|
The Prime Minister of Spain, José Luiz Zapatero, disembarked yesterday in Brasília to pay his first official visit to Latin America. Zapatero, who won election last March for the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, held a work meeting today with Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Zapatero also visited the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and the Federal Supreme Court.
At the work meeting with Lula, the two countries signed a strategic cooperation agreement. Agreements were also signed in the areas of tourism, agriculture, education, and the Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism.
In the tourism sector, two agreements were signed. One of them provides for the Spanish government's concession of technology for the implantation of a tourist information central in Brazil.
With the central, tourists from anywhere in the world will be able to put together their own Brazilian travel package.
The technology granted by the Spaniards will also permit the digital inclusion of micro and small tourism firms - which account for 95% of this sector in Brazil.
The second agreement deals with collaboration between the two countries in five areas: tourism statistics, promotion and marketing, training, cooperation for development in tourism affairs, and quality and certification.
According to the Ministry of Tourism, Spanish groups are expected to invest US$ 74 million (R$ 200 million) in Northeastern Brazil by 2007.
The IberoStar Hotel & Resorts company alone plans to spend US$ 30 million to build three hotel ships that will navigate the Rio Negro, in the Amazon. The first ship will commence operations in a month.
Zapatero will leave for São Paulo today, where he will inaugurate the new headquarters of the Spanish consulate and meet with Governor Geraldo Alckmin and Brazilian entrepreneurs. The Spanish Prime Minister will remain in Brazil through January 25.
Translation: David Silberstein
Agência Brasil
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
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).