Rumors about the end of family allowance are 'criminal', says Dilma
Last edited Tue May 21, 2013, 02:32 PM - Edit history (1)
Two days after the start of uproars across the country provoked by rumors about the end of the "Bolsa Família" ('family allowance', a social welfare program of the Brazilian government that provides financial aid to poor families), president Dilma Rousseff said this Monday (20) that the responsible for disseminating the false information is a "criminal".
"The author of this rumor is outrageously inhuman. He is also a criminal", said the president during a ceremony to inaugurate the petroleum ship "Zumbi dos Palmares", in the city of Ipojuca, metropolitan area of Recife.
"I want to make my government's commitment with Bolsa Família very clear: it's a strong, deep and definitive commitment. We won't give up Bolsa Família [...] Don't believe in rumors, because they sometimes are spread in this country in a surprising manner."
(...)
A wave of rumors about the end of the Bolsa Família drove thousands of people last weekend to the lottery stores and bank agencies of Caixa Econômica Federal to withdraw their benefits, mostly in the North and Northeast regions.
The rumor extended to ten states, causing long lines and a lot of uproars. Several people felt sick and fainted. There were fights and stations were plundered.
The government denied the rumor and requested the opening of an inquiry by the Federal Police. All possibilities are being considered, including that of political motivation. "It doesn't seem to be mere chance, and we won't reject any hypothesis, said the minister José Eduardo Cardoso.
(...)
Bolsa Família, which serves 13.8 million families and will complete ten years next October, is the most important income transfer program of the government. It has a strong politic and electoral weight and is also one of the symbols of the administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.
Read more (in Portuguese):
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2013/05/1281750-boato-sobre-fim-do-bolsa-familia-e-criminoso-diz-dilma-em-pernambuco.shtml
Some pictures:
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Can't help but notice that U.S. "divide and conquer" tactics of both the Bush Junta and the Obama administration have utterly failed to sabotage the Brazil-Venezuela alliance, and other such alliances, including the overall South American alliance of the many leftist governments elected over the last decade, as well as failing to destroy their social justice programs and goals.
This genuine and highly successful Latin American independence movement, based on new close cooperation among Latin American countries and including all of them but led by the leftist countries, must be infuriating to U.S.-based transglobal corporations, banksters and war profiteers. They don't want these countries to have any choices. They don't want a "level playing field" for instance on resource contracts or market share. They oppose all regulation. They oppose worker protection. They oppose social programs such as education and health care. They oppose development of "the commons"--they want to privatize and loot everything in sight. They oppose Latin American country sovereignty. They are monopolists and bullies and are out to loot, pillage and dominate. And U.S. policy and U.S. agencies serve these scofflaw corporate powers exclusively. They don't serve us, the majority in the U.S.; and they certainly don't serve the Latin American majority.
Brazil's participation in this new Latin American alliance, and its election and re-election of leftist leaders who strongly support it, I am quite sure has been a priority target of U.S. agencies ever since Lula da Silva's election. When the Bush Junta sent down its dictate to South American leaders that they "must isolate" Hugo Chavez, Argentina's president at that time replied, "But he's my brother!"--and Lula da Silva undertook a high profile visit to Venezuela just before the 2006 election in Venezuela for the opening of the Orinoco Bridge between Venezuela and Brazil. He could have timed it differently. He did not. 2006 was the first serious effort by U.S.-backed rightwing forces in Venezuela to destabilize the country by crying "election fraud!" (in that case using a false poll devised by a prominent Washington DC polling firm; the plot was exposed and failed). (We are now seeing a repeat effort, this time with Obama as U.S. president--who refuses to recognize the election of Chavez's successor, Nicolas Maduro, in an election system that former U.S. president Jimmy Carter has called "the best in the world."
Lula da Silva furthermore stated publicly that, "They can invent all kinds of things to criticize Chavez but not on democracy!" And he actively opposed U.S. policy on Honduras in 2009 (on Obama's watch) and tried to save that democracy from U.S.-backed destruction, among many other efforts to bolster Latin American democracy and independence, including swift and successful action on the U.S.(Bush Junta)-organized white separatist insurrection to topple Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2008.
Now they have Dilma Rousseff to contend with, Lula da Silva's chief of staff, who was horribly tortured by U.S.-backed fascists when she was young. She has even more reason to promote Latin American independence than Lula did (who was 'merely' jailed by the U.S.-backed fascists for union organizing). Obama was apparently so upset with her that he chose to announce the bombing of Libya while on his trip to Brazil--a crude violation of diplomatic etiquette worthy of Bush Jr. or Dick Cheney.
