Brazil desmarca apresentação de credenciais de "embaixadora" da oposição venezuelana: militares determinaram a posição - Anthony Boadle (Reuters)

O jornalista contatou-me quando eu estava em viagem, e só pude responder perfunctoriamente. Em todo caso, ele registrou uma de minhas afirmações, ao final.
O fato é que os diplomatas e cônsules do Brasil na Venezuela têm de, são obrigados a tratar com o governo de fato em Caracas, para todas as providências administrativas de que se necessita numa relação bilateral.
As decisões precipitadas do chanceler no caso da Venezuela nunca foram bem vistas pelos militares, que preferem ser "diplomáticos", ao contrário do chanceler, que estava sendo inclusive anticonstitucional, ou inconstitucional, ao desprezar todas as regras do Direito Internacional, e o artigo 4 da CF-1988, que proibe intervenção nos assuntos internos de outros Estados. Neste caso, o chanceler estava seguindo o aventureirismo eleitoral de Trump, numa demonstração de subserviência política jamais vista nos anais de nossa diplomacia. Os militares, mais sensatos, estão aí para isso mesmo: corrigir os arroubos olavistas, bolsonaristas, tresloucados e aloprados, de uma tropa de amadores em matéria de política externa, todos eles influenciados por um destrambelhado que insiste em empreender uma cruzada contra o globalismo.
Tristes dias de nossa diplomacia...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brazil snubs Venezuelan opposition envoy to avoid escalating border tensions

Anthony Boadle (Reuters)

The Globe and Mail, May 31, 2019

Venezuela's opposition leader and self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido, in Caracas, Venezuela, May 24, 2019.

The Associated Press

Brazil withdrew an invitation to the envoy for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to present her diplomatic credentials, she said on Friday, and the government in Brasilia said it would decide later whether to accept them.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro still recognizes Mr. Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, his spokesman said. Mr. Guaido’s envoy, Maria Teresa Belandria, played down the idea that the snub reflected skepticism from Mr. Bolsonaro’s government.

Diplomatic analysts said mounting evidence that a change of government in Venezuela is not imminent may have Mr. Bolsonaro and his aides wondering if they overplayed their support for Mr. Guaido.

Former military officers making up about a third of Brazil’s cabinet have been wary of provoking Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, warning against moves that could tip an economic and political crisis into violence across Brazil’s northern border.

Ms. Belandria had been invited to present her credentials at the presidential palace along with ambassadors from other countries next Tuesday, but the government changed its mind.

“I was uninvited,” she told Reuters, but went on to dismiss any suggestion the snub reflected diminished support for Mr. Guaido.

“There will be another opportunity,” she said. “Brazil’s support continues to be strong, solid and decisive. It’s merely a protocol matter.”

Presidential spokesman General Otavio Rego Barros said Ms. Belandria was the representative of Venezuela’s “legitimate president” and denied an invitation had been withdrawn.

“Reception or not of the letters of accreditation will be assessed at a more convenient moment,” he told Reuters.

Brazilian newspapers Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo reported that Mr. Bolsonaro’s government had cancelled her invitation because ex-military aides want to pursue dialogue with Mr. Maduro, who also has an official representative in Brasilia.

“They realize Brazil has to deal with the reality that Maduro is not going anywhere right now and, even if he leaves, Guaido will not be president and a general will likely take his place,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of foreign relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.

Mr. Guaido invoked Venezuela’s constitution in January to assume the interim presidency, saying Mr. Maduro’s re-election was not legitimate. Brazil and most Western countries have since backed him as head of state.

However, the Brazilian government has not revoked the credentials of Mr. Maduro’s representatives in Brasilia.

Mr. Guaido’s press team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Venezuela recently reopened its border crossing to Brazil after a nearly three-month closure, and Mr. Bolsonaro’s aides are working to restore more regular power supply for the Brazilian state of Roraima, which depends on the Venezuelan grid.

