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In an address, Monday, January, on a national radio and television pool, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that by liquidating Brazil's debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the country will be able to invest more on the population.
"By gaining sovereignty, we are turning a page in our country's history. Brazil will move forward under its own power," Lula affirmed in the 9-minute speech. Lula also noted that "the best thing" is that this financial independence is happening together with a series of other accomplishments by the Brazilian people, just when, according to him, Brazil is achieving the best results in recent years in reducing poverty and distributing income. According to Lula, the Brazilian government repaid the IMF the US$ 15.5 billion in standby funds obtained to deal with the 2001-2002 crisis. "We are proving, among other things, that we no longer depend upon foreign loans to keep growing; we can do it with our own resources. This means independence and development," he affirmed. Among the country's other recent accomplishments, he highlighted the growth of the salary mass and the increase in personal credit, as well as record exports. Lula remarked that, when he took office, the country was spending US$ 3 billion per year on social programs. "In 2005 we invested US$ 7.4 billion. And this year we will reach US$ 9.6 billion, directly benefiting 40 million poor Brazilians," he said. In December the Brazilian government announced it would pay off its US$ 15.5 billion debt to the IMF ahead of time. Last week the managing director of the IMF, Rodrigo de Rato, from Spain, visited Brazil to make the advance payment official. Agência Brasil
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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).