A subida dos oceanos

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.  Photographs: Rising SeasMARCH 28, 2014        

“This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

Photo

Various measurements have captured the West Antarctic ice sheet changing very rapidly in the region where it flows into the Amundsen Sea. Credit Landsat

Two scientific papers released on Monday by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. NASA called a telephone news conference Monday to highlight the urgency of the findings.

The West Antarctic ice sheet sits in a bowl-shaped depression in the earth, with the base of the ice below sea level. Warm ocean water is causing the ice sitting along the rim of the bowl to thin and retreat. As the front edge of the ice pulls away from the rim and enters deeper water, it can retreat much faster than before.

In one of the new papers, a team led by Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, used satellite and air measurements to document an accelerating retreat over the past several decades of six glaciers draining into the Amundsen Sea region. And with updated mapping of the terrain beneath the ice sheet, the team was able to rule out the presence of any mountains or hills significant enough to slow the retreat.                    Consider Clashing Scientific and Societal Meanings of 'Collapse' When Reading Antarctic Ice News       

“Today we present observational evidence that a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into irreversible retreat,” Dr. Rignot said in the NASA news conference. “It has passed the point of no return.”

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Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.

A separate team led by Ian Joughin of the University of Washington studied one of the most important glaciers, Thwaites, using sophisticated computer modeling, coupled with recent measurements of the ice flow. That team also found that a slow-motion collapse had become inevitable. Even if the warm water now eating away at the ice were to dissipate, it would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” Dr. Joughin said. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.”

Continue reading the main story

The new finding appears to be the fulfillment of a prediction made in 1978 by an eminent glaciologist, John H. Mercer of the Ohio State University. He outlined the vulnerable nature of the West Antarctic ice sheet and warned that the rapid human-driven release of greenhouse gases posed “a threat of disaster.” He was assailed at the time, but in recent years, scientists have been watching with growing concern as events have unfolded in much the way Dr. Mercer predicted. (He died in 1987.)

   

Timor-Leste está a completar 12 anos

"At the stroke of midnight on 20 May 2002, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste became the first new nation of the 21st century. From that moment, those who fought for independence have faced a challenge even bigger than shaking off Indonesian occupation: running a country of their own. Beloved Land picks up the story where world attention left off."
In the book, Gordon Peake, a development specialist who was initially meant to spend only a few weeks in Dili and ended up staying for several years, tells an story about his time in Timor Leste, blending travelogue, history, and political analysis, providing a useful introduction to one of the least known countries in the world.
The author describes at length how Timorese politics is a complicated web of alliances, factions and family relationships that are very hard for outsiders to understand, yet his bafflement seems at times exaggerated - after all, isn't that the way politics works not only in developing countries, but all over the world? Equally, his descriptions of local traditions and superstitions sometimes strike the reader as a bit Western-centric.
The book is more interesting when Peake describes how the aid and "peace industry" overruns the country, sending in supposed experts who produce long reports of little of no use to the local government. He describes overpaid development specialists who speak neither Portuguese, Tetum nor Indonesian, yet seem confident to help the nascent state on such intricate matters such reforming the telecommunications sector. This points to larger questions about the international community's capacity to help a struggling nation build a functioning state. Although Peake does not engage in this discussion, his book suggests international organizations still have a long way to go to play a constructive role.
This matters greatly because Timor-Leste was born at the height of global nation-building euphoria, when many international observers seems confident about the UN's capacity to rebuild failed or new states. James Traub's article in Foreign Affairs in 2000 of Sergio Vieira de Mello in Timor Leste ("Inventing East Timor") best symbolizes this moment.
He writes that
the U.N. is fully aware of East Timor’s importance as a test case and has sent out a kind of A-team of international technocrats. Most of the top people in UNTAET speak four or five languages, have extensive experience in Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and seem appropriately daunted and bemused by the magnitude of the burden they have been handed.
A few months later, Ruth Wedgewood wrote a critical reply to Traub, arguing that
The U.N. Transitional Administration for East Timor (UNTAET) building overlooking the harbor in Dili is also chockablock with p-5s, d-1s, and d-2s -- expensive senior staff -- who happen to lack any experience in providing basic government services.
She further writes that
Traub says that the U.N. is "fully aware of East Timor's importance as a test case and has sent out a kind of A-team of international technocrats" who "speak four or five languages." Right idea, wrong languages. Only a handful of U.N. staff speak Bahasa Indonesia (a Malay tongue) or Tetun, preventing them from communicating with 80 percent of East Timor's population.
Beyond the question of nation-building, Beloved Land is insightful when it describes the processes by opposing parties during the struggle for independence made peace and seem to go hold no grudges against each other, despite the human rights abuses committed. Peake finds the Timorese capacity to forgive and move on strange, and indeed it is nothing short of admirable and deeply pragmatic, for post-conflict societies are often too fragile to punish the guilty, as the perpetrators of violence are still too powerful and important to participate in the state-building process. In the same way, Timor Leste's visionary leader Ramos-Horta once remarked that his country had no interest in asking Indonesia to punish those involved in the 1999 mass killings in Timor Leste, for it could undermine Indonesian democracy, where former military leaders still hold considerable political power.
Peake's account is personal and his relaxed and self-deprecating style make Beloved Land and enjoyable read for those interested in Timor-Leste. In several instances, his editor could have done a better job reducing repetitiveness (for example, the reader learns several times about an episode during which a group of journalists was "killed in cold blood"), and in some passages could be shortened somewhat to improve the flow. Still, given the book's informal nature, these few flaws do not matter much, and the author achieves his main objective - to provide a vivid glimpse into the soul of one of the world's youngest nations and the challenges it faces.