Mr. Bolsonaro, like many heads of state in the region, has been sharply critical of the Maduro government, and advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump have pressed him to take a harder line, raising speculation about positioning U.S. troops in Brazil.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s top security adviser, retired General Augusto Heleno, told Reuters two weeks ago that Venezuela’s armed forces will decide Mr. Maduro’s future and could depose him to lead a transition to democratic elections.

“Recognition of Guaido’s envoy was never agreed to by the military, who vetoed the idea of a U.S. base in Brazil from day one,” said Brazilian diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida.

Toronto: museu Aga Khan, uma visita incontornavel, para concluir um tour na America do Norte

Vamos ajustar, Carmen Lícia e eu, nossa volta da costa do Pacífico, no próximo mês de Setembro, para poder visitar essa maravilha.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Building on faith: Inside Toronto’s new Aga Khan Museum, designed by the world’s leading architects

ALEX BOZIKOVIC

The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Aug. 01 2014, 12:39 PM EDT

• 39 comments
 

• 6K

  6K

  247

  224

 
• AA

All photos by Tom Arban

A majestic structure in a plain Toronto suburb, the ambitious Aga Khan Museum pays tribute to an ancient culture by setting a new standard in contemporary design, Alex Bozikovic writes.

If you have driven north along the Don Valley Parkway, one of Toronto’s major highways, you may have glimpsed a mysterious sight as you leave the downtown. Since 2010, two handsome monoliths have been rising next to the highway in the Don Mills neighbourhood. One is a torqued box of glimmering white stone; the other, a pale limestone disc capped by a crystalline blue dome.

These mysterious volumes are two of Canada’s most remarkable new buildings. In September they will open as the Aga Khan Museum, a celebration of Islamic art and culture, and a new community centre and prayer hall for Ismaili Muslims.

This 17-acre campus will be a special place, not only for the region’s Ismailis but also for the city and for the country. And it may alter Toronto’s cultural map as well.

There’s no question it is worth the 13-kilometre trip from the downtown core. The museum and Ismaili Centre buildings, both inflected by Islamic traditions in architecture and art, are designed by architects of global stature: Japanese Pritzker Prize-winner Fumihiko Maki and Indian modernist Charles Correa, together with Toronto’s Moriyama & Teshima Architects. The surrounding 10 acres of public gardens were created by Lebanese landscape architect Vladimir Djurovic as a contemporary take on Persian Islamic gardens.

The complex is the work of the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of international development organizations and social enterprises overseen by the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the globe’s 15 million Ismailis and a worldly figure who is a champion of pluralism, a noted breeder of racehorses and a serious patron of architecture.

When I toured the site recently, it was being polished to its final readiness. In the gardens, workers were adjusting the black-granite surfaces of the reflecting pools to make them perfectly level. A canvas-thin layer of water lapped quietly over the edges of the stone, refracting the equally smooth planes of the sky and the limestone and granite facades nearby.

For Toronto’s Ismailis, the community centre – one of only six of its kind in the world – will be a place for social and cultural events, and for prayer. For other visitors, the museum, its auditorium and the gardens will be a place to learn about the history and contemporary culture of the Islamic world.

The museum has “a very broad ambition in terms of programming and our audience,” says director Henry Kim. It aims to introduce the art, material culture and performing arts of Islamic civilizations – with artifacts largely from the Aga Khan’s family collections, spanning more than 1,000 years of history from Europe to India, and from manuscripts to contemporary dance.

The museum building is designed by Maki, who at 85 is one of the world’s leading architects. He favours a subtle language of lightweight panels and precise grids. The exterior of the 113,000-square-foot building is wrapped in white Brazilian granite, polished to a low lustre. When you run your hands across the facade, you find that every angle and cranny is precisely finished.

Within, the museum’s galleries are rational white boxes, with teak flooring and indirect light from a series of skylights scooped from the building’s roof line.

