SUMMARY: At the White House on Tuesday, President Trump welcomed Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, in the latter’s first bilateral foreign visit. The two leaders share many similar views, as they reiterated at a press conference, and Bolsonaro represents Brazil’s first pro-U.S. leader in decades. Nick Schifrin reports on how the two presidents hope to align their countries on trade and politics.
SUMMARY: Among the many concerns confronting Brazil's first Olympic Games, one of the most pressing is the state of Guanabara Bay, site of the sailing competition. A vital source of income for local fishermen, the bay is severely polluted and lethally toxic -- but those fighting to preserve it face a violent response. Special correspondent Lulu Garcia-Navarro of NPR reports.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO (NPR): Alexandre Anderson is a hunted man, targeted for his work on these treacherous waters.
Every day, as he heads out onto Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay, he's on a mission to defend the bay he calls home. He tells us its stark beauty hides a dark reality.
ALEXANDRE ANDERSON, Fisherman (through interpreter): We hope the Olympics will show the world another bay. There is the bay for the rich, for visitors to see, and there is the bay of the fishermen, who are suffering. That is the bay of excrement, garbage, and oil. It is the Guanabara Bay of violence.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO: Alexandre took us on a tour of that bay. He knows it well. He grew up fishing here. But as the bay got more and more polluted, he became an activist, who leads a fishermen's organization.
The ecological devastation here is hard to miss. He shows us a mangrove swamp used as an illegal dumping ground for trash. Raw sewage is also pumped into the bay from communities that have no access to sanitation.
But for Alexandre Anderson, the biggest polluters are not only the residents who lack basic infrastructure, but also the petroleum industry. This is one of the biggest refineries in the area. And it's right on the banks of the Guanabara Bay.
And you can see here in the water it's slick with oil. Rio de Janeiro, a world-famous beach town, is also Brazil's oil and gas heartland. Energy accounted for 13 percent of Brazil's GDP in 2014. And almost three-quarters of the world's recent deep-water oil discoveries have been made in Brazil. The Guanabara Bay is the industry's hub.
Alexandre takes us to an oil industry shipyard and points out broken eco-barriers meant to stop paint and chemicals from leaking into the water.
SUMMARY: As Brazil prepares for its first Olympic Games, violence is flaring in the notorious favelas surrounding Rio de Janeiro. While a paramilitary policing initiative known as “pacification” stemmed the tide of drugs and crime for a while, economic downturn and widespread police brutality have once again turned the slum districts into war zones. Special correspondent Lulu Garcia-Navarro of NPR reports.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): It's just over two months until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
For the host country, Brazil, it's been a troubled journey. The Zika virus, corruption scandals, and an economic and political meltdown have all had an impact. But for many residents, the most worrying development is a spike in crime across Rio and what happens after the athletes go home.
“NewsHour” producer Jon Gerberg teamed up with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and they report from the shantytowns, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro.
And a warning: Some of the images are disturbing.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO (NPR): The image of glamorous Rio de Janeiro most people know; world-famous beaches like Copacabana, a draw for tourists and residents alike.
But just behind the high-rises and hotels lies another world. These are two impoverished communities called Babilonia and Chapeu Mangueira. They are at the heart of a bold policing experiment that started in 2008. It's called pacification.
It introduced community-based police units to many favelas that are close to tourist areas, its aim, to push out the violent drug gangs that operated here in advance of Brazil's debut on the world stage with the 2014 World Cup and, in two months' time, the Olympics.
Babilonia and Chapeu Mangueira together became the poster children of Rio's transformation. Crime dropped. New businesses opened, catering to tourists. Police would walk around with their weapons holstered. Dignitaries like U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and media like me were taken here to show off the project's success.
But that success is now under threat. Pacification is in crisis. The first time I came to this favela three years ago, it was safe. It was known as the Disneyland favela. This time, residents refusing to talk to us because they have been threatened by drug traffickers. And the only way we can come is with heavily armed police.
These pacification units, known as UPPs, now walk around ready for battle. Two rival gangs are violently fighting for control in this area, and police are struggling. At the crest of the favelas, Commander Paulo Berbat tells me the gangs use these jungle paths to ferry weapons and drugs in and out.
He told me that, in March, the battle for control over these routes turned deadly.
So, he's saying that, just up here in this area, members of a rival gang from a different community used the cover of the forest to try and invade this community and take it over. There was an intense confrontation between the drug gang that controls this community, and three of the drug traffickers were killed.
Businesses that had flourished, attracting foreigners, are now reporting a 50 percent drop in revenue. Even though no visitors have been harmed in Babilonia and Chapeu Mangueira, tourists are choosing to stay away. It's a shocking turnaround for the residents here.
Among them is Rodrigo da Silva. He sells food to make a living on the beaches just near his home in Chapeu Mangueira. He had hoped that the Olympics and pacification would provide new opportunities, so he opened a hostel, advertised on Airbnb, but clients today are scarce
RODRIGO DA SILVA, Favela Resident (through interpreter): Our business has decreased. We had much higher expectations in terms of hosting people throughout the Olympics. If the situation had improved, maybe I wouldn't still have to work here on the beach.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO: Concerned about gang pressure, da Silva only agreed to meet us outside his favela.
RODRIGO DA SILVA (through interpreter): If you talk too much, it ends badly. Here's the deal: You do not mess with their business. I don't mess with their stuff and they don't mess with mine. Everyone wins, in a way.
SUMMARY: In Brazil, health workers are searching for the smoking gun link between the virus and infant microcephaly, while troops attack mosquito breeding grounds and mothers of affected children face the long-term consequences. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now to the growing effort to rein in the mosquito-borne Zika virus spreading through parts of South and Central America. It is suspected of being the cause devastating birth defects in children who are born to women who become infected during pregnancy.