 Oliver Stuenkel

Receia-se grande erupção vulcânica nos EUA

Millions of U.S. citizens could end up in Brazil, Australia, or Argentina if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it has been claimed.
South African news website Praag claims the African National Congress was offered $10 billion a year for 10 years if it would build temporary housing for Americans in case of an eruption as part of contingency plans being drawn up.
Bloggers and conspiracy theorists have spent weeks debating the plans since it was claimed video showed animals fleeing the area - even though park rangers said they were in fact scared by tourists.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2623684/Conspiracy-theories-claim-US-government-working-secret-evacuation-plan-case-Yellowstone-megavolcano-erupts.html#ixzz31gTOC9j4

MH370: Ao terceiro mês

IN THE absence of any firm evidence about the fate of missing flight MH370, the world's conspiracy theorists have weighed in with explanations of their own for the Malaysian Airlines plane's disappearance.
A poll conducted by CNN this week found that one in ten Americans believe that "space aliens, time travellers or beings from another dimension" were involved in the plane's disappearance. More prosaically, almost half believe that investigators are looking in the wrong place and the plane is "somewhere else far from the area where the search is taking place."
A lack of clarity from official has allowed rumours to flourish. Even the Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, has accused his country's government of withholding "missing bits of information" about the investigation. He asked how a country with "one of the most sophisticated" radar systems in the world could simply lose track of an aeroplane.
The recent claim that investigators can't rule out the possibility that Flight MH370 landed rather than crashed after all only fuelled the debate: according to the CNN poll, 21 per cent of people believe that at least some people from the flight survived.
Far away from the scene of the search, on the internet's more excitable fringes, individuals have been working on theories of their own to plug the information gaps. Here are some of the best (and weirdest):

Alien abduction 

Five per cent of Americans surveyed by Reason.com believe that the plane was abducted by aliens. Some bloggers have pointed to a number of recent UFO sightings in Malaysia as evidence for extraterrestrial intervention. Alexandra Bruce, from Forbidden Knowledge TV, "proves" the involvement of aliens with her analysis of radar data. She claims that footage posted on YouTube shows the presence of something that "can only be termed a UFO" in the skies over Malaysia. Of course, that means something that is "unidentified" rather than aliens.

A 9/11-style false-flag hijack mission

No conspiracy is complete without Israeli involvement, and MH370 is no exception. According to this theory, Israeli agents planned to crash the Malaysia Airways plane into a building, as in the September 11 attacks, and then blame the atrocity on Iran. Proponents point to the quick identification of two Iranian nationals travelling on forged passports, and claims that CCTV images released of the pair had been doctored. More extravagantly, some have claimed that a Malaysia Airways Boeing 777 identical to the one that went missing “had been stored in a hangar in Tel Aviv since November 2013”

The Bermuda Triangle

Ok, so the plane didn't actually fly anywhere near Bermuda, but some people – including one Malaysian minister – pointed out that the area where MH370 vanished is on the exact opposite side of the globe to the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately those people are wrong; the exact opposite side of the globe is closer to the Caribbean than Bermuda, The Sunday Times notes.

