Em 2007, Eva da Silva foi ignorada mesmo depois de morta. Era 2 de fevereiro. Fazia calor. Nove e meia da manhã e o corpo da mulher pendurado numa corda no galpão de um sítio localizado no pequeno município gaúcho de Vale do Sol, a 184 quilômetros de Porto Alegre, no Vale do Rio Pardo, não fazia a menor diferença.
Os homens, um oficial de justiça e seis policiais militares, continuavam trabalhando, como se nada tivesse ocorrido. Todos apressados em atender ao pedido da fumageira Alliance One Brasil Exportadora de Tabacos Ltda., sob ordem do excelentíssimo juiz Marcelo Silva de Carvalho: tomar a produção de fumo da agricultora para o pagamento de uma suposta dívida que ela teria com a empresa.
Desesperada, Eva ainda gritou que se mataria. O aviso da idosa de 61 anos não fez eco, mesmo que ela vendesse folhas de tabaco para a Alliance One havia 25 anos. O oficial de justiça, Rodrigo Federezzi, fez a fala de praxe:
— Só estou cumprindo ordens.
A porta do galpão foi arrombada pelos policiais, que carregaram os fardos de fumo sem nenhuma piedade.
Ao ser comunicada do suicídio, a empresa enviou funcionários para aumentar o grupo. Não com o objetivo de prestar auxílio à família, mas de retirar o fumo mais rapidamente. O juiz Marcelo Silva de Carvalho, depois de receber telefonema do oficial de justiça, autorizou o prosseguimento, informação confirmada pelo delegado de polícia que atendeu o caso, Miguel Mendes Ribeiro Neto.
Para a empresa, a morte de Eva só valeu um “comunicado oficial”. Nele, representantes da Alliance lamentavam “o ocorrido” e diziam que o suicídio foi uma “fatalidade”. A fumageira garantiu que o arresto – como é chamado pela justiça o sequestro de bens para garantir um pagamento – ocorreu por “quebra de contrato”, ou seja, por dívidas que a agricultora não teria pago.
Contudo, Eva não tinha, de fato, dívida. O contrato dela com a fumageira venceria em 31 de julho de 2007 e a execução do arresto veio em 31 de janeiro, com seis meses de antecipação. No ano anterior, a Alliance havia comprado 100% do tabaco da camponesa e renovado o compromisso.
De acordo com uma comissão parlamentar formada por deputados estaduais e federais gaúchos, que acompanhou o caso, notas fiscais comprovavam que não havia motivo para o arresto.
O juiz responsável argumentou que Eva tinha parcelas de uma dívida em atraso e que, mesmo que o contrato novo não estivesse vencido, ele poderia, amparado pela lei, antecipar a cobrança e exigir o arresto em favor da fumageira.
Apesar de estar entre os municípios mais ricos do Rio Grande do Sul, Venâncio Aires, vizinha a Vale do Sol, com 65 mil habitantes, teve 105 suicídios entre 2011 e 2017, média de 26,1 casos por 100 mil habitantes. Isso deixa a cidade numa preocupante e mórbida segunda colocação na contagem dos suicídios no país.
Em uma cidade que possui baixo índice de criminalidade, a polícia se ocupa muito da investigação de suicídios. E a hipótese predominante ao senso comum é a influência da cultura alemã e o rigor trazido por ela. Do ponto de vista da saúde, a informação oficial é que 10% dos leitos do principal hospital local são reservados para a psiquiatria e que a Prefeitura investe em programas de prevenção, com internações e grupos de ajuda. Uma unidade do Centro de Valorização da Vida, o cvv foi instalada na cidade. Contudo, abrir o leque dos motivos de suicídio no diálogo com moradores, autoridades e associações é um tabu.
A Afubra, a Associação dos Fumicultores do Brasil, que tem sede na cidade, rejeita a relação dos suicídios com o uso de agrotóxicos, mas, ainda assim, faz questão de afirmar que, hoje, o composto é pouco utilizado nas lavouras. Já o SindiTabaco, o Sindicato da Indústria do Tabaco, divulga a posição de que “atrelar casos de suicídio ao uso de agrotóxicos na cultura do tabaco é uma afirmação inconsistente”. O argumento da entidade é que, dos dez municípios com maior índice de tentativa de suicídios no Rio Grande do Sul, “apenas” três possuem “grande” produção de tabaco: Venâncio Aires, Santa Cruz do Sul e Canguçu.
A tentativa de atenuar a importância do sofrimento dos fumicultores também parte das autoridades. Foi o que demonstrou, em setembro de 2014, o então prefeito de Venâncio Aires, Airton Artus, do pdt. Na época, durante a disputa pela Presidência da República, ele procurou a então candidata Marina Silva num evento em Porto Alegre. Artus não hesitou em aproveitar a oportunidade para falar sobre a “importância do setor fumageiro para as famílias de agricultores” e “desmistificar” as informações correntes sobre o segmento.
Ao entregar à candidata um documento sobre o setor, ele mencionou a relevância social e econômica do fumo. Basicamente, o que ele fez foi compilar dados ofertados pelo SindiTabaco e pela Afubra:
Em 2013, o tabaco representou 1,3% do total das exportações brasileiras, com us$ 3,27 bilhões embarcados. Da produção de mais de setecentas mil toneladas, mais de 85% foram destinados ao mercado externo. Para o Sul do país, a cultura é uma das atividades agroindustriais mais significativas. No Rio Grande do Sul, a participação do tabaco representou 9,3% no total das exportações; em Santa Catarina, 10,2%.
Em julho de 2015, Artus foi eleito presidente da Câmara Setorial da Cadeia Produtiva do Tabaco, grupo técnico ligado ao Ministério da Agricultura e que congrega todo o leque de instituições pró-indústria. O ex-prefeito é médico de formação e, além de pretender “desmistificar” a relação entre o cultivo do fumo e o sofrimento dos trabalhadores, queria mostrar que não existe relação direta entre a produção e o consumo de tabaco. Ele diz que, se o Brasil deixar de plantar, outro país assumirá esse mercado:
A fumicultura tem considerável importância socioeconômica no Rio Grande do Sul e em toda a região Sul do Brasil. Em Venâncio Aires, o setor tabagista, desde a produção e beneficiamento até a exportação, gera riquezas anuais superiores a r$ 600 milhões, o que representa cerca de 70% do valor adicionado do município.
Um prefeito-médico que entrega um documento da indústria do cigarro a postulantes ao cargo de presidente de um país sem tocar em questões de saúde soa bizarro por si só. Mais esquisito é saber que essa questão veio a público pela primeira vez no estado em um relatório da Comissão de Direitos Humanos da Assembleia Legislativa gaúcha 14 anos antes, mostrando que 80% dos suicídios em Venâncio Aires se davam entre agricultores, com aumento expressivo dos casos nos períodos de maior uso de agrotóxicos.
Passadas mais de duas décadas, Artus negligencia tais dados, mas nós entrevistamos o engenheiro agrônomo e florestal Sebastião Pinheiro, funcionário aposentado da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul , mas ainda ativo na colaboração com o Núcleo de Economia Alternativa da universidade. Ele foi um dos responsáveis pela pesquisa que avaliava a relação entre o índice de suicídios, o cultivo de fumo em Venâncio Aires e os agrotóxicos.
“As pessoas, adultas ou não, colhem fumo com as mãos e carregam as folhas embaixo dos braços, o veneno entra no corpo e provoca depressão. Depois, a doença se agrava e vêm os suicídios”, afirma Pinheiro.
Após o relatório, o Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, o cnpq, financiou um novo estudo, com médicos a bordo, do qual Pinheiro não participou. Alguns levantamentos foram feitos, mas restaram inconclusivos.
“Suicídio não tem uma origem única e direta — rebate Pinheiro. — Assim, um grupo de médicos não tem condições de analisar sozinho alterações no campo eletromagnético [pequenos campos magnéticos que dão estabilidade e equilíbrio às moléculas do corpo humano] de pessoas expostas a praguicidas ou agrotóxicos e, se eles não têm capacidade de avaliar isso, o resultado do trabalho destoa da realidade.”
De acordo com o engenheiro, a maioria dos agrotóxicos é responsável por alterações no comportamento das pessoas, o que, entre diversos males, leva à predisposição a doenças psiquiátricas e ao suicídio. Ele mostra documentos internacionais civis e militares em que encontrou elementos científicos que comprovam a existência da depressão causada por intoxicação de agrotóxicos.
“As pessoas, adultas ou não, colhem fumo com as mãos e carregam as folhas embaixo dos braços, o veneno entra no corpo e provoca depressão. Depois, a doença se agrava e vêm os suicídios”, afirma Pinheiro.
Após o relatório, o Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, o cnpq, financiou um novo estudo, com médicos a bordo, do qual Pinheiro não participou. Alguns levantamentos foram feitos, mas restaram inconclusivos.
“Suicídio não tem uma origem única e direta — rebate Pinheiro. — Assim, um grupo de médicos não tem condições de analisar sozinho alterações no campo eletromagnético [pequenos campos magnéticos que dão estabilidade e equilíbrio às moléculas do corpo humano] de pessoas expostas a praguicidas ou agrotóxicos e, se eles não têm capacidade de avaliar isso, o resultado do trabalho destoa da realidade.”
De acordo com o engenheiro, a maioria dos agrotóxicos é responsável por alterações no comportamento das pessoas, o que, entre diversos males, leva à predisposição a doenças psiquiátricas e ao suicídio. Ele mostra documentos internacionais civis e militares em que encontrou elementos científicos que comprovam a existência da depressão causada por intoxicação de agrotóxicos.
Autor do livro Fumo: servidão moderna e violação de direitos humanos , o também pesquisador Guilherme Eidt Gonçalves de Almeida, especialista em direito sanitário pela Fiocruz, chama atenção para a conexão entre os meses de uso mais intenso de agrotóxicos nas lavouras de fumo — outubro, novembro e dezembro — e o período com maior número de suicídios. O mês de abril, que apresenta também alto índice de casos, coincide com a época da preparação dos canteiros pelos plantadores, afirma Eidt. Sebastião Pinheiro lembra ainda que o grau de toxicidade dos agrotóxicos utilizados no país não é medido corretamente:
“A classificação é enganosa para atender aos interesses da indústria do veneno. Assim, a periculosidade e a insalubridade a que estão expostos os agricultores não têm tamanho no Brasil. E os mais vulneráveis são os que não podem mecanizar a produção, como os que trabalham com as folhas de tabaco.”
A doença da folha verde do tabaco — em que o camponês absorve grandes quantidades de nicotina no contato com a planta, o que pode causar várias reações físicas e psicológicas negativas — é mais um complicador dos quadros clínicos, alerta Tião. Um estudo de 2010 publicado na revista Cadernos de Saúde Pública, da Fiocruz, relatou a ocorrência de um surto da doença da folha verde no Brasil, caracterizando-a como uma intoxicação aguda de nicotina decorrente da absorção da substância a partir do contato com a planta.
Para que se tenha uma ideia da incidência da enfermidade entre os fumicultores, o registro foi realizado no nordeste, região responsável por menos de 2% do plantio em solo brasileiro, segundo dados da Afubra. Ainda assim, 107 casos foram identificados em trabalhadores de 11 municípios da região de Arapiraca, em Alagoas. Todos deram entrada em unidades de saúde ou hospitais em apenas uma noite do ano de 2007, e os principais sintomas observados foram tontura, fraqueza, vômito, náusea, dor de cabeça e cansaço extremo – exatamente os males descritos a nós pelos agricultores do Vale do Rio Pardo e relatados por Tião Pinheiro à Assembleia Legislativa gaúcha.
