|
 "The path to Bali passes through Brasília (capital of Brazil)". The statement made by the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and repeated by the Brazilian Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, reveals the main subject of the first visit that the UN chief pays to Brazil since he took the position, in January.
The island of Bali, in Indonesia, will host, in December, the UN Conference on Climate Change. To Ban, Brazil plays a key role in this matter, as the country is a "green giant, a leader" due to its natural wealth and its outstanding projects for environmental preservation, such as biofuel and combat to deforestation in the Amazon.
A native of South Korea, Ban arrived in Brazil on Sunday, November 11, in the afternoon, and got to know an ethanol production plant in the city of Jaboticabal, in the interior of the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Yesterday, November 12, he went to Brasília, where he met with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and minister Celso Amorim.
In addition to environmental issues, the president and the secretary discussed the reform processes of UN and of the organization's Security Council. According to Amorim, Lula brought up the matter and stated that the council cannot remain with the same structure that it had at the time of its establishment, in 1945.
Brazil aspires to a permanent seat in the council of the international organization. "President Lula claimed that the situation cannot remain the same any longer, or else the UN itself is going to become discredited, because it is not possible that 65 years after its creation, the council remains the same, given that the current geopolitical context is completely different," said the minister.
President Lula also talked about the Brazilian proposal in the last UN Climate Change Conference, in Nairobi (capital of Kenya), of granting incentives to countries - especially the poorer ones - that promote actions for combating deforestation.
They also discussed hunger combat, and according to Amorim, the UN secretary-general praised Brazil for the Millennium Development Goals that it has already achieved.
Late in the afternoon, Ban left from Brasília to the northeastern Brazilian state of Pará to get acquainted with projects for combating deforestation in the Amazon.
 |
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.