High-tech hijacking

The disappearance of flight MH370 may be down to the world’s first cyber hijack, according to the Sunday Express. It says that hackers could have accessed the aircraft’s flight computer and reprogrammed the speed, altitude and direction. “It could then be landed or made to crash by remote control,” the paper suggests. It may be worth noting that the woman who came up with the theory “runs her own company training businesses and governments to counter terrorist attacks”

Invisibility

According to reports, 20 employees of Freescale Semiconductor, a company that develops "cloaking" technology were onboard the MH370 when it went missing. Some, such as the writers of WorthyToShare.com, have speculated that the plane may have been turned invisible and landed somewhere, possibly at the US Air Force base in Diego Garcia.

A weapon of unimaginable power

Writing for NaturalNews.com, Mike Adams says that the plane's disappearance shows that "some entirely new, mysterious and powerful force is at work on our planet which can pluck airplanes out of the sky without leaving behind even a shred of evidence". If a weapon capable of making a plane disappear without trace does exist, then "whoever controls it already has the ability to dominate all of Earth's nations with a fearsome military weapon of unimaginable power", Adams writes. Quite concerning.

MH370 itself could be used as a weapon

Some people have expressed concern that the aeroplane may have been hijacked by terrorists and landed somewhere, to be used as a weapon at a later date. The proponents of the theory suggest that the plane could have been flown to a safe place, landed and camouflaged and may, at some point, be used to commit a 9/11-style atrocity. Former RAF navigator Sean Maffett told the BBC that in his view this would be very hard to do, but that the possibility cannot be ruled out. "We are now at stage where very, very difficult things have to be considered as all sensible options seem to have dropped off," he said.

Passengers deliberately killed

Another theory suggests that passengers may have been killed by decompression. If the 777 was deliberately flown to over 45,000 feet, the cabin could have depressurised. In such an event oxygen masks would deploy, but they would have supplied air for only another 12 to 15 minutes. Anyone in the cockpit would also have been killed, but supporters of the theory say that the pilots or hijackers could have smuggled their own oxygen supply onto the flight.

MH370 hid in shadow of another flight

Blogger Keith Ledgerwood argues that the MH370 may have hidden itself from radar detection by manoeuvring itself behind Singapore Airlines flight 68. "It is my belief that MH370 likely flew in the shadow of SIA68 through India and Afghanistan airspace. As MH370 was flying 'dark' without a transponder, SIA68 would have had no knowledge that MH370 was anywhere around, and as it entered Indian airspace, it would have shown up as one single blip on the radar with only the transponder information of SIA68 lighting up ATC and military radar screens", Ledgerwood wrote. Professor Hugh Griffiths, a radar expert at University College London, told the BBC that the theory was feasible, but estimates that to escape detection, the planes would have needed to have flown no more than 3,300 feet from one another. And even then military radar, which is more subtle, could possibly have detected one plane from the other.
What drives conspiracy theories? David Aaronovitch author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy in Shaping Modern History, told the Sunday Times: "Given that people can make conspiracy theories out of something that is fully explained, like the moon landings, it's not surprising that they will fill the void in a genuine mystery with conspiracy theories. Essentially these people can't face the thought of chaos. They can't face the role of accident and contingency in life; they have to attribute agency." · 


Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/flight-mh370/58037/flight-mh370-conspiracy-theories-what-happened-missing-plane#ixzz31gRXmKHV

