“A beautiful landscape of Mendoza City’s park seen from the height of the Gómez building.” By Itsmemarttin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsMat Youkee has a fascinating article, “Who Killed the Nazi Scientist trying to Wipe out Cocaine,” on the online site Ozy. The piece tells the story of Heinz Brücher, who had served as a second lieutenant in the German military (S.S.) during World War Two. A biologist, Brücher had stolen a Ukrainian seed-bank on Heinrich Himmler’s orders. Later in the war, he disobeyed orders to destroy these seeds, and fled the Reich with them. As with other German military figures at the war’s end, he fled to Argentina, as part of an evacuation which has become a theme in popular culture from film to conspiracy theories. He did not stay in Argentina only, however, but also taught as a faculty member everywhere from Venezuela to Paraguay. Later in life, though, he wound up living in a farm house in Mendoza, Argentina, where he seems to have hatched an incredible plot: to destroy the coca plant that is the basis for the cocaine trade.
The coca plant has been used for thousands of years in the Andes. One can see ancient indigenous sculptures in which the cheek of one figure is extended, because the person is chewing coca. The leaf figures in ritual and religion, but is also a rich source of nutrition.Throughout Latin America coca tea is often used as an infusion because it is supposed to have medicinal properties. The leaf itself is vastly different from the processed drug known as cocaine. In 1898 a German chemist, Richard Martin Willstätter, created cocaine, which had become one of the most used drugs in the world. By the 1970s and 80s, cocaine was the basis for the cartels of Colombia. At the same time, there were allegations that the U.S. intelligence services were themselves involved in the cocaine trade in order to fund the guerrillas fighting against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. …
In the 1980s the global media gave extensive coverage to deforestation in Amazonia. Over the last thirty years, there has been a significant decline in media attention to this topic, which partly reflects very real progress that Brazil and neighboring countries have made in slowing deforestation. Still, the problem remains. In 2014, Brazil decided not to sign a UN agreement to defend forests.
I’ve been teaching a course on Amazonian history for 20 years, and I’ve never found such a good classroom resource on the topic as this storyboard by the Council on Foreign Relations. The storyboard combines small amounts of text, with imagery and short videos to place the issue into historical context. Many of the pages are dynamic; that is, there is movement in the background. Some of the maps are excellent. I also particularly liked the successive aerial shots of forest in the Brazilian state of Rondonia over ten year increments.
One weakness is that the storyboard focuses only on Brazil. While Brazil is the country that on its own has the largest Amazonian territories, it would have been useful to have more information on Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela as well. I also personally believe that dams are perhaps the greatest environmental threat in the region, and would like to have seen more coverage of this issue in the storyboard. Still, for any class that addresses environmental issues, this would be a great link in a course shell.
I’ve written before about how there aren’t truly “uncontacted tribes” in Amazonia, but rather refugees from a long history of slave-raiding, disease, missionary work, and development. Partly for this reason, the term now used in Amazonia for these populations is “Isolated Peoples.” This term makes clear that these peoples are separated from the dominant culture by choice, rather than only because they live in some pristine environment preserved from contact. For some nation-states, particularly Peru, the existence of these peoples has sometimes been controversial, because they limit the state and corporations’ ability to extract resources from Amazonia. Still, there are Isolated Peoples remaining in Latin America and elsewhere; Amazonia likely has more than any other region of the world.
Recently a Canadian professor, Dr. Amir Attaran, called for the Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro to be delayed or moved because of the risk that the wave of visitors will accelerate the spread of the Zika epidemic. The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Tom Frieden, has now weighed in to argue that the risk to the athletes is small, and many people are already traveling to areas affected by Zika. The Games should therefore move forward as scheduled. Still, it is remarkable that this close to the Games, people are suggesting that they moved, not only because of Zika, but also because of other concerns such as contamination of the waters in the bay of Guanabara. One recent study found that virus levels in the bay were 1.7 million times the permissible limit in California. I confess that when I read this figure my first thought was not for the athletes, but rather how many times I had swum in these waters myself. Sailors are also complaining about the sheer quantity of garbage in the bay, and are concerned that impacts with the trash may affect races.
In the end the games will move forward, and likely will be a success. In the future, however, the experience with the Brazilian games will likely change discussions about the venues for other Olympics. Perhaps more importantly, within Brazil, it will emphasize the point that many Brazilian critics of the games have long made: that the interests of Brazilian citizens have to come first in government decisions, and that basic needs -education, health and sanitation- should be prioritized over mega-projects.
Addendum: Immediately after posting this piece, I read that 150 health experts had written an open letter calling for the Games to be postponed because of Zika. You can read more about their arguments at USA today. What is most interesting in the piece is the argument that the World Health Organization (WHO) has a conflict of interest regarding the Games, given its partnership with the International Olympics Committee.
