Booming economy, government programs help Brazil expand its middle class

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By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 3, 2010; A06

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Teresiña Lopes Vieira da Silva peddles spices and peppers from a street stall, but hers is no fly-by-night business.

She sells to restaurants in Rio's swankiest districts and sees her success reflected in the two houses she has bought. Instead of scraping by, she has joined the middle class in an increasingly affluent Brazil, her accomplishment made possible by government loans and a booming economy.

"Now I live in a house with six rooms," said Vieira da Silva, 62, speaking of her home in Rocinha, a poor but bustling district with growing ranks of entrepreneurs. "It does not have a pool yet, but I am planning to build one."

Once hobbled with high inflation and perennially susceptible to worldwide crises, Brazil now has a vibrant consumer market, investment-grade status for its sovereign debt, vast foreign reserves and an agricultural sector that is vying to supplant that of the United States as the world's most productive.

Brazil's $1.3 trillion economy is bigger than those of India and Russia, and its per-capita income is nearly twice that of China. Recent discoveries by Brazil's state oil company are expected to make the country one of the world's biggest crude producers. An unwieldy bureaucracy and red tape have not slowed foreign investment, which at $45 billion in 2008 is three times as much as it was a decade ago.

Economists and social scientists here say the booming trade-oriented economy and innovative government programs are lifting millions from poverty and shaking what was once a certainty: that a person born poor in Brazil would surely die poor.

Solid, tangible progress

Since 2003, more than 32 million people in this country of 198 million have entered the middle class, and about 20 million have risen above poverty, according to the Center for Social Policies at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, a Rio policy group that studies socioeconomic trends.

"We can generate inclusive growth as probably no other country can, given the scale of the country and the level of inequality," said Marcelo Neri, chief economist at the center. "Brazil is following what you may call a middle path. We are respecting the rules of the market and, at the same time, we are doing very active social policy."

Since 2002, a commodities boom has fueled strong growth and lowered poverty across Latin America. But Brazil's progress is perhaps the most notable because it has far more poor people than any other South American country and has long been one of the world's most unequal societies.

Neri said Brazil has made solid progress by creating 8.5 million jobs since 2003, and by instituting programs such as food assistance for poor families and low-interest credit for first-time home buyers and small-business owners.

The change has been tangible to people such as Thiago Firmino, 28, a teacher. He has lived in a poor locality all his life, but he owns a car and a computer and says his son's life will be easier than his.

"A lot of people improved their lives," said. "It is not like they built themselves a castle, but, you know, they have taken little steps and made things better."

The foundation of today's success was laid during the administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, an academic-turned-politician best known for taming inflation in the mid-1990s. The man who has gotten much of the credit is his successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who as a union activist once railed against globalization.

Lula's election to the presidency in 2002 sent shudders through Brazil's economic elite, which worried that the former rabble-rouser would lead the country down a populist, anti-capitalist path, as Hugo Chávez did in Venezuela.

Lula did make ending poverty a priority, but he also proved to be a market-friendly steward of the economy and is popular today among Brazil's business community.

With Asia hungry for soybeans, beef and iron ore, economic growth in Brazil averaged 4.2 percent annually from 2003 through 2008, a year in which foreign investment in the country posted a 30 percent increase over 2007, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The worldwide economic crisis caused a brief downturn here, but economists say Brazil will post 5 percent growth in 2010.

At SulAmérica Investments in Sao Paulo, Marcelo Mello, vice president of asset management, said that in the past, investors worried about inflation and high interest rates.

Now, driven by increasingly affluent Brazilian investors, Mello said, SulAmérica is managing $9 billion, three times the amount from five years ago. "Through the increase in real income over the last 10 years, we've seen a huge movement in our Brazilian fund industry and the Brazilian markets," he said.

The country's stock market is minting record numbers of billionaires, and the wealth in Brazil is palpable. Luxury apartment houses are rising in fashionable districts, and the world's most exclusive stores, from Tiffany's to Gucci, consider Rio and Sao Paulo fertile markets.

Bullish about the future

Of course, most of Brazil's people are far from rich. In the country's vast urban slums, many youths turn to drugs, the quality of public schooling is poor and basic services such as health care are chronically underfunded, residents say.

"Can you believe this serves 150,000 people?" said Flavio Wittlin, who runs a group that helps get young people off the streets, as he walked through a tiny health center in Rocinha. He said many services in the district, from garbage pickup to policing, are substandard.

Still, Rocinha is chock-full of machine shops and small stores, many of them spurred by government loans.

Although Brazil's industrial giants -- such as the airplane maker Embraer and the mining company Vale -- attract investors and headlines, the future is also rooted in businesses like Alan Roberto Lima's sewing shop.

The shop, on the second floor of his house in a hardscrabble neighborhood on Rio's outskirts, has only a half-dozen sewing machines. But Lima, 34, has in a few years found that Rio's upscale boutiques are a ready market for his skirts and blouses.

Now he talks of his own clothing line and, if that is a success, opening his own store.

"Preferably," he added, "near the beach."

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Brazil Aims to Prevent Land Grabs in Amazon

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By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

VILA DOS CRENTES, Brazil — Raimundo Teixeira de Souza came to this sweltering Amazon outpost 15 years ago, looking for land. He bought 20 acres, he said, but more powerful farmers, who roam this Wild West territory with rifles strapped to their backs, forced him to sell much of it for a pittance.

Then someone shot and killed Mr. de Souza’s 23-year-old stepson in the middle of a village road two years ago, residents said. No one has been arrested. In fact, the new police chief has no record that the crime was even investigated by his predecessor. It is hardly surprising, the chief said, considering that he has only four investigators to cover an area of rampant land-grabbing and deforestation the size of Austria.

“We are being massacred,” said Mr. de Souza, 44, who leads the local residents’ association. “We just want to work and raise our children.”

