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Brazil & Southern Cone - June 2012 (ISSN 1741-4431)

FOREIGN POLICY: It’s not all roses…

While the US and Brazil are happy collaborators on open governance and international environmental policy, it’s not all rosy in the garden. Mike Hammer, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, in early June called for “more action” from Brazil to pressure Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad on 1 June. In a swift and firm riposte, Brazil’s foreign minister Antonio Patriota insisted that Brazil’s commitment to supporting the plan of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for settling the Syrian crisis was “perhaps greater than that of the US”. He added that Brazil not only supported the Annan plan but also a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) calling for Assad to allow it to send an independent team, led by a Brazilian, to investigate the massacre of some 100 civilians in the town of Houla on 25 May. The crisis has only escalated then; Annan said on 7 June that his plan had failed, laying the blame squarely at the feet of the Syrian government, only for France’s new foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, to call on the UN to make the plan “obligatory” under the UN's Chapter Seven provision, which would allow for action to be backed up by force.

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