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 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, claims that his American counterpart, Barack Obama, has forgotten about Latin America after having promised a new relation with the continent. He also revealed he was working for a meeting between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Colombia's Alvaro Uribe "so they can address their differences".
Brazil's financial newspaper Valor reproduces some extracts from Lula's presentation on Brazilian foreign policy with the Financial Times editors during breakfast in London.
According to Lula, following the Americas Summit last April in Trinidad and Tobago when Obama promised a new relation with Latin America, the US president simply forgot about the region.
"I told Obama after the meeting that he had given the kick off to establish a more productive relation with Latin America. The fact is nothing happened since, but the coup in Honduras," pointed out the Brazilian leader.
But he also understands Obama, "with concerns over Iraq and Afghanistan and the health scheme in Congress, it doesn't leave much time to address Latin America."
"But I consider very important that the United States should have more interest in Latin America so we can definitively implement a dynamics of peace and links with the continent," said the president of Brazil.
During breakfast with editors from the Financial Times who organized a seminar on Brazil, Lula was critical of the recent military cooperation agreement signed between Colombia and the US and again strongly demanded guarantees that operations will be limited to Colombian territory.
"We were surprised by the transfer of military bases from Manta, in Ecuador to Colombia," admitted Lula.
"We are not questioning Colombia's sovereignty but we demand that in the agreement signed with the US, it's explicit, that we want international law guarantees; that those bases as a matter of principle will operate inside Colombian and not along border areas with neighboring countries."
Regarding Washington's concerns with Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez, Lula said it was reciprocal: "I don't know if the US should be concerned about Chavez or if Chavez should be concerned about the US. One position fuels the other."
As to differences between Colombia and Venezuela and the alleged threats from Chavez to close the border with its neighbor and ban bilateral trade, the Brazilian chief of state said that "you can't do politics from media headlines."
Complementation and interdependency of the two economies is above headlines policies. "How do you stop people along the border trading?"
However he was hopeful that President Chavez will end reaching an understanding with his peer Colombian Alvaro Uribe, for which he is trying to organize a meeting of the two leaders next November 26 in Manaus, capital of the Brazilian northern state of Amazonas.
Lula has invited all Amazon basin countries to a regional summit ahead of the Climate conference in Copenhagen next December.
Finally he recalled that he recently had dinner with Chavez and lunch with Uribe, and "I'm sure I can get them to sit together in Manaus."
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. 
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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.
I also asked Mr. Obama to assign Hydrologists as Patent Examiners in the USPTO so that my ‘Scientific Discovery’ in hydrodynamics as patents stop being massively violated by laypeople working in a science they have no expertise. I want Hydrologists to do Examination with fluidic devices.
I cannot accept my patents being violated by others even bearing scientific flaws.
Americans are developed people that are supposed to honor and respect common knowledge on scientific literature.
As a scientist I told Mr. Obama about my concern that Americans are becoming obese, broken, homeless, jobless and derailing human kind from its purpose by failing to protect principles of human existence.
My personal issues will be solved because my patents are supported by my PhD books at Penn State University.
Bill Clinton at my commencement on May 10, 1996 said that Americans were proud of offering us the highest education that Americans could offer. He did not mention about my fight to protect my scientific breakthrough toward a long standing bias by USPTO.
Mr. Obama is a Lawyer and I have been telling them that Science above the Law as Hydrology is supposed to be handled by Hydrologists on high technology affairs.