It has been this way for decades, residents say. Throughout this huge stretch of the Amazon, the state has been virtually nonexistent, whether in the form of police officers or clear records of land ownership, giving way to a brazen culture of illegal land seizures, often at the tip of a gun barrel.

But using a new law, Brazil’s government is trying to impose order on this often lawless territory, and in the process, possibly nip away at a broader global concern: deforestation and the threat of climate change that comes with it.

For the first time, the Brazilian government is formally establishing who owns tens of millions of acres across the Amazon, enabling it to track who is responsible for clearing forests for logging and cattle — and who should be held accountable when it is done illegally.

“The government will finally know whose land it is, and who is responsible for what goes on there,” said Thomas E. Lovejoy, the biodiversity chair for the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington.

This county in the state of Pará is the worst place for forest destruction in Brazil, and environmentalists say they hope that the new law, approved by Brazil’s Congress in June, will help the government finally enforce its official limits on clearing land.

Image by World Bank Photo Collection via Flickr

But it is a huge and messy undertaking. Clear ownership records exist for less than 4 percent of the land in private hands throughout the Brazilian Amazon, government officials said. Here in Pará, officials have discovered false titles for about 320 million acres, almost double the amount of land that actually exists, according to federal officials.

And while small farmers like Mr. de Souza are pinning their hopes on the law, many larger-scale land holders say they have sacrificed too much blood and sweat for bureaucrats in Brasília, the capital, to force new rules upon them.

“Everything we have today was built from our own desire to work,” said Jorgiano Alves de Oliveira, 68, who raises cattle and grows cocoa on about 600 acres.

The problem began with the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, which invited settlers to occupy the Amazon but required them to clear forests to gain access to land and credit.

Growing criticism of Brazil’s Amazon policies pushed the civilian government of the 1980s to develop laws that, on paper at least, were among the world’s most protective of forests. But with scant presence of authorities to enforce them, the laws did little to stop the widespread grabbing of land.

“This chaos of legal insecurity was the most important basis for the perverse incentives in the Amazon to pillage rather than to preserve or to develop, and constant incitement to violence,” said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the former minister for strategic affairs who helped develop the new land law.

Under the law, which applies to more than 150 million acres, the government will award plots up to 250 acres free to settlers. Bigger plots will be sold at varying prices, with or without public auctions, depending on their size. Those larger than about 6,000 acres cannot be sold without an explicit act of Congress. So far, settlers have registered about 4 percent of the land singled out under the law, according to government officials.

Since the days of the dictatorship, this huge county in Pará State, known as São Félix do Xingu, has drawn hardy settlers and prospectors in search of cheap land, good soil, a rich array of minerals and rare Amazon fruits.

But notorious criminals have also found refuge. Leonardo Dias Mendonça ran a vast criminal enterprise from São Félix, which included a fleet of planes used to deliver weapons to the Colombian rebels in exchange for drugs, before being convicted in 2003.

Disputes in São Félix were traditionally settled with “a lot of death,” said Waldemir de Oliveira, the leader of the São Félix agricultural association. “It was the law of the strongest,” Mr. de Oliveira said. “Farmers put guards on the perimeter of their land and no one went in. Those that did were told to ‘Get out or die.’ ”

Mr. de Oliveira and other residents say the violence is diminishing but is still a major worry. In November, a local bar owner turned the tables on four men who came to kill him in broad daylight, killing all of them, said João Gross, an architect in the area.

In Vila dos Crentes, the loud roar of a generator nearly drowned out a recent meeting of residents gathered in a church. “We are beginning to understand that we have to get engaged in reforestation and stop deforestation,” Mr. de Souza said.

But those goals are clouded by the constant threat of violence. Residents said workers on a nearby farm had been carrying out a campaign of violence and intimidation to try to force them out, and even dumped a poisonous chemical from a plane over the area, killing fish and animals.

In May 2007, residents found Mr. de Souza’s stepson dead in the road, shot multiple times.

“No one should make enemies here,” said Eder Rodrigues de Oliveira, 26, who said he grew up with Mr. de Souza’s stepson. “Everyone here must be humble.”

At the closest police station, more than 100 miles away, Chief Álvaro Ikeda said killing was common here, touching a stack of files containing information about 11 suspected homicides under investigation.

Witnesses often are too afraid to come forward. “I cannot guarantee the witnesses’ life,” Chief Ikeda said. “I cannot even guarantee my own life.”

To that end, the police chief decided to live in the police station. He keeps a 12-gauge shotgun and an assault rifle at the ready.

“Here we do not let go of our guns,” he said.

Mery Galanternick contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.

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Brazil: Curb Police Violence in Rio, São Paulo

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Extrajudicial Killings Undermine Public Security

December 8, 2009

(Rio de Janeiro) - Police officers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo routinely resort to lethal force, often committing extrajudicial executions and exacerbating violence in both states, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 122-page report, "Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo," examined 51 cases in which police appeared to have executed alleged criminal suspects and then reported the victims had died in shootouts while resisting arrest.

Rio and São Paulo police together kill more than 1,000 people every year in such alleged confrontations. While some of these "resistance" killings by police are legitimate acts of self-defense, many others are extrajudicial executions, the report found.

"Extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "The residents of Rio and São Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police."

Unlawful police killings undercut legitimate efforts in both states to curb criminal violence, much of which is carried out by heavily armed gangs. In Rio, these gangs are largely responsible for one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere. In São Paulo, despite a drop in homicides over the past decade, gang violence also poses a major threat.

Human Rights Watch obtained credible evidence in 51 "resistance" cases that contradicted police officers' claims that victims died in a shootout. For example, in 33 cases, forensic evidence was at odds with the official version of what took place - including 17 cases in which autopsy reports show that police shot their victims at point blank range. The 51 cases do not represent the totality of potential extrajudicial killings, but are indicative of a much broader problem, the report concluded.

