Protests greeted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Brazil at the start of a South American tour intended to bolster the Iranian president's legitimacy and ease his country's international isolation.
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on the eve of Ahmadinejad's arrival to denounce his record on human rights, homosexuality and Israel.
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was expected to welcome the visitor with red carpet pomp in the capital, Brasilia, before holding talks on economic and political co-operation. "It doesn't help isolating Iran," Lula said in his weekly radio address today.
Around 200 Iranian businessmen accompanied Ahmadinejad's delegation, in a sign of their eagerness to tap opportunities in a continent that does not consider Tehran a pariah. Iran's leader faces simmering discontent at home and hostility in the west, but in Latin America he has friends and allies among a leftist bloc led by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and including Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.
"This is the first time in Latin American history that an Islamic government has been so present in the US backyard," Hamid Molana, an Ahmadinejad adviser, told the Irna state news agency.
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