Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva is expected to announce some of the names that will make up his cabinet once he takes office on Jan. 1 on Friday just before the quarterfinal football match between the South American country's national team and that of Croatia at the Qatar 2022 World Cup.
In the margins of the Petrocaribe Summit currently taking place in Jamaica, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro will be meeting the foreign ministers of Argentina and Brazil to discuss the border crisis with Colombia.
Uruguay's foreign minister said on Friday that nobody supports the proposal from the Brazilian Senate president Renan Calheiros to put an end to the Mercosur customs union. However he did point out that he proposal exposed that the block effectively is 'not working' and needs to have its foundations reviewed.
Venezuela will hold parliamentary elections in the last quarter of this year and the exact date will be announced soon, the head of the National Electoral Council (CNE) said on Sunday. The elected lawmakers will be inaugurated for five years on 2016.
Uruguay and Brazil foreign ministers Rodolfo Nin Novoa and Mauro Vieira will be meeting this week in Brasilia in yet another attempt to push forward the stalled negotiations for a trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union, according to the minutes of a meeting of the Uruguayan official with members of the Foreign Affairs committee.
Brazilian foreign minister Mauro Vieira discarded that the recent agreements reached by Argentina with China can interfere with Mercosur, while his Argentine counterpart Hector Timerman said that the package of accords with Beijing will actually benefit Mercosur.
Brazil's new foreign minister Mauro Vieira has left for Beijing to attend the first ministerial meeting between China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, CELAC, according to reports from Brasilia.