Motive? The CIA and other covert U.S. government and private agencies have lots and lots of motive to begin the destabilization of Brazil. Means? U.S. agencies spend billions of our taxpayer dollars to create the means to sabotage other peoples' democracies, including infiltration of militaries and police forces, news media, government agencies, legislative bodies, drug mafias and rightwing death squads and any and all power centers, and including funding of rightwing groups including rightwing thugs. Opportunity? Such agencies also create opportunities to cause panic, to instigate riots and disorder, to crash markets, to instigate product shortages (such as the food and other shortages that Venezuela is suffering), to set one leftist group against another and one country against another. These are classic CIA tactics in Latin America, and we have seen many instances of them recently, though mostly failures. So it is no stretch of the imagination, nor "conspiracy theory," to make the educated guess that this "rumor" that caused panic among Brazil's poor--and possible resentment against Brazil's leftist government--had a U.S. origin.
Latin America has plenty of rich, badass elites quite capable of "dirty tricks" and worse, in efforts to regain power. But they are generally allied with the U.S. government, often funded by U.S. taxpayers, and invariably act in the interest of U.S. corporate/war profiteer domination of the region, rather than in the interest of their countries and the majority of their people. This "rumor" could be happenstance. "Shit" does "happen" sometimes. It could be Brazilian in origin (local fascist plotters who hate Rousseff). It could be regional in origin (say, fascist operatives out of Colombia--I'm thinking of Alvaro Uribe, head of the fascist mafia in Colombia, and its former president under the Bush Junta, who has reason to hate Brazil's leftist leaders). And it could be the CIA, the DEA, the FBI, the DIA or any number of secretive U.S.-taxpayer funded dirty players, or private corporate dirty players.
Having tried to follow the highly secretive and devious activities of the CIA recently and over the last decade, in Latin America, just as an ordinary citizen following the news (and reading between its lines), that's my guess: a revived CIA--revived under Leon Panetta (close ties to Bush Sr.)--restored to its function of covert sabotage rather than outright war against target countries and subtler and harder to see than Bush Junta thuggery (for instance, the Uribe/Bush Junta effort to start a war between the U.S./Colombia and Venezuela/Ecuador in early 2008). I predicted a resurgence of subtler methods in LatAm when Panetta was appointed CIA Director. (His first priority, I think, was to end the war between the Pentagon and the CIA that Rumsfeld and Cheney had started. But one of his first actions was to visit Bogota amidst rumors of a Uribe coup to stay in power, and to yank Uribe from the stage, albeit landing him on a "silk cushion." Uribe was too crude for the renovated CIA.)
I expected just this: evil, deadly, destabilizing rumors.
It's insane to do such a thing.
This couple of peasants, Ademir and Júlia de Sousa had an accident while driving in a road during the night to go to bank agency and withdraw their allowances in a city 38 kilometers far. As Julia puts it: "A person who invents a lie such as this has no heart."
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2013/05/1282696-casal-se-acidenta-ao-tentar-sacar-bolsa-familia-no-piaui.shtml
The president of the Worker's Party, Rui Falcão, said that "electoral terrorism has started", and that rumors are being transmitted in personal chats, internet, and even in the buses. Local radio stations also broadcast the rumor.
The Minister of Justice, José Eduardo Cardozo said that the speed with which the rumors were spread across the national territory suggests that this was an orchestrated operation.
"Evidently, there was a set of hand-in-hand action across several parts of the national territory, what suggests the evaluation that someone made this deliberately, in a planned and articulate manner. We still can not affirm that, but the situation sure makes us consider that hypothesis."
According to Caixa Econômica Federal, the state-owned bank that distributes the allowances, there were problems in 13 states. There were 900,000 withdraws totaling R$ 152 million during the weekend.
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2013/05/1282662-presidente-do-pt-chama-boatos-sobre-bolsa-familia-de-terrorismo-eleitoral.shtml
A woman said she was told that those who did not withdraw the money during the weekend would have their registers canceled. Looks like they intended to kill two birds with one stone, by causing structural problems to the government bank and create confusion in the streets at the same time.
Social Program Contributes to Reduced Infant Mortality in Brazil
Brasilia, May 24 (Prensa Latina) Research to review the impact of the Bolsa Familia program in Brazil reveals that this helped reduce the mortality rate among children under the age of five by 17 percent between 2004 and 2009. Data provided by the Minister of Social Development and the Fight aganinst Hunger, Tereza Campello, confirms that Bolsa Familia, which delivers 70 reales (33 dollars) to people in extreme poverty, has helped to decrease malnutrition-related deaths.
With the registration of people in this program, child vaccinations were also included, an important step in the fight against diseases such as measles and polio, she said.
...
"Bolsa Familia improved the diet of mothers. Studies show that the family is engaged in the purchase of food and this is an element of change in a child's lifestyle," particularly in terms of pre-natal care, she added.
Campello also pointed out that people in Bolsa Familia have access to the Salud Familia program, which provides basic medical care, a decisive factor in the reduction of the mortality rate for diseases such as diarrhea and respiratory infections.
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President Dilma Rousseff's government intends to extend this program and eliminate extreme poverty in Brazil by 2014.
sc/sa/cgm/tgj/lgo
Modificado el ( viernes, 24 de mayo de 2013 )
http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1444671&Itemid=1