A absorção da nicotina foi percebida mais intensamente quando a folha estava molhada ou quando o agricultor suava. O diagnóstico baseou-se em três fatores: histórico de exposição ao cultivo de tabaco, análise clínica e verificação do nível de nicotina na saliva, sangue ou urina. Os resultados apontaram que, em 77% dos casos, os trabalhadores jamais fumaram. Somente 12% dos pacientes afirmaram ser fumantes regulares.
A longa exposição à substância pode piorar o quadro, segundo os pesquisadores. Como agravante, vem a possibilidade de ocorrência de outras doenças, a exemplo de tumores e problemas nos pulmões e no coração A predominância de adoecimento ocorre entre homens — maioria dos agricultores que manuseia as folhas —, não fumantes e trabalhadores que atuam na etapa da colheita.
Por fim, o estudo reivindica que o tema entre definitivamente na agenda de saúde pública do país, o que incluiria elaborar uma alternativa econômica sustentável para as famílias que cultivam o fumo.
Como se vê, falta de informação não é desculpa. Aliás, alguns resultados da investigação saíram do nordeste e chegaram ao sul antes de serem publicados pela Fiocruz. Em 2009, o Ministério da Saúde enviou dados à Secretaria de Saúde do Rio Grande do Sul — então, sob o governo da tucana Yeda Crusius — no intuito de difundir orientações a gestores municipais, técnicos de saúde, agricultores e fumageiras.
Naquele mesmo ano, a Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde do ministério havia mapeado casos de trabalhadores afetados pela doença no município gaúcho de Candelária, que contabilizava quatro mil famílias trabalhando na produção de fumo. A investigação durou 50 dias e, dos 46 casos suspeitos, 33 foram confirmados.
Enquanto isso, o SindiTabaco se vangloria de ter desenvolvido uma vestimenta que “protege” o trabalhador. De acordo com Iro Schünke, presidente da entidade,
em alguns fóruns, especialmente antitabagistas, ouvimos que a nossa vestimenta não protege o produtor contra a doença da folha verde do tabaco. A publicação de um artigo em uma revista de porte desmantela qualquer tipo de argumento nesse sentido, pois referencia todos os testes e parâmetros seguidos com total concordância aos mais elevados critérios científicos internacionais.
O artigo a que Schünke se refere leva o título de “Avaliação da vestimenta-padrão utilizada durante a colheita das folhas do tabaco e implicações na prevenção da Green Tobacco Sickness (gts)”. Assinado por Cristiana Leslie Correa, Giuliana da Fontoura Rodrigues Selmi e Flávio Ailton Duque Zambrone, o texto foi publicado pela Revista Brasileira de Medicina do Trabalho, da Associação Nacional de Medicina do Trabalho, em 2016. É taxativo quanto à conclusão de que o traje confere ao agricultor 98% de proteção.
Uma corrida de olho até o fim do artigo expõe o problema central: a fonte de financiamento do estudo é o Sindicato da Indústria do Tabaco da Região Sul do Brasil. Ou seja, os pesquisadores tiveram financiamento do SindiTabaco para falar bem do equipamento que a indústria bancou. Além disso, o texto teve o amparo de uma assistência em toxicologia — ou, se preferir, uma consultoria. A Planitox, de Campinas, no interior de São Paulo, pertence ao médico Flávio Zambrone, um dos autores do artigo, que relatava em reportagem de 2012 ter faturado r$ 5 milhões anuais atendendo a gigantes mundiais de agrotóxicos, casos de Basf e Bayer. Zambrone também é coordenador-científico da Força-Tarefa de Avaliação de Risco de Agroquímicos do ilsi Brasil, braço do International Life Sciences Institute, organização supostamente científica criada nos Estados Unidos em 1978 e mantida pelas corporações agroquímicas Arysta, Basf, Bayer, Iharabras e Monsanto. Outras megaempresas, como Coca-Cola, Heinz, Kraft, General Foods e Procter & Gamble, também apoiam o instituto — na verdade, o fundaram, com o objetivo de influenciar políticas públicas de saúde em escala planetária.
Exemplo disso foi apontado num trabalho publicado em 2001 por um comitê de cientistas independentes em parceria com a Organização Mundial da Saúde. O artigo “A indústria do tabaco e os grupos científicos do ilsi: um estudo de caso” delineou uma série de manobras pelas quais a indústria tentou minar os esforços de controle do cigarro nas últimas décadas.
Um dos métodos destacados pelos pesquisadores foi o financiamento das empresas a grupos científicos para manipular o debate público. É apresentada a cronologia das relações do setor fumageiro com o ilsi entre 1983 e 1998. Os resultados mostraram que “funcionários de escritórios sêniores do ilsi” estavam diretamente envolvidos em ações de lobby pró-cigarro, financiadas pelas transnacionais British American Tobacco e Philip Morris, principalmente.
Insistentes, personagens como Iro Schünke seguem a distorcer os fatos até que caibam nos interesses que defendem. Para essas figuras, a doença da folha verde só foi descoberta no Brasil recentemente. “Fomos pioneiros no desenvolvimento de uma vestimenta de colheita adequada para evitar a intoxicação. A vestimenta de colheita que os produtores recebem sai ao preço de custo das empresas”, diz.
Sem fumaça, há ciênciaÉ farta a documentação da doença nos Estados Unidos desde a década de 1970. O pesquidor William Gehlbach publicou, no longínquo 30 de setembro de 1974, o artigo “Green tobacco disease. An illness of tobacco lanyards” [Doença do tabaco verde. Uma doença de colhedores de tabaco, em tradução livre], veiculado no Journal of the American Medical Association, o Jama.. Já neste estudo constavam causas e sintomas da doença, inclusive identificando grande incidência em crianças que, como no Brasil, trabalhavam nas lavouras de tabaco para ajudar os pais. A doença específica relacionada ao tabaco foi identificada primeiro na zona rural do estado da Flórida, em 1970, e compreendida como um mal capaz de causar a inibição de receptores do sistema nervoso central.
A linha do tempo regride ainda mais: o primeiro registro do reconhecimento dos riscos à saúde humana pela produção de tabaco data de 1713. Sim, século 18. De acordo com o artigo “Saúde, ambiente e condições de trabalho na cultura do tabaco: revisão de literatura”, das pesquisadoras Deise Lisboa Riquinho e Elida Azevedo Hennington, da Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública da Fiocruz, há mais de 300 anos o médico italiano Bernardino Ramazzini já notava os sintomas da doença, incluindo dor de cabeça e cólicas abdominais, entre trabalhadores de regiões da Itália onde o fumo era cultivado.
No Brasil, uma pesquisa a respeito da ineficácia da vestimenta foi realizada em 2014 pela Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade Federal de Pelotas. O estudo foi publicado no American Journal of Industrial Medicine, dos Estados Unidos. Entre os entrevistados nos quais se constatou a doença, 72% não eram fumantes.
O trabalho foi coordenado pela médica Anaclaudia Gastal Fassa, que não encontrou evidências de que as vestes protegessem os agricultores da contaminação. Esse estudo foi feito cinco anos depois da “criação revolucionária” do uniforme que o SindiTabaco tanto comemora.
O Departamento de Estudos Socioeconômicos Rurais, o Deser, do Paraná, também tem o que dizer. Está mais do que comprovado que a produção de fumo — tanto pelo uso intenso de agrotóxicos quanto pela liberação da nicotina nas folhas verdes de tabaco, especialmente nos períodos de colheita — ostenta as maiores causas de mortes e doenças no meio rural. Diversos tipos de câncer, intoxicações, alergias e problemas de ordem psiquiátrica, como a depressão e o suicídio, estão diretamente associados à produção de fumo, como atesta uma análise conduzida pelo Deser em 2010.
Apesar de muitos estudos, a dificuldade em popularizar as descobertas científicas persiste. Não que isso seja um problema exclusivo do Vale do Rio Pardo, no sul, ou de Arapiraca, no nordeste. Muros altos separam a universidade da população em todo o Brasil. Porém, sem dúvida, lugares mais fechados a informações de fora e controlados por uma voz hegemônica que aposta na deseducação e na manipulação de pesquisas tendem a cultivar maior desconhecimento.
Entre 2011 e 2016, por exemplo, 271 casos da doença da folha verde foram detectados no Rio Grande do Sul, número que é considerado artificialmente baixo por todos os pesquisadores citados aqui, uma vez que os sintomas são confundidos com outros males de saúde ou com intoxicação pelo uso de agrotóxicos. O grande índice de subnotificação dificulta o trabalho dos agentes de saúde municipais e facilita a vida da indústria, ávida por se eximir de qualquer responsabilidade.
Pior: a coordenadora do Centro de Apoio e Promoção da Agroecologia de Pelotas, Rita Surita, explica que, apesar dos riscos, as empresas ainda conseguem manter o discurso sedutor dirigido às famílias, com promessas de aumento de renda e de status nas comunidades. “A ideia é facilitada quando se oferece um pacote tecnológico e de insumos, junto com crédito fácil. Fora que, com o isolamento e a confusão de informações, a culpa de adoecer vai toda para as costas do trabalhador”, avalia.
Já que estamos falando de ciênciaO ano era 1962 e surgiam os primeiros movimentos para a criação de uma universidade em Santa Cruz do Sul, no interior do Rio Grande do Sul e coração da região fumageira. A partir da fundação de uma associação de educadores — a Associação Pró-Ensino —, foram abertas as Faculdades Integradas de Santa Cruz do Sul. Trinta e um anos depois, em 1993, vem a transformação em universidade, um projeto de educação superior mais amplo e de personalidade jurídica comunitária, do que se depreende, numa primeira análise, que seja um espaço autônomo do pensar. Com um olhar mais detido e profundo, porém, vê-se que o espaço também não é livre de influências da indústria: um dos pontos decisivos para a alteração de formato foi o apoio das fumageiras, a começar pela doação do terreno que sedia o maior campus da Unisc.
A relação é tão evidente que se traduz no batismo do maior auditório da universidade. A sala 111 do complexo leva o nome de Auditório Souza Cruz. Um ponto “curioso”: embora a região de Santa Cruz tenha relevância econômica clara para o Rio Grande do Sul, não há universidades públicas na região, deixando que a instituição privada prevaleça.
A Unisc serve de apoio às fumageiras até hoje. Em 2006, por exemplo, quando a China Tabacos instalou um escritório no município, a universidade cedeu estrutura e profissionais de pesquisa para se certificar de que a qualidade do fumo estava nos padrões exigidos pelo mercado chinês de cigarros, como explica Pinheiro.
Marco André Cadoná, que foi professor do Departamento de Desenvolvimento Regional da Unisc e hoje trabalha na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, comenta o nível de autonomia da instituição:
“Não sei se tenho uma resposta clara para essa questão, mas tendo a dizer que, sim, há uma posição hegemônica na Unisc, e que essa posição, expressão do que se observa na própria região, é de colaboração com o complexo agroindustrial do tabaco, o que, inclusive, cria limitações para um enfrentamento mais crítico das contradições presentes nesse complexo.”
O historiador e professor da Unisc Olgário Vogt explica que existem grupos com posições divergentes na universidade, mas também acredita que a balança penda a favor das fumageiras:
“A Unisc tem um setor mais ligado às humanas, que tem uma visão mais crítica em relação a essa economia daqui. Só que, nessa cidade, se tu falar mal do setor fumageiro, tu também te colocas em um campo em que tu tens inimigos.”
