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 Brazil is getting ready to host a Latin American economic encounter. More than 500 political, social and economic leaders from 37 countries will meet next week in Rio for the World Economic Forum on Latin America, the organizers announced.
The Brazil Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex) helps the World Economic Forum organize the event, which will take place on April 14 to 16, and will be supported by the Brazilian government and the Rio de Janeiro State Government.
The Forum's program is built around five thematic pillars: responding proactively to the economic slowdown, building bridges among regions, integration to build a better future, public policies for sustainable growth, and challenges and opportunities for a green development cycle.
According to the organizers, most of the participants - about 75% - are businessmen, mostly CEOs and high executives.
"We are very satisfied with the number and quality of the participants," said the Forum Director, Emilio Lozoya Austin.
The opening speech, under the theme "Implications of the Global Economic Crisis for Latin America," will be made by Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe and Dominica's President Leonel Fernandez will also be present.
The discussions carried out in the Latin American Forum will be taken to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, which takes place in Davos, Switzerland.
Mercopress
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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.
The "major banks", their CEOs, and other corporate lackeys no longer can boast the righteousness of capital formation under their prescriptions. You don't get to bankrupt the world and then dictate the policies needed for recovery! The "social engineering" prescriptions of the IMF and World Bank cannot be the basis for economic recovery for developing nations as the Western democracies go about picking over the corpse of their corrupt and failed economic agenda. Will the IMF force the US to increase gas and bread prices for US citizens? Not likely, even though that would assist the global effort at financial responsibility.