have just made a comment based in articles published in a specialized American magazine. But the word of the director of a regulatory agency has weight not only over the sector regulated by it, but also over financial markets. Therefore it is not his role to make any inference. The weight of the word of an oil sector manager is much bigger than the opinion or an article of a journalist.
The weight of the word and the responsability - Leandro Vieira

The media, which in its overwhelming majority is opposed to the president Luis Inacio da Silva, the “Lula”, has tried to characterize Haroldo Lima as irresponsible, and the oppositionist CVM (Securities and Exchange Commission) says it will “investigate” him for having shared information with the public before an official announcement from Petrobras. That was an evident demonstration of spite, envy and hatred from the Brazilian right against the President Lula. That’s what we can translate from the attempt to disqualify the remarks of Haroldo Lima — a respectable public Brazilian figure. In its sordid ways, the media has tried to sensationalize the context of Lima’s comments, which were made in a closed event, as if he had made an announcement in a public plaza with a megaphone, aiming to reach the whole population. In fact, the information about the Carioca field was already known by oil specialists, and it had already been reported in the US by the “World Oil Magazine”.
Media roars against - Tribuna Petista

Lula: … tell Petrobras to make up another oil field,
so that I can get away from the latest scandals, heck!!!

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April fool’s day this year has brought a bitter taste to the Brazilian open source community. The announcement of the approval of Microsoft’s Open XML Format (OOXML) as an ISO/IEC International Standard was, at first, seen as some kind of joke. After all, OOXML had lost a vote on its adoption at ISO in September 2007. The voting members had requested hundreds of adjustments to the standard however it is widely known that today the majority have remained unimplemented. But let’s check out why such a drab debate over technical standards has caught the attention of so many bloggers in Brazil.

The open source movement in Brazil, with all its successes and failures, has somehow turned into a cultural trend. In this context, Microsoft’s Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) and its proprietary files’ format became the very symbol of the monopolistic obstacle against the freedom pursued by free software activists, and also the main target of government agencies’ official substitution policies. Where the Linux operating system was still not ready to reign, at least OpenOffice — with it’s ISO approved ODF file format standard — could help breaking Microsoft’s cultural hegemony. And it worked!

In fact, it seems that the strategy has worked too well. Microsoft started to see its multi-billion dollar Office business model menaced by the rising trend of governments giving preference to open standards in their decisions on software acquisition. The tactical reaction of Microsoft in defense of their monopoly position was to blitz for the sanction of their incompatible alternative format Open XML as a second ISO standard. Bloggers decried that the strategy used to carry OOXML through the ISO fast-track process has damaged the standard’s credibility and created serious consequences for the whole concept of open standards. Indeed, Microsoft tactics can bring forth an intense rage among those Brazilians who have worked so long and so hard for open standards, and it is not surprising to see MS portrayed not merely as a monopolist but as a monster.

Although having (barely) followed the procedural norms, ISO has lost (or at least damaged) its credibility by being involved in a process that was corrupted behind the scenes by a series of suspicions, irregularities, lobbies and so forth. If the approval had been reached by agreement, be it through Fast-Track or not, ISO would have maintained its credibility. But by passively conceding to Redmond’s pressure, and not checking the decision-making procedures of the various countries, ISO has damaged its credibility in a permanent way — and somehow thwarted all the other ISO standards.
OOXML = ISO 29500 - Microsoft Wins, we all lose - Linux… e mais coisas

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The abrupt dimissal of the journalist Paulo Henrique Amorim — or PHA as he is referred too — from his anchor-like position at the IG portal has fueled this week’s blogs debate. The humorous and opinionated style used by PHA in his ‘Conversa Afiada‘ blog to attack what he called the ‘PIG’ — an acronym for Portuguese words meaning, ‘the party of the coup-plotting mass media’ — was an outlet for ‘left bloggers’, and many posts were quick to denounce IG’s surprising move as censorship.

Luiz Carlos Azenha’s website says that Paulo Henrique Amorim was dismissed from IG on Tuesday, by fax. What first calls our attention is the suddenness of the portal’s decision. If it was not for Azenha, we would be accessing PHA’s site without reaching it, and not knowing why… It’s almost impossible not to speculate about possible political meddling. We wait for an explanation from IG. While waiting for it, we can speculate and worry about a media witch-hunt that may be starting, promoted by the big media companies and by the politicians who control it, the ones already known to all.
PHA’s Dismissal - Cidadania.com

It is important to mention that IG differentiates itself from the rest of the big Internet outlets by its sympathetic approach to the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. This perspective adds intrigue to the plot, as it is not so easy to identify the forces driving behind PHA’s release.

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Two of the biggest media companies in Brazil are currently involved is court cases that similarly raise the issue of freedom of speech and press even though the media finds itself on opposite sides of the issue in the two cases. The influential newspaper ‘Folha de SP’ is facing a series of lawsuits filed by followers of an evangelical church, while Veja, the top weekly magazine, and some of its main editors are going after a blogger through another series of lawsuits. Taking the larger view, the Brazilian blogosphere is uniquely pointing out the similarity and contradictions revealed by the connectedness of both situations.

Folha’s problems started a week ago when Elvira Lobato, a reporter who is now facing about 50 individual suits, published an article about the finances of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God - IURD, and its connections with tax havens. The piece lists the TV network (2nd national audience), 23 TV and 40 radio stations, besides the other 19 companies — 2 newspapers included — that forms the church’s ‘empire’, but the suits actually complain about IURD being portrayed as a ’sect’.