O geógrafo Rogério Leandro de Lima também pondera sobre a questão, mas com uma visão diferente da dos dois colegas: ele acredita na existência de uma pluralidade de pensamento na instituição de ensino superior.
“Nós vamos ter determinados cursos, programas, como é o caso do Desenvolvimento Regional, que têm sempre uma estrutura muito crítica em relação às indústrias, ao modelo de desenvolvimento local, regional. A gente até fica marcado por isso.”
Esse texto foi originalmente publicado como um capítulo do livro Roucos e sufocados: a indústria do cigarro está viva, e matando, que traça um retrato do Vale do Rio Pardo, no Rio Grande do Sul, coração da indústria de fumo nacional. É de lá que emana boa parte do discurso — e do lobby — em defesa do cigarro.
The post Ela tinha uma falsa dívida com a fumageira Alliance One. Ainda assim, se matou. appeared first on The Intercept.
No final do ano passado, em uma reunião no centro de Belo Horizonte, conselheiros, advogados e representantes da sociedade civil e empresas de mineração decidiam o futuro da exploração de ferro na região. Eles discutiram o pedido da Vale S.A. de ampliar a capacidade da Mina Córrego do Feijão, que explora ferro em Brumadinho, na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte. Ambientalistas viram problemas na expansão. Alguns conselheiros e a mineradora insistiram na liberação. Mesmo controverso, o pedido da Vale – que aumentaria a capacidade da mina em 88% – foi aceito em dezembro do ano passado.
Interessada em expandir seus negócios na região, a Vale sequer cuidou do que já funcionava. Hoje, pouco mais de um mês depois, uma das barragens de rejeitos daquela mina, desativada desde 2015, se rompeu. Há pelo menos três mortos, 200 desaparecidos e um impacto ambiental ainda incalculável – que pode chegar até o Rio São Francisco. Há quem diga que o desastre é ainda pior do que foi o da Samarco em Mariana.
Mais uma vez, não foi por falta de aviso. A presença da Vale na região estava na mira de entidades de proteção ambiental e dos moradores da região que, em dezembro do ano passado, protestaram contra a expansão da mineração. E o governo do petista Fernando Pimentel em Minas Gerais sabia bem que o processo de licenciamento daquela mina era problemático. Ainda no final do ano passado, o secretário de Meio Ambiente, Germano Luiz Gomes Vieira, recebeu uma carta do Fórum Nacional da Sociedade Civil na Gestão de Bacias Hidrográficas, o Fonasc, pedindo que o processo de licenciamento fosse suspenso. A entidade estava em uma disputa dentro do Copam, o Conselho de Políticas Ambientais de Minas Gerais, responsável pela licença, tentando impedir que o processo da mineradora avançasse.
A entidade constatou uma série de inconsistências no processo de licenciamento. Para começar, ele sequer seguiu os ritos tradicionais: em vez de ter as licenças prévia, de instalação e de operação, no chamado modelo trifásico, a Vale conseguiu cortar caminho por meio da chamada licença LAC1. Isso aconteceu graças a uma mãozinha do governo mineiro, que aprovou uma deliberação que garante que empreendimentos de mineração de grande porte, antes classe 6, fossem enquadrados como classe 4, que tem um procedimento mais simples.
O Fonasc classificou o pedido de expansão – que aumentaria em 88% a capacidade de extração, inicialmente prevista para seguir até 2032 – dentro da “classe 4″ como uma “insanidade”. É a mesma classe em que está, por exemplo, a problemática mineração da Anglo American, também em Minas Gerais. “É gravíssimo porque, na realidade, são de grande porte e grande potencial devastador”, disse Maria Teresa Corujo, conselheira ambiental, durante a reunião que decidiu pela liberação do projeto.
Em uma carta enviada no dia 30 de novembro de 2018, o Fonasc, do qual Corujo faz parte, pediu a Breno Esteves Lasmar, presidente da Câmara de Atividades Minerárias, a retirada da pauta do pedido de licenciamento da Vale. Além da “insanidade” de ter o seu impacto minimizado, o pedido da mineradora tinha problemas técnicos – não havia apresentado a correta delimitação da área, por exemplo.
Uarlen Valerio/O Tempo/Folhapress
Os pareceres também minimizaram os impactos ambientais ao dizer que o empreendimento ficaria em uma área já alterada pelo homem. Ignoraram, porém, que a expansão atingiria o Parque Estadual da Serra do Rola Moça, terceiro maior do país em regiões urbanas. Ao atingir o parque, coloca em risco as mananciais que a unidade de conservação protege – cursos d’água como Taboão, Rola Moça, Barreirinho, Barreiro, Mutuca e Catarina; todos servem ao abastecimento da população da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte.
Secretaria do Meio Ambiente classificou as reclamações como ‘questões meramente procedimentais’.Yuri Rafael de Oliveira Trovão, presidente suplente da Câmara de Atividades Minerárias, no entanto, decidiu seguir com o processo. A entidade, então, subiu um degrau e escreveu ao secretário de estado de Meio Ambiente de Minas Gerais, Germano Luiz Gomes Vieira, alegando “necessidade imediata do controle de legalidade da decisão” de Trovão.
O parecer da secretaria de Meio Ambiente mineira foi lido na reunião da Câmara de Atividades Minerárias. Para Germano, os problemas apontados pelo Fonasc eram irrisórios, “questões meramente procedimentais”, e a mudança do tipo de licença requisitada pela Vale tinha sido devidamente anunciada à sociedade por publicação no Diário Oficial do Estado. Dizia ainda que não haveria “qualquer prejuízo ambiental” se o procedimento seguisse os ritos e fosse discutido durante o encontro.
Ali, dia 11 de dezembro, cinco representantes de órgãos do Governo do Estado de Minas Gerais, três de entidades ligadas ao setor produtivo mineiro e o Conselho Regional de Engenharia e Agronomia de Minas Gerais (Crea-MG) votaram a favor do licenciamento, enquanto apenas o Fonasc votou contra. Um mês depois, a barragem da Vale em Brumadinho se rompeu.
Segundo a secretaria estadual do Meio Ambiente, “o empreendimento, e também a barragem, estão devidamente licenciados”. O governo diz que a barragem “não recebia rejeitos desde 2015 e tinha estabilidade garantida pelo auditor, conforme laudo elaborado em agosto de 2018″.
Comunidades reclamam há mais de uma décadaDurante a reunião que concedeu a licença à Vale, moradores de Casa Branca contaram os problemas que enfrentam, como a crônica falta de água que assola a comunidade.
“Alguém vive aqui sem água? Nós estamos vivendo uma crise hídrica já, à beira de um colapso hídrico. Na hora que faltar água, nós vamos nos lembrar do dia de hoje, de tudo que está sendo falado aqui e do que possivelmente vai ser votado aqui hoje. quem está falando que não vai faltar água? A empresa responsável por Bento Rodrigues, a empresa responsável por Mariana, a empresa responsável pelo rio Doce. Vocês se esqueceram disso?”, disse Ka Ribas, uma das representantes da comunidade.
Em dezembro do ano passado, eles chegaram a fazer uma manifestação contra a concessão de novas licenças de mineração na região.
Viver sem água vale? Moradores de Brumadinho protestam contra a mineração na região.
Divulgação
Moradores da região reclamam há mais de 10 anos sobre desmatamento ilegal e a má qualidade da água contaminada pela mineração – a comunidade registra um alto número de problemas dentários por conta no minério de ferro na água.
O minério de ferro é extraído do local desde os anos 1950, e a Vale S.A. opera a mina desde 2003. Foi em 2015 que entrou com o pedido para ampliar a capacidade das minas Córrego do Feijão e Jangada, respectivamente nas cidades de Brumadinho e Sarzedo. Como é praxe nesse tipo de licenciamento, são necessários estudos de impacto e a análise de ambientalistas e pesquisadores para calcular a viabilidade de um empreendimento – e seus respectivos custos ambientais e sociais. Muitos desses estudos são problemáticos.
E vale lembrar: as mineradoras estão entre as principais interessadas em afrouxar as regras de licenciamento ambiental, que está em discussão na Câmara. E o ministro do Meio Ambiente, Ricardo Salles, já mostrou que é da turma que defende a “agilidade” no processo de licenciamento.
Correção: 25 de janeiro de 2019, às 21h46
Este texto inicialmente afirmava, no título, que a ampliação era na barragem – dando a entender que foi na barragem rompida. Na verdade, a ampliação é uma “lavra a céu aberto sem tratamento ou tratamento a seco”.
The post ‘Beira a insanidade’, alertou entidade sobre ampliação da mineração em Brumadinho appeared first on The Intercept.
Elor Azaria, a former Israeli Army medic who became a hero to that nation’s far right by publicly executing a wounded Palestinian suspect in the occupied West Bank in 2016, is the star of a new political advertising campaign for a deputy minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
The former soldier, who was convicted of manslaughter based on video evidence of the crime, served just nine months in jail before being released last summer. In a poster and video message published on Facebook this week by the deputy environment minister, Yaron Mazuz, Azaria is seen grinning and shaking the politician’s hand.
In the video, Mazuz, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, urges supporters to vote for him in a primary election next month, so he can be a candidate in the April general election.
Here's the video: Likud deputy minister Yaron Mazuz recruits Elor Azaria (of Hebron shooting incident fame) and his smirking face to his primaries campaign team. #IsraElex19 pic.twitter.com/f6wHFSorIR
— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) January 23, 2019
“I am sitting next to my friend Elor Azaria, whom we enlisted in our primary campaign, and with God’s help, together with him, we will succeed,” Mazuz says in the video, according to a translation by Lahav Harkov of the Jerusalem Post.
Mazuz also gave Azaria a paid position on his campaign, the Post reported, and called the former soldier’s crime justified. “We have to support our soldiers and let them act according to the threats they face in the battlefield,” Mazuz told Israel’s Channel 12 News. “We cannot tie their hands and neuter them when facing vile murderers.”
Video recorded by a Palestinian witness on March 24, 2016, left no doubt that Azaria did execute the incapacitated suspect, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, after the Palestinian had stabbed an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint in the occupied city of Hebron. By the time Azaria arrived at the scene, the Palestinian had already been shot by another soldier and was stretched out on the pavement, unable to move. Azaria was caught on camera cocking his rifle and firing a single bullet into the suspected attacker’s head, killing him.
When Israel’s Army put the young medic on trial, he was quickly lauded as a hero by a large swath of the Israeli public.
The latest celebration of Azaria horrified Elizabeth Tsurkov, an Israeli rights activist, and Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.
The horror. The soldier caught executing a prone Palestinian assailant in Hebron Elor Azaria, is now a celebrity used to recruit votes in the Likud primaries. The ad for Likud MK Yaron Mazuz reads: "Elor Azaria has joined me, you join too!" https://t.co/dQBSweO6t2
— Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) January 23, 2019
Remember this the next time you see a bill or congressional hearing on Palestinian incitement or glorification of violence. https://t.co/vRUvPPVh7m
— Khaled Elgindy (@elgindy_) January 23, 2019
Last July, following his early release from prison, Azaria was given a hero’s welcome back to the scene of the crime by Israeli settlers in Hebron.
Elor Azaria Receives Hero's Welcome at Scene of Hebron Shootinghttps://t.co/dekWv2hfB3 pic.twitter.com/Tg4gEuFyW1
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) July 4, 2018
As Tsurkov noted, earlier this week, the Israeli Army’s former chief of staff Benny Gantz, who is considered the only serious rival to Netanyahu’s re-election as prime minister, started his own election campaign. Three of the first four ads for Gantz celebrate his record of killing Palestinians, during the Israeli offensives on Gaza in 2012 and 2014.
