US Senate approves Elizabeth Bagley as new ambassador to Brazil

The United States Senate approved this Wednesday (14) the nomination of Elizabeth Bagley as the country’s next ambassador to Brazil. She will take over the post that has been vacant since July 2021, when Todd Chapman, appointed by former President Donald Trump, decided to retire.

It is another step towards normalizing Brazil-United States relations. The White House hopes to reconnect with the Planalto with the new Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) government, and there was a desire in Washington that there be an official representative of the country in Brasília during Lula’s inauguration, on January 1st. Since 2021, the position has been occupied on an interim basis by the US chargé d’affaires in Brazil, Douglas Koneff.

Bagley, 70, has State Department experience and is a longtime Democrat. She worked for Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and Barack Obama (2009-2017) administrations. She was ambassador to Portugal during the Clinton administration and special adviser to the State Department under Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Bagley’s experience with diplomacy is considered a strong asset, but it is common for the US government to appoint campaign donors to represent the US in other countries. Bagley also meets the requirement — she and her husband have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Obama and Clinton campaigns in the past. In the private sector, the family owns a telephone company that operates in the states of Arizona and New Mexico.

Bagley was nominated by Biden in January of this year, but the nomination had been stalled since June, when the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not approve her name. There was resistance mainly because of statements that were considered anti-Semitic made by Bagley in an interview she gave in 1998 to the magazine of the Association for Training and Diplomatic Studies.

In two of the questions in the 86-page interview, Bagley stated that “there’s always the influence of the Jewish lobby because there’s a lot of money involved.” “Democrats always tend to follow what Jews define about Israel and say stupid things, things like moving the capital to Jerusalem always come up. These are things we shouldn’t even touch.”

The lines were quoted in the hearing that Bagley was subjected to by the Senate, in May, when she replied that she “didn’t mean any of that” and that “it was a bad choice of words.” The episode had a negative impact, which ended up blocking her nomination.

For months there was speculation whether the Biden government would nominate another name for the vacancy or would insist on the diplomat. On the last day 3, senator Mark Warner maneuvered to remove the nomination from the Committee on Foreign Relations and take it to the full Senate.

The justification was that the US should have an ambassador in Brazil until Lula takes office. “Brazil will have a new president and, frankly, I believe it is embarrassing that we have been without an ambassador in Brazil for almost two years,” said Warner. “In terms of north-south relations, our relations with Brazil are as important as any other nation in the southern hemisphere, we have a lot of work to do,” he said.

The absence of an ambassador is not a prerogative of Brazil. Today, there are 42 nominations pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, most for smaller nations, but also some for key countries in US geopolitics, such as India and Saudi Arabia.