A series of anti-Semitic actions have taken place recently in Brazil, it was reported by the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs which noted that “there are troubling signs that rightwing factions within the nation’s military and their civilian supporters have begun to oppose the government’s commitment to gradually liberalizing Brazil’s institutions.”
The Council reported that there was an attempt to kill a prominent Jewish leader, Soo Paulo State Deputy Flavio Bierrenbach, last month in Soo Paulo. Bierrenbach, described by the Council as “a staunch human rights leader” and a member of the opposition Brazilian Democratic Mobilization Party, was out of his office when it was partially destroyed by intruders’ gunfire.
The Council also reported that the security and information branch of the Ministry of Mines and Energy earlier this year accused “Zionists,” scientists and opposition political leaders of staging a campaign with “origins in the U.S. and the USSR” to sabotage Brazil’s nuclear accord with West Germany. The charges, the Council noted, echoed those mode in a series of threats last year against several Soo Paulo scientists and intellectuals, including Jewish scientist Jose Goldemberg, president of the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science.
Other anti-Semitic incidents included threatening letters and phone calls and the beating of a Soo Paulo artist, Lourdes Cedarn, the wife of physicist Mario Schemberg, a leading opponent of the nuclear accord, the Council reported. It also pointed out that a Brazilian neo-Nazi group, the Moviento de Reorganizacoo, has been identified as being responsible for acts of intimidation against opponents of the nuclear accord and against prominent scientists, theo logions, liberal political leaders, lawyers who defend political scientists and Jewish personalities, artists and journalists.
The Council concluded that these incidents are “symptomatic of this new upsurge of anti-Semitism in the nation” which has a Jewish community of 150,000.
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