The other 3 ads focus on Gantz’s “achievements” in Gaza & bear the tagline “only the strong one wins.” 1 video brags about “returning parts of Gaza to the stone age” in the 2014 war, destroying 6,231 militant targets https://t.co/g0zDynW8mg pic.twitter.com/fLzMfwQJ6C
— Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) January 21, 2019
The 3rd video features drone footage of an assassination and brags about the 2012 killing of Ahmad Jaabri, Hamas leader, at the start of the “Pillar of Defense” operation. https://t.co/21Zt9IFup7 pic.twitter.com/MR5iprN9ge
— Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) January 21, 2019
Time and time again, Israel's Center attempts to reach power by presenting itself as more anti-Arab & more savage than the Israeli Right. This strategy usually fails, but helps further demonize Palestinians. Why try to make peace with people whose homes deserve to be obliterated?
— Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) January 21, 2019
The post Israeli Campaign Ad Stars Former Soldier Lauded for Executing Palestinian Suspect appeared first on The Intercept.
Former West Virginia State Sen. Richard Ojeda ended his long-shot presidential bid on Friday. A leader of the state’s teachers strikes last year, Ojeda concluded that the campaign ultimately wasn’t winnable and told his supporters that he could no longer ask people to contribute money to a cause he thought was lost.
“I don’t want to see people send money to a campaign that’s probably not going to get off the ground,” he said in a video he recorded and provided to The Intercept and The Young Turks.
Hints that he was picking up momentum were strong, he said in an accompanying statement, but not strong enough. “The indications were very positive from an overwhelming response to our videos, to thousands of volunteers, and a level of grassroots fundraising support that grew every day. However, the last thing I want to do is accept money from people who are struggling for a campaign that does not have the ability to compete,” he said.
Ojeda said he is planning to announce his next move soon. He launched his presidential bid in November, running as an unapologetic class warrior from an area of the country Donald Trump won handily. (Ojeda voted for Trump and turned on the president early in his term.) Last month, Ojeda released one of the strongest abortion rights platforms in contemporary Democratic politics. He waged an unsuccessful bid for the House in 2018, losing by 13 points in a district that Trump carried by 49 points two years earlier.
He recently joined striking Los Angeles teachers on a picket line.
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book We’ve Got People: The Rise of a New Political Force in American Politics. Sign up here to get an email when it’s released.
The post Richard Ojeda Drops Out of Presidential Race appeared first on The Intercept.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed legislation to impose new sanctions on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad and its allies, and those who do business with them. The move comes a month after President Donald Trump’s announcement to withdraw troops from Syria, and as some Arab governments are thawing relations with the Assad regime, which has all but secured a military victory after nearly eight years of war. The measure has been passed by the House twice in previous sessions, and a companion bill currently remains pending in the Senate.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., reintroduced the standalone version of the Syria bill, H.R. 31, which passed under fast-track procedures. On the Senate side, the bill is one provision rolled into a foreign policy-related package called the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as a lead sponsor. Senate Democrats blocked the bill — designated as S.1, which symbolizes heightened importance — on the grounds that Congress should reopen the government before considering unrelated legislation.
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act is named after the whistleblower who defected from the Assad regime and smuggled tens of thousands of photos of those tortured to death in regime prisons.
The current version of the bill imposes sanctions on anyone engaging in “significant financial, material, or technological support to, or knowingly engages in a significant transaction with” the Syrian government or the governments of Russia and Iran in Syria. It includes an exception for nongovernmental organizations operating in Syria, and it directs the president to come up with a plan regarding the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syrians in need.
The Syrian government has been courting investors to help rebuild parts of the country decimated throughout the multi-pronged Syrian war. Reconstruction plans have largely focused on areas destroyed by Syrian and Russian bombs, like parts of Damascus and Homs, and not cities like Raqqa, which the U.S.-led coalition flattened in its fight against the Islamic State. Western governments have said they will not contribute to reconstruction efforts until progress is made toward a peaceful settlement to the war. The European Union this week imposed a new round of sanctions on business executives and entities doing business with the Assad regime.
Some antiwar groups, including the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Just Foreign Policy, oppose the Caesar bill, considering it a rebuke to the Trump administration’s plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. “FCNL opposed the original draft of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act [the Rubio-Engel Syria-Iran-Russia sanctions bill] in 2017,” the group said in a statement before the House vote. “Since that time, important changes to the legislation have been made, but our core concerns remain the same. In light of President Trump’s recent decision to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, support for this bill is widely being interpreted as an appeal for continued military involvement.”
Chad Brand, a government relations officer at the Syrian American Council, which consulted lawmakers throughout the drafting of the bill, rejects the criticism. He noted that the sanctions don’t endorse any kind of military action and are in no way tied to attempts to keep U.S. forces in the war-torn country.
“This isn’t targeted against the Syrian people, it isn’t targeting humanitarian aid,” Brand said. “If you look specifically at Section 3, to be precise, there’s waiver language that’s in there to ensure that NGOs are not penalized regarding the distribution of aid in the regime areas.”
The White House issued a statement in support of the bill last November. “This bill will help provide additional leverage to achieve the United States government’s objectives to de-escalate the military conflict and support the United Nations-led peace process and a transition to a government in Syria that honors the will of the Syrian people, respects the rule of law and human rights, and peacefully co-exists with its neighbors in the region,” the White House wrote.
H.R. 31, legislation that would impose new levels of sanctions on #Syria with unrealistic conditions that would have to be met before the penalties could be suspended. Send a message now to your reps that you oppose H.R. 31 and not to fast-track it.https://t.co/Zn2R9dZ1j5 pic.twitter.com/5Xk6H2kFjj
— CODEPINK (@codepink) January 23, 2019
The women’s anti-war group Code Pink is one of the more prominent opponents of the bill. Before the House vote, the group urged its supporters to contact their representative to voice their concern over the bill, which they described as an attempt to reverse U.S. withdrawal from Syria through sanctions with “unrealistic conditions” that would have to be met before the penalties could be suspended. “CODEPINK believes that the best way to end the bloodshed and humanitarian crisis in Syria is through a UN-led political negotiation process and that this is what Congress should be supporting,” a spokesperson for the group told The Intercept in an email.
Syria’s U.N.-sponsored peace talks have collapsed and restarted several times since the first round was held in Geneva in 2012. The diplomatic process, which was initially meant to lead to the creation of a transitional government, has not borne fruit partially due to the lack of a coherent opposition, as well as the Assad regime’s pursuit of a military victory rather than a negotiated settlement. Most recently, the U.N. has tried to merge the Geneva process with a separate track known as the Astana talks — spearheaded by Russia, Iran, and Turkey — to set up a constitutional committee. Analysts have noted that this process could give diplomatic cover to the government’s military victory.
The Caesar bill allows for sanctions to be suspended under a number of conditions, including if the Syrian government and its allies cease bombing civilian centers or release political prisoners. The sanctions could also be suspended if the Syrian government takes “verifiable steps to establish meaningful accountability for perpetrators of war crimes in Syria and justice for victims of war crimes committed by the Assad regime, including by participation in a credible and independent truth and reconciliation process.”
Despite its self-proclaimed commitment to grassroots organizing, Code Pink didn’t reach out to any Syrian groups before pronouncing its opposition to the legislation. “While we were not able to reach out to Syrians about this bill, we are part of a number of groups including Just Foreign Policy, Friends Committee on National Legislation, and the National Iranian-American Council who are opposing the legislation,” the group’s spokesperson wrote to The Intercept.
In addition to the Syrian American Council, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which is also a Washington-based, anti-Assad organization, celebrated the bill’s passage in the House. The Day After, a Syrian anti-Assad group based in Istanbul, similarly endorsed the legislation. The SETF also advised lawmakers throughout the drafting process.
In the Senate, the Syria sanctions are included in S.1, the first bill of the 116th Congress. As The Intercept first reported, the Senate package also includes a provision aimed at the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territories. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which has been blasted by free speech groups, gives state and local governments legal authority to boycott any companies that participate in boycotts against Israel. Two of the newly elected Democratic members and the first two Muslim women in Congress, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, are both supporters of the BDS movement — marking a first for U.S. lawmakers.
When asked if he would be willing to put the bill on the House floor if it passes the Senate, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., last week told reporters that “we haven’t counted votes,” but “I think the overwhelming majority don’t want to see Israel hurt.” He added that his colleagues “also want to protect free speech, and I think there are a number of amendments that have been added to the bill since it was originally introduced to affect that end.”
The post Congress Is Pushing Sanctions Against Supporters of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad appeared first on The Intercept.
Sou cria da favela Nova Holanda, na Maré, zona norte do Rio de Janeiro, onde moro desde que nasci. Gosto muito da NH, como costumamos chamar. Nem sei explicar o porquê. Aqui estão meus amigos, minha família. Não pretendo sair da Nova Holanda nunca!
Por mais que ame viver aqui, admito que o dia a dia na favela já foi melhor. Na minha infância, eu tinha mais liberdade para ficar na rua, ainda que meu pai pegasse no meu pé. Ele trabalhava à noite, então me vigiava bastante ao longo do dia. Era preocupação normal, porque eu era seu único filho. Ele me paparicava com dinheiro para ir à lan house. Se eu não estivesse na escola, com certeza estaria jogando CS com os outros garotos. A minha avó, por outro lado, era mais fácil de vencer no ‘desenrolo’. Eu a convencia a me deixar jogar bola na rua. Sempre fui bom de bola, até cheguei a jogar nas categorias de base do Fluminense, em Xerém, por volta dos 11, 12 anos de idade.
Nessa época, era raro acontecer operação policial e, quando eles vinham, a ação ocorria de forma diferente. Eles chegavam de blazer, não de caveirão. E não era tão violento também.
O clima na favela piorou de 2014 para cá. Quando a polícia e o Exército passaram a vir com mais frequência, a insegurança na Maré aumentou, e eu comecei a ver o lugar onde moro como uma área de risco. A presença deles e a forma como atuam sempre geram conflito com arma de fogo, o que impede os moradores de realizar suas atividades. Eu sou um deles.
Minha rotina é simples. Acordo às 8h para estar na aula às 9h. Participo de uma agência-escola de jornalismo, a Narra, vinculada ao Observatório de Favelas, também na Nova Holanda. As atividades acontecem três vezes na semana, pela manhã. No tempo livre, converso com meus amigos na rua. Em dia de operação, não dá para fazer nada disso: em menos de três meses, já perdi oito aulas. Sem contar os momentos de lazer. E não sou só eu. De acordo com o laboratório de dados sobre violência armada Fogo Cruzado, ao menos 170 escolas e creches de ensino públicas foram afetadas durante os tiroteiros e disparos com arma de fogo em 2018, um aumento de 204% em relação a 2017. Ontem, dia 24, o caveirão voador disparou próximo a uma colônia de férias.
Em 2018, tiroteios próximos a escolas foram recorrentes: o número de unidades de ensino afetadas por tiros nas proximidades aumentou 204%.
Imagem: Observatório da Intervenção
Da minha casa, na Rua Tatajuba, até a agência, na Teixeira Ribeiro, é um trajeto bem curto, uns 10 minutos a pé. Entretanto, é inviável chegar lá. A minha rua faz parte da divisa entre a Nova Holanda e a Baixa do Sapateiro. Alguns traficantes costumam ficar por aqui, por isso, geralmente há confronto com a polícia.