The report also draws upon extensive interviews with more than 40 criminal justice officials, including top prosecutors who view extrajudicial executions by the police as a major problem in both states.

Official government statistics support the prosecutors' assessment that the problem is widespread:

• The Rio and São Paulo police have killed more than 11,000 people since 2003;

• The number of police killings in Rio state reached a record high of 1,330 in 2007 and in 2008, the number was third highest at 1,137;

• The number of police killings in São Paulo state, while less than in Rio, is also comparatively high: over the past five years, for example, there were more police killings in São Paulo state (2,176) than in all of South Africa (1,623), a country with a much higher homicide rate than São Paulo.

The high number of police killings is all the more dramatic when viewed alongside the comparatively low numbers of non-fatal injuries of civilians by police and of police fatalities.

• The São Paulo Shock Police Command killed 305 people from 2004 through 2008 yet left only 20 injured. In all of these alleged "shootouts," the police suffered one death;

• In Rio, police in 10 military policing zones were responsible for 825 "resistance" killings in 2008 while suffering a total of 12 police fatalities;

• Rio police arrested 23 people for every person they killed in 2008, and São Paulo police arrested 348 for every kill. By contrast, police in the United States arrested over 37,000 for every person they killed in alleged confrontations that year.

"Police officers are permitted to use lethal force as a last resort to protect themselves or others," Vivanco said. "But the notion that these police killings are committed in self-defense, or justified by high crime rates, does not hold up under scrutiny."

In addition to the many "resistance" killings each year by police on duty, officers kill hundreds more while off-duty, often when they are acting as members of militias in Rio and death squads in São Paulo.

Police officers responsible for unlawful killings in Rio and São Paulo are rarely brought to justice. The principal cause of this chronic failure to hold police to account for murder, the report found, is that the criminal justice systems in both states currently rely almost entirely on police investigators to resolve these cases.

Human Rights Watch found that police officers frequently take steps to cover up the true nature of "resistance" killings. And police investigators often fail to take necessary steps to determine what has taken place, helping to ensure that criminal responsibility cannot be established and that those responsible remain unaccountable.

"So long as they are left to police themselves these executions will continue unchecked, and legitimate efforts to curb violence in both states will suffer," Vivanco said.

The report provides recommendations to Rio and São Paulo authorities for curbing police violence and improving law enforcement. The central recommendation is the creation of specialized units within state prosecutors' offices to investigate "resistance" killings and ensure that officers responsible for extrajudicial executions are brought to justice.

The report also details measures that state and federal authorities should take to maximize the effectiveness of these special units. These include:

• Requiring police officers to notify prosecutors of "resistance" killings immediately after they take place;

• Establishing and strictly enforcing a crime scene protocol that deters police officers from engaging in false "rescues" and other cover-up techniques;

• Investigating potential police cover-up techniques, including false "rescues," and prosecuting officers who engage in them.

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Brazil Looks for Answers After Huge Blackout - NYTimes.com

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By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

RIO DE JANEIRO — Officials were searching for answers early Wednesday after a power failure blacked out large swaths of Brazil and Paraguay for more than two hours late Tuesday.

The failure of three transmission lines at Itaipu, the world’s largest operating hydroelectric plant, created a domino effect that cut energy to 18 of 26 states in Brazil, including the country’s two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and affected an estimated 60 million people. Airports in several cities were briefly shut down, and passengers had to be pulled from subway cars in São Paulo when the system lost power.

Electricity system operators were quick to dismiss the possibility of sabotage at the Itaipu dam and assigned initial blame to an unexplained atmospheric event possibly exacerbated by heavy rains. It was the first time that Itaipu had failed so completely in its 25 years of operation, energy officials said late Tuesday.

Energy experts in both countries said Wednesday that the major blackout was a cautionary sign of the dangers of interconnection and showed the vulnerability in Brazil’s transmission system.

“The interconnection system is necessary in a country that uses a lot of hydroelectric plants, but it needs to better managed,” said Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, a physics professor at the Federal University of Rio, speaking on television.

The power failure recalled the blackout of August 2003 in the northeastern United States, the country’s most widespread electrical blackout in history, which affected 10 million people in southeastern Canada and 45 million people in eight American states.

For Brazilians, Tuesday night’s blackout brought back painful memories of energy shortages in 2001, which led the country to step up its push for more natural gas and hydroelectric power generation. The president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, instituted nine months of energy rationing, and the country’s perceived energy fallibility was blamed for a considerable decline in Mr. Cardoso’s popularity as he ended his second term in office.

But since then Brazil has diversified its energy supply and has avoided widespread shortages.

Tuesday night’s blackout hit at 10:13 p.m. local time. It affected the southeast of Brazil most severely, leaving São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo completely without electricity. Blackouts also swept through the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, the interior or Bahia and parts of Pernambuco, energy officials said.

By 12:30 a.m. power had been restored to most areas.

Itaipu, which straddles the border between Brazil and Paraguay along the Paraná River, supplies about 20 percent of Brazil’s power and 90 percent of the energy consumed by Paraguay.

As of 7 a.m. Wednesday, 18 of the 20 generators at Itaipu were producing energy for Brazil and Paraguay, according to Itaipu’s Web site.

Courting goodwill in Rio's mean streets - washingtonpost.com

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Community policing offered in slums as an alternative to tough security forces

By Juan Forero
Tuesday, October 27, 2009

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The residents of Santa Marta, one of this violent city's many hillside slums, had never seen someone quite like the new police captain, a woman who strolled its maze of passageways to shake hands and ask residents what services the government might deliver.

They had also not seen officers quite like the ones she commanded. Instead of wearing riot gear, they had on soft blue berets, and instead of storming Santa Marta with guns blazing, a scene common to Rio's shantytowns, they came to generate goodwill with residents normally fearful of police.

