Brazil's Windy City Gets LatAm's Largest Aeolian Power Plant
Written by Alana Gandra
Thursday, 29 September 2005
The municipality of Osório, in southern Brazil, will possess the largest aeolian (wind power) complex in Latin America. It will be built by the South Winds Energy company.
Osório is known in the region as "the Windy City," because of the "Minuano," a wind from the pampas that blows from south to north in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
This privileged geographical location can ensure Osório the world's largest capacity for generating aeolian power, projected at 150 megawatts (MW), according to the president of South Winds Energy, Telmo Magadan.
The aeolian project will receive financing from the National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES) to the tune of US$ 207.28 million, which represents 69% of the total investment.
The rest is private capital from Enerfin Enervento, a Spanish company that is part of the Elecnor group, which formed an association with the Wobben group from Germany. which is responsible for the generators, and the CIP Brasil company from Rio Grande do Sul, to harness the winds of Osório. ABr
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Brazil received a huge boost in its international image with its selection as the host of the 2016 Olympics, but it was really just the cherry on top of the overall recognition of the country's ascension to the ranks of one of the world's most important countries. Now, as it finally takes its place on the world scene, there has been a great deal of concern about what kind of image Brazil hopes to project, now that the world is really paying attention. 
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. 
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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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