International
Tough choices as Brazil’s Lula gets down to business
| By AFP | Marcelo Silva De Sousa
Fresh off a celebratory beach holiday, Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva got down to uglier business Monday: figuring out how to govern with a hostile Congress, nasty budget crunch and impossible-looking to-do list.
The political horse-trading of the transition period now starts in earnest for the veteran leftist, who will be sworn in for a third term on January 1, facing a far tougher outlook than the commodities-fueled boom he presided over in the 2000s.
Lula, 77, celebrated his narrow win over far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in the October 30 runoff election by escaping last week to the sun-drenched coast of Bahia in northeastern Brazil.
He joked he needed a belated honeymoon with his first-lady-to-be, Rosangela “Janja” da Silva, whom the twice-widowed ex-metalworker married in May.
His other honeymoon — the political one — could be short, analysts say.
Lula is meeting Monday with advisers in Sao Paulo. On Tuesday, he will travel to the capital, Brasilia, to finish assembling his 50-member transition team and start negotiating with members of Congress, two allies told AFP.
He faces a battle to get bills passed in a legislature where conservatives scored big gains in October’s elections.
Lula’s coalition has around 123 votes in the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies, and 27 in the 81-seat Senate, meaning he will have to strike alliances to get anything done — and even just survive, given the threat of impeachment in Brazil, where two presidents have been impeached in the past 30 years.
Into the shark tank
Lula is expected to meet in Brasilia with lower-house speaker Arthur Lira, a key Bolsonaro ally from the loose coalition of parties known as the “Centrao,” a group known for striking alliances with whoever is in power — in exchange for feeding on the federal pork barrel.
Lula will be under pressure from the Centrao not to oppose the so-called “secret budget”: 19.4 billion reais ($3.8 billion) in basically unmonitored federal funding that Bolsonaro agreed to allocate to select lawmakers to boost support for his reelection bid.
Meanwhile, money will be tight for Lula’s campaign promises, including increasing the minimum wage and maintaining a beefed-up 600-reais-per-month welfare program, “Auxilio Brasil.”
Bolsonaro, who introduced the program, did not allocate sufficient funding to continue it in the 2023 budget.
“We can’t start 2023 without the ‘Auxilio’ and a real increase in the minimum wage,” the leader of Lula’s Workers’ Party, Gleisi Hoffmann, said Friday.
“That’s our contract with the Brazilian people.”
Facing the impossible math of funding such pledges without breaking the government spending cap, Lula’s allies are exploring their options, including passing a constitutional amendment allowing exceptional spending next year.
But they are racing the clock: it would have to be approved by December 15.
Markets watching
Lula, who ran on vague promises of restoring Latin America’s biggest economy to the golden times of his first two terms (2003-2010), faces a bleaker picture this time around.
“The challenge is… how to balance fiscal responsibility with a highly anticipated social agenda,” in the face of high inflation and a possible global recession, said political scientist Leandro Consentino of Insper university.
Markets are watching closely — especially his pick for finance minister.
Lula is expected to split Bolsonaro’s economy “super-ministry” into three portfolios: finance, planning, and trade and industry.
Analysts predict a political choice for finance minister, a technocrat for planning and a business executive for trade.
Names floated for the finance job include Lula’s former education minister Fernando Haddad and his campaign coordinator, Aloizio Mercadante.
COP27 stage
Other closely watched portfolios are the environment and a promised new ministry of Indigenous affairs — both sore spots under Bolsonaro, who presided over a surge of destruction in the Amazon rainforest.
The former job could go to Lula’s one-time environment minister Marina Silva, credited with curbing deforestation in the 2000s.
In a key gesture, the president-elect will make his return to the international stage at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt, where he will arrive on November 14, advisers said.
Silva, who will travel with him, told newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo: “The climate issue is now a strategic priority at the highest level.”
