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[ View Forums | Start New Topic | Search ]     [ Join | Login ] Post Reply    Forum  Café Brazil    Topic  FT Latin America Agenda *  Subject  *  Message  <QUOTE>Posted by BrazilMax:<BR>Latin America Agenda -- Generous Lula February 19: Generous Lula Edited by Richard Lapper Last week's meeting in Brasília between presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Evo Morales of Bolivia was tinged with farce before it began. Mr Morales has been under increasing domestic pressure to deliver concrete benefits from his "nationalisation" of foreign assets in Bolivia's natural resources industries and threatened to cancel the meeting unless Brazil promised to renegotiate gas supply contracts with Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil group, during his visit. Brazilian diplomats described such tactics as "childish" and "amateur" and insisted any renegotiation would take place on a strictly commercial basis - and that Petrobras's contract would stay in force unchanged until it expired in 2009. Instead, though, negotiations took place president-to-president and Mr Lula da Silva, citing the need to be "generous" to Brazil's much poorer neighbour, agreed to pay more for Bolivian gas. Just how much more is unclear but the Bolivians, who wanted to increase the price to Brazil from $4.20 per million British thermal units to $5.00 - the price agreed recently with Argentina - appear to have got at least half of what they wanted. (The basic price is to stay the same, but Petrobras will pay extra for premium gases included in the mix it receives.) The details will emerge in coming days. What matters now is that for geopolitical reasons, Mr Lula da Silva has intervened and torn up a contract signed between two commercial partners. To investors already jittery about regulatory uncertainty in Brazil, that will be one more reason to stay away. Death in Rio The horrific murder of a six-year-old boy in Rio de Janeiro has thrown a shadow over this year's Carnaval celebrations. Predictably, because of the involvement of a 16-year-old in the killing, there has been a chorus of demands for changes to Brazil's penal code, under which nobody under 18 years of age may be sentenced to more than three years in detention. The problem of crime in Brazil is beyond the reach of such simple fixes, even if they were effective in themselves. But it is not beyond the reach of well-crafted policy. Some isolated local examples show the effectiveness of simple measures, such as closing bars at 11 pm (which has helped slash the murder rate in Diadema in greater São Paulo). Other shortcomings of the existing security apparatus cry out for change, such as the anarchic structure of the country's overlapping police forces, which encourages rivalry, inefficiency and confusion instead of co-operation, the corrupt and incompetent prisons services, or the dysfunctional judiciary. Unfortunately, to tackle the vested interests that work against change would require courage, determination, vision and leadership - not the qualities that most stand out among Brazilian politicians. Notes by Jonathan Wheatley, Richard Lapper, Benedict Mander and Adam Thomson</QUOTE> on (Email Addresses and URLs will be automatically converted to links) on (Links, Images and Bold, Underline and Italic are allowed) *  Username  No Username? Join! *  Password  Forgot Password?    Use Signature?  Yes No    Lock Topic?  Only a moderator may lock this Topic.     * Indicates a required field. Brazilmax.com Home | Brazilmax.com Forum | Contact Us ©2003 - Powered by Cold BBS :  Version v2.0