While businessmen and part of the financial market celebrated the formal start of Brazil’s entry into the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), announced this Wednesday (26), former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim considers that the country’s entry into the entity should be analyzed calmly and with other eyes.
“There are no great benefits to being a member of the OECD,” says Amorim, former president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva’s (PT) chief adviser on international affairs. “This quality ‘pseudo-seal’ thing is gone, after what happened in Chile and Mexico.” The former minister does not see joining the entity as a way to increase investments in the country.
In November, Amorim accompanied Lula on his tour of Europe, where the PT candidate for the presidency was received with the honors of head of state by French Emmanuel Macron.
The former chancellor also criticizes the political arrests of opponents of dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua (“I deplore what is happening”) and denies that the country, in an eventual PT government, will align itself with Bolivarian countries. “Our model is not Nicaragua, it is not Cuba and it is not Venezuela. Brazil is a capitalist country and will continue to be.”
He talked to leaf making the reservation that he was speaking in his own name, not that of the party or Lula.
Former President Lula was in Europe and had a trip to Mexico scheduled, postponed because of the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Wouldn’t a trip to the US also be important? This saying that the PT governments turned their backs on the US is absurd. Obviously we had differences, but the fact that President Lula was received at Camp David [pelo então presidente George W. Bush, em 2007] demonstrates that this is not so. There were differences on some topics, which were treated in an adult manner.
There is a perception that a Lula government would be closer to China. This is something that causes some unease among Americans. We are going to have a pragmatic view with China. Closer than the government [Jair] Bolsonaro (PL), from a policy point of view, is inevitable. Bolsonaro was an absolute disaster. Does having a rapprochement with China now mean that we will choose China over the US? No, we will treat it pragmatically.
China is a very important country, our exports there are almost triple those to the US, there’s no way to ignore that. China is a potential supplier of investment likely to be much more flexible than the US, given the nature of the regime. That doesn’t mean you’re going to opt for the Chinese system, but I don’t think it has to be anti-China either.
There’s more pressure now, in terms of technology. In the 5G auction, despite American pressure, China’s Huawei was not excluded. But this technological Cold War between China and the US will continue… If 5G was already with Bolsonaro, what can I do? When the US was the main technological power in the world, it was the main supplier of technology to Brazil. I don’t think the Chinese behave like saints, but neither do Americans. The US doesn’t have much moral authority to talk about espionage.
China is a very important country, our exports there are almost triple those to the US, there’s no way to ignore that. […] That doesn’t mean you’re going to opt for the Chinese system, but I don’t think it has to be anti-China either.
Yes, but one country is a dictatorship, and the other is a democracy. Technology does not come marked as dictatorship or democracy. There is no such thing as a “comunavirus”, just as there is no such thing as “communovacine”, Pfizer doesn’t say “democratic vaccine”. We have cooperation with China in the space area that started in the Sarney administration and continued: with Collor, Fernando Henrique, Lula. We will have good relations with both of them. It does not mean that you will follow the Chinese model. But in some respects the American model also leaves something to be desired. Trumpism hasn’t disappeared, we don’t know what it will be like two years from now.
In which areas can Brazil approach the US? We have nothing against the US. The Alca [Área de Livre Comércio das Américas] it was a difficult issue, but that didn’t stop us from working very actively as partners in the World Trade Organization. The person who invited us to be part of the most central nucleus of the WTO negotiation was Bob Zoellick [ex-vice-secretário de Estado dos EUA e ex-presidente do Banco Mundial].
Did Zoellick make this invitation before or after he said that if Brazil did not join the FTAA, it would have to trade with Antarctica? He said this during the election campaign [brasileira], then saw that it was not so. We’re still not in favor of FTAA, I don’t think we’d have anything to gain — you get too caught up in areas like intellectual property and investments. It’s a very pragmatic thing, there’s nothing ideological or anti-American.
I think there’s a lot of positive things to do with the US, but that doesn’t mean you have to totally subordinate yourself. Brazil needs to give a high priority to the integration of Latin America into South America. This is an important thing, and we want to do it in a cooperative way, not hostile to the US. Now it’s also not blindly following what they want. It’s not because they’re fighting with Russia over Ukraine that we’re going to get into it. This fight is not ours.
Recently, emissaries of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear that they wanted Brazil’s support in relation to Ukraine. And President Bolsonaro is going to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. Things are complex, you can’t have simplisms. Having a new Cold War with Russia or China and the US is not good for the world. Brazil can help in dialogue. I think it lacks a little [Henry] Kissinger, of [George] Kennan, on American foreign policy.
I’m not talking about liberals, but about political realists, people who realize that the world has to work on a basis of a certain balance. Kissinger, at the time [durante o governo Nixon], sought to approach China to counterbalance the Soviet Union and respect political realities. Kennan was always against NATO expansion in Eastern Europe. But that’s their fight, it’s not our priority. We need to take care of integration in South America, look for a very deep relationship with the European Union.
