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 Thanks to a high global demand for agricultural products, ethanol and iron ore and a booming domestic market, the Brazilian economy grew more than 5% in 2007, Brazil's Finance Minister Guido Mantega said Friday, March 8, during a press conference.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration reported expansion of 5.7% in the third quarter of 2007, largely because of big gains in the agricultural and industrial sectors. Brazil's IBGE Census Bureau is scheduled to release GDP figures for 2007 next week but Mantega said GDP growth could be estimated between 5.2% and 5.3%.
The Finance minister said that the target for 2008 was 5%. Brazil in 2006 expanded 3.7%. "We already know that it will be more than 5%" he indicated at a meeting of the Institute of International Finance in Rio de Janeiro.
Mantega said the country's industrial output is expected to grow more than the 6% posted in 2007, given the country's increased production of capital goods and rising imports of equipment and machinery.
A domestic spending boom has been fed by higher salaries, easier credit and falling interest rates. Brazil's benchmark Selic interest rate now stands at 11.25%, down from a high of 19.75% in mid-2005. Inflation remains in the range of 4.5% to 5.5%.
Mantega was optimistic about the future and said Brazil is well-prepared if the US economy goes into recession. "The subprime crisis has not reached Copacabana beach yet," he told the meeting at a hotel near Rio's famous beach.
Treasury Secretary Arno Augustin said that Brazil's strong fiscal performance has been supporting the country's economic fundamentals even as international markets deteriorate.
"There is a strong declining tendency in debt to GDP ratios, which has been confirmed even during the current period of international turbulence," Augustin said during a phone conference with investors.
Brazil has a history of frequent boom-bust economic cycles, but many experts believe those trends have been smoothed with orthodox monetary police implemented by the Lula administration.
The Brazilian central bank, relatively autonomous from political influence, has been under the wheel of Henrique Meirelles former Bank of Boston CEO.
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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.
I agree with the minister. It may affect many other beaches along our coastline, but not Copacabana that was immortalized by Barry Manilow!