O número de loucos está a aumentar

New estimates suggest that dementia is going to be an even bigger global problem than previously thought.
A policy brief released Wednesday from Alzheimer's Disease International, a federation of advocacy and research organizations, estimates that 135 million people worldwide will be living with dementia by 2050. That revised prediction is 17% above previous ones, largely driven by increases in China and sub-Saharan Africa.
It says the number of people living with dementia worldwide in 2013 is estimated at 44 million (the 2010 estimate was 35 million), and that global numbers are expected to hit 76 million in 2030.
The report was released a week before a major dementia summit is scheduled to take place in London, called by the British prime minister and including representatives of eight of the world's biggest economies.
Participants intend to develop a shared strategy for addressing dementia research and care, said Matthew Baumgart, senior director of public policy for the Alzheimer's Association, an American advocacy group that will attend the summit.
"We're glad they're meeting," he said, but that will only be a beginning. "We hope they come up with a shared vision and commitment, but it's equally important that they follow through afterwards."
The revised estimates better reflect the burden that Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia will place on the world's economies and on families whose loved ones have lost their memories and their ability to function in the world, Baumgart said.
The report says Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia represent "a global epidemic — although cases are disproportionately concentrated in the world's richest and most demographically aged countries, already the clear majority (62%) of people with dementia live in low- and middle-income countries where access to social protection, services, support and care are very limited."
In China, better estimates have come to light in recent years, as data was digitized and translated into English, says Igor Rudan, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who often works for the World Health Organization. "It's been like finding a huge gold mine that nobody knew existed," says Rudan, who co-wrote a June paper in the scientific journal The Lancet revising estimates of Chinese with dementia up to 9 million from 5 million.
Rates of dementia have remained relatively constant in China over the last two decades, according to Yu-Tzu Wu, a doctoral student in public health at the University of Cambridge who helped write another paper on the subject published in June in PLOS One. But rates are increasing in Japan and Korea, she said, suggesting that they will soon rise in China, too.
Researchers also realized that they had miscalculated the number of people with dementia In sub-Saharan Africa, Rudan said.
Previously, they had assumed that all cases of dementia would be among people over 65 — and since there were few in sub-Saharan Africa who lived that long, the rates of dementia were quite low. But, although dementia is rare among younger people, it does strike some early, Rudan said. Accounting for these people with early dementia pushed the numbers upward, he said.
As economies improve and HIV treatment has reduced deaths from AIDS and saved lives, more people in sub-Saharan Africa are living to an age when dementia is more common, Baumgart said, which is also likely to push numbers higher.
There is still some hope that a better understanding of what causes the disease and advances in treatment will be able to reduce the numbers of people who develop dementia, Baumgart and Rudan said.
But it may be that the human brain is just not designed to function well past age 85, when about 40% of people have dementia — a number that continues to rise with age, Rudan said.
"It seems to be our own biological limit," he said. "It will affect us all, and unless we figure out what to do about it, we are going to be in trouble."   USA Today

Bissau: As múltiplas tarefas pós-eleitorais

Guinea-Bissau’s army has a history of being overly involved in political affairs since the country achieved its independence from Portugal in 1974, as evidenced by cycles of coups, attempted coups, repression, and counter-coups. Divisions within the military sometimes follow ethnic lines, and certain factions have been accused of trafficking in drugs and arms. In April 2013, a complex sting operation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration led to the indictment of two notorious drug kingpins: one was the former chief of Guinea-Bissau’s navy, Rear Admiral José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, and the other was the head of the armed forces, General António Indjai.
Widespread corruption, chronic and severe poverty, a weak state, and personal rivalries between those who fought in the war of independence and those who did not further exacerbate the power struggles that have produced so much conflict in the past. These are, unsurprisingly, echoed in the political realm. In the lead up to the April elections, the biggest political rivalries are between the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and the main opposition party, the Party for Social Renewal (PRS). Despite a legal appeal to prevent the PAICG candidate, former Finance Minister Jose Mario Vaz, from contesting the election due to his suspected embezzlement of funds, the Supreme Court cleared the way for him to run earlier this month.
These power struggles may become even more pronounced in the weeks and months after the elections as the effects of the shift in political power become apparent. When leaders refuse to give up their power, for example, post-election violence often ensues.
So, what can be done? Make no mistake, this nation has much potential. It was one of the leading producers of cashews; it has a lush and scenic tropical coastline that would be attractive to tourists; and, most recently, it has been discovered that oil reserves off its shores are larger than first estimated. However, without proper governance in place, it will be impossible to meaningfully develop these resources so that the country can thrive economically. And, of course, good governance cannot be cultivated if the military and other powerful forces are meddling in the political realm.
An inexpensive and low-risk, yet potentially very impactful, investment could be made in holding an elite-level mediation process with key political and military figures. There are a number of different international and regional actors that are well-placed to convene such talks, including the United Nations, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the African Union. The aim of these talks would be to promote increased cooperation for everyone’s benefit and to chart a path forward while not denying the need to reconcile past differences.
Undoubtedly, one of the biggest and most difficult issues to deal with will be the need for security sector reform and ensuring that proper incentives and resources are in place in order for these reforms to occur. Not only does the military need to be reduced in size and professionalized, it also needs to be brought firmly under civilian control and oversight (the US State Department reports that authorities have failed to maintain effective control over the security forces and that they committed human rights abuses last year). Previous attempts at security sector reform have fallen short because these goals have not been met.
However, holding elite-level talks is easier said than done, and previous efforts have failed—even when they had the support of Guinea-Bissau’s president. So, the first step would be to create sufficient political will among all the key actors to ensure their active participation in the talks, and clearly this is no easy task.
A much more invasive and expensive course of action would be to establish a peacekeeping force in conjunction with undertaking extensive security sector reform that would see the army reduced in size and moved into the barracks. A UN force would likely be rejected by the Guinea-Bissau government, making an ECOWAS or AU peacekeeping mission a more promising option. This could improve the security situation while also reducing challenges related to drug trafficking, allowing a solid platform for statebuilding to emerge.
Of course, such an intervention doesn’t come without inherent risks and other difficulties. Aside from the matter of using a large enough peacekeeping force that has the support of the government and has been invited by them to intervene, there are questions related to defining a robust mandate for the mission and establishing clear exit plans. In order to maximize effectiveness, any future peacekeeping mission would ideally be very closely linked to state building, poverty reduction, and anti-corruption efforts. Such a mission might also help deter terrorists and other nefarious actors from using Guinea-Bissau as a staging and training ground.
However, the truth of the matter is that the international community seems to have very little interest in the country since it doesn’t hold much geopolitical importance at the moment. So, the first step (like in any other forgotten conflict) will be to secure increased international and regional attention and assistance. This requires international advocacy and lobbying, and currently no one is doing this, so Guinea-Bissau seems destined for more of the same misery for the foreseeable future.
Evan Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Conflict Resolution at Nova Southeastern University. Global Observatory

