|
Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that, for the government's social programs to work, everyone must be conscious and confident that what is being done is the best course and that, when mistakes are made, it is necessary to correct them.
"We are responsive enough to understand errors when they are discovered and to adjust the trajectory," Lula told his audience, yesterday, at the Planalto Palace for the fifth meeting of the Food Security Council (Consea).
During the Consea meeting, Lula was awarded the "International Alliance against Hunger" gold medal by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The President admitted that it is impossible to exert total control over his government's social programs.
"Every once in a while people say that the registry of the Family Grant program fails to do this or fails to do that. Come on, even an important supermarket like the Pão de Açúcar ("Sugarloaf") assumes a one percent loss due to theft, so you can imagine that in a program with 5 million cards, deviations can certainly occur," the President pointed out.
Referring to the report aired on the Globo Network's variety show, Fantástico exposing problems in the Family Grant, the President admitted that the facts presented help the government identify the mistakes.
"The moment we perceive that there is someone in our midst who is committing errors, who is pursuing the wrong policy, we must punish that individual," Lula said.
The President once again defended the joint effort between the federal and municipal governments to extend the government's social policies to those who need them.
"The municipal governments by themselves are unable to handle a program of this magnitude. And we cannot do without the social control the government must have over public policies."
President Lula also observed that as long as his government does not have perfect men and women to fill its posts, a little bit of scrutiny on the part of society constitutes a reasonable dose to reduce the patient's fever.
"We have an obligation, and we shall fulfill it. This year we want to reach 6.5 million families by December 1. Next year we want to reach 8.7 million families, and, God willing, in 2006 we shall complete the total we have on record, that is, 11 million families," the President said.
Lula and the World Social Forum
Commenting on the World Social Forum, which is scheduled to return to Porto Alegre at the beginning of next year, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared that the event must focus on a few central issues or face the possibility of becoming "an ideological fairgrounds."
"In my opinion, the forum should concentrate on one or two targets for the year. Otherwise it could become a fairgrounds for ideologies where each person comes, buys what he wants, sells what he wants and everybody then goes home without any commitment to the future.
"The forum should be a place where people decide on what needs to be done and how to get the government, political parties and congressmen on board," said Lula.
Program for Human Rights
Yesterday, Brazil's National Secretary of Human Rights, Nilmário Miranda, launched the National Program for Protection of Defenders of Human Rights. Next year the program will have a budget of US$ 418 (1.2 million reais).
The new program's coordinator, Darcy Frigo, explained that the objective is to guarantee protection for people who receive threats.
"This is more than political, it is a social question that we are dealing with," she declared.
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).