A restaurant, shop and large auditorium are arranged around a central courtyard. In the courtyard, glass walls are printed with an ornamental pattern drawn from an eight-pointed star – based on mashrabiya, the patterned wooden screens used to modulate the sun in many Middle Eastern buildings. The courtyard, too, is a common device of that region’s architecture; here it brings together the different functions of the building in a grand central promenade, caressed by the shifting tracery of the mashrabiya’s shadows.

The cultural fusion is rich, and subtle. Combined with the quality of materials – including a silky plaster that makes long expanses of wall feel like a textile – it creates a remarkable quality of place.

This is no accident. The Aga Khan, now 77, is one of the world’s most sophisticated patrons of architecture; he oversees a set of international prizes in architecture, and projects of the Aga Khan Development Network around the world include housing, urban infrastructure and historic preservation.

Daniel Teramura, a partner at Moriyama & Teshima who is overseeing the Ismaili Centre, recalls the Aga Khan, on a winter visit to the site, standing in the cold to study samples of limestone in the Don Mills daylight. “I don’t remember another client who has taken that kind of interest in the details,” Teramura says.

This project also serves an agenda of cultural diplomacy. The Aga Khan had long been seeking a site for a major museum that would showcase the collection of Islamic art and artifacts, in keeping with his and the Ismaili community’s emphasis on cross-cultural dialogue. The location in Don Mills was locked up in 2002, after the Aga Khan’s plans to build the museum in central London, across the Thames from Parliament, fell apart.

The Aga Khan’s organizations decided instead to focus on Don Mills, where the Ismaili Centre was already in the works. They bought the site of the former Bata Shoe headquarters, a significant building by the Toronto modernist office of John B. Parkin Associates. But after studying the site, the Aga Khan’s agencies decided that the building couldn’t be reused and demolished it in 2007.

That was a substantial loss, but the new complex offers more than fair compensation. The urbanity of the project is remarkable: Most of the parking is underground, in a 600-space garage, allowing most of the site to be preserved as open space.

Allowing people to wander the gardens and to “sample” the museum’s galleries and evening performances is an important part of the museum’s strategy, says Kim, who came to this project from the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. He realizes that the location of the Aga Khan Museum might be a challenge in attracting visitors. But the new Eglinton Crosstown transit line will run past its doorstep, and by car it is as easily accessible as the Ontario Science Centre, just around the corner. “What we have is a potentially very interesting cultural centre away from downtown,” he argues.

That is an exciting prospect. Don Mills once was a locus for innovation in architecture and planning, with offices and warehouse buildings designed by some of Canada’s top architects in the 1960s. That modernist legacy has been badly diluted by new buildings, but the absurdly fine quality of the museum and Ismaili Centre will set a new standard.

The Ismaili community in Toronto is also gaining a beautiful new amenity. The Ismaili Centre is the work of Correa, arguably India’s greatest contemporary architect, and the prayer hall, orjamat khana, especially, is unmatched. The space is expansive, capped with a glass roof that stretches 21 metres as it bends, weaves and reaches for the sky. This room, which will be restricted to Ismailis during times of prayer, may be the most beautiful sacred space in the country.

The rest of the centre serves secular purposes, with interiors designed mainly by Toronto’s Arriz & Co. Designer Arriz Hassam, an Ismaili whose family arrived in Canada as refugees from Uganda in 1974, fused Islamic tradition (ornate floors, inset with Turkish and Italian marble) and Canadian maple to craft a serene, spare setting. It reflects, in its details, the Ismaili experience in Canada.

“Many Islamic buildings build on societies’ local traditions,” Hassam notes. “How do you develop a building that would identify with the Ismaili community in a Canadian context? This is their home now.”

Just outside the main prayer hall is an anteroom. Here, maple slats on the walls – expressions of tasteful Canadian modernism – are interspersed with a subtle pattern that repeats again and again. It is, in calligraphic script, the name of Allah.

Follow Alex Bozikovic on Twitter: @alexbozikovic