Road chronicle of a blogger

First of all, thank you to all my friends in the blogosphere.

The blog still needs your subscription or contribution, but the campaign to raise the necessary funds to pay Ali Kamel's "compensation" has easily reached its goal.

In addition to specific donations for the campaign, the number of Cafezinho subscribers increased from 500 to 700, a growth of 40% in two weeks.

I especially thank Leandro Fortes, Renato Rovai, Altamiro Borges, and Paulo Nogueira, who wrote supporting texts and, in doing so, helped me extraordinarily to confront the outrageousness of our judiciary.

I am, of course, grateful to all the bloggers and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of readers who sent messages and contributed in some way.

I also thank Jandira Feghali, the federal congresswoman who most strongly defends the cause of freedom of expression for alternative media in the National Congress.

The PMDB leaders are always talking about defending freedom of information, press, and expression, but apparently this defense only applies to the major media outlets, heirs of the dictatorship.

Finally, a special thank you to Wadih Damous, president of the Human Rights Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB), who has always supported us; and to the creator of Brasil 247, who also persistently collaborated to denounce an unjust and disproportionate conviction.

The Brazilian right wing can stage as many coups as it wants, manipulate public opinion, influence judges through intimidation or flattery, and conspire with sectors of the Public Prosecutor's Office and opposition groups entrenched within the Federal Police.

None of this will negate our greatest victory.

The emergence of a core group critical of the media is a major democratic achievement.

We are saddened by everything that is happening because we become emotionally involved with the political issue.

We rejoice in good news about Brazil and are depressed by negative news, unlike the cynical media, who report misfortunes with a wicked grin and divulge good news with a dead and embarrassed look.

Sad, yet possessing an irreducible dignity, as if we had finally been immunized against the worst disease that can afflict a citizen: becoming a media idiot, a fool easily manipulated by the tricks of the most corrupt and cynical sectors of our society.

Tomorrow I will write about the strange (or not so strange, since the tucano [a member of the PSDB party] is an unaccountable species) generosity of the Attorney General towards Aécio Neves. And also about the approval of the PEC da Bengala [a proposed amendment to the Constitution regarding the retirement age of Supreme Court justices], this not insignificant blow against our democracy.

That being said, allow me to continue the post in the form of a somewhat crazy chronicle, which is all I can offer you today.

I'm here in M., in the interior of Minas Gerais, the heart of the coffee-growing region, a small town of 14 inhabitants, ugly as sin, but an important little piece of my beloved Brazil, full of honest and hardworking people.

I arrived this morning after seven hours sitting next to a small businessman in the export industry, who spent the entire trip, while driving, trying to convert me to Allan Kardec's spiritism.

For this, Faulkner's readings were useful to me. I find amusement in any situation, and I fueled my colleague's spiritual enthusiasm; feeling relieved, in any case, that he didn't talk about politics at all.

He's a really nice guy, but his sources of information necessarily place him at the opposite pole from mine (my prediction would be correct, as I found out a little later).

I came to interview a man who is practically the owner of the city, a businessman with interests in the coffee, supermarket, university, mineral water, and dairy sectors.

I wasn't expecting this, but it was the businessman who, throughout the interview, praised the current government for the priority it gives to social issues.

This is the kind of work I do for pleasure, to learn a little more about Brazil, despite this kind of risk: spending seven hours listening to talk about spiritism, and thanking God that the person I'm talking to doesn't prefer to talk about politics.

I hope that, on his return, he spends the same seven hours talking about Kardec…

I didn't even have time to rest much at home. On Wednesday night, I bought a bed at the Tietê bus station, with the Expresso Brasileiro company, which I publicly commend here for having excellent onboard internet, allowing me to watch a few more episodes of season 3 of House of Cards.

I arrived in Rio at 5 a.m., washed some dishes I had left dirty days before, before going to São Paulo, tidied up the house a bit (I mention this out of pride in differentiating myself from the aristocratic, ancien régime profile of our newspaper columnists, who probably have a maid even to serve them a glass of water), and waited for my fellow spiritualist to pick me up at the building's entrance.

A note for the trolls who love to come here and call me a "failure": there was a time when I was the leading coffee journalist in Brazil, and one of the leading ones in the world.

In addition to editing the leading newsletter in the sector in Brazil, I wrote daily in Portuguese and English for an American website, which paid me in dollars.

