|
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his American counterpart George Bush are expected to get together in Washington before the semester is over.
The meeting would most likely happen in April and the agenda would include trade discussions as well as the political situation in Cuba and Venezuela. Lula is good friends with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the Castro brothers in Havana.
While the information of the encounter was given by BBC, which cited as its source an American government official, Brasília's Palácio do Planalto (the presidential office) says that the visit still doesn't have a date.
It's known, however, that the ambassadors of both countries are already discussing the details of the meeting. According to the Brazilian government, the invitation for Lula to visit Washington was made at the end of October when Bush called Lula to congratulate him for his reelection. The Brazilian president promptly accepted.
The White House is apparently waiting for Lula to choose his new cabinet before it settles on a date and guidelines for the encounter.
Lula, who is vacationing until January 15 is not expected to announce the new ministers until the beginning of February. Before that he should be in Rio for a Mercosur summit and is expected to announce on January 22 a new economic plan that would guarantee a solid sustained growth in the four years of his second mandate.
The last time Bush and Lula met, the US president was in a short tour of South America and paid a courtesy call to Lula in Brasília.
Lula had been received in the White House on June 2003. At that occasion Bush said: "I'm very impressed by the vision of the President of Brazil. He's a man who clearly has deep concerns for all the people of Brazil. He not only has a tremendous heart, but he's got the abilities to work closely with his government and the people of Brazil to encourage prosperity and to end hunger."
The discussion between both presidents should include besides free trade and the political transition in Cuba, other themes like security, ethanol, environment and science and technology.
Among top American officials who will be visiting Brazil before Lula's trip there are the Secretary of Justice, Alberto Gonzales, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Nicholas Burns, plus the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon. These three are expected in Brazil in early February.
A top White House aide confided that the Brazilian government is seen by the Bush administration as a country that is respected in Latin America "for its size, for its relationship with other countries and for the leadership that president Lula exercises in the region."
And he added: "We hope that Venezuela's neighbors act as a moderating influence in the region. We hope that Brazil will be engaged in this effort."
For Bush, the meeting with Lula will be an attempt to disprove those who say that the United States has neglected its neighbors to the south since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The American president wants to show that South America is a priority in his government.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
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.