Rio de Janeiro, March 3. Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira will make his first visit to Paraguay next Thursday since taking office and at a time when the two countries are preparing to renegotiate some of the clauses of the treaty by which they built the hydroelectric plant in ‘Itaipu. .
Vieira will have a working meeting in Asunción with the Paraguayan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julio César Arriola, to discuss different issues of bilateral, regional and multilateral interest, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported in a statement on Friday.
The two foreign ministers will use the meeting to deepen the issues they discussed on January 1, when Arriola traveled to Brasilia to participate in the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as President of Brazil, and to the bilateral meeting they had in mid-January during the Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Buenos Aires.
“Broad bilateral issues will be discussed, including trade, infrastructure, security, defense and technical cooperation, as well as issues on the regional and multilateral agenda,” according to the note from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry.
Although the note from the Brazilian government does not specifically mention Itaipu Binacional among the items on the agenda, a note from the Paraguayan government mentions it first.
Last Tuesday, Itaipu Binacional, the second largest hydroelectric plant in the world and created by the two governments 50 years ago to build and operate the hydroelectric dam of the same name, announced that it had finished paying the debt it had for the work, which is estimated at around $17,600 million.
Coinciding with the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the agreement to build the dam, the two countries will probably renegotiate from next August certain clauses of the constitutive treaty of Itaipu, which currently satisfies 90% of electricity consumption in Paraguay. and 13% in Brazil. .
Among the clauses to be renegotiated, there is the so-called appendix C of the treaty, which provides that Brazil and Paraguay are entitled to 50% of the energy produced, but which establishes that if one of the parties does not use the its entire quota, it must sell the surplus to the other partner at preferential prices.
The Government of Paraguay has for years been calling for a change to this annex because it claims that it sells its excess energy to Brazil at a price well below the market price and that it could export it to other countries at more competitive.
In a recent interview, the general manager appointed by Lula for Itaipu, deputy Enio Verri, who has not yet taken office, said that the orientations he received from the progressive leader on the management of the company were to give priority to regional integration.
Brazil is one of the members, together with Paraguay, of the Common Market of the South (Mercosur, also made up of Argentina and Uruguay) and the main trading partner of the neighboring country and the largest source of direct investment. foreigner on Paraguayan territory (904 million dollars). .
According to official data, trade between the two countries hit a record high of $7,150 million in 2022, up 7.8% from 2021. EFE
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