It’s not true that the age of discovery is over, and everything worth knowing has already been found. We live in an age of revelations, such as the resting site of one of the ships from the lost Franklin expedition, an immense canyon in Greenland, and an unknown tapir in the Amazon. How can an mammal that travels in groups and weighs 200 pounds have remained undiscovered for so long? What is remarkable is the pace of the discoveries. A new species of wolf has just been revealed in the Himalaya. Three new species of lemurs were discovered by researchers at the University of Kentucky. Multiple new species were just discovered in the ocean off of Atlantic Canada. Still, all of these discoveries are less surprising than the recent announcement that a coral reef exists at the mouth of the Amazon. The reef is the size of Delaware. Part of the reason that it hasn’t been studied before was that nobody thought that such a reef could exist in the fresh water and heavy sediments that pour into the ocean from the river. If we can miss an ecosystem 600 miles long (965 kilometers) long, what else is out there that we’re missing?
Today I gave a talk at the World Affair’s Council in Portland on the upcoming impeachment process in Brazil. Brazil’s Senate will vote in May on whether to initiate a trial against President Dilma Rousseff. A simple majority vote within the Senate will be enough to remove her from power for 180 days, while it considers her case. In that event, the Senate would then have to vote by two-thirds to impeach the President. If this were to happen, what would then occur next? …
In Brazil a female news presenter was the target of racist comments online after the show posted her picture to Facebook. In response, people posted these comments on billboards near the authors’ houses, without giving their names. This brief video shows the billboards and interviews people about their reaction to these comments. Although the people speak in Portuguese, the video is subtitled in English. The slogan at the bottom of the billboards says “Virtual Racism: the consequences are real.” At a time when racial justice is a pressing issue in the United States, it’s interesting to examine how people in another nation are addressing racist speech. The video also raises the issue of how people adopt new personas online, because they perceive that different standards of speech apply, and they can act with impunity.
I’ve been studying Brazil for nearly 25 years now, and have seen the country pass through many difficult times. For all the bad news regarding Brazil, the nation is still in a very different place than in 1992-93, when inflation was perhaps 1,700 percent annually, and the clerk at the post office had to use a calculator to figure out what a stamp cost on that particular day. A very poor graduate student, I used to change my money late in the week, in the hope that the grocery stores had not had enough time to raise their prices. It was always disappointing to get to the store and see that the stock clerks had changed prices in advance of my arrival. I was also in Rio de Janeiro was President Fernando Collor de Mello was impeached in 1992. For this reason, I tend to take a skeptical look at bad news from Brazil, which often overlooks the many real advances that are being made. Still, it’s hard not to feel pessimistic right now. A recent article in the Economist describes the immense economic and political challenges that Brazil faces. Given Brazil’s importance to Latin America, this piece is worth reading. If you want something a little more uplifting, though, listen to this Planet Money podcast about how Brazil tamed its terrible problem with inflation.
“Rash on Arm due to Zika virus,” uploaded to Wikipedia by FRED on January 10, 2014. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zika.Virus.Rash.Arm.2014.jpg
The health news from Brazil is truly remarkable, as the Ministry of Health is advising women in the northeast not to become pregnant at this time because of the emergence of a new disease in the Americas called Zika fever. Historically, Zika fever has been a very rare disease, which until 2007 had caused only a small number of diagnosed cases in Africa and Asia. The Zika virus was native to the forest of Zika in Uganda, where it circulated amongst monkeys. The disease suddenly appeared in 2007 in Micronesia, then spread to French Polynesia in 2013, followed by Easter Island in 2014, before finally arriving in Brazil. The disease causes many of the same symptoms as dengue (high fever, headache, joint and muscle pain, nausea, stomach pain, exhaustion, pain in the back of the eyes, conjunctivitis, a maculopapular rash, and swelling of the legs). This is unsurprising because dengue and the Zika virus are members of the same viral family (flaviviridae), and are both spread by the same species of mosquitoes, particularly Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. There is no treatment or vaccine for Zika fever.
When it first appeared in Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, in April 2013, it was not immediately obvious that this was a new disease. As patients were tested for dengue, however, and the results came back negative, the medical system soon realized that something unusual was happening. While worrying, the disease did not seem disastrous when it appeared in Brazil. People can be infected with Zika fever only once. The symptoms typically last four to seven days, then the patients recovers. In some cases, patients suffer from immunological or neurological disease (Guillain-Barre syndrome) as a result of their infection, but this is atypical. When it appeared, the disease seemed to be less serious than dengue. Very few people have died from it in Brazil. As the epidemic continued, however, doctors began to report a bizarre increase in the number of babies born with a serious birth defect, microcephaly. This disorder is characterized by a reduction in the size of the head of the baby. The rate of this disorder has increased sharply, perhaps ten-fold over the last year. Some doctors at Brazil’s Hospital Oswaldo Cruz are now suggesting that the problem is unrelated to Zika fever, but rather is tied to another emerging infectious disease in the region, Chikungunya. …
