{"id":1530,"date":"2004-09-18T10:24:03","date_gmt":"2004-09-18T09:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2004\/09\/18\/brazil_held_up_enforcing_law_on_us_demand"},"modified":"2025-10-12T21:51:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T20:51:07","slug":"brazil_held_up_enforcing_law_on_us_demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2004\/09\/18\/brazil_held_up_enforcing_law_on_us_demand","title":{"rendered":"Brazil held up enforcing law &#8230; on US demand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A Brazilian journalist called Carlos Chagas <a href=\"http:\/\/brazzil.com\/2004\/html\/articles\/sep04\/p117sep04.htm\">reports here<\/a> that the Brazilian government held up implementing the &quot;shoot-down law&quot;, enabling the shooting-down of planes which are being used to smuggle drugs, was held up for seven years because of threats from the US government. &quot;By way of an imperial gesture,&quot; he alleges,&quot; US president, George Bush, is now allowing Brazil to shoot drug-carrying planes as if he were dishing out a handout to a hobo.&quot;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The article claims that the Americans objected because a similar law in Peru ended up with a plane full of pastors being shot down. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bradynet.com\/report.html\">This article<\/a> on &quot;BradyNet&quot; alleges that the law was held up by a &quot;veiled threat&quot; from Eximbank to suspend funding for SIVAM, a system for monitoring the Amazon forest.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/americas\/3657170.stm\">A BBC report<\/a> earlier this month also claimed that Brazil was the &quot;world&#39;s hacking capital&quot;. In this case, the reference is clearly to internet fraud, but my understanding is that a lot of a different sort of hacking is going on in Brazil &#8211; hacking of open-source software, which is freely-available alternatives to commercial computer software. Brazilians generally can&#39;t afford American and European proprietary software, and &quot;free&quot; (and generally superior) system software is much more widely used there than in Europe or America. The open-source community uses the term &quot;hacking&quot; to refer to experimentation with software, not with breaking into other people&#39;s computers which is known to them as &quot;cracking&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>As for why I post it here, well Chagas is concerned about the ability and\/or willingness of Brazil to stand up to the Americans, and if Brazil (one of the most populous and powerful in the southern hemisphere) won&#39;t do this, who will?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Brazilian journalist called Carlos Chagas reports here that the Brazilian government held up implementing the &quot;shoot-down law&quot;, enabling the shooting-down of planes which are being used to smuggle drugs, was held up for&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-oG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42951,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530\/revisions\/42951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}