Urgent appeal; Please get us out of here

[BrB]

Jeff,
Your Capitol City is Brasilia (forgive my spelling it's been a while since I looked it up) your President is from the workers party and maintains a fairly left wing view of politics. Your country is doing quite well over all with a fairly low unemployment rate and a GNP that, while marginally, has in fact maintained positive growth.

I?m glad that you take the time to learn and more so that you voice your opinion. Active educated people can only make our world a better place.

Thank you Cpt. Jim, that was very nice. The information you got is fairly good, including the spelling you got right, only that our unemployment rates aren?t that low. Right now are somewhere 17% to 18%. In my state they are close to 6,8% wich is good. The real problem in Brazil is wealth distribution, which masks the GNP and other social numbers. More than 70% of the GNP is in the hands of less then 3% of the population, more or less (don?t have the offical numbers right now, but quite like that).

Your information is greatly apreciated and I hope Iraq goes the same direction.





Two interesting notes on Brazilian News last night:

NOTE #1:
Yesterday the ABIN (Brazilian Inteligence Agency) have transfered all the dictatorship period documents, dated from 1964-1990 from their vaults to the National Archives and they will be available to the population with no restrictions from 1964-1975. You are free to ask for information on yourself and direct relatives, but can?t ask for information regarding others not related to you. Documents from 1975-1990 still have to be rated CLASSIFIED, SUPER CLASSIFIED or FREE before liberated. Classified documents will be available in 20 years from it?s origination and Super Classified in 30 years from their origination. Lot?s of things will come out now.

Fun fact (FUN?!?!): one minister of the current government name Jos? Dirceu, recently taken away from public life by political investigation process, have been in 1969 a member of a gerilla group called Araguaia Guerilla wich was hunt down and exterminated during the "lead years" of the military government. Only a handfull of their number were able to scape. He had left the country and came back with false identity and got married. Lived under a false name, not telling anyone about it, including his wife and kids (with whom he lived for 10 years). He came back to his true identity after the anisty in 1982. Jos? Dirceu is a personal friend of the President and has been kept away from public life now because is acused of running a corruption network that bought votes on the congress from several parties using stolen money from national government companies.

NOTE #2:
The prosecutor office of the Amazonia state is investigating a case of experiments on humans made by American researchers on the Malaria Disease where they inoculated 12 brazilian citzens. The Florida University had an agreement with Oswald Cruz Foundation (government bio-research institute) to research the disease. The english version of the agreement kept in the USA has the phrase that authorizes the tests in humans, while the portuguese version deposited in the Brazilian Government doesn?t. They are trying to pass it as a translation mistake that got 12 people contaminated. None of those were killed, but they all stated that the researchers did not offer any treatment and they were in fact treated by the public health care structure. Oddly the only "mistranslation" is the phrase that authorizes the tests in human beings, the rest of the text is perfect. And what scares the most, the original english text wich was proposed by Florida university was WRITTEN with that phrase... which means they indended to conduct tests in humans!

Anything about this last one in USA news ???