The recent arrival of Capt. Pricilla de Oliveira Azevedo and her officers was part of a new community policing strategy that officials in Rio hope will curtail the kind of violence that erupted this month. Street gangs shot down a police helicopter, killing three officers, and gunfights in the streets left more than 30 dead.

The mayhem shook the city and raised concerns about whether the government is prepared to tame bustling shantytowns ahead of the 2016 Olympics, which Rio recently won after defeating Chicago and two other cities. Though capturing the Olympics was a personal victory for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, authorities here were mortified when the violence in this picturesque seaside city was televised worldwide.

The tough police tactics that Rio's security forces have long used -- complete with assault rifles, armored personnel carriers and helicopters -- have by no means ended in the city's favelas, as the slums are known.

But Azevedo said that in Santa Marta and in a handful of other once-violent districts, the strategy is to replace the militarized police with patrol officers. She said officers permanently deployed in the favelas would be better positioned to develop intelligence from residents about drug trafficking and to help government authorities determine where new state funds are needed to build homes and provide social programs.

"For a long time this community was abandoned," said Azevedo, 31, who has served in some of the city's toughest districts. "It is difficult to be able to change a 50-year situation in one year, but our intention is to change the minds of people and their impression of the police."

The task will not be easy. Favelas have multiplied from a few hundred a decade ago to more than 1,000. Many spread across steep hillsides, their narrow, concrete passageways leading to tiny cinder-block homes built haphazardly, one above the other. Two million to 3 million of Rio de Janeiro state's 14 million people live in the slums, and most of the country's 5,717 homicides last year took place there.

Life in the favelas has always been hard, but as the slums have grown, and the gangs have grown more violent, the police over the years began to slowly withdraw. Gangs such as the Pure Third Command and the Red Command were left in control, with the Brazilian state virtually absent.

The police would still go into the favelas, residents said, but only to engage traffickers in gun battles like the one that proceeded the helicopter's downing. The police say the gangs are heavily armed, not just with assault rifles but also with rocket launchers and grenades.

"They always arrives at the time when kids are going to school and people are going to work," Daniela Barreto, 27, who lives in a favela called Rocinha. "It's horrible. People start running and panicking."

An Italian-born director of a school in Rocinha said children play-act what they see in the streets, favoring the gangsters who live in their midst. "They play policeman and narcotics dealer, but no one wants to be the policeman," said Barbara Olivi.

Teams of off-duty police officers and firefighters have formed their own militias, which extort local businesses and also fight the drug dealers for preeminence. The United Nations found last year that the police in Rio killed an average of four people a day, prompting the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, to call the hard-line police operations "murderous and self-defeating."

In recent days, Rio's newspapers have been filled with accounts of how a pair of police officers robbed two men who just moments before had mugged and shot a well-known community leader, Evandro João Silva. When the officers came upon Silva, the authorities said, they did nothing to help him, a sequence captured on a surveillance camera and replayed on local television news programs.

Police officers said they were ashamed by that episode. But it is not hard to find officers in the favelas who favor a hard-line approach to policing. Sgt. Gilson, who asked that his last name not be used because he is not authorized to speak to reporters, said he considers himself a "war veteran" after 17 years on the force.

Toting an assault rifle as he spoke, Gilson said casualties are a necessary byproduct of operations to take back the favelas. "If it weren't like that, the Americans would have left Iraq," he said. "If we show weakness, we will lose."

Jose Mariano Beltrame, Rio's secretary of public security, said authorities are trying to curtail brutality and corruption in the favelas by deploying police officers recently graduated from the academy. Those in the toughest districts are also receiving a bonus that increases their salary by 50 percent.

"These newly trained officers come to the job without the inherent vices that they would pick up on the streets," Beltrame said. The objective, he added, is to return control of the favelas to the state.

Pastor Dione Dos Santos, a former gang member who leads an evangelical church that tries to get criminals to give up their lawless ways, said he does not oppose having more police in the neighborhoods. But he said community-policing units do not make up for a lack of services and opportunities in the favelas, nor does the deployment of new officers automatically alleviate residents' tense relationship with police.

"It's not enough to bring in a police officer who doesn't know the problems of the community," Dos Santos said. "The people don't respect the police because the police don't give them any respect."

When Culture Trumps Law - Nation

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In November, Adriana gave birth to a child she never wanted and spent two months fighting not to have. The first time Adriana was raped, on January 29, 2008, a stranger forced her into his car and drove to a parking lot near the airport in João Pessoa, the capital of the state of Paraíba in northeast Brazil. The stranger's gang rented a house on her street. The second time, he drove a different car and threatened to go after her family if she told anyone what had happened.

Adriana, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, stayed inside her home for four months. Each day, her attacker passed by the window, holding two pointed fingers to his head to remind her of what she stood to lose. When Adriana, 26 and a virgin before she was raped, realized she was pregnant, she knew she wanted an abortion, but she didn't dare ask anyone in her family for help. She knew her evangelical father, in whose house she lived, would tell her to have the child, and that her mother would be ashamed. So in early June, when the gang finally left the house on her street and moved on, Adriana went to the local public hospital.

Under Brazil's penal code, abortion is a crime except in cases of rape or direct threat to the mother's life. When Adriana went to the public maternity hospital, Instituto Cândida Vargas, on June 10, she explained that she had been raped, estimated that she was nineteen weeks pregnant and asked for an abortion. The receptionist sent her to the hospital psychologist, who told her that women have a responsibility to have children. The doctor held up the stethoscope so she could hear the baby's heartbeat, told her the hospital only does abortions until twelve weeks and sent her away.

Adriana's case received far less attention than that of the 9-year-old girl who received an abortion in Recife, a nearby city in the state of Pernambuco. In early March, the Catholic Church excommunicated two doctors for performing the abortion, which fell under both exceptions to the penal code: the girl had been raped by her stepfather, and her hips were too narrow to safely give birth to the twins she was carrying. (Following an international uproar, the Church withdrew the excommunication.) The doctors agreed to the procedure, but in an interview on Brazilian national television the next day, Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho of Recife announced that when government laws and the "law of God" conflict, "the human law has no value."

