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Brazil's newly re-elected leader visited Venezuela on Monday in a show of support for his fellow leftist, President Hugo Chavez, who is himself campaigning for another term in a December 3 vote.
Chavez and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are probably the two most influential men in Latin American politics and have forged a solid relationship despite representing two sides of Latin America's generally leftist tilt of recent years. The presidents shook hands enthusiastically and laughed when Lula stepped out of his plane late on Sunday on his first foreign trip since re-election last month. Chavez, who ordered the arrival to be broadcast live on all national TV stations, put his arm across Lula's shoulders as they chatted at a red-carpet ceremony to greet each other's diplomats. Lula, a former labor union leader, pushes centrist economic policies that have cheered Wall Street and made him a comfortable partner for Washington. Chavez sells most of Venezuela's oil to the United States but criticizes the superpower for meddling in the region and advocates hard-left socialism. Lula will promote regional integration with Chavez by inaugurating a Brazilian-built bridge across the Orinoco River and overseeing work by the countries' state oil companies exploring Venezuela's vast reserves. The visit helps blunt opposition criticism of Chavez - Cuba's top ally - that he is out of touch with modern leaders and also provides the impression that his regional diplomacy is producing concrete economic results.
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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).