|
 American President George W. Bush will tour Latin America in March, in an attempt to curb the influence of his Socialist Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez, and to neutralize recent Iranian efforts to improve ties in the region.
Bush's visit crowns months of a US diplomatic offensive aiming to isolate the ongoing Socialist Revolution in Caracas by developing ties with South America's giant, Brazil.
Bush is arriving in Brazil March 8 and his tour ends March 14. The US president is expected to also visit Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay and Colombia to show agreement following years of divergences in Washington's southern flank.
According to analysts, the ultimate goal is to stop Chavez' plans to turn the Common Market of the South into a Latin American body where political anti-US stances prevail over plain economic integration.
As such, Bush's visit to Uruguay becomes one of the hot spots of his tour. In Montevideo, Washington diplomats are expected to deepen trade ties between both nations, something that could disrupt the Mercosur block that Uruguayans founded with Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
Washington wants to strengthen the Brazilian leadership in the region to corner Chavez efforts to export his Bolivarian Revolution. US diplomats see President Lula as a moderate reformist who could take an alternative leadership to the radical moves of the Venezuelan.
In order to counter the Venezuelan oil diplomacy, Washington will be offering an energy deal with Brazil for production and trade of biofuels. Together, the US and Brazil amount to around 70% of the world ethanol production.
Nicholas Burns, the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, told newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo that Brazil "is the most powerful country in South America." Burns added that his country did not want to depend on oil from "countries such as Iran and Venezuela."
"Energy has become a big diplomatic issue. Energy has tended to distort and expand the power of some countries beyond the power they should probably have," Burns said.
Bush's visit to Latin America, came only one month after the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Sponsored by Chavez, Tehran aims to develop closer ties in a region that ranks for its anti-American spirit.
Iran closed energy deals and a strategic partnership in Venezuela but did not succeed in cooperating with other nations.
Argentina, for instance, has a long-running diplomatic conflict with Tehran, as top Iranian officials have been requested by local courts on charges of terrorism after the bombing of Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994.
Pravda - http://english.pravda.ru/
 |
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.
President Bush should have invested more time and more efforts in his "US backyard" since his first administration, but he didn't do so and now he is running after that lost time.
Now, Mr Bush will have to show the world how good are his skills in foreign policy to stop that trojan horse that has already entered his "unnatended" backyard.
All these facts are often forgoten, and added to the "L.A. anti-american" account.