Brazil’s indecision

Henry Kissinger, who aside from being a war criminal is also a shrewd analyst of the international scene, said in the late 1960s that “in whatever direction Brazil leans, so will Latin America.”

That’s not true today because the Bolivarian tide has changed the region’s sociopolitical map for the better, but, even so, Brazil’s weight on the hemisphere continues to be very important. If its government had forcefully endorsed Mercosur, the Unasur, or the Celac, the history of those initiatives would have been different indeed.

But Washington has been working for a long time to discourage that leading role.  It took advantage of the naive credulity or deep-rooted mental colonialism of Itamaraty, [Brazil’s Foreign Ministry] promising demagogically that it would guarantee Brazil a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council, while keeping out India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Egypt, Nigeria, Japan and Germany, among others.

But it’s not just a case of naiveté, because the option of associating intimately with Washington seduces many in Brasília. A few days after taking over as Foreign Minister, Antonio Patriota granted a long interview to the magazine Veja (Look). The first question was, “In all your years as a professional diplomat, what image did you form of the United States?”

The answer was astounding. “It is difficult to speak objectively, because I have an emotional involvement [sic!] with the United States through my family – my wife and her family. There are aspects of American society that I admire greatly.”

The reasonable thing to do would have been for the government to ask immediately for Patriota’s resignation, due to “emotional incompatibility” with his defense of Brazil’s national interest, but that didn’t happen. Why? Because it’s obvious that in Brazil two trends coexist: one, moderately pro-Latin America, which prospered during Lula’s administration, and another one that believes that Brazil’s future splendor must come from an intimate association with the United States, to the exclusion of Brazil’s rowdy neighbors.

This current is still not hegemonic at Planalto Palace, but undoubtedly it finds ears that are more receptive than in the past.

And this change in the relation of forces between the two currents became evident with the very belated reaction of President Dilma Rousseff to the hijacking of [Bolivian President] Evo Morales’ plane. While the presidents of Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina (along with Ali Rodriguez, Secretary General of Unasur) voiced their repudiation to that act and expressed solidarity with the Bolivian president within minutes, the Brazilian president waited almost 15 hours before joining them.

Her reaction came after some strong statements by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, who condemned the hijacking almost simultaneously with the presidents. Conflicts and jostling inside the administration forced Dilma Rousseff not to participate in the summit meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, barely two and a half hours by plane from Brasília, weakening the global impact of that presidential gathering.

To a Latin America that shook off the neocolonial handcuffs, it is decisive to count on Brazil. But that will not be possible (except with an eyedropper) until the struggle between those two currents is resolved in favor of Latin America. The current situation not only turns Brazil into a vacillating actor in initiatives such as Mercosur or Unasur but also causes it to suffer a dangerous paralysis in strategic issues of a domestic nature.

For example, Brazil has not decided – since 2009 – where it will buy the 36 fighter planes it needs to control its huge territory, especially the Amazon and sub-Amazon basins. Part of the high command leans toward buying U.S. aircraft, while the other proposes buying them in Sweden, France or Russia. Not even Lula could settle the discussion.

This absurd paralysis would disappear easily if the political elite asked a simple question: How many military bases in the region are operated by each of the countries offering aircraft to Brazil?

If the question were asked, the answer would be as follows: Russia and Sweden have none. France has an aerospace base in French Guyana with the presence of some U.S. military personnel. On the other hand, the United States has 76 military bases in the region, some of them leased from – or co-managed with – third countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Holland.

Some bureaucrat from Itamaraty or some officer trained in West Point might claim that the bases are there to watch Venezuela. But the harsh reality is that, while Venezuela is threatened by 13 U.S. military bases set up in border countries, Brazil is literally surrounded by 23 bases, which could become 25 if you consider the two British overseas bases at Ascencion Island and the Malvinas [Falklands].

Coincidentally, Brazil’s major oil fields are approximately halfway between those two military installations.

Faced with that raw evidence, how can anyone doubt where Brazil will buy the planes it needs? The only realistic hypothesis of conflict is between Brazil and the United States. In Argentina, some predict that the confrontation will be with China.

There are differences, of course. While China invades the region with innumerable supermarkets, Washington does so with its military might, surrounding Brazil. And, just in case, it reactivated its Fourth Fleet (in another of those “coincidences” of history!) a few weeks after President Lula announced the discovery of a great oil field along the shores of Sao Paulo.

Or could it be that the officials in charge of such issues in Brazil don’t know that as soon as President Hugo Chávez started to have problems with Washington, the U.S. blocked the sale of parts, replacements and updated systems of aerial navigation and combat for the fleet of F-16s that Venezuela owned, leaving it useless?

You don’t have to be bright to imagine what might happen if a serious disagreement occurs between Brazil and the United States over – for example – the access to some strategic minerals in the Amazonia, or to the pre-salt oil? Or, in a worst-case scenario, if Brasília doesn’t join Washington in a military adventure intended to overthrow some annoying president in the region, replicating the model used in Libya?

In that case, the reprisals against the ally who defects would be the same as those applied to Chávez. I hope that those harsh realities will be publicly discussed in Brazil and that its government will end its chronic vacillations. The Mercosur meeting in Montevideo could be a good beginning.

Atilio Borón is director of PLED, the Floreal Gorini Cultural Center for Cooperation.

(From Página 12)