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Brazil will pay off a US$ 2.6 billion debt with the Paris Club in January. This is a debt that was contracted in 1983 and was to have been paid off by December 2006 in three installments of US$ 860 million in January 2006, June 2006 and December 2006.
This is the second anticipation of a debt payment Brazil has made this month. It recently paid off US$ 15.5 billion to the International Monetary Fund. According to the head of the secretariat of the National Treasury (Tesouro Nacional), Joaquim Levy, Brazil's "healthy economy" and solid foreign accounts are making it possible to anticipate debt payments. The anticipation will represent an economy of US$ 100 million for Brazil. Brazilian Minister of Finance, Antonio Palocci, announced earlier this month that Brazil was anticipating the payment of an International Monetary Fund loan of US$ 15.5 billion, which would mean an economy of around US$ 900 million in interest payments. The loan was to have been paid off in installments ending in December 2007. Palocci pointed out that whereas the country's total reserves were US$ 15 billion in 2003, today the country has US$ 51 billion, above the IMF loan amount, so the payment will not have a negative effect on its international reserves. For Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the decision to anticipate paying off the IMF debt shows that Brazil can control its own destiny. "We are making this payment because we want to show the world and the market that we are in charge. When we do things we might make mistakes or we might get things right, but we decide," said the President. ABr
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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.
- when and how the government is doing vote buying.
- that corruption is not illegal, when done by official government people or congressmen/senators.
- that providing 1 % of government budget to Bolsa Familia is... very generous !
- that subsiding heavily your industries are normal, but not when other nations subsidy their industries.
What is lacking you the most, Mr President, is honesty, consistency, transparency.
Your only consistency has been lies, trunked numbers and fallacies to your own contradictory public and official speeches.
You are not a man of trust but a man full of dirty tricks.
Your own success at any price at whatever cost has been the motto you followed since your youth.