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 The Brazilian government rushed aid Wednesday, May 6, by air, over land and through rapidly rising waters to scores of cities and towns isolated by floods that have killed at least 32 and left nearly 500,000 homeless. However in the south the country is suffering a severe months-long drought which is threatening hydroelectricity generation and agriculture.
But rain continued to fall across a vast region stretching from the Amazon jungle to the northeastern Atlantic coast and meteorologists predicted the bad weather could last for weeks. Some areas were experiencing their heaviest rainfall in two decades. The most affected states are Bahia, Ceará, Maranhão, Piauí, Pará and Amazonas.
In three Amazon states, at least 3.000 Indians near rivers that overflowed fled to higher ground or into the jungle after seeing their crops of manioc, bananas and potatoes destroyed, said Sebastião Haji Manchiner, executive secretary of the Brazilian Amazon Indigenous Organization.
In the hardest-hit state of Maranhão, some rivers were rising as much as 30 centimeters per day, destroying bridges and making it too dangerous for relief workers to navigate waterways.
The unusually heavy rains that have slammed the region for two months are now affecting 10 of Brazil's 26 states in a zone three times the size of Alaska. It stretches from the normally wet jungle to coastal states known for lengthy droughts, though not all parts of the states have been affected.
Most victims drowned or were killed when mudslides swept apart ramshackle homes, but authorities feared the situation could get much worse because some areas have been isolated for days without shipments of food or water.
Civil defense workers used army helicopters to airlift supplies to some places. Trucks laden with emergency shipments of food and water were forced to stop at highway washouts so aid workers could transfer the goods onto boats for delivery, said Abner Ferreira, a spokesman for Maranhão's civil defense department.
In the Para state city of Altamira, more rain fell in three hours than the jungle city of 90.000 normally gets in two months, Mayor Odileida Sampaio told the state-run Agência Brasil news agency. About 5.000 buildings were damaged, and nearly a third of the city's residents were forced from their homes - many of whom live in rickety shacks erected atop stilts.
Floods created a crater and a lake along the path of a key iron ore export railway that takes raw ingredient for steel from a jungle mine to an Atlantic port. Railway owner, Companhia Vale does Rio Doce SA, said in a statement it was working on repairs and would reopen the railway as soon as possible.
Meteorologists blamed the rains on an Atlantic weather system that typically moves on by April but has remained longer this year.
The system "is staying farther south from where it usually stays this time of the year," said Luiz Kondraski of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. "If it were more to the north right now, the rains wouldn't be so intense."
Meanwhile in the south of Brazil the lack of rain in the Parana-Uruguay basin is also affecting northern Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The three countries have granted aid to drought-stricken farmers in the region and hydro electricity generation has plunged.
The shared Argentine/Uruguay dam of Salto Grande has a normal flow of 4.000 cubic meters per second, but now is down to less than 400 cubic meters per second. In exceptional periods the flow has ballooned to 21.000 cubic meters per second.
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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.
Funny...we have already seen how Robbing Hook handled the flooding in Santa Catarina.
With very little help, aid and money...as usual !
No doubt that the Northeast flooding will get even much less, since it is a poor area anyway. And Brazil never helped much their poorest citizens....until proven otherwise !