Last week’s first Colombia-Brazil Investment Forum in Bogota featured a level of private sector discourse on trade, investment and economic cooperation between South America’s two largest economies that put into sharp perspective the strategy underpinning Brazil’s strategic pursuits in the hemisphere.
The 2009 opening of the Takutu Bridge to formalize the long talked-about link between Guyana and Brazil triggered animated discourse here in Guyana at the levels of both the public and private sectors regarding the prospects of creating permanent and, for Guyana, potentially lucrative trading links with northern Brazil. The stumbling block to the envisaged heavy two-way flow of traffic between the two countries is the absence of an all-weather road linking northern Brazil with coastal Guyana via Lethem and the absence of any immediate prospects for the completion of the road-building project.
Not that Brazil is indifferent to the significance of creating a road link to Guyana, the strategic significance of such a link being Brasilia’s quest for
