|
 The future of Brazil as an emerging power is closely linked to the regional situation. This according to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's international affairs advisor, Marco Aurélio Garcia.
"We believe the destiny of Brazil is closely linked to the destiny of the region where we still have a complicated problem, which is too many poor people and a very unequal distribution," said Garcia, who is a history academic and has represented President Lula in several regional conflicts.
Garcia said that Lula's foreign policy towards Latin America has been above all to defend national interests but also "pursue with great insistence regional integration."
"Which has been the intelligence of President Lula?" asks Garcia. He's not a great theory man, but "he understood that Latin America has deep differences and he has worked hard to establish a good relation with all countries and insisted that we must see beyond our differences."
In this line of thinking Garcia said it would be good if the new United States administration understood the signals from Latin American countries, of all political sensitivities, that consider "dialogue with Cuba as most important for the region."
Garcia added the issue would probably crop up during the Americas Summit in Trinidad Tobago, on April 17, 19, even when it's not one of the main points of the agenda.
"The issue of Cuba is going to emerge because there's a general feeling in Latinamerica that the embargo at this stage is senseless; it belongs to the Cold War agenda."
"In Brazil we believe that normalization of relations with Cuba would have an extraordinary effect on the image of the United States. Even when the first steps must be unilateral, with no conditions or strings," insisted Garcia.
Lula's advisor said that if necessary Brazil could act as a mediator, as long as both sides so request it, "which has not happened."
Nevertheless the main issue at the Americas summit, which will be attended by US president Barack Obama, is the crisis, said Garcia. "There are some countries in the area that are suffering particularly hard because of the dramatic fall in US imports and remittances."
Regarding Brazilian relations with Ecuador and Bolivia, Garcia said those differences "have been solved in an amicable way" and hopefully with Paraguay and "a civilized dialogue we will reach an acceptable consensus."
Ecuador and Bolivia nationalized Brazilian corporations assets and Paraguay is demanding a fair price for the electricity generated by the shared Itaipu dam, South America's largest.
Mercopress
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
these latin american leaders should work on changing those anti castro cubans minds if they really want the usa to stop the embargo