Believe it or not, I gave up everything to write about politics. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life writing about coffee.

Coffee helped me get to know Brazil because it made me travel a lot, interview small and large producers, agronomists, exporters, etc. More importantly, it saved me from a common vice among those who venture into political literature, which is to only know and associate with those with whom you share ideological affinity.

I spent years writing for people who, for the most part, had opinions and backgrounds completely different from mine, which helped me develop a more careful style of writing (a quality that, I fear, I have lost in recent years).

As I was saying, I was in São Paulo.

I arrived in the big capital on Saturday morning, also by bus. I went to the hotel, took a shower, and took a taxi to the headquarters of Barão de Itararé, where we had some political meetings, both in the morning and afternoon.

In the morning, there was a situational analysis, with CUT's communications secretary, Rosane Bertotti, Laurindo Leal Filho, an academic in the field of communication, as well as the president of Barão de Itararé, Miro Borges, and the likely successor to the position, Renata Mielli.

A weighty, even pessimistic analysis, punctuated by harsh interventions from participants, criticizing the government's silence and cowardice, especially when it comes to what, in growing spheres of the social movement, is considered the primary battle: communication policy.

One of the participating bloggers, later, in a bar in Roosevelt Square, summed up an almost unanimous thought: "I have the feeling that we don't have a president."

Just as the ancients said, amidst the torments of bygone eras, that "we will always have Paris," today we can affirm that at least they left us with beer and good humor.

These are assets the media won't be able to steal from us so easily.

After hours of heated debate about the dark clouds hanging over Brazilian politics, with the conservative opposition and media corporations rapidly and frighteningly advancing on public opinion, a handful of bloggers went to drink beer and laugh at their own misfortune in a small bar in São Paulo.

So I extended my stay in the big capital for a few days.

The first day was spent out of laziness and having intestinal problems. The second day was spent attending a meeting between the Minister of Culture, Juca Ferreira, and independent media producers and bloggers.

Juca is serving his second term at a very different time from his first, when, in his own words, he was still treated like a "teddy bear" due to his limited identification, at the time, with the PT (Workers' Party) and the left in general.

Today, people, and the media in particular, know his trajectory. They know he has a side, and that he was one of the strategic figures for Dilma's victory in the second round. Juca Ferreira helped to politically ignite the electoral campaign, bringing together politically aware agents from the peripheries, and uniting the stray flocks of the cultural left.

Ferreira leveled harsh criticism at the Rouanet Law, which he considered a neoliberal excrescence (the terms are mine; Juca used milder words), even unconstitutional, insofar as it allows companies to supplement their private marketing using public funds.

He said that studies show that companies participating in the Rouanet Law reduce the resources allocated to marketing because they consider the law an efficient way to sell their brand.

Juca recounted that an Englishman who participated in a debate with him about the law, after reading – in astonishment – ​​the text with its regulations, said that a similar law would never be possible in England, because there it would not be acceptable to transfer public funds to private companies for use in marketing.

In my presentation, I addressed the problem of culture and media, specifically how Brazilian cultural debate remains hostage to a highly concentrated media landscape. Cinema, literature, visual arts—the lack of greater plurality in our mass media undermines diversity and, consequently, the quality of national cultural and artistic production.

Of course, alternative media and the digital world have opened many avenues, but when it comes to a national debate that virtually unites the entire society around some common concepts and values, we are still held hostage by the same media groups that supported the dictatorship and constantly try to interfere in the sovereign decisions of the population.

Every country faces similar problems, but the concentration in Brazil seems to me one of the most alarming in the entire democratic world.

Ivana Bentes, from the Ministry of Culture's Secretariat for Citizenship and Cultural Diversity, recalled that the ministry has been seeking to compensate for the lack of human and financial resources it faces through networked actions in partnership with civil society. She informed that the Ministry of Culture has begun a series of meetings with the Ministry of Communications to establish a bridge between cultural and communication policies, based on the understanding that one can no longer exist without the other.

Francisco Bosco, the new president of Funarte, also made a statement, but the post got too long, so I'll end it here.

- See more at: http://www.ocafezinho.com/2015/03/05/road-cronica-de-um-blogueiro/#sthash.kK3YLn0G.8GG4TAT2.dpuf