Guiné Equatorial, um país corrupto

A entrada da Guiné Equatorial na CPLP tem gerado um interessante debate. A novidade é a entrada na discussão de António Martins da Cruz. Recorde-se os mais esquecidos que, depois de ter sido assessor diplomático de Cavaco Silva, Martins da Cruz foi ministro de Durão Barroso – cargo do qual não se pode dizer que tenha tido uma saída limpa.

 

Diz Martins da Cruz que não encontra “razões para que a Guiné Equatorial não seja aceite na CPLP”. A afirmação não provoca surpresa, acompanhando as declarações servis de Luís Amado e Rui Machete. Os argumentos alternam entre a negação da realidade e a admissão, essa sincera, de que as relações políticas entre Estados não devem ser submetidas ao critério da democracia. Em todo o caso, valerá a pena referir o que tenta esconder o trio Cruz-Amado-Machete sobre a ditadura de Teodoro Obiang.

 

A primeira ideia avançada por Martins da Cruz – à semelhança do que haviam dito Luís Amado e Rui Machete – é a de que a Guiné Equatorial regista uma evolução no que diz respeito aos direitos humanos. Diz o ex-ministro sobre a pena de morte: “a Guiné Equatorial declarou uma moratória, ou seja, embora não a tenha abolido, comprometeu-se a não a utilizar”. Trata-se da imagem perfeita da falácia científica: inventam-se os factos (a moratória) para comprovar a teoria (os progressos do regime). Acontece que, em rigor, a referida moratória não existe. A referência à abolição da pena de morte, incluída na resolução presidencial nº 426/2014, tem apenas um carácter temporário e não tem qualquer perspetiva de inclusão no quadro legal do país. Não tendo sido submetida a qualquer debate parlamentar, nem tão-pouco a consulta referendária, aplicar-se-á apenas às condenações já efetuadas.

 

Prova da artificialidade da medida é o facto de o discurso oficial contrariar a prática seguida no país nos últimos meses: em Fevereiro deste ano, Ana Lúcia Sá denunciou a “execução sumária sem direito a uma apelação” de nove ativistas políticos. Esta denúncia foi prontamente confirmada pela Amnistia Internacional, que refere que “os presos foram informados das suas iminentes execuções apenas 30 minutos antes de as mesmas acontecerem”. O compromisso com a abolição da pena de morte não tem outro valor que não o da palavra de Teodoro Obiang. Ou seja, não tem valor algum.