Minha mãe trabalha em um hospital e, frequentemente, precisa faltar para ficar comigo e com meu sobrinho, de 10 anos. Já perdi a conta de quantas vezes ele deixou de ir à aula também, no Ciep Elis Regina, na Rubens Vaz. Ela fica com medo de sair, e os policiais entrarem na casa e fazerem alguma covardia, como já os vi fazer muitas vezes aqui na favela.
Fui alvejado na costela quando tinha 16 anos, em junho de 2016.Nesta última operação mais violenta, os policiais entraram na favela à noite. Minha família e eu ficamos até as 16h do dia seguinte sem conseguir sair de casa. Não deu nem pra ir comprar pão. A casa nunca chegou a ser atingida por disparo, porém a toda hora chegava notícia de mais alguém morto ou ferido. A Zezé da loja de tatuagem, o MC Rodson, até morador de rua a polícia matou. O Daniel, um dos mortos na operação, era gente boa, todo mundo gostava dele. Os feirantes davam a ele o que ficava para a ‘chepa’, e alguns moradores doavam refeições também.
A comunicação entre a galera da favela rola o tempo todo, seja por ligação, pelas páginas de bairro no Facebook ou pelo WhatsApp. Um informa ao outro o que está acontecendo para que se protejam. O perigo que eu sofro é o mesmo para todos, pois os policiais não respeitam os moradores.
Eu procuro me preservar um pouco mais nas operações, porque em uma delas aconteceu uma fatalidade comigo. Fui alvejado na costela quando tinha 16 anos, em junho de 2016. Desde então, me sinto mal em dia de operação, me vem à mente a imagem do momento em que fui baleado. Não gosto de pensar sobre isso, pois também perdi amigos que eram como irmãos para mim nessa mesma ação da polícia. Lembro de sentir sede, muita sede… Passei quatro meses no hospital. Minha irmã dormiu comigo todos os dias, com medo de que eu não resistisse. Foi a pior experiência da minha vida. Sobrevivi e passei a andar de cadeira de rodas.
Passei dois anos sem ficar na rua. Até saía para longe, para o shopping, por exemplo, mas aqui na Nova Holanda eu sentia vergonha. Não queria suportar o olhar estranho das pessoas. Meu medo do que elas pensariam me fez enfrentá-las. Passei a encará-las de cara feia. Quem me convenceu foi um fotógrafo aqui da Maré, o Bira Carvalho. Ele também havia sido baleado na juventude. Quase todo dia ele vinha à minha casa para tentar me convencer a sair. A gente jogava videogame – ele é mais viciado que eu – e o Bira prometia me levar a vários lugares. Por insistência dele, me inscrevi na agência.
Foi bom voltar a andar na favela, porque todo mundo me conhece. Se eu estiver sozinho e cair, sei que alguém vai me ajudar. Estou até me sentindo meio famoso, porque, há uns três meses, consertaram um buraco na rua a meu pedido. Os meninos pediram a um vizinho se ele poderia utilizar um pouco do cimento da obra na casa dele para nivelar um trecho na Teixeira Ribeiro. No dia seguinte, enquanto eu ia à aula, reparei, e ele me contou.
The post A Polícia e o Exército me impedem de estudar: em 3 meses, perdi 8 aulas por causa das operações appeared first on The Intercept.
A New York Police Department officer at a Police Academy graduation ceremony in New York on June 29, 2017.
Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP
Last March, the New York State Senate unanimously passed a bill that should have always been a law. Senate bill S7708 asserts that when a person is “under arrest, detention or otherwise in actual custody” by a police officer or other law enforcement official, that person is incapable of consenting to a sexual encounter. That is to say the obvious: There’s no uncoerced sex in police custody — there’s only rape.
There is little common sense informing the legal battle that Anna Chambers currently faces in trying to prove that she was raped by two New York Police Department officers.Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the legislation “common-sense reform” that closes an “egregious loophole.” That being said, there is little common sense informing the legal battle that Anna Chambers currently faces in trying to prove that she was raped by two New York Police Department officers who admit to having sex with her while she was in their custody in September 2017, as DNA tests confirmed. The latest updates in Chambers’s case demonstrate a judicial process continuing to operate under the pernicious logic of a perverse legal loophole — allowing cops to claim, impossibly, that consent was given — even as the loophole is being closed.
Chambers — who uses a pseudonym to protect her privacy — has remained consistent about the central aspects of her story since The Intercept first covered it in October 2017: On the night of September 15, 2017, she and two male friends were stopped by the police while driving in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. The cops searched the car and found a small amount of drugs. Only Chambers was then detained, handcuffed, and placed in NYPD detectives Richard Hall and Edward Martins’s unmarked van. They drove a short distance and then Chambers was forced to perform oral sex on both officers and vaginal sex with Martins. Then the cops left her on a corner.
Chambers went to a hospital that night; a rape kit confirmed the presence of the officers’ semen in her mouth and vagina. Within hours of Chambers’s civil attorney Michael David filing a lawsuit against the NYPD, a story was leaked to the New York Post in which the officers claimed that the sex was consensual. “The police were trying to get ahead of the story,” David told me at the time.
The police officers are poised to continue using that defense in court, in a trial that was slated to begin this week.
“If the law [S7708] was on the books when the rape occurred, this case would be shut and closed already,” New York City Council Member Mark Treyger told me. Treyger, on hearing of Chambers’s case, was the first public official to call for a change in state legislation. “I’m disappointed in this latest turn of events,” Treyger said, “that Ms. Anna Chambers has to relive this trauma again, while every syllable she has said is tracked. What message are we sending when we have a confession, we have DNA evidence, and we still can’t guarantee her the justice she deserves?”
As of last week, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office prosecuting Hall and Martins — who have since been fired — for the first-degree rape of Chambers asked to be removed from the case and replaced with a special prosecutor. Defense lawyers in the case made the same rare request for a special prosecutor. As such, the trial, which was meant to begin on Tuesday, has been delayed as the judge reviews the request. The next scheduled court date is February 6.
Key among the reasons the prosecution cited for asking to be replaced is Chambers’s credibility as a witness. In its letter to the judge, the district attorney’s office claimed that Chambers, who was 18 at the time of the rape, made “a series of false, misleading, and inconsistent statements about the facts of this case and about collateral or unrelated matters.” The letter continued, “Most troubling, she made some false statements under oath.” The prosecutors cite Chambers’s “hostility” to their office and note that due to her “false, misleading and inconsistent statements … legal requirements prohibit us from calling her to testify under oath.”
With DNA evidence and admissions by the defendants of sex with a detainee, Chambers’s testimony should be irrelevant and unnecessary.Therein lies the iniquity at the core of its case: With DNA evidence and admissions by the defendants of sex with a detainee, Chambers’s testimony should be irrelevant and unnecessary. Instead, it is the teen’s credibility and character under legal and public scrutiny. The defense has asked for a special prosecutor empowered to investigate the survivor herself for perjury and “related offenses” — a risk Chambers should not be facing were the DNA evidence and cops’ admissions considered sufficient to show rape.
Chambers took to Twitter last week to deny that she lied under oath. “No. I only said what the DA told me to say,” she wrote. But, again, if the case were not organized around an outdated and glaring legislative failure, Chambers would not need to testify to prove a rape occurred. It is an indictment of the legal system that the common sense of S7708 has not already been applied in this case. Sound legal judgement, even if not represented de jure law, should assert that the power dynamic between a police officer and a handcuffed detainee precludes consent. “If our system doesn’t get this case right, there will be a great chilling effect,” Treyger told me.
There’s a risk in suggesting that a legislative reform like the passage of S7708 will deliver justice to future survivors of police sexual assault — a risk within the broader mistake of conflating law with justice. It’s feasible that had the law already been on the books at the time of Chambers’s rape, her assaulters would not have admitted to sex on duty as a defense; perhaps they would have claimed that the sex occurred off-duty and yet again a grimy he-said-she-said of so many sexual assaults would have ensued.
Even once the laws around on-duty rape are expanded, there’s little doubt that police will continue to presume much of the impunity to which they are accustomed. Under New York penal law, for example, it is already the case that there can be no consensual sex between corrections officers and detainees. But a 2012 Justice Department report found that half of the 200,000-plus sexual assaults reported in U.S. detention centers every year cited prison guards or staff as the alleged abuser.
This, we know: Because of Chambers’s case — and the widespread recognition that what happened to her constituted rape — a grievous flaw in New York law came to light and has been addressed. It is an injustice on a historic scale that the 19-year-old survivor cannot rely upon the very law that her torturous experience helped change.
The post The Rape of Anna Chambers Led to a Change in New York Law — but She Can’t Benefit From It appeared first on The Intercept.
On the 35th day of the U.S. government shutdown, President Trump announced that he would sign legislation to reopen the government for three weeks—up to February 15—without a $5.7-billion border-wall guarantee. Friday began with major airport delays throughout the northeast, and is ending with the bill to reopen the government passing in Congress and heading to the president’s desk. But the deadlock is ending how it began in December: with the president accepting a deal he’d earlier rejected.
Longtime Trump friend and associate Roger Stone was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller earlier in the day. The indictment connects a few more potential dots between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign: After WikiLeaks released stolen Democratic emails in July of 2016, “a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had “regarding the Clinton campaign.” Natasha Bertrand writes about the questions that remain unanswered. (Need a reminder of who exactly Roger Stone is? This timeline should help.)
Bryan Singer will still be directing the new film Red Sonja. After a recent Atlantic investigation containing accusations against Singer of alleged rape and coercive sex with men and underaged boys, the CEO of the company producing Red Sonja issued a terse statement, mentioning the amount of money Singer’s recent movie Bohemian Rhapsody generated. Here’s an industry where the ability to make money—for oneself or for a corporation—can serve as its own exoneration, Megan Garber writes.
“Western governments’ complicity, primarily by way of silence, gives authoritarian rulers confidence in their actions.” Matthew Hedges was a British academic jailed for seven months last year in the United Arab Emirates for alleged espionage. He writes publicly about his harrowing experience for the first time here.
Evening Read
(Photo: Jennifer A. Smith / Getty)
Socially conscious grocery shoppers have long been eager to remedy one of the most-cited problems in the food industry: unused produce. Start-ups that put together boxes of “ugly” fruits and veggies have popped up to tackle the issue. Can they have real impact?
“Depending on who you ask, ugly produce is either the salvation or destruction of America’s food system. The reality of its potential impact might be a little more complicated, with start-ups profiting from the food system’s structural problems while also providing real, material good for working-class people. It seems as though ‘ugly’ produce companies didn’t anticipate the criticism they’ve received.”
→ Read the rest.
(Still from The Favourite / Fox)
Read: The Man Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma’s second book, An Orchestra of Minorities, is a recasting of Homer’s Odyssey epic—for the protagonists in each tale, “mere survival is the most amazing feat of all.”
Watch: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated The Favourite, and watch it especially for the ways the three female leads move—flail, stomp, fall, storm—through the halls of power, with “refreshing range and complexity.”
Listen: The indie rocker Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album, Remind Me Tomorrow, is a celebration of vulnerability. The songs have a pop accessibility; yet “they also blur and drift, edging from expected notes to weird ones.”
Poem of the WeekOn this chaotic Friday, here is an excerpt from “Rope’s End,” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning former U.S. poet laureate, Howard Nemerov:
Unraveling a rope
You begin at the end.
Taking the finished work
You pick it to its bits,
Straightening out the crossed,
Deriving many from one.
→ Read the rest, from The Atlantic’s September 1967 issue.
Reporting Residency
The Atlantic is launching a program to help cultivate a new generation of public-service journalists. We’re looking for emerging writers who are interested in working with Atlantic editors to report and write a portfolio piece or series. The residency lasts three months and comes with a $15,000 stipend. Pitches are due by January 27. Apply here.
