GAVIN O’TOOLE examines the fatal relationship between environmental crimes and politics in Brazil and the inspiration provided by Indigenous people
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Lula’s toughest battle
RON JACOBS appreciates the suspenseful style of a biography of the path to Lula’s first presidency, and the lessons it contains for working class self-organisation
Lula making a speech in Diadema, Sao Paulo, launching subsidized housing and Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance) credits, 2005. His social welfare programs like Bolsa Familia eventually led to growth in GDP, reduction in external debt and inflation, and helped 20 million Brazilians escape poverty.
[Ricardo Stuckert/PR/CC] 
MARIA DUARTE and LEO BOIX review Little Trouble Girls, Big Boys, The Roses, and Caught Stealing
MARY CONWAY admires a study of environmental idealism that aspires to Chekhov but is arrested in a deluge of middle-class opinion
ANGUS REID questions whether a human scriptwriter is behind the multiple plagiarisms of Disney’s much-lauded and vacuous extension of the Alien franchise
ANDREW FILMER welcomes the reopening of Glasgow’s landmark theatre after a seven-year transformation
CHRIS SEARLE encourages you to go hear a landmark performance, and introduces some of the musicians
Lula: A Biography
Fernando Morais, Verso, £25
LAWFARE is a relatively new term. In essence, it is the weaponisation of bourgeois law, usually by the right wing.
In Latin America, lawfare has been mostly used to try to eliminate leftist opponents who operate within the confines of bourgeois law. Probably the best known use of this tactic is when Brazil’s far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro employed it against Brazil’s former president Lula.
A brief description of these attempts goes like this.
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