The issue has called RSF’s attention, and the ABI [Brazilian Press Association] has released a note [pt] describing IURD’s reaction as an ‘unprecedented coercive campaign in Brazilian media history’. While the suits against Folha has generated such compelling response from traditional media and its backers, a very different approach is being adopted towards the legal dispute between Veja magazine and the journalist-turned-into-blogger Luis Nassif. As expected, the blogosphere has much to say about that.

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A traditional Brazilian newspaper launched an advertising campaign to promote its new website, and the core message of all video and visual pieces was based on a humorous approach of blogs as bad sources of information. One video piece went far enough as comparing bloggers with monkeys. As expected, the local blogosphere took it personally.

On its website, Talent Agency explains its new campaign to advertise Estadão’s website as follows: “The campaign exposes, in a playful way, the risks of searching sites on the Internet, managing to impart the newspaper’s website novelties“. I should say that it is a case of questionable sense of humor, to coarsely compare bloggers with… monkeys.
Estadão against blogs? - Pensar Enlouquece

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Ethanol has suddenly turned into a popular word among Brazilian bloggers, specially because of the foreign attention it attracts. In fact, “alcohol” is the word Brazilians have been using to call its sugar-cane derived biofuel since the 70s, when Proalcool started, but blogs are surely under global influence. As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva traveled to attend an EU-sponsored biofuel international conference last week, some blogs are tracking the global media coverage on the ‘ethanol’ issue and reacting to it.

An article on the Spanish newspaper “El Mundo” reported on Friday that the UE doesn’t want Brazil’s “dirty alcohol”. The term adresses the block’s concerns over Brazilian sugar cane cultivation practices, which are seen by European leaders as potentially harmful to the environment. (…) Concerns over the Brazilian alcohol were manifested also by the Italian “La Repubblica”, who recalled the recent liberation of 1.106 workers in slave conditions in a sugar cane farm in Pará state. According to the newspaper, Lula — who is described as the leader “with the apostle role on biofuels” — “has not mentioned (in Brussels) the connection between the two reports”. (Folha Online) ** “European representative blames Lula on leading Brazil towards unsustainability”. The Green Party’s European representative David Hammerstein has said on Thursday that President Lula is “leading Brazil through a path of unsustainability” with the biofuels and that the EU should not finance the “Brazilian environmental destruction”. “The EU should give priority to feeding and not to transportation”, Hammerstein declared in a release. The representative’s speech was being divulged at the same time Lula was trying to convince the European leaders that the growth on biofuel production in Brazil would not represent any social or environmental risk.”
Replies to Alcoholism - A Nova Corja

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A blame game seemed to start as soon as Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath walked out of the G4 talks with their counterparts from the US and the EU Thursday in Postdam, Germany. The meeting between these four key players in the World Trade Organization was formulated as an attempt to salvage global trade talks from a six year stalemate on the issues of farm subsidies and open markets. It turned into a fiasco and now charges over who or what caused the failure has become an open dispute, which is evoking interesting reactions from the media. Brazilian bloggers are trying to understand what’s going on… and they too are offering explanations.

In Washington on Thursday (21 June), the White House spokesman declared that President Bush was ‘disappointed’ with the collapse of the talks in Postdam. The US President blamed Brazil and India for the meeting’s failure. “The president is disappointed with some countries that are blocking an opportunity to expand global commerce”, remarked the White House spokesman, Tony Fratto. “Big economies as Brazil and India should not stand in the way of the progress of small nations, the poor developing countries — but that seems to be what happened in Germany this week”, Fratto said.
Lula culpa ricos por fracasso em Doha; Bush critica o Brasil - Mercosul e CPLP

No, Mr. Bush. That was not exactly what happened in the city of Postdam, in Germany, where the G4 met. In fact, the powerful nations seem to be opposed to the growth of the less affluent countries, but this kind of relationship is not what happens between Brazil, India and the poorer countries. This pattern exists between the US, the EU and the poorer countries. The core issue seems clear to me — the rich countries refuse to cut the agriculture subsidies to their farmers, and this situation can’t be seen as fair “commerce”. End. Brazil and India properly left the talks. The Europeans said that the emerging countries were not ready to make concessions, and I should ask: what more do they want? Meantime leaders are still thinking that social policies are to be restricted to national borders, we won’t have any development in the “better world” project. The attitude of the Lula Government in the case of the Bolivian refineries was, in my view, iconic. It would be indecent if the Brazilian president cared only for the national interests [of Brazil]. The well being of a Bolivian citizen is worth the same as mine or yours, dear reader. But this is not the line of thought of Europeans and Anglo-Americans. That is the reason why the Doha Round is dwindling. Just like Mercosur, Alca, etc.
Às favas com o comércio justo - Expressão Literária

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The word is out on the web: blogs are celebrating their 10th anniversary. And although blogging about blogging is something bloggers do all the time, the remembrance offers the opportunity for new raps around the beloved theme. The thread started from an April 1st Dave Winer’s post where he praises the decade long course of his ‘Scripting News‘, but the paternity attribution is not undisputed. The Lusophone blogosphere catches the wave by sending out new perspectives on the issue and honoring the date as an important collective achievement.

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