Brazil & Southern Cone - December 2009 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Brazil challenges the US in Latin America

Although Presidents Lula da Silva and Barack Obama established a warm rapport at the outset of 2009, with Obama playing up Brazil’s desire to be accepted as the region’s natural leader, Brazil-US relations have cooled of late, amid growing Brazilian disappointment at US policies in the region. In early November in London Lula accused a distracted Obama of ignoring the region and of failing to follow up on his promised new era of engagement at the April 2009 Summit of the Americas.  Lula’s foreign affairs advisor, Marco Aurélio García, was quoted in the daily O Estado de São Paulo on 20 November as saying, rather more dramatically, that US-Latin American relations are now “very bad”.