Veja Magazine

I have read Veja, Brazil’s principal weekly magazine, religiously for the almost 15 years of my residence here in Brazil. I find the tone of the journalists horribly condescending, ideologically predictable and in coverage of foreign news, suspiciously similar to what came out in The Economist the week before. But I read on.

One becomes accustomed to format in things we read and perhaps this is the magazine’s great strength.

They always have an interview and this week is was with an Israeli mathematician and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for economics. He has a very long beard, which makes anybody look strange.

He is an expert on something called Game Theory, which apparently is a good base from which to conduct negotiation. He uses the example of Mutually Assured Destruction to portray how peace was kept between the US and USSR during the cold war, and Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich to show how placating or trying to hard to assuage your adversary can be extremely dangerous.

All good stuff, until he talks about how Israel has been too weak with the Palestinians, citing the settlement pullout from the Gaza Strip as proof of a pattern of craven concessions to the Arabs. There is a tendency among many, though by no means all, Israelis to ignore the fact that 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the creation of Israel. This delegitimized his argument slightly.

The ‘Panorama Page’ features a picture of the carnage wrought by a recent suicide bomb in a market in Pakistan that went off just when mothers were picking up their kids from school. Most of the victims, therefore, were women and children. Yet the non-existent outcry, Veja disdainfully declared, from those who decry the FMI, World Bank and other pillars of global capitalism, was significant for its absence. Pakistan seems like a complete basket case.

A few statistics are interwoven to articles, of interest this time was the fact that Brazil’s carbon emissions increased 25% between 1990 and 2005; 15% of the Brazilian population is Evangelical and the economy is running a 7.6 billion real deficit. The governor of Paraná State also declared that the recent cases of breast cancer among men have been caused by all these gay parades.

An article on the crack epidemic, exemplified by a nice middle class boy who strangled his girlfriend under the influence, points out that 16,000 psychiatric beds have been removed from hospitals in the past few years. The ‘generous’ health insurance companies, maintained by those few who can afford them, agree to pay for 15 days of counseling for drug addicts and no more, hardly sufficient time for chronic cases. Whoever invented crack is in the same league as hackers, destroying society for kicks.

A disheartening article on the principals of public schools in Brazil, 80% of who are women, stated that while 98% don’t think it’s their fault that their students perform so horrendously, 64% judge themselves unprepared for their responsibilities. Contradictions are many in this country and galling when the middle class pays 37% of its income to the government for universal health and education that is so bad they have to use the private sector.

The international feature story was about Venezuela. This is like asking a victim of crime to say something positive about their attacker. Chavez is the devil incarnate for Veja, his Bolivaran revolution close to as dangerous as the Ebola virus. Endless evils are cited, including those attesting to plummeting industrial and agricultural production. Not to defend Chavez, a pretty rancid guy, but if Venezuela was so great before, why in this country full of oil, land and a small population were most people poor? And why is it different when the president of Colombia, Alvoro Uribe, amends his country’s constitution to perpetuate his rule, as opposed to Chavez and his other leftist clones in Latin America?

Despite its obvious bias, Veja is not without a sense of humor. In the section entitled People, devoted mostly to celebrities, it reported on the rapper Diddy’s latest song on Brazil. It goes something like this, translated by the author:

Booties, booties, booties.
First class booties, round booties, everywhere
It’s a Tsunami of booties.

And remember, Diddy went out with Jenifer Lopez so knows a thing or two about “booties.’

Salvador, Bahia, 03/11/09