A Brazilian angle

Myra Sidharta (The Jakarta Post, May 3, 1996) is not alone with his visa problems. Visa officers are bureaucrats and they live to stamp forms and shuffle paper. To keep budgets from being cut -- or to get them increased -- missions abroad persuade their foreign affairs' people back home that they should screen people to death. Consequently they demand to know anything that might have any relevance to the visa application before stamping your passport.

I stopped going to Canada, a nice country with the friendliest people on earth, because they introduced visas for Brazilians in the late 1980s and their visa sections are nasty.

I would like to visit France but they started asking for visas in the late eighties. I want to go to Perth one of these days, but if the Aussies require a visa, forget it.

OSVALDO COELHO

Bandung, West Java