Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro reportedly called for closer relations between their countries when they met in Switzerland on Tuesday.
The two leaders discussed bilateral ties on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum held in the Swiss town of Davos.
“They highly appraised the state of Brazilian-Armenian friendly relations and stressed the importance of expanding the areas of cooperation,” Pashinian’s office said in a statement. It gave no other details.
Bolsonaro, who is known for his far-right views, took office on January 1 two months after winning presidential elections.
Armenia has long maintained warm relations with Brazil as well as neighboring Argentina and Uruguay cemented by the existence of sizable Armenian communities in the three South American nations.
There are up to 100,000 ethnic Armenians living in Brazil. Most of them are descendants of survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
The Brazilian Senate recognized the genocide in 2015 in a “resolution of solidarity with the Armenian people.” The resolution also praised Armenians for their “economic, social and cultural” contributions to Brazil.
Armenia opened an embassy in the capital Brasilia in 2010. In 2016, then President Serzh Sarkisian attended the ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of a new embassy building there. The construction was financed by Brazilian Armenian philanthropist Hilda Diruhy Burmaian, who is also Armenia’s honorary consul in Sao Paulo.
Sarkisian’s predecessors, Robert Kocharian and Levon Ter-Petrosian, also visited South America’s largest country while in office.
Brazil opened an embassy in Yerevan in 2006. A square in the Armenian capital was named after Brazil in 2003.
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