Adriana knows what it means for a law to lose its meaning.

Adriana didn't know that the Brazilian Ministry of Health's recommended limit for abortions--the one cited in hospital policy--was twenty-two weeks, not twelve. She didn't know the law entitled her to an abortion and required the public hospital to perform it. She didn't know that within the past two years, João Pessoa, ten minutes from her house in Bayeux, a city of 92,000, established a government commission on women and opened a domestic violence center. Opposition to abortion in Brazil, the nation with the largest Roman Catholic population in the world and a growing evangelical movement, disproportionately affects women who don't have money for private abortion clinics or a sense of entitlement to services from public institutions. Adriana might have given up if a nurse hadn't suggested she visit a local feminist organization called Cunhã. Cunhã staff immediately brought her to the dignified purple-and-white house in the center of João Pessoa, where the government-funded domestic violence center opened in September 2007.

When Adriana arrived at the center in June, having been turned away by the hospital, it looked as if the law was one thing she had on her side. Within a few hours a team of dynamic lawyers, psychologists and other staff members decided that Adriana would go to the police station and report the rape, and someone would go with her. She would find a lawyer and collect the necessary paperwork. She would go back to the hospital and demand an ultrasound. And she would bring this information to a judge, who would issue an order for the abortion to which she was legally entitled.

Regina Alves, a psychologist at the center, insists that when it comes to working with a victim of violence, "what matters is what she says." Though Adriana arrived at the center without an ultrasound or proof that she had been raped, the staff immediately contacted hospitals in nearby cities to find out their abortion policies. Lila de Oliveira, a tall and outspoken social worker from the center, stood beside Adriana through weeks of testing and waiting. Adriana and Lila went to the public defender's office to ask a judge to intervene, then started putting together a file with an HIV test, a medical report and a police notice, hoping the evangelical judge put in charge of Adriana's case would order the hospital to carry out an abortion.

By the time the tests and documentation the judge ordered came back from the police station and the hospital, it was June 30. I went with Lila and Douraci Vieira dos Santos, the head of the government commission on women, to meet Adriana at the bus stop and bring her to the hospital. Adriana came from tutoring students in her home and planned to go right back to teaching as soon as they set a date for her abortion. She was poised and steady next to me on the green couch in the bare white room, Lila on her left clutching the blue plastic folder of documents. Having the right documents takes on a certain urgency in a hospital where reported abortion protocol changes from one day to the next, and in a country where without proof of rape or threat to maternal health, victims and doctors who carry out abortions can be imprisoned for as long as three years.

Hospital director Eduardo Sergio swept in and said the fetus was 722 grams, too heavy to abort. The Ministry of Health recommends against aborting fetuses above 500 grams. After exceeding this weight, an aborted fetus is likely to come out breathing on its own, in which case the hospital is legally bound to do everything in its power to keep the premature baby alive. Though Douraci and Lila had begun putting together funding to fly Adriana to a hospital in another city, even doctors in Recife and São Paulo said it was too late to carry out an abortion. Adriana crumpled, almost imperceptibly, but she was sitting next to me and I could feel her shaking. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and spoke, audibly but quietly. "I don't want this inside of me. Why did you have to grow? I didn't want you to grow."

No single person stopped Adriana from having an abortion to which she was legally entitled. Adriana was forced to give birth to her rapist's child because of backs turned and services denied or delayed that together pushed the abortion off until it was too late. Between June 11 and June 30, Adriana and a representative from the center went to the hospital five times, the police station five times and the public defender's office three times. "There's an excuse in every case," Lila explained dryly, on the day the hospital staff announced that it would take a month to produce the results of a medical exam needed to show evidence of rape, and the policemen were on lunch break well into the afternoon.

Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition, traces the problem to Brazil's restrictive abortion laws and lack of infrastructure for enforcing the legal exceptions that do exist. "Most people perceive, in Brazil and elsewhere, that abortion is illegal," Germain said. "But if it's legal for any reason, it must be provided safely. Every medical institution should provide training; every site should have equipment and personnel to provide a safe procedure."

In João Pessoa, not all professionals know the law, and those who do know don't necessarily follow it. When Douraci went to Cândida Vargas hospital asking for documentation of the protocol that limits abortions to twelve weeks, Dr. Sergio told her the standard they followed was twenty-one to twenty-two weeks, not twelve. Adriana had been eligible for an abortion the day she set foot in the hospital.

As director of the maternity hospital, Dr. Sergio has overseen abortion services at Cândida Vargas since 2005, when city government responded to pressure from the local women's movement to incorporate abortion services into João Pessoa's public healthcare system. Until then, women like Adriana could go to a private clinic or try to find care in another city. Dr. Sergio told me he wasn't at the hospital when Adriana first arrived. If he'd been there, he said, he would have done the abortion right away, since doctors have to "be careful that our social and religious values don't interfere with our process of attending to women." Douraci insists that whether or not Dr. Sergio knew about Adriana's situation during her first visit to the hospital, she discussed the case on the phone with him that same week, when Adriana was less than twenty-two weeks pregnant and still within the recommended timeline for an abortion.