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult throughout the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Friday, January 25. On the 35th day of the government shutdown, federal employees missed their second consecutive paycheck, and travel was delayed across the country after the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily halted incoming flights at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, citing a staffing shortage. Escalating consequences appeared to cause President Donald Trump to capitulate.
Too Much Pressure: In an afternoon address from the Rose Garden, Trump agreed to sign a continuing resolution to fund the government through February 15, without $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall—the same deal that the president rejected before. Both the House and Senate are expected to pass the legislation on Friday night.
No Stone Unturned: Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted and arrested the Trump ally and former campaign adviser Roger Stone, alleging that he had served as a go-between for the campaign and WikiLeaks, to coordinate the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Stone, the self-described “dirty trickster” of Republican politics, has a long history of involvement in Trumpworld: He and Trump met—and hit it off—in the 1980s. In an interview on Friday, Stone pledged to never turn on the president, and called the charges against him “bogus.”
Snapshot
Roger Stone, a former campaign adviser for President Donald Trump, walks out of the federal courthouse following a hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Lynne Sladky / AP
Ideas From The AtlanticPelosi Defeats Trump (Alex Wagner)
“Trump’s pugilistic impulses … have been virtually unchecked—especially these days, when he is without administration minders. But Pelosi has rendered Trump unable to employ his traditional weaponry.” → Read on.
Trump Associates Keep Taking Notes on Conspiracies (Adam Serwer
“If Donald Trump’s advisers had only watched The Wire, many of the president’s aides and associates might have saved themselves a great deal of legal trouble.” → Read on.
Roger Stone’s Arrest Means Congress Must Act (David Frum)
“But now—now!—the country is in danger. Now—now!—it is headed by a president whose fundamental loyalty to the United States cannot intelligently be trusted. Waiting for Mueller has always been a slow option. That slowness more and more appears a danger that the country cannot safely risk.” → Read on.
The Trump Administration Is Proving Blind to the Shutdown’s Damage (Annie Lowrey)
“Trump’s top staffers have argued that the damage is temporary and that the lost economic activity is recoverable. In this telling, the shutdown is an economic event like a hurricane … But this shutdown has gone on for so long, and has affected so many families and businesses, that its effects might be more permanent than in the past, economists have started to argue.” → Read on.
◆ How Grief Became Joe Biden’s ‘Superpower’ (Michael Kruse, Politico)
◆ Elizabeth Warren to Propose Spreading the Wealth Around (Eric Levitz, New York)
◆ On Venezuela, ‘Democratic Socialists’ Are More Socialist Than Democratic (Noah Rothman, Commentary)
◆ If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Were a Conservative (Marc A. Thiessen, The Washington Post)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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Historically, the women’s restroom was seen as a luxury. In 19th-century urban areas, public spaces and, by extension, public bathrooms were male-dominated. That legacy could be one of the reasons women have to endure longer lines than men do to use the bathroom in most buildings, stadiums, and other public venues, writes Joe Pinsker. Today’s architects, developers, and code officials (who are often mostly male themselves) might assume that equal access to facilities is as simple as square footage—but that doesn’t account for the fact that more urinals fit in a restroom than toilets, for example. While there’s a push for “potty parity,” others want to do away with the gender separation altogether.
Tara Fallaux’s documentary short celebrates the strength of vulnerability: She asked people to read their love letters—written to exes, crushes, and lovers—out loud and on camera. “Most of the people I spoke with loved the idea and were happy to share their stories with me,” Fallaux told The Atlantic. “However, hardly anyone dared to participate in the film. Too intimate, too painful, too naked.” Those who did share their letters help reveal the quiet power of honestly accepting emotions and insecurities.
HighlightsThe Atlantic staff writer Ashley Fetters attended the 46th annual March for Life on January 19, where she observed somewhat unexpected groups: secular and left-leaning pro-lifers. These attendees are a kind of “counterculture” within the movement, she writes, who emphasize the scientific evidence that life begins at conception. While religious organizations at the march certainly outnumbered nonreligious ones, Fetters found that the latter group felt comfortable there—for the most part.
Dear Therapist
BIANCA BAGNARELLIEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, a reader writes to Lori about her boyfriend’s surprise Christmas gift: a ring, but not an engagement ring. She’s disappointed because they’ve talked about marriage, but now is wondering whether he’s trying to put off their engagement.
Lori’s advice: Discuss the associations you both have with marriage, and why he seems worried about moving forward.
For you it may signify safety, trust, and commitment, and for him it might signify something entirely different … Maybe he feels he can’t live up to whatever idea he has in his head about the role of “husband.” Maybe he worries that he’d be the one to disappoint you. Maybe he didn’t see a loving marriage in his own home growing up, and now he worries about making a mistake or the marriage not lasting.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
In mid-December, Donald Trump seemed prepared to cave—yet again—on funding for his border wall. The president had repeatedly failed to secure money for construction. He still wanted to build it, but the Senate had already passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the government running, and the House stood ready to do so as well. Although Trump had said earlier in December that he would be “proud” to shut down the government, his White House spent a week walking that pledge back.
But after an onslaught of criticism from conservative media, Trump suddenly changed his mind: He would, in fact, refuse to approve any funding that didn’t allocate $5.7 billion toward the wall.
As is now clear, however, it’s not that Trump didn’t cave—he merely delayed caving. On Friday, the president announced a deal to reopen the government through February 15, buying time for a longer-term agreement. The announcement is a big win for Democrats, who had demanded that Trump reopen the government before they’d negotiate on border security. Trump did not sound especially optimistic that Democrats would give him the money he’s requested. Replacing his standard refrain of “Build the wall,” Trump was hopeful he could get “whatever you want to call it.”
[Read: The president has a consistent pattern: Talk a big game, then back down]
“After 36 days of spirited debate and dialogue, I have seen and heard from enough Democrats and Republicans that they are willing to put partisanship aside, I think, and put the security of the American people first,” he said. “I do believe they’re going to do that. They have said they are for complete border security, and they have finally and fully acknowledged that having barriers, fencing, or walls—or whatever you want to call it—will be an important part of the solution.”
In other words, Trump not only folded—sustaining all the political damage that he would have in December—but he did so only after a long, bruising shutdown that hurt his public approval and split off even some of his core supporters. This dubious strategy is in keeping with the president’s modus operandi. As I have written, Trump almost always folds. From tougher gun control to family separations at the border to negotiations with hostile actors (from Pyongyang to the Democratic caucus), the president talks a tough game and then generally gives in.
Trump’s desire for the wall is genuine. Hoping to make good on his central campaign promise, he has pursued the project with remarkable tenacity. Unfortunately for him, he has also pursued it with incompetence. After two years as president, Trump still evinces little understanding of how the government works. His vision of the presidency is entirely romantic and cinematic: The heroic chief executive uses the bully pulpit, and the rest of Washington gets in line. Trump is not the only president to underestimate the difficulty of getting things done, but it is surprising that after nearly two years in office, he still doesn’t recognize that simply demanding things without any plan won’t work.
[Read: Trump can’t get what he wants and doesn’t know why]
The deal to end the shutdown isn’t the first time Trump has been forced into agreeing to a stopgap funding bill he doesn’t like. In March 2018, he grudgingly signed a spending package that Congress sent him, having previously threatened a veto. The president said he agreed to approve the bill, despite his reservations, because it funded the military, but he was livid that he hadn’t gotten money for the wall.
“I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump said. “I’m not going to do it again.”
As it turned out, that was just another one of the president’s many false statements.
He relished his late-night phone calls with Donald Trump in 2016. He was regularly in touch with a senior Trump campaign official about WikiLeaks’ plans to destroy Trump’s foe, Hillary Clinton. And now Roger Stone, the longtime adviser to Trump and a self-proclaimed “dirty trickster,” has met his reckoning. Just before 6 a.m. on Friday, federal agents wielding guns and ballistic vests arrested Stone, who was then indicted on seven felony counts including obstruction and witness tampering by Trump’s other biggest foe—Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Stone said on Friday that he intends to fight the charges and go to trial.
Throughout his decades-long career operating in Republican circles, Stone, who has a likeness of Richard Nixon tattooed on his back, has taken pride in mastering the “black arts” of politics. He’s been accused of threatening political opponents, has been sued for defamation, and regularly spreads conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination and Hillary Clinton’s infidelity. He served as Trump’s Washington lobbyist in the late 1990s and early 2000s and has been encouraging him to run for president for more than a decade. “Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald,” Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, said of Stone in a 2017 documentary. Though he wasn’t initially seen as an integral part of Trump’s campaign, he kept hovering—and now the dirty tricks have finally caught up with him.
“It’s a sunny place for shady people,” Stone said, quoting W. Somerset Maugham when asked by The New Yorker in 2008 why he lives in Miami. “I fit right in.”
The indictment unsealed on Friday offers the clearest link yet between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and suggests that the Trump campaign might have known about additional stolen emails before they were released. In late July 2016, after WikiLeaks had released stolen Democratic emails, “a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had “regarding the Clinton campaign,” the indictment said.
The indictment also details the extent of Stone’s scheming in 2016 to find emails damaging to Clinton; how he communicated those plans to Trump’s campaign team; and his efforts to prevent a key witness from disclosing his efforts to the FBI, calling him a “rat.” His false statements to the House Intelligence Committee during his September 2017 interview about his ties to WikiLeaks comprised five of the seven counts against him.
Over the past two years, more and more evidence has emerged of Stone’s wrongdoing as details have been reported about his conversations with associates and interactions with WikiLeaks in 2016. But he has remained defiant, taking to Instagram regularly to proclaim his innocence, attacking critics, requesting donations for his legal defense fund, and consistently swearing that he would never turn on Trump. He stuck to that on Friday, telling professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an interview shortly before his appearance outside the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, federal courthouse that he would never “bear false witness against the president,” and that the charges brought against him were “thin” and “bogus.”
[Read: A brief history of Roger Stone]
By the time Stone began seeking out more WikiLeaks releases in late July 2016, it had already been reported that Russia was behind the theft of Democratic emails released by WikiLeaks on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. Mueller, who has been investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia since May 2017, has not accused Stone of having any improper contacts with Russian nationals in pursuit of the Clinton emails. (Stone has long promoted the conspiracy theory, repeatedly debunked by the U.S. intelligence community, that the DNC hack was an inside job—effectively amplifying propaganda pushed by Russia to deflect blame for the election interference.) But like former National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, and the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen before him, Stone’s efforts to conceal his Russia-related activities during the 2016 election were his downfall.
In May 2016, Stone met with a Russian national, Henry Greenberg, on the promise of obtaining Clinton dirt, and exchanged private Twitter messages with a user known as Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to have “penetrated Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers” but was later characterized by U.S. officials as a front for Russian military intelligence. Stone also said several times in 2016 that he was directly in touch with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but he began to walk those claims back in early 2017, drawing more scrutiny from congressional and federal investigators and ensnaring several of his contacts in the process.
“I had no contact with Assange,” Stone told ABC last month, despite the fact that he exchanged private messages with WikiLeaks on Twitter in October 2016. He also said he would never turn on the president. “There’s no circumstance under which I would testify against the president, because I’d have to bear false witness against him,” Stone said. “I’d have to make things up, and I’m not going to do that.” Trump appeared to appreciate that. “Nice to know that some people still have ‘guts!’” he tweeted in response. Mueller first drew a line directly between Stone and Trump in a draft court document made public in November. In that document, Mueller said that Stone was understood to be in regular contact with “then-candidate Donald J. Trump” in 2016—a detail that reportedly unnerved Trump’s legal team.
