Lula slapped by parliament, hooted by Amazon's poor

Brazil's grandiose Prez, nicknamed Lula (Luiz Inacio da Silva), has found that his Workers' Party and its allies, are not in the mood to let him run the lower house in his kingly way any more. Many of them and the opposition gave Lula a whack by voting in as parliament's top officer a moderate dissident from the Progressive Party, a little outfit considered an ally of the Workers' Party. The shock came in the vote 300-195 that turned away from Lula's hand-picked candidate for Prime Minister, on whose all-out support the passage of the Brazilian President's legislative agenda largely depends. Now Lula will have to deal with Progressive Severino Calvacanti backed by a 300-vote mandate. 105 more than the other fella.

As tho that weren't enuff, in the jungle forests of the Amazon a duo of brigands following yet another agenda, assassinated in broad daylight one of Brazil's most revered persons among the poor. 73-year-old Sister Dorothy Stang, a naturalized citizen of US origin from Dayton, Ohio, was famous for her outspoken and politicized support for the landless peasants of either those disposessed by logging and ranching interests, or immigrants coming directly from the dry dustbowls elsewhere in Brazil. Her funeral brawt thousands of angry poor to the county of Anapu capital in Para state; Sister Dorothy was gunned down about 30 miles further into the interior where she ministered daily to some 400 families trying to survive in the jungle. Her death is part of a pattern of killings of activists by surrogates of the interests mentioned, who are rarely if ever brawt to justice. The problems have been exacerbated by Lula's promises of land to "400,000 poor families to shrink income inequalities. ¶ "That encouraged settlers to travel the Trans-Amazonian highway and claim areas with help from activists like Stang. ¶ " 'She had radical methods, she clashed with people who invested here,' said logger Gersino Filho, who said he lost 20,000 hectares of land after Stang lobbied for a settlement," according to Yahhoo!News/Reuters. [URL: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20050216/wl_nm/crime_brazil_nun_dc]

During all this turmoil, at least another three land-for-the-poor activists have been similarly assassinated. These events are inflaming the peasants-gone-jungle-dwellers as word spreads to every nook and cranny of the Amazon forest population, especially the settlements ringing the forest in competition with loggers, ranchers, and land speculators. Lula's VP and Defense Minister, Jose Alencar, has now had to call out the military, in a force of some 2,000 infantry. It's doubtful such a small force can control events thru-out the contested area as the word spreads; indeed, such a small force will probably become a further instrument against the poor, because the vested interests can easily buy it out, soldier by soldier, if necessary. We won't hear the end of these negative developments for quite some time, I'm afraid. But maybe such a crisis in the broader view will bring the plight of Brazil's homeless, in the dustbowl's and in the jungles (which cover half the country) toward a remedy, at least a major amelioration of their misery. [http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/02/16/amazon.nun.ap/index.html]

Link