Adriana's case may seem to come down to technicalities like weeks and weight. But the cultural attitude toward abortion in Brazil is more deeply ingrained--and harder to change--than laws and numbers. The majority of abortions in Brazil are performed under illegal, unsafe conditions. Of the 1 million to 2 million Brazilian women who receive clandestine abortions annually, 250,000 end up in hospitals with complications resulting from the procedure. Reproductive rights activists had hoped that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist president elected in 2002, would introduce more progressive policies regarding women. In May 2007--a week after Mexico City legalized abortion through the third month of pregnancy--Lula identified illegal abortion as a public health concern because so many women die each year from them. Public health minister José Gomes Temporão questioned Brazil's conservative abortion law, particularly the legislated imprisonment of women who seek illegal abortions, and called for a national referendum on the issue. But in July 2008 a proposed bill to legalize abortion, on the table for seventeen years, was voted down by Congress, 57-4. Lula has appointed seven of Brazil's eleven Supreme Court justices. His most recent appointment, Carlos Alberto Menezes Direito, openly defends the notion of life beginning at conception, allying himself with at least three of Lula's six other appointments known for antichoice rulings.

Sixty-nine years after an amendment to the penal code made abortion legal in cases of rape, five of Brazil's twenty-six states don't have a facility that provides abortions. Even facilities designated for female victims of violence don't always support women's decisions. In 1985, Brazil established a network of all-female police stations designed to improve care for victims of rape and domestic violence. João Pessoa was the third city in the nation to open such a station, called a delegacia da mulher. Since Bayeux is too small to receive government funds for an all-female police station, Regina and Lila brought Adriana to the delegacia in João Pessoa. Though delegacias were designed as safe spaces for women to report crimes, Regina reported to her colleagues that "when they [delegacia policewomen] learned it was a case of rape and abortion, they didn't want to listen to what we had to say." Adriana then went to the police station in Bayeux, where she faced a line of policemen at the door, alerted to the case by their colleagues in João Pessoa and already prepared to turn her away.

Each doctor who examined Adriana told her to have the child. Finally she asked one of them, "And if you were in my place? What would you do?" The doctor didn't answer. He left the room.

When I asked Rosana de Lucena, director of the domestic violence center, why so many officials stood in the way of an abortion, she responded that "they don't want to grapple with this fear"--the fear felt by women like Adriana, who face family members who don't believe in abortion, and by public officials concerned about their careers. It's one thing to choose to work at a domestic violence center, Rosana explained, and "another thing to work at a hospital where suddenly you're told you're dealing with violence against women." Doctors, in particular, fear prosecution. Without proof that the mother's life is on the line or that a rape occurred, carrying out an abortion in Brazil means committing a crime.

"There's a large gap between the law and the application of the law," notes Mayor Ricardo Coutinho, the first mayor to require the local maternity hospital to provide abortion services. As mayor, he says, it's easier to change the laws than to change how people are treated in public facilities. Even in cases where abortion is legal, "the medical professionals are very reluctant because there exists a kind of professional terrorism. There's a lot of pressure on them because of efforts to characterize them as baby killers, as murderers."

Dr. Sergio sees the case as unfortunate but inevitable. He knows it could have turned out differently, but in his view each decision was necessary to protect Adriana's safety and the hospital's reputation. I met with him during his overnight shift. Women in a mix of street clothes and hospital gowns lined up outside his office, and he continued to usher them in and out as he spoke, stopping his conversation with me only to help a woman off the examining table and explain why she needed to stay in the hospital overnight. He told me that as head of the hospital, he was responsible for carrying out an abortion if the doctor on duty refused to do so. I asked when he had carried out this procedure, but Dr. Sergio didn't answer directly and instead explained why the responsibility fell to him. "In the same way that these women were victims and still have their rights and their liberties," he told me, "I can't force someone to carry out a procedure he doesn't believe in from a religious or social standpoint."

Efforts to fully legalize abortion, and to obtain abortions in cases where the procedure is already legal, take place against a strong current of religious opposition. At the national level, mobilized religious groups in Brazil's Congress are pushing proposals to recognize fetuses for tax purposes and create a national Day of the Unborn. The staff of the domestic violence center in João Pessoa work with women from all sorts of religious backgrounds; in almost every case, they told me, religion shapes a woman's beliefs on abortion and the way she is treated at home and in public institutions. The Catholic Church has a firm stance on abortion: any woman who has an abortion, or any doctor who aids in the procedure, is automatically excommunicated. The case of the 9-year-old girl in Recife shows that this is not an empty threat.

While each staff member at the domestic violence center is deeply invested in individual cases, as a team they've learned to take a long view and focus on crafting a model for a public institution that treats people with dignity and respect for their choices. In April, the women who worked on Adriana's case will meet with feminist leaders in two northeastern states, Rio Grande do Norte and Pernambuco, to build a regional coalition out of their many local initiatives. This follows a history of strong women's rights activism in Brazil. Brazilian women were the first in Latin America to introduce abortion information into medical school curriculums and among the first to develop underground abortion networks for poor women. In partnership with Cunhã and the government commission on women, the domestic violence center in João Pessoa used Adriana's case to hold the hospital accountable for repeated attempts to stop women from having abortions. Based on a report they submitted to the Ministry of Health about Adriana's case, the ministry removed Dr. Sergio from his position as director of the hospital; but he didn't lose his place as an influential physician until another rape victim reported that she, too, had sought an abortion at Cândida Vargas and was turned away.

In Brazil, the public battle for abortion rights--the one that makes it into international newspapers--is a legal one. But the less visible battles are equally important. Cases like Adriana's are battles to make the law mean something to people on the ground, and the people waging them have taken on more than a single doctor who refuses to do an abortion. They also confront what Douraci calls "the inequalities, the power of machismo, the violence and the silence" that shape women's lives in João Pessoa and throughout Brazil. When I interviewed Douraci during the week that Adriana began prenatal care and newspapers reported that Congress voted against a bill to legalize abortion, she insisted that simply enacting new policies for women "does not further the debate on gender relations in those women's lives." That debate takes place outside state legislatures: in the waiting rooms of domestic violence centers and in the hallways of public hospitals, where what the law says doesn't correspond to what the doctors do. Legal rights are put to the test in these waiting rooms and hallways, where people fight to turn rights on paper into rights in reality.