International
Israel says 136 food aid boxes airdropped into Gaza by six nations
The Israeli military announced on Sunday that 136 boxes of food aid were airdropped into Gaza by the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, Germany, and Belgium.
“In recent hours, six countries conducted air drops of 136 aid packages containing food for residents in the southern and northern Gaza Strip,” read the statement, which added that the operation was coordinated by COGAT, the Israeli defense body overseeing civil affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Israeli military emphasized that they will “continue working to improve the humanitarian response alongside the international community” and reiterated their stance to “refute false allegations of deliberate famine in Gaza.”
The announcement comes as UN agencies warn Gaza faces an imminent risk of famine. More than one in three residents go days without eating, and other nutrition indicators have dropped to their worst levels since the conflict began.
The agencies also noted the difficulty of “collecting reliable data in current conditions, as Gaza’s health systems —already devastated by nearly three years of conflict— are collapsing.”
Meanwhile, Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry reported on Sunday that hospitals in the enclave recorded six deaths from hunger and malnutrition on Saturday, all of them adults.
International
Seven inmates dead, 11 injured after violent riot in Veracruz prison
Seven inmates were killed and eleven others injured in a violent riot and clash inside a penitentiary in the Mexican state of Veracruz, local authorities reported on Sunday.
The disturbance began on Saturday afternoon at the Social Reintegration Center in the port city of Tuxpan, in northern Veracruz, when inmates staged a protest over extortion and assaults allegedly carried out by members of the criminal group known as Grupo Sombra.
The protesting prisoners clashed with another group of inmates and set fires inside and outside the facility, seizing control of the prison for more than 12 hours.
During the takeover, the rioters released several videos, including one showing four prisoners —believed to be members of Grupo Sombra— accusing them of being behind the violence and extortion inside the prison.
It wasn’t until Sunday morning that elements of the Mexican Army, the National Guard, and local police forces managed to enter the prison and regain control. The state’s Public Security Secretariat confirmed that around 9:00 a.m. local time a coordinated operation restored full order and reestablished control of the facility.
Authorities also reported that the fires set by inmates were fully extinguished.
Official figures confirmed the “tragic” deaths of seven inmates and injuries to eleven people, who are now receiving medical treatment in various regional hospitals.
This is the second deadliest riot in Veracruz in the past eight years. In 2018, a violent uprising at the La Toma medium-security prison left seven people dead (six police officers and one unidentified man) and at least 22 injured (15 officers and seven inmates).
The riot follows the kidnapping and killing of retired teacher and taxi driver Irma Hernández, a case that shocked the entire country and was attributed to Grupo Sombra. Images of Hernández kneeling, surrounded by armed men in the municipality of Álamo, sparked nationwide outrage. She was murdered after refusing to pay extortion demands from the criminal organization.
Despite these incidents, Veracruz has not seen a spike in the daily homicide average. In fact, there has been a 1.6% decrease in homicides in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System.
In 2023, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) reported 3,094 incidents in Mexican prisons —an 18.5% increase from the previous year— resulting in 100 deaths and 892 injuries.
International
Study finds COVID-19 vaccines prevented 2.5 million deaths worldwide
COVID-19 vaccines prevented an estimated 2,533,000 deaths worldwide between 2020 and 2024, according to an international study led by Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Italy and Stanford University in the United States, published in the journal JAMA Health Forum. Researchers calculated that one death was prevented for every 5,400 doses administered.
The analysis also found that the vaccines saved 14.8 million years of life, equivalent to one year of life gained for every 900 doses given.
The study, coordinated by Professor Stefania Boccia, revealed that 82% of the lives saved were people vaccinated before becoming infected with the virus, and 57% of deaths avoided occurred during the Omicron wave. In addition, 90% of the beneficiaries were adults over 60 years old.
“This is the most comprehensive analysis to date, based on global data and fewer assumptions about the evolution of the pandemic,” explained Boccia and researcher Angelo Maria Pezzullo.
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