Brazilian Ambassador Bernardo de Azevedo Brito payed a farewell visit to Estonian President Lennart Meri today. The Ambassador said he was pleased that life in Estonia had progressed fast since Estonia became independent again and that relations between Estonia and Brazil had also become closer. The Ambassador passed on to President Meri an invitation by the President of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to visit Brazil in 1998. If the visit took place it would help take relations between the states to a new level, he noted.
There has been advancement in scientific contacts between the two countries; according to the Ambassador, cooperation was remarkable between the two countries' quantum physicists. He also pointed out successful cooperation between Estonian Paulig and Brazilian coffee producers. The Ambassador gave an affirmative answer to President Meri's question whether the trade agreement signed between Estonia and Brazil in 1932 was still effective. The Brazilian Ambassador called back to the mind of the Estonian head of state that there is a large Estonian community living in Brazil, who are both good Brazilians and Estonians.
Brazil and Estonia had lively dealings with each other before the war, and then the Brazilian representatives were also based in Helsinki. The outgoing ambassador told President Meri that a lot of pre-war Estonian diplomatic documents were being preserved in the Brazilian Helsinki Embassy. President Meri promised to have Estonian diplomatists sent to photocopy the old documents.

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