About Emma Sokoloff-Rubin

Emma Sokoloff-Rubin is a sophomore at Yale University and an associate editor of The Yale Globalist. Research support for this article was provided by the Thomas C. Barry Travel Fellowship.

Ousted Leader, Manuel Zelaya, Returns to Honduras - NYTimes.com

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By ELISABETH MALKIN

MEXICO CITY — Three months after he was expelled in a dawn coup, the deposed president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, sneaked back into his country on Monday, forcing world leaders gathered in New York to refocus their attention on the political stalemate to the south and presenting a new challenge to the de facto government.

After what he described as a 15-hour trek through the mountains, taking back roads to avoid checkpoints, Mr. Zelaya and his wife took refuge at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. He did not say which country he crossed into Honduras from.

At the embassy, he gave a series of interviews with the international news media, saying that he hoped to begin meeting with “prominent Hondurans” and members of the de facto government that ousted him to find an end to the crisis that has engulfed the country since he was exiled on June 28.

“We ask those in the coup government to think and to come to dialogue with us,” he told Al Jazeera’s English network.

His return appeared to have caught the de facto government by surprise. Roberto Micheletti, who was appointed president by Congress, at first denied that Mr. Zelaya had returned, calling the reports “media terrorism.”

But on Monday evening, after imposing a nationwide curfew, he acknowledged Mr. Zelaya’s presence but said it “changes nothing of our reality.” He called on Brazil to hand Mr. Zelaya over for arrest and trial.

“We are waiting for him,” Mr. Micheletti said in a news conference earlier in the day. “A court is ready to proceed against him legally, and a jail is also ready.”

The de facto government has said that Mr. Zelaya would be arrested if he tried to return, citing 18 charges against him, including treason.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday evening that the two sides must find a way to talk. “It’s imperative that dialogue begin,” she said. “It’s also imperative that the return of President Zelaya does not lead to any conflict or violence, but instead that everyone act in a peaceful way to try to find some common ground.”

President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica, who has led the international negotiations on Honduras, offered to go to Honduras to mediate if he were asked.

Mr. Arias and Mrs. Clinton were meeting in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting there.

Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, also in New York, denied that Brazil had helped plan the return of Mr. Zelaya and his wife, Xiomara Castro, to Honduras. He said they had arrived at the embassy through “their own peaceful methods.”

Mr. Amorim did not say whether there was a time limit on Mr. Zelaya’s stay in the embassy, but he stressed that the Organization of American States should renew efforts to negotiate a solution. “If the O.A.S. doesn’t work to give guarantees to a democratically elected government, in the case of a coup like this, then what is the O.A.S. for?” he said.

Delegates from the organization met late Monday in Washington to discuss the crisis.

Mr. Zelaya has accepted a proposal offered by Mr. Arias that would restore him to the presidency with limited powers and grant an amnesty on all sides. Mr. Micheletti has rejected it.

As the talks have stalled and the international community has turned its attention elsewhere, Mr. Zelaya has grown impatient.

Since the coup, he has tried to return to Honduras at least twice. A week after the coup, he tried to fly into the Tegucigalpa airport, but soldiers massed on the tarmac and blocked his plane from landing.

In July, he set up camp with his supporters just over the border in Nicaragua, and stepped briefly into Honduran territory before returning to Nicaragua. Rumors that Mr. Zelaya was already in the country, or was about to return, have circulated through the capital repeatedly since then.

The curfew was announced just 30 minutes before it took effect at 4 p.m. Monday, sending residents of the capital rushing to get home and tying traffic in knots, residents said.

At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his opponents said would have been the first step toward allowing him to run for another term in office, which is forbidden under the Honduran Constitution. Mr. Zelaya has denied any attempt to run for re-election.

No country has recognized the de facto government of Mr. Micheletti. President Obama and other leaders in the hemisphere have insisted that Mr. Zelaya be returned to office, contending that he was removed in a coup. The United States, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have all suspended aid to Honduras in protest.

But the Micheletti government has stood fast, insisting that Mr. Zelaya was removed from office legally. Mr. Micheletti has promised to hand over power to a new president who will be elected in national elections scheduled for Nov. 29.

Alexei Barrionuevo contributed reporting from New York.

Trauma of life in one of Brazil's most violent slums - CNN.com

Image by kaysha via Flickr

• Story Highlights
• Dr. Douglas Khayat describes life in one of Brazil's most violent favelas
  
• Psychologists have so far given 2,000 consultations for traumatized locals
  
• Doctors Without Borders provide the only medical/psychiatric help in the region

By Douglas Khayat
Special to CNN

Douglas Khayat is a psychologist for the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders//Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), working in Complexo do Alemao, one of the poorest and most violent favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- An estimated 150,000 people live in Complexo do Alemao, where armed groups fight for turf, and fighting between police forces and ruling groups leave thousands of people trapped by violence.

There are no private or public health facilities inside Alemao and not even government ambulances enter. In this extremely violent corner of the world, residents live with a great deal of psychological trauma.

In recognition of this trauma, Doctors Without Borders offers psychological support, in addition to the medical services we provide to the community in the favela.

The people who call Alemao home live under a vow of silence, the unspoken code of survival that dictates that no one discuss what goes on inside the community particularly the violent episodes they endure or witness. Killings, beating, threats, expulsions, regular exposure to heavy weapons, and other forms of abuse, are all carried out by the armed groups that control the drug trafficking, imposing their own set of rules.
See images of life in the favelas »

Since October 2007, Doctors Without Borders psychologists have conducted 2,000 consultations for 1,000 different patients. For 85 percent of patients, suffering was directly related to violence. They have either been directly affected by combat, experienced the trauma of witnessing extreme violence, have had family members killed or tortured.