One of the biggest unanswered questions is whether Stone and the Trump campaign coordinated WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta to distract from the damaging Access Hollywood tape, which showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. The emails were dumped just minutes after the tape was released on October 7, 2016, and the Stone indictment reveals a tantalizing new detail: Shortly after the Podesta emails were released, a Trump campaign associate texted Stone, “well done.” Stone then took credit for having correctly predicted the “October surprise,” according to Mueller. (Stone was not the only member of Trump’s campaign communicating with WikiLeaks during the election. WikiLeaks also exchanged private Twitter messages with Donald Trump Jr., who provided the correspondence to congressional investigators. WikiLeaks continued to message Trump Jr. through July 2017.)
[Read: The smoking guns are sitting out in the open]
Stone’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in September 2017 might have been what ultimately sealed his fate. According to Mueller, Stone “made deliberately false and misleading statements to the committee concerning, among other things, his possession of documents pertinent” to the committee’s investigation and his communications with the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks.
Stone also appeared to lie about who his key back channel to Assange really was. The indictment details texts Stone wrote in late July 2016 to Jerome Corsi, a right-wing writer and conspiracy theorist, to “Get to Assange at Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending WikiLeaks emails.” Days later, Corsi replied with some news in another email, according to the Stone indictment: “Word is friend in Embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
The interactions between Stone and Corsi appear to strengthen New York radio host Randy Credico’s denials that he was the back channel. They also reveal that Stone wasn’t just looking for confirmation from Credico that Assange had the goods, as he told the panel in his supplemental statement. He was actively seeking out more stolen emails via Corsi.
But Stone never disclosed his conversations with Corsi to the House Intelligence Committee, according to Mueller, and intimidated Credico into cooperating with his version of events. “I’m not talking to the FBI and if your smart you won’t either,” Stone told Credico in a December 2017 text message. When Credico told Stone that he should have just been “honest” with the House Intelligence Committee rather than opening himself up to perjury charges, Stone replied: “You are so full of [expletive]. You got nothing.”
Stone didn’t stop there. In April 2018, he wrote to Credico: “You are a rat,” according to text messages obtained by Mueller. “A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds.” Stone also threatened to take Credico’s dog away from him, and said: “Prepare to die.” Additionally, Stone allegedly lied to the committee about having emails related to WikiLeaks and Assange.
The White House has stuck to a line it uses every time Mueller brings a new indictment: no collusion, and no ties to Trump. “The indictment today does not allege Russian collusion by Roger Stone or anyone else,” Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow said in a statement. “Rather, the indictment focuses on alleged false statements Mr. Stone made to Congress.” “This has nothing to do with the president, and certainly nothing to do with the White House,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in response to the charges brought against Stone on Friday.
If Stone is worried, though, he’s not showing it. “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he told reporters on the steps of the courthouse on Friday, smiling as they shouted questions at him and onlookers chanted, “Lock him up.” He flashed a “V” for victory sign, à la his former mentor, Richard Nixon, before walking back into the courthouse.
On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump walked into the Rose Garden to announce, effectively, that he was throwing in the towel. After shutting down the government as part of a 35-day executive tantrum to secure funding for his proposed border wall with Mexico, Trump announced a plan to reopen the government for the next three weeks while House and Senate negotiators look at border-security funding measures. The government will reopen, and no wall is in sight.
It was the coda to what has been a national misery and a rolling disaster for the self-designated deal maker: By Friday afternoon, Trump’s disapproval rating had shot up five points since the start of the federal freeze, and one in five Americans polled said that the shutdown had personally inconvenienced them. This sure didn’t seem like big-shot master strategy.
The Rose Garden capitulation, besides providing the capstone to Trump’s public disgrace, was an undeniable victory for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and a lesson about the new Washington power dynamic: The Donald has met his match.
[Read: The shutdown deal is the same one Trump previously rejected]
From her very first shutdown scrap with Trump in the Oval Office in mid-December, shortly before the federal drama officially began, the speaker was clearly not going to be politely deferential to the whims and wisecracks of the president. Within moments of being offered the chance to speak with the press during a televised gaggle, Pelosi had edged Trump off his footing:
“We should not have a Trump shutdown …” Pelosi said.
“A what? Did you say ‘Trump’?” he replied.
Indeed, she had said “Trump shutdown,” and by the conclusion of their unfortunately televised conclave, Trump had been fully lured into the bear trap: “I’ll tell you what, I am proud to shut down the government for border security … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it. The last time you shut it down, it didn’t work. I will take the mantle of shutting down, and I’m going to shut it down for border security.”
Trump, and his advisers, have known ever since that it would be impossible to blame Democrats for the shutdown, and the American public has not forgotten, either. (A majority blame Trump and Republicans.) Trump would never really recover from it.
[Read: The longest shutdown in history reaches a breaking point]
As things got progressively worse, as more unpaid federal workers lined up for canned food and more security agencies made public the ways in which the shutdown was compromising their basic capability to operate, Trump’s inability to land a punch—to even swing!—became embarrassingly apparent.
After a series of letters litigating whether (or not) the president would be allowed to deliver a State of the Union address next week, Pelosi this Wednesday informed Trump that no, the House was closed.
In response, the president … caved.
Late that night, he tweeted:
As the Shutdown was going on, Nancy Pelosi asked me to give the State of the Union Address. I agreed. She then changed her mind because of the Shutdown, suggesting a later date. This is her prerogative--I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over…
“Nancy’s Prerogative” might be the name of an Irish bar, but in this case it signaled the waving of the presidential white flag, a fairly shocking thing to see on any war front. Trump’s pugilistic impulses, after all, have been virtually unchecked—especially these days, when he is without administration minders. But Pelosi has rendered Trump unable to employ his traditional weaponry. He couldn’t even muster the juju necessary to formulate that most Trumpian of Trump battle strategies, a demeaning nickname. “Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her,” Trump said on Wednesday, “doesn’t want to hear the truth.”
[Peter Beinart: Democrats are blowing a golden opportunity]
Nancy—also known as “Nancy.” This was not just the basement of creative nomenclature; it signaled something else: defeat. Some sort of mystical Pelosian shield rendered the disrespecter in chief unable to skewer her. In reality, that shield is probably power. Here is what the former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res told The New York Times about Pelosi:
[She represents] a new challenge to Mr. Trump’s lifelong tactics. One blind spot [Res] observed was that Mr. Trump “believes he’s better than anyone who ever lived” and saw even the most capable of women as easy to run over. “But there was never a woman with power that he ran up against, until Pelosi,” she said. “And he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s totally in a corner.”
Trump has intersected with powerful women before—Hillary Clinton, most notably—and showed little hesitation to diminish and demean. But Pelosi, who once joked to me she eats nails for breakfast, is a ready warrior. She is happy to meet the demands of war, whereas Clinton was reluctant, semi-disgusted, and annoyed to be dragged to the depths that running against Trump demanded. The speaker of the House is, technically, a coastal elite from San Francisco, but she was trained in the hurly-burly of machine politics of Baltimore by her father, Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. It is not a coincidence that Pelosi has managed, over and over, to vanquish her rivals in the challenges for Democratic leadership: she flocks to the fight, not just because she usually wins, but apparently because she likes it.
To be powerful and to also need nothing is to be in the catbird seat, and Pelosi, in this moment, had both: her House majority is on offense, and the shutdown was—and now forevermore will be—Trump’s humiliation. If we can give credit to the president in this moment of failure, perhaps it is in the fact that he likely recognized, before even the first federal worker was furloughed, that Pelosi had already won.
Updated at 7:29 p.m. ET on January 25, 2019.
On the 35th day of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Donald Trump gave in.
And for all the drama of the past month, the deadlock over whether to construct a wall along the southern border will end, for now, how it began: with the president accepting a deal he previously rejected, punting the question a few weeks down the road.
Trump on Friday afternoon said he would sign legislation to reopen the government for three weeks without the $5.7 billion in funding for a wall that he has demanded, unyielding, throughout the impasse. “In a short while, I will sign a bill to open our government for three weeks until February 15,” Trump said during remarks in the White House Rose Garden. “I will make sure that all employees receive their back pay very quickly or as soon as possible. It’ll happen fast.”
Trump asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to put a bill ending the shutdown on the floor “immediately”—an unequivocal endorsement that Republicans had been seeking. Moments after Trump spoke, McConnell said on the Senate floor that he would do exactly that, paving the way for a rapid end to the shutdown. By 5 p.m. Eastern, the Senate had approved the legislation by voice vote, and the House followed suit later in the evening.
The agreement Trump endorsed represents an unmitigated defeat for the president, who repeatedly rejected calls from both Republicans and Democrats to postpone negotiations over a border-security package until after the government reopened. Indeed, it appears to be nearly identical to the deal Republicans endorsed—and Trump rejected—five weeks ago in an effort to head off a shutdown. After weeks of “spirited debate and dialogue,” Trump said, “I have seen and heard from enough Democrats and Republicans that they are willing to put partisanship aside, I think, and put the security of the American people first. I do believe they’re going to do that.”
Democrats celebrated the president’s decision while lamenting that it took so long for him to reach it. “It’s sad,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters, “that it’s taken this long to come to an obvious conclusion.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would now engage in a House-Senate conference committee to hash out broader legislation funding the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the year. “Hopefully it means a lesson has been learned,” he said, referring to Trump. “Shutting down government over a policy difference is self-defeating.” A Senate Democratic aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal conversations, said the deal emerged after Schumer rejected a bid from Trump to reopen the government “with a down payment on the wall.”
[Read: Trump was always going to fold on the border wall]
In typical fashion, the president did not concede defeat but held out hope that talks over the next several weeks would yield a bill that funds the wall. “Many disagree, but I really feel that working with Democrats and Republicans we can make a truly great and secure deal happen for everyone,” Trump said. “Walls should not be controversial.” At the end of his remarks, however, he warned that the government could shut down in February if he does not get his way. “If we don’t get a fair deal from Congress,” he said, “the government will either shut down on February 15 again or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the Constitution of the United States to address this emergency.”
In the end, Trump’s hand was forced by angry and anxious Senate Republicans as well as by the cascading impact of the shutdown the president once said he’d proudly “own.” A crisis that Trump had tried to conjure on the southern border—vigorously disputed by congressional Democrats—had materialized instead in the nation’s airports, national parks, FBI and IRS offices, and the homes of well over 1 million federal employees and contractors who had gone without pay for more than a month.
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been working without getting paid. The financial burden caused callouts at the Transportation Security Administration to rise to levels two or three times above normal, straining the nation’s aviation system. It all seemed to come to a head on Friday morning, a day after the Senate rejected competing plans to reopen the government, including one that included money for Trump’s wall. A shortage of air-traffic controllers forced New York’s LaGuardia Airport to order a brief ground stop, while associated delays plagued airports elsewhere. On Thursday, the unions representing air-traffic controllers, pilots, and flight attendants warned that the shutdown was threatening the safety of the traveling public along with their members. “In our risk-averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break,” they said in a statement. “It is unprecedented.”
Meanwhile, public opinion turned decidedly against Trump and Republicans in Congress. Polls released over the past several days showed a consistent drop in the president’s approval rating, with respondents blaming him for the shutdown instead of Democrats by a wide margin. As the shutdown dragged on, labor groups representing federal employees made clear which party they held responsible. “Do we have your attention now, Leader McConnell? All lawmakers?” asked Sara Nelson, the president of the flight attendants’ union, in a statement responding to Friday’s airport disruptions. “Open the government and then get back to the business of democracy to discuss whatever issue you so choose. This shutdown must end immediately. Our country’s entire economy is on the line.”
In Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, dialogue from The Godfather is presented as the urtext, the key to the masculine code, “the sum of all wisdom,” as Tom Hanks’s character emails Meg Ryan’s at one point in the film. In the shadowy, conspiratorial circle that so often seems to surround Donald Trump, the Mafia’s cryptic lingo plays the same role.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone charges that Stone urged Randy Credico, the radio personality who Mueller says served as Stone’s intermediary with WikiLeaks, to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’ ’’ and lie to the House Intelligence Committee, rather than contradict Stone’s 2017 testimony that he and Credico had not exchanged any messages during the 2016 presidential campaign.
In fact, Mueller’s indictment alleges, Stone and Credico had texted and emailed each other often during the campaign, including exchanges about WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that spread stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In the end, Credico took the Fifth Amendment and declined to testify.
Frank Pentangeli, or Frankie Five Angels, is a character in The Godfather: Part II, a Corleone-family capo turned rival prepared to tell a Senate committee that Michael Corleone heads the most powerful organized-crime family in the nation, controls gambling throughout the country, has ordered numerous murders, and has committed a couple himself. Then, after a single intimidating glance from his Sicilian brother, whom Michael has flown in for the occasion, he recants and soon slits his wrists in a bathtub suicide.
The character is indelible in part because of Michael V. Gazzo’s mumbling, raspy-voiced, understated portrayal (he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and lost only to his co-star Robert De Niro, who played the young Vito Corleone). But Pentangeli is also the epitome of the corrosive moral and human toll that organized crime takes on all who touch it. In the end, he dies with a perverse kind of honor while Michael Corleone, at least as bad and utterly unrepentant, lives to fight another day.
Trump’s invocation of the Mafia’s code of honor and omertà has been noted by many writers, including the editor of this magazine.
[Jeffrey Goldberg: Donald Trump’s Mafia mind-set]
No less an expert than Nicholas Pileggi has explained how Trump’s vocabulary often echoes the idiom of the Brooklyn mob. Trump himself has called his former lawyer Michael Cohen a “rat” for agreeing to cooperate with Mueller, and has praised his campaign chief Paul Manafort’s initial refusal to “break” as worthy of “such respect for a brave man!” Trump’s recent claims that Cohen is cooperating with Mueller to mask shady dealings by his father-in-law smack of a classic don’s intimidation tactics.
[Read: Three remarkable things about Michael Cohen’s plea]
Still, Stone’s language as recounted in Mueller’s latest indictment is striking. “Stonewall it. Plead the fifth. Anything to save the plan,” Stone texted Credico in November 2017, according to the indictment. By last spring, Stone had escalated his tone sharply. “You are a rat,” he emailed Credico. “A stoolie. You backstab your friends—run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds.” In the next sentence, Stone threatened to “take that dog away from you,” referring to Credico’s emotional support dog, a tiny white Coton de Tulear named Bianca.
“I am so ready,” Stone added. “Let’s get it on. Prepare to die …”
[Read: Roger Stone’s shifting story is a liability]
It is perhaps remarkable, and pitiable, enough that the president of the United States for years employed Cohen, a lawyer who is unself-consciously also described as a “fixer,” as his own personal Michael Clayton (to cite another movie), the in-house “janitor” on call to clean up his every mess. It is yet another thing to learn that Stone, the man who may be as responsible as anyone for helping to shape Trump’s view of political strategy and sparking his presidential run, is on the record as threatening canine kidnapping and even death to a colleague whose mere telling of the truth could subject him to perjury charges. If a horse’s head turns up in somebody’s satin sheets, should anybody still be surprised?
The Newseum was in dire financial straits, and needed a way out. Johns Hopkins University had four buildings in Washington, D.C., and was looking to expand its presence in the capital while consolidating into one space. That the Newseum’s prime property is located within blocks of the U.S. Capitol only helped. On Friday, the university announced that it would be buying the 250,000-square-foot building; the museum is now looking for a new home.
In an interview, Ronald Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins, told me that the purchase is an opportunity to position the university, literally, to better contribute its expertise to national- and international-policy discussions. He emphasized that the school won’t be decamping from its main campus in Baltimore, but that the purchase will give it a more pronounced presence in D.C., which several colleges, including New York University, Arizona State University, and others, have sought to leave their mark on.
Making this acquisition possible is a string of wealthy donors that the university has been cultivating for some time. Daniels confirmed that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and a Johns Hopkins alum, will be contributing to the purchase. The remainder of the money will come from the university’s budget and the sale of the institution’s other four properties in the city. Daniels did not disclose how much financial support the university will be receiving from Bloomberg, who has donated billions of dollars to Johns Hopkins over the years and announced a $1.8 billion donation to the school in November. (His contribution to this project will be separate from the November donation.) Daniels did add, however, that Bloomberg is not the only philanthropist who will be financially supporting the purchase.
[Read more: The limits of a billion-dollar donation to Johns Hopkins]
“This was a difficult decision, but it was the responsible one,” Jan Neuharth, the chair and CEO of the Freedom Forum, the organization that runs the Newseum, said in a statement. “With today’s announcement, we can begin to explore all options to find a new home in the Washington, DC area.” As the deal is ironed out and finalized, all of the Newseum’s artifacts will be archived. The sale of the Newseum, a shrine to journalism, comes as more than 1,000 journalists have been laid off across the country this week. Several writers, most notably Jack Shafer, have argued that instead of purchasing the behemoth space back in 2008, the Freedom Forum should have used its money to hire, fund, and advocate for journalists.
The deal is not yet final, as the university needs to get approval for government permits to convert the space for academic use. But in a letter to the campus community, Daniels wrote that “Johns Hopkins’ acquisition of the building also provides financial support for the Freedom Forum’s vitally important First Amendment mission.” The School of Advanced International Studies, which has been located in D.C. for decades, will anchor the university’s offerings in the city. “This is a great moment for us” to really add to the public-policy debate, Daniels told me. But it is also a power move for a university that ping-pongs in and out of the top-10 rankings—one that may lead more students to salivate over the school, and improve its status.
On Wednesday, The Atlantic published the results of a long investigation into several allegations of sexual misconduct against Bryan Singer, the director of, among other films, The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Superman Returns, and, most recently, the Golden Globe–winning and Oscar-nominated Bohemian Rhapsody. The report, the result of 12 months’ worth of investigative work from the writers Alex French and Maximillian Potter, contains accusations of rape and coercive sex with men and underaged boys. It contains testimony from a psychologist about the traumas that can be inflicted on a person who is sexually exploited as a child. It contains stories of lives derailed, of young people being made to understand that their interests do not much matter, when those interests are set against the soaring demands of a man who has proved himself so capable of making money for, and through, the movie industry.
In Hollywood, stories related to #MeToo often double as stories related to business: money and morality, colliding with wrenching effects. One of the questions that hovered over French and Potter’s reporting concerned that most basic matter of moneymaking: employment itself. Would the evidence against Singer—multiple men coming forward, many of them using their own names and images, to allege abuse—affect the director’s ability to keep his current job? Would the movie Singer had recently signed on to direct, Red Sonja, retain him at its helm?
Shortly after The Atlantic published its story, that last question got an answer: Singer, it seems, will be keeping his job. Millennium Films, the company producing Red Sonja, offered this terse statement to The Hollywood Reporter via its CEO, Avi Lerner: “I continue to be in development for Red Sonja and Bryan Singer continues to be attached.” Lerner added:
The over $800 million Bohemian Rhapsody has grossed, making it the highest grossing drama in film history, is testament to his remarkable vision and acumen. I know the difference between agenda driven fake news and reality, and I am very comfortable with this decision. In America people are innocent until proven otherwise.
The statement is noteworthy for several reasons, the most immediate being that it suggests, outside of a lawsuit that is still pending against him (in late 2017, Cesar Sanchez-Guzman claimed that Singer had raped him when he was 17) that Singer will for now face no meaningful repercussions for the many allegations that have been leveled against him.
But Lerner’s defense of his director is even more insidious at its edges: Lerner is suggesting, with his emphasis on the gross of Bohemian Rhapsody, that there is a causal connection between a filmmaker’s “vision and acumen”—and relatedly, his ability to bring massive profits to the companies that make use of those talents—and the filmmaker’s moral behavior. It’s an assumption that lingers in Hollywood, in spite of the layered revelations of #MeToo: It was there when Harvey Weinstein defended Roman Polanski; when a CBS board member, after a series of allegations against Leslie Moonves were made public, framed Moonves’s step away from the company as a mere retirement; when corporations decide that the best course of action, given strong evidence of a profitable abuser among them, is merely a stern talking-to.
When money enters the moral calculus, the combination allows for a pernicious form of magical thinking. When money is allowed to serve as a kind of character witness—the over $800 million Bohemian Rhapsody has grossed—the allowance summons one of the shiniest lies that American culture has devised: That there is a meaningful connection between money and moral attainment. That the ability to accumulate wealth—for oneself, or on behalf of a corporation—is its own form of exoneration.
What Lerner’s defense of Singer does not mention is that Millennium Films, the company, is facing its own allegations of misconduct. A former executive at Millennium (the outfit also produced The Expendables, London Has Fallen, and 2008’s Rambo) filed a harassment lawsuit against it in 2017, alleging that the company fostered a culture that was demeaning toward its female employees and actors. “The suit alleges,” Variety notes, “that women were called ‘whores,’ ‘c—suckers,’ and ‘mistresses,’ and actresses were routinely called ‘too fat,’ ‘too ugly,’ and ‘too old.’” Avi Lerner is listed as a defendant. (“It’s all lies,” Lerner told Deadline in response to the suit. “It’s all a joke.”)
Now, unsurprisingly, the accused is defending the accused. The weary circularities are setting in. (Singer has hired the crisis-PR agent Howard Bragman. Bragman is also representing Red Sonja.) Here is part of the statement Singer issued in reaction to The Atlantic’s report:
It’s sad that The Atlantic would stoop to this low standard of journalistic integrity. Again, I am forced to reiterate that this story rehashes claims from bogus lawsuits filed by a disreputable cast of individuals willing to lie for money or attention. And it is no surprise that, with Bohemian Rhapsody being an award-winning hit, this homophobic smear piece has been conveniently timed to take advantage of its success.
Here is part of the statement GLAAD offered in response:
In light of the latest allegations against director Bryan Singer, GLAAD has made the difficult decision to remove Bohemian Rhapsody from contention for a GLAAD Media Award in the Outstanding Film—Wide Release category this year. This week’s story in The Atlantic documenting unspeakable harms endured by young men and teenage boys brought to light a reality that cannot be ignored or even tacitly rewarded.
Singer’s response to The Atlantic story wrongfully used “homophobia” to deflect from sexual assault allegations and GLAAD urges the media and the industry at large to not gloss over the fact that survivors of sexual assault should be put first.
“Gloss over” is correct. It’s another old story: the welfare of the alleged victims, treated as a complication facing the broader goods of Art and Culture and Vision. Those alleged victims, dismissed on the grounds that they are simply seeking money. Avi Lerner, himself accused of misconduct, defending his moneymaking director on the grounds that the allegations against him are mere fake news.
The gambit is all too familiar, but it is, on top of everything else, an example of the self-ratifying effects of power. Bohemian Rhapsody, as far as we know, will contend for its Oscar. Red Sonja, as far as we know, will go on under the “vision and acumen” of a director who has been accused of rape. Red Sonja, it’s worth noting, is a film about a survivor of sexual assault.
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