Five centuries after it was founded as a Portuguese sugar colony and plantation society, the once wealthy land of Brazil is today a highly fragmented society with a vast and largely unemployed and unproductive Third World population, like many other places in the Western world. This point was driven home today in a report from RT America (be sure to check out the pictures) on a massive Brazilian military/police operation involving tanks, helicopters and thousands of troops which was intended to get a grip on the sprawling and lawless Third World slums, called favelas in Brazil, which ring many of the countries’ cities:
Brazilian troops and police swept through Rio’s most infamous slums in a pre-dawn raid, backed up by helicopters and tanks. The “pacification” mission is intended to bring the crime-ridden favelas to heel before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.
Over 2,000 troops participated in the crack operation in the northern favelas of Jacarezinho and Manguinhos. They began moving through the shanty towns at 5:00 am local time, searching houses and making arrests.
The slums are renowned for the trafficking of crack cocaine and weapons, which police confiscated during the operation. Despite the favelas’ reputations, police said that the raid went without a hitch.
Around 800 officers entered into the favelas flanked by armored vehicles while the rest patrolled the perimeter.
…Around 75,000 people inhabit Jacarezinho and Manguinhos, slums recognized as Rio’s most dangerous. Drug trafficking is rife in the favelas, where the trading of crack cocaine is an everyday activity.
This is not the first time that the Brazilian government has had to engage in a large scale military operation to re-take control of the slum areas of its cities. A year ago the Brazilian press hailed the conquest of the Zona Sul favela with police and military forces as an ‘historic victory.’
The Empire of Brazil, which was prospering in the 1880s and rising as an international power, fell apart rather suddenly due to poor monarchical leadership and the lack of an heir to continue the dynasty. In 1888, the pessimistic, aged and sickly emperor of Brazil was in Europe seeking healthcare. His daughter, Isabel, who had no desire to lead the country, signed a bill which came to be known as the Golden Law which abolished slavery in Brazil. A year later the monarchy fell in a coup d’état, which the emperor took no measure to resist. The ironically named Golden Law which abolished slavery essentially signaled the demise of the last remaining classically-based, agrarian society in the Golden Circle region. Today, this once-wealthy and well-ordered country at the bottom of the Golden Circle, which still maintains some Golden Circle symbolism, has to conduct major military operations within its own borders to try and regain some semblance of law and order in the massive slums which ring its cities.
If this sounds familiar, its part of the same narrative that is playing out even well beyond the Golden Circle region throughout the Western world in places such as France and England. The Western world is literally self-destructing under regimes based on the ideology of democracy, equality and universalism.
Obama visits Brazil’s slums
Note: In the Spring of 2011, US President Barack Obama visited ‘The City of God’ favela of Rio de Janeiro.
Also see: Ruins of the Golden Circle: Poverty in the post-war South
The fall of the monarchy was perhaps the single most tragic and dooming event for the once-prosperous Brasileira civilization.