A month ago, Joe Biden received the Brazilian ambassador in the Oval Office, who went “to convey the friendship guarantees of Bolsonaro.” The American president posed shaking his hand, on social media.
Two weeks later, Biden included in a speech a promise to pay Brazil to protect the Amazon. Then, his Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, traveled to Brasília for a High Level Dialogue USA-Brazil.
Posing on social media with Bolsonaro’s chancellor, she hailed the “deep partnership“, whose “history of cooperation shows the potential to do much more together”.
On the visit, Nuland was asked about Bolsonaro’s criticism of the electoral system and said, according to Reuters: “We have confidence in your system and you need to have it, including at the leadership level.”
The vague caveat only appeared in the fifth paragraph of the April 25 report. The title, based on another statement by the undersecretary, was “USA seeks closer ties with Brazil in times of turmoil and war”.
On the 30th, Scott Hamilton, who was the consul general in Rio until last year, published the article “Defending democracy” in the newspaper O Globo, demanding his own country: “Amid threats to democratic institutions in Brazil, the US remains passive”.
He wrote that “Bolsonaro and his supporters try to sabotage the integrity of the democratic process and its, in general, spectacular independent institutions — the press, NGOs, TSE, STF and the voting system itself.” And he concluded: “The time for the US to speak up is now, not when a crisis is underway or after it.”
Nothing happened. On May 3, the Brazilian ambassador received the assistant secretary of state to the Americas, with a delegation from the organization AS/COA, “which represents well-established companies in Brazil”, as he tweeted.
Then everything changed. On the 5th, last Thursday, the leak happened to the same Reuters, almost an order, “Exclusive – CIA Chief told the Bolsonaro government not to mess with Brazil’s election, sources say” (title reproduced above). It was no longer about diplomats, but about the spy agency.
In July last year, CIA director William Burns reportedly told “former generals” Luiz Eduardo Ramos and Augusto Heleno “that the democratic process was sacred, and that Bolsonaro should not be talking that way.”
Reuters noted that Washington had been “seeking to improve ties with Brasilia in recent weeks”, targeting a meeting of the two presidents at the Summit of the Americas in June in Los Angeles, “if Bolsonaro participates”.
It is not known, especially after the public charge, if Bolsonaro will go. But the summit is already making water, according to an article in Foreign Policy by Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America expert at the centenary Chatham House think tank.
Alerting that the meeting “may be the tombstone of US influence in the region”, he underlines that, with one month to go, invitations have not yet been sent and 12 ambassadorial posts in Latin America are vacant, including in Brazil.
“So far, the Biden administration’s regional initiatives consist of diplomatic visits, empty promises and a cascade of sanctions, [sem] provide substantive alternatives to China’s economic proposals,” writes Sabatini.
In short, “a low attendance, triviality-fueled and substantially empty summit would be worse than a bad party: it would serve China as an embarrassing end to US influence in the Western Hemisphere.”
