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Relations between Britain and Brazil have struck a new low after a careless slip by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, during a major foreign policy speech in Washington last week.
The timing of the diplomatic spat is unfortunate for Mr Blair, who has been courting Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in an effort to break the deadlock in international trade talks. The Brazilian Foreign Ministry confirmed yesterday, June 1st, that its Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, called the British ambassador in Rio, Peter Collecott, into his office on Tuesday to seek an explanation for Mr Blair's apparent gaffe. The row began after Mr Blair spoke in Washington about the need to reform the United Nations by expanding permanent membership of the Security Council - which represents the victorious allies after the Second World War - from five to include leading industrial powers and representatives from the developing world. The British government has long championed the membership of Brazil, even though Argentina has a strong claim as a representative from Latin America. Mr Blair reiterated Britain's support for Brazil's candidature when Mr Da Silva visited Downing Street earlier this year. But when Mr Blair made his speech, he said: "A security council which has France as a permanent member but not Germany, Britain but not Japan, China but not India, to say nothing of the absence of proper representation from Latin America or Africa, cannot be legitimate in the modern world." The Brazilians immediately picked up on the sudden absence of their country. Mr Blair scribbled down the speech, the third in a series of wide-ranging foreign policy speeches, on the flight from London to Washington. According to a British source, he did not seek to change British policy with regard to Brazil but was simply setting out his overall argument about a need for UN reform. A Foreign Office spokesman said yesterday: "We remain supportive of Brazil's candidature, along with Germany, Japan and India, for permanent seats on an enlarged security council. The speech was not intended to set out our policy in detail but was an attempt to inject momentum into the debate. We remain solidly supportive of Brazil's bid for a permanent seat." Mr Blair, along with the American President, George Bush, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been trying to secure the support of five leading developing countries, including Brazil, for a special trade conference to be held around the time of next month's G8 summit in St Petersburg, Russia. Mercopress - www.mercopress.com
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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.
That was not a slip of the tongue. It was deliberately conceived. Haha , the Brazilian government was naive to believe his promises.
Brazil is not Latin America. I t differs from Latin American countries in many ways , the language to begin with.