Lula plays the 'principal partner' card
GIVE AND TAKE IN MOST IMPORTANT MEETING YET WITH BUSH
Brazil and the US were accentuating the positive during President Lula da Silva's visit to Washington in June. Both sides studiously avoided sticking points such as Lula's advocacy of Fidel Castro's Cuba, about which he says he can't remember why it's not a member of the Rio Group of Latin American countries, formed to address regional security issues. The Brazilian even pressed his case for UN mediation in the Colombian crisis, despite his host's recent dismissal of the UN route for resolving his and other countries' differences with Iraq.
There was, in any case, significant give and take from both parties at the meeting. President Bush's government expressed support for Brazil's pretensions, renewed and invigorated under Lula, for regional leadership in South America. Meanwhile, Lula promised to work to guarantee the entry into operation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in January 2005, where a month earlier his government had argued for a delay until 2010 (see RB-03-05).
Waxing hegemonic? President Lula da Silva seeks to position Brazil as the United States' most important partner in South America, with Washington affording his country autonomy of thought and action yet relying on it as a diplomatic ally to resolve regional problems, in particular the war in Colombia.
Its neighbours have long harboured concerns regarding Brazil's hegemonic ambitions, however, and at least one South American president, Chile's Ricardo Lagos, came away from a recent Mercosur summit miffed at how his Brazilian counterpart had 'eclipsed' his peers. Reassurances that Brazil has no such ambitions will undoubtedly have formed part of Lula's discourse during his attendance as the first head of state from outside the Andean Community invited to sit in on one of its summit meetings, held in Colombia at the beginning of July.
Staying out of Colombia. Still, Lula's main objective right now is not to keep Ricardo Lagos, or indeed any other South American leader, happy. Rather, it is to assert his government's clout and independence, going his own way on the Colombian issue by opposing President Alvaro Uribe's idea, which enjoyed the tacit support of Washington, of a multilateral force to combat the Farc and other narcoguerrilla movements.
The US might well get involved in such a scheme, particularly if it were carried out under the auspices of the Organization of American States, and Lula clearly opposes an 'internationalisation' of the Colombian conflict. He favours instead bilateral cooperation and intelligence-sharing with Colombia. The Brazilian Armed Forces have just completed Operação Timbó, a week of joint operations at the beginning of July, designed to test their readiness to repress the drug trade and incursions by Farc into Brazil. Defence minister José Viégas Filho was dispatched to Bogotá to brief his Colombian counterpart María Lucía Ramírez on Timbó as it happened, signing a memorandum of understanding with her regarding shared intelligence. That is, of course, still a long way short of joint, let alone multilateral, military operations, fighting the Farc on Colombian soil.
Fighter contract. Timbó covered the border regions with Colombia (1,645km) and Peru (2,995km) and was a test for the Sivam air and satellite surveillance system across Amazônia, put in place under Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002). Brazil's armed forces are now pushing for a key next step in structuring their response to the drugs-and-guerrillas threat from Colombia, namely legislation determining the circumstances under which they can bring down planes invading Brazilian air space.
There were 200 such occurrences last year, and they see clarification of their 'downing rights' as the logical succession to the installation of Sivam. Indeed, to guarantee the necessary fire power, Lula's government is now seriously considering revival of the US$700m plan to acquire 12 new fighters for the Brazilian air force, replacing a fleet of French Mirages that are going out of commission in 2004.
Goodwill. That tender was suspended after Lula came to office for lack of funds. However, during his recent visit to the US, his first since taking office but his third meeting with President Bush since being elected last November, it appeared that the world financial community was smiling on Brazil, and with Washington's blessing. Finance minister Antônio Palocci emerged from a meeting with IMF director-general Horst Koehler to announce that the government still hadn't decided whether to renew the agreement with the IMF, involving the bulk of the US$30bn agreed with the Cardoso administration in August last year, at the height of investor jitters about a possible Lula victory in the November presidentials. Meanwhile, Koehler told the press that, whether or not Brazil renewed, the Fund would find a way of helping the country.
With such goodwill flowing in its direction, no wonder the Lula government reckons it should be able to afford the US$700m for those new fighters. And with the Bush administration such a fervent advocate of its Brazilian counterpart, it will be interesting to see how the US contender for the contract, Lockheed-Martin, fares against competition from French, Russian, Anglo-Swedish and Franco-Brazilian consortia.
FTAA. In exchange for being taken so seriously, Lula assured Bush that Brazil would work for the entry into force of the FTAA agreement in January 2005, a statement which drew flak from the left in his country, accusing him of changing his tune on Washington's push for hemispheric integration. Here again, though, he can argue that Brazil and the US are joint chairmen of the negotiating process right now, so it is their joint recommendation that will be presented to the next meeting of member countries' foreign ministers in November.