Is joining the OECD a priority? I think we have to look at this very, very carefully — and it’s a very long negotiation. What did the countries that entered gain? Chile had a brutal neoliberal crisis on the streets. Mexico, the country that opened the most, was one of the countries that suffered the most from the [banco] Lehman Brothers [2008]. Being from the OECD did not make Mexico receive more investments than Brazil.
There are no great benefits to joining the OECD. The OECD is, let’s say, a temple of neoliberalism, which imposes trade liberalization, freedom of capital movement, restrictions on intellectual property, generics, compulsory licensing of medicines. I think we have to look at this carefully. I will not demonize the OECD, but I will not deify it either. This “pseudo-seal” of quality is gone, after what happened in Chile and Mexico. Perhaps we can have a joint negotiation with Argentina, which was also invited. It has to be calm.
We are seeing the movement of ex-president Lula towards the center, with gestures towards ex-governor Geraldo Alckmin, who has just left the PSDB. Can we expect a central foreign policy? Our foreign policy is already of the center, it has never been of the left, it is a national policy. Our foreign policy did not have any moment of hostility towards the US, towards the EU, it just gave emphasis to Africa, South America, BRICS, which had less emphasis.
There was a great rapprochement with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We didn’t get very close. Of course the [Hugo] Chávez looked for us a lot, but the [Alvaro] Uribe [ex-presidente da Colômbia] was also looking. I went to Nicaragua only once as a minister.
Our model is not Nicaragua, it is not Cuba and it is not Venezuela. Brazil is a capitalist country and will continue. Now, capitalist with social sensitivity. We defend democracy in ways that seem most effective to us, not just to please the agenda of the media or other sectors.
But there is resistance to criticizing the Nicaraguan regime, which is not respecting the democratic order. We are not obsessed with criticizing. I don’t want to name country names. They keep pressing: “Oh, aren’t you going to criticize the government that arrests, kills and tortures journalists?”. Are they charging this every day from Washington?
One thing does not cancel out the other. What Lula said, including in the interview with El País, is a criticism [à Nicarágua], he said that he is against perpetuating a person in power, against political prisoners. But by imposing harsh sanctions, you take away the morale of criticism. I think you have to do the dialogue. Instead of criticizing Chávez, we helped establish a mechanism for dialogue with the opposition, and at the time that helped a little. Obviously solving Venezuela’s problems is a much more complex thing. Now, permanent hostility doesn’t help.
There is indeed a criticism of the US, of not condemning Saudi Arabia more vehemently. You criticize other countries, but not Nicaragua and Venezuela. We are not in government. Our model is not Nicaragua, it is not Cuba and it is not Venezuela. Brazil is a capitalist country and will continue. Now, capitalist with social sensitivity. We defend democracy in ways that seem most effective to us, not just to please the agenda of the media or other sectors.
The PT has strongly criticized President Bolsonaro’s authoritarian movements, it is not paradoxical that Mr. think Venezuela and Nicaragua have functioning democracies? But do I say this?
But they don’t say otherwise. There are ways and means of acting, of persuading, of seeking dialogue. Now, there is more evolution than in Trump’s time, of threats of sanctions, of invasion.
There was a huge deterioration in conditions in both countries. Would dialog still work? Sanction and isolation do not work. Without going into the merits of the government, the sanctions regime imposed 60 years ago against Cuba is a huge historic failure of a policy. It is through persuasion. I personally don’t like what is happening in Nicaragua, when I see people being arrested, historic Sandinistas, I deplore it. But from there to think that this has to be the focus of our foreign policy, I disagree. There are many other things that we have to take care of, it is much more shameful not to defend Brazilian interests, to subordinate ourselves, as at the time Bolsonaro-Trump.
Brazil was part of this conservative western Christian alliance, with countries like Hungary, Poland… How would that alignment look like? This is such an artificial thing that, with one breath, it ends.
And in relation to Israel, what changes? We had good relations with Israel the entire time we were in government. But let’s not stop criticizing the occupation of Palestinian territories contrary to United Nations resolutions, this is not being against Israel. We have historically advocated the two-state solution.
There are initiatives in European countries to pass laws that will punish exports from Brazil because of deforestation. But the government thinks this is a negative campaign by foreign media and an attempt at protectionism. How can this image be fixed? At the time of the military dictatorship, I was young and I was in Brazil’s mission at the OAS [Organização dos Estados Americanos], and an important Brazilian emissary arrived saying that the government was very concerned about the image. Then our ambassador, Jorge Álvaro Maciel, said: “I have an idea to improve the image: end the torture that improves”.
So if Brazil starts to have a coherent sustainable development policy, it will improve. That there are protectionist interests, of course there are. Now, if you have an environmental policy like that of the Bolsonaro government, you are giving all the pretexts for these protectionist interests to be legitimized.