The symptoms we mostly see are anxiety disorders, depression, psychosomatic conditions, and learning and behavior problems in children. When police enter the area, fighting often breaks out with armed groups. The state of fear created by these groups creates an environment in which psychological disorders multiply. Some get used to living this way, but others do not, particularly children.
See a report on healthcare in Brazil »

The needs are incredible, so are the stories.

Last year a middle-aged man arrived at our project asking to see a psychologist. Two years earlier he suffered a series of tragic events that resulted in persistent insomnia and anxiety that almost ruined his family.

He was crossing a football field holding hands with a female friend, not his wife, when suddenly a armored police car entered the community and began shooting.

Everything happened in a matter of seconds. His girlfriend told him she was wounded. The shooting became so bad that he had to leave her to find shelter. She died and he could not stop blaming himself for leaving her in the middle of the field.

It made his marriage hell. It started to affect his work and he began to have terrible nightmares. He started to drink a lot. But our treatment with him went really well. We helped him reevaluate others facets of his life and things started to get better, his marriage, his work. People around him reacted to his new attitude, and his life began to improve.

The population trusts us because we live the same day-to-day routine they live. Our project is the only health facility inside Complexo do Alemao. During the day, we are exposed to the same environment as the residents. This experience in the same environment helps to develop a bond with our patients.

For me as a Brazilian, as a middle class carioca (from Rio de Janeiro), it is difficult to experience this aspect of my country. I've grown angrier about the conditions in my city and country after doing this work.

At the same time, it has been and continues to be a life changing experience, a possibility to dive into my country's soul and play an important part of people's lives.

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As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.

But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”

New Honduran Leadership Flouts Worldwide Censure

By William Booth and Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, June 29 -- Honduras's new government vowed Monday to remain in power despite growing worldwide condemnation of the military-led coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

As leaders from across Latin America met in Nicaragua to demand that Zelaya be returned to office, hundreds of protesters in the Honduran capital were met with tear gas fired by soldiers surrounding the presidential palace. The new government ordered the streets cleared, and shopkeepers barricaded their doors. Residents rushed home as a 9 p.m. curfew was enforced.

Although the United States and its allies condemned the coup, the most vocal opposition -- along with threats of military intervention -- came from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who led a summit of leftist allies in Nicaragua that demanded Zelaya be reinstated. The Venezuelan populist, who led a failed coup in his own country in 1992 and survived one in 2002, said the Honduran people should rebel against the new government.

"We are saying to the coup organizers, we are ready to support a rebellion of the people of Honduras," Chávez said. "This coup will be defeated."

Chávez spent Monday in the meeting in Managua, attended by the leaders of Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and other countries allied with Honduras. "We have to be very firm, very firm. This cannot end until José Manuel Zelaya is returned to power, without condition," he said.

Three of Honduras's neighbors -- Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua -- said Monday that they would suspend overland trade with Honduras for 48 hours. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, reading a statement, said the suspension was a "first step" against the new government.

Chávez also said his country is cutting off oil shipments to Honduras, which has received Venezuelan petroleum under beneficial terms.

Earlier, Chávez had pledged to "overthrow" Roberto Micheletti, a Honduran congressional leader and member of Zelaya's party who was sworn in as president Sunday afternoon.

On Monday, Micheletti responded to Chávez's threat on Honduran radio, saying, "Nobody scares us."

Chávez's growing belligerence marks a clear challenge to the Obama administration to reverse the coup or suffer a loss of clout in the region.

Senior Obama officials said an overthrow of the Zelaya government had been brewing for days -- and they worked behind the scenes to stop the military and its conservative, wealthy backers from pushing Zelaya out. That the United States failed to stop the coup gives antagonists such as Chávez room to use events to push their vision for the region.

At dawn on Sunday, heavily armed troops burst into the presidential palace here, broke through the door of Zelaya's bedroom and roused him from bed. He told reporters guns were pointed at him and he was escorted from his official residence in pajamas. Later he was put on a Honduran military plane and flown into exile in Costa Rica.

Honduran leaders who supported his removal say Zelaya had overstepped his presidential powers by calling for a nonbinding referendum on how long a president can serve here. His critics say Zelaya was intent on using his populist rhetoric to maintain power after his term officially was to end in January.

Honduran military helicopters circled the capital all afternoon, as Micheletti met with his supporters and began to make appointments for a new cabinet, a signal that organizers of the military-led ouster of Zelaya were planning to hold firm.

"I am sure that 80 to 90 percent of the Honduran population is happy with what happened," Micheletti said, adding he had not spoken to any other Latin American head of state.

The coup appears to have been well organized. Sunday morning, as Zelaya was being ousted, local TV and radio stations went off the air. Cellphone and land-line communications remain jammed, and many numbers offered only a busy signal.

Zelaya, speaking to reporters in Managua, demanded that he be restored to power but said that violence was not an option.

He also said that many Hondurans had no idea about the worldwide condemnation of the coup because private television stations in his country blacked out coverage, playing cartoons and soap operas.

By early Monday night, another meeting of Latin American nations had begun in Managua, with such heavyweights as Mexico and the secretary general of the Organization of American States, José Miguel Insulza, criticizing Zelaya's opponents.

Across the Americas and Europe, leaders called for Zelaya's reinstatement. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, said his government would not recognize a Honduran administration not headed by Zelaya. "We in Latin America can no longer accept someone trying to resolve his problem through the means of a coup," Lula said.

The United Nations condemned the coup and said Micheletti should make way for Zelaya's return. Zelaya was invited to address the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. Zelaya also said he planned to return to Honduras and reclaim the presidency.

The ouster in the poor, agricultural country of 7 million people revived memories of coup-driven turmoil in Latin America. Zelaya, who has spoken frequently with reporters, has been quick to mention the political chaos that military overthrows have traditionally caused.

"Are we going to go back to the military being outside of the control of the civil state?" Zelaya said. "Everything that is supposed to be an achievement of the 21st century is at risk in Honduras."

Forero reported from Caracas, Venezuela.