Our science correspondent, Miles O’Brien, has been reporting on developments from Brazil, which has been hard-hit by the virus.
Tonight, he looks at ways doctors and scientists are racing to get ahead of the outbreak.
MILES O’BRIEN (NewsHour): It’s Carnival week in Brazil, the raucous run-up to Lent, when people take to the streets to party their worries away. But this year, it’s harder to mask reality, as a frightening epidemic also marches through the nation.
DR. ADRIANA SCAVUZZI, Obstetrician, IMIP: They come to us asking many questions, and we cannot say almost nothing with 100 percent sure. What we have to do is to support them. That’s all we have to do.
MILES O’BRIEN: Dr. Adriana Scavuzzi is an obstetrician at one of the largest hospitals in Recife, the epicenter of a fast-moving outbreak of the Zika virus; a flavivirus virus in the same family as Yellow Fever, West Nile, and Dengue.
In each case, the virus hitchhikes on a tenacious day-biting mosquito called Aedes Aegypti that has origins in Africa and is now spreading throughout the globe. Two-month-old Nicollas Pereira has an abnormally small head, microcephaly.
Doctors at this hospital would normally see 10 cases like this a year. But starting in August, there were suddenly 10 to 20 a month.
Dr. Ana Van Der Linden is a pediatric neurologist. She says Nicollas must contend with an array of permanent mental and physical problems.
DR. ANA VAN DER LINDEN, Pediatric Neurologist, IMIP (through interpreter): With this impairment, we see that reflex reactions are good, but voluntary actions that depend on better brain development will be impaired. He will have bad motor skills and mental development. He can also have abnormal vision, hearing disorders, and bone malformation.
Shoppers here with a notion of what items cost abroad need to brace themselves when buying a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone: the same model that costs $615 in the United States is nearly double that in Brazil. An even bigger shock awaits parents needing a crib: the cheapest one at Tok & Stok costs over $440, more than six times the price of a similarly made item at Ikea in the United States.
For Brazilians seething with resentment over wasteful spending by the country’s political elite, the high prices they must pay for just about everything — a large cheese pizza can cost almost $30 — only fuel their ire.
“People get angry because we know there are ways to get things cheaper; we see it elsewhere, so we know there must be something wrong here,” said Luana Medeiros, 28, who works in the Education Ministry.
Brazil’s street protests grew out of a popular campaign against bus fare increases. Residents of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro spend a much larger share of their salaries to ride the bus than residents of New York or Paris. Yet the price of transportation is just one example of the struggles that many Brazilians face in making ends meet, economists say.
Renting an apartment in coveted areas of Rio has become more expensive than in Oslo, the capital of oil-rich Norway. Before the protests, soaring prices for basic foods like tomatoes prompted parodies of President Dilma Rousseff and her economic advisers.
Inflation stands at about 6.4 percent, with many in the middle class complaining that they are bearing the brunt of price increases. Limiting the authorities’ maneuvering room, the popular indignation is festering at a time when huge stimulus projects are failing to lift the economy from a slowdown, raising the specter of stagflation in Latin America’s largest economy.
“Brazil is on the verge of recession now that the commodities boom is over,” said Luciano Sobral, an economist and a partner in a São Paulo asset management firm who maintains an irreverent economics blog under the name the Drunkeynesian. “This is making it impossible to ignore the high prices which plague Brazilians, especially those who cannot easily afford to travel abroad for buying sprees where things are cheaper.”
SUMMARY: Anti-government fury swelled to new heights across Brazil as at least a million protesters took to the streets overnight. The mostly peaceful week-long protests turned violent when masked youths challenged riot police. Jeffrey Brown reports on how the public outraged was sparked by a transit fare hike.
SUMMARY: At least a million Brazilian protesters flocked to the streets overnight. Margaret Warner talks with Matthew Cowley, Sao Paulo bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, about how worries about an economic slowdown and Brazil's upcoming hosting of major sports events have helped fuel the massive public protests.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Next, charting the rise of Brazil as a new and growing power on the global stage.
Jeffrey Brown profiles one of the men who helped build it.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Yes, Brazil is still a soccer power. And, yes, it's still famous for its music and Carnival.
But, today, Brazil is something much more. A nation of 200 million, it's now the world's sixth largest economy, an energy giant with a booming manufacturing sector and growing middle class, in short, an economic and democratic power very much on the rise, and decidedly not the nation Fernando Henrique Cardoso was born into.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Now we have another story in our series on global population issues. It's a partnership with National Geographic Magazine, which has been reporting on this topic throughout 2011. The September issue examines the declining birth rate in Brazil.
Our report is from special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro.
This week Brazil is poised to start selling off its “gift from God.”
After billions of barrels of undersea oil were discovered off Brazil’s coast in 2007, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva credited divine providence. “God is Brazilian,” he said in a speech following the discovery, later calling the oil not only a divine gift, but his country’s “passport to the future.”
That future arrives in part on Thursday. That’s when Brazil’s state-run oil company, Petrobras, is set to announce the start of its commercial production of a small section of the Tupi field, one of several billion-barrel oil fields the company says are located offshore.
More than 200 miles out to sea and several miles below the surface, the pools of oil are thought to be among the biggest discovered on earth in recent decades. Properly tapped, they’ll make fortunes and catapult Brazil into the ranks of the world’s top oil-producing countries.
But as the crude begins to flow, some industry experts say Brazil has understated the risks involved — made apparent by the deep-sea drilling that caused this year’s disastrous spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The fields are known as the "pre-salt" region, due to the fact that the bulk of the oil is locked beneath a formation of hardened salt as much as 6,500 feet thick. The closest of the new fields are about 200 miles southeast from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro on a patch of sea floor where the water is more than a mile deep.
