Portugal and Brazil, United Nations | Opinion
In the year in which Brazil celebrates the 200th anniversary of its Independence, studying the past to understand the present and projecting the future is a very useful exercise, provided that each era is contextualized in its temporal specificity. And what can be proud of almost two of peace in a continent crossed by so many conflicts, that no one happened that this year to exercise this critical and significant look.
For my part, as a Portuguese and also as Portugal’s representative in Brazil, I want to focus on what unites us. Two countries whose destinations, historically, are now carried out in different geographies, with different configurations and different methods of action. But with so much in common, to the point that they increasingly coincide, in a world that is also constantly changing, but that we keep values that we do. We share a language of planetary dimension, the fourth or fifth most spoken in the world, the first most spoken in the Southern Hemisphere. Together we enrich the Ibero-American space with a strong voice in Portuguese. One day, we hope, Portuguese will be the official language of the United Nations.
From science and technology to defense education to agriculture, business to culture, our cooperation has reached a level of excellence and maturity that still has room to grow. And the strongest reason to believe that the best is still for people. It is the Brazilian community in Portugal and the Portuguese or Portuguese-descendant community in Brazil, which represents more than 1.5 million people. They are doing tourism.
Let’s take the example of health. Last October, in the presence of the Brazilian Minister of Health, the Portugal Saúde brand in Brazil took the Portuguese government and 11 Brazilian hospitals with a Portuguese matrix forward to a step that will have suspicious developments in the future. 2021 was also a year of increased cooperation between Fiocruz and several Portuguese institutions, with Fiocruz continuing to internationalize itself from Portugal. It can be said that the seed of the future was sown group Portugal-Brazil in the area of health.
This year, there will not be unique moments to substantial developments in several areas of our greater cooperation — Portuguese participation will provide several relevant moments — as Portugal and Brazil will be involved in participating in the international importance and we, where Brazil can count on the international importance we hope to be able to count on Brazil. On the Portuguese side, the United Nations Conference on the Oceans. On the Brazilian side, the status of member of the UN Security Council.
It is not by chance that one of the strongest manifestations of cooperation between Portugal and Brazil currently takes place at the United Nations New York school, through two teachers, one Brazilian and the other Portuguese, who teach our language at that international school.
The author writes according to the new orthographic agreement