 

As sucessivas violações dos direitos humanos devem ser vistas à luz da realidade social e política do país. Teodoro Obiang lidera o país desde 1979. Não é que o facto impressione Martins da Cruz, que, numa entrevista recente, teceu simpáticos elogios a José Eduardo dos Santos. A longevidade do regime é a imagem da sua elite dirigente: a acumulação da família Obiang contrasta com a miséria de um país em que a esperança média de vida à nascença é de 51 anos. Os dados do Fundo Monetário Internacional (2011) referem que a Guiné Equatorial tem o 45º PIB nominal per capita mais elevado do mundo. Contudo, o relatório anual da Human Righs Watch refere que o país “tem de longe a maior diferença de todos os países entre o seu produto per capita e o seu nível de desenvolvimento humano”.

 

O Índice de Percepção sobre a Corrupção de 2013, da Transparência Internacional, coloca a Guiné Equatorial no 163º lugar no ranking dos 177 países mais corruptos do mundo. O próprio filho do presidente, Teodorin Obiang, indicado como o seu provável sucessor, tem um mandato de captura válido em Portugal e, em 2011, os tribunais norte-americanos decretaram a apreensão dos bens de luxo adquiridos (num valor superior a 70 milhões de euros).

 

Cada um destes dados, ainda que ignorado pelos defensores do regime, é uma machadada no espírito dos documentos fundacionais da CPLP. Os princípios orientadores da organização assumem “o primado da paz, da democracia, do estado de direito, dos direitos humanos e da justiça social” (artigo 5º dos Estatutos da CPLP). Martins da Cruz, que certamente conhece como poucos estes documentos, esqueceu-se de referir que estes princípios devem ser interpretados como critérios excludentes da entrada de novos membros. É pena.

 

Sem argumentos que sustentem a evolução positiva do país, restaria ao trio Cruz-Amado-Machete o argumento da língua portuguesa. É ponto assente, e por ninguém desmentido, que a língua portuguesa não é falada na Guiné Equatorial. E, ao contrário do que refere Martins da Cruz, “o problema da língua portuguesa” não ficou resolvido “com a visita, há uns meses, do Secretário de Estado da Cooperação”. Não deixa, aliás, de ser estranho que o ex-ministro refira que nesta visita “se deu o pontapé de saída para que o português começasse a ser estudado ao nível liceal e universitário”. É que já o segundo governo de José Sócrates se tinha predisposto a assinar protocolos de cooperação para o ensino do português no país. Sinal das contradições do discurso, esta afirmação deixa a dúvida: esses programas nunca saíram do papel ou tratava-se apenas de uma estratégia para legitimar a proposta de entrada na CPLP? Talvez Luís Amado, à época ministro da tutela, lhe possa soprar a resposta.

 

Por último, Martins da Cruz tenta ainda argumentar que o território “já foi uma colónia portuguesa”. O facto, que por si não justifica coisa alguma, é igualmente absurdo: a presença portuguesa na Guiné Equatorial circunscreveu-se fundamentalmente às ilhas de Fernando Pó e Ano Bom (e, como o próprio reconhece, terminou com o Tratado de Madrid, em 1753). Assim, fica apenas uma vaga referência à lusofonia como marca de um sentimento pós-colonial mal disfarçado – sentimento esse que Miguel Vale de Almeida em boa hora classificou como “complexo colonial português”.

 

Se é certo que a Guiné Equatorial não respeita os direitos humanos e não é um país de língua portuguesa, o que move, afinal, os defensores da sua entrada na CPLP? Serão várias as motivações, dependendo dos interesses nos recursos de um dos maiores produtores de petróleo e gás do continente africano. O Jorge Costa, num artigo publicado neste espaço, refere a relação entre o capital guinéu-equatoriano e o BANIF. Soube-se entretanto que Luís Amado, que passou de ministro para chairman deste banco, foi convidado para ser vice-presidente da Cimeira de Díli – na qual será decidida a entrada da Guiné Equatorial da CPLP. Certo é que, no caso destes três responsáveis políticos, que passaram pelos vários governos, a expressão “negócios estrangeiros” está longe de estar desadequada.

Publicado por João Curvêlo