Honduras Exposes New Status of Brazil
This piece has been translated from Portuguese by Research Associate Josiane Paschoarelli
The role during the Honduran crisis, the attainment of the Olympic status for Río de Janeiro and the G20 strengthening have been viewed by analysts as signs that Brazil is becoming a world power.
Brazil’s greater role in Latin America can come as a byproduct of Washington’s current absence from the region. Nonetheless there are doubts about the weight of this role when it comes to the relationship with the U.S.
The following sentence was published in an article on Wednesday in the online version of Time Magazine. “In recent years, this South American powerhouse has been recognized as the first real counterweight to the USA in the Western Hemisphere.” The biggest and most prestigious weekly magazine in the U.S. was referring to the Honduran case, in which the presence of the deposed president Manuel Zelaya at the country’s embassy in Tegucigalpa declared Brazil as one of the major protagonists.
The same perspective was presented some days later in the American press, also citing the decision of the world’s richest countries to enlarge the economical global forum to accommodate emergent nations into the G20, and the victory of Rio de Janeiro as the host-city for the Olympic Games 2016, announced in Copenhagen.
“It makes Brazil’s status as an emergent world power crystal clear,” wrote the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and “it seems to crown the late arrival of the country into the international stage,” the weekly Newsweek Magazine emphasized. “In summary, the Olympic Games are going to reaffirm the government’s international reputation as a leader of the emergent nations,” the monthly Foreign Policy concluded.
On Friday, Folha de Sao Paulo talked to Latin American and Brazilian analysts and asked their opinion on these statements. The unanimous conclusion was that this is Brazil’s great moment, and never in the country’s history has it been so clear and evident. However, there are still some reservations about it.
According to Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, “Brazil is clearly gaining influence, prestige and authority, both regionally and globally, and it can become a counterweight to the USA in some occasions and when dealing with some issues.” However, he concluded that the financial resources, the military power and the political influence, as well as the expectations of other countries, “gives the USA a bigger role in most situations.”
The word “counterweight” also bothers Julia Sweig, director for Latin America Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. It is wrong to think like that, she said, “because it suggests that the USA continues to be the predominant power, which only applies to the Central American sphere, Mexico and Colombia.”
She believes that all is going to change in the next few years. “I would risk saying that with the exception of Mexico, the USA will split the power, even with Brazil. Honduras is just the beginning.” For Sweig, Brazil has stepped up to fill the American power vacuum. “And [Brazil] will offer alternative substance and style with its diplomacy.”
This stance is shared by a Brazilian diplomat, also an expert in Latin American issues, who has asked to remain anonymous. According to him, Brazil’s most pro-active role takes place when the US’ geopolitical force in the region is diminished. This has happened when the US focuses its foreign policy outside of the region. This limitation on behalf of the US, he says, opened the possibilities for diplomatic action for Brazil, as in the case of Haiti, and now in Honduras.
This could be true, affirms Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “In fact, Brazil has a foreign policy which is mostly independent of the USA, even more so than Europe’s foreign policy. But it is also a fact that Brazil has been very timid regarding Honduras. Brazil has tried to avoid confrontation with Washington while Barack Obama allows the de facto regime to violate the international rights of the Brazilian embassy as well as the human rights of Hondurans.”
Weisbrot said that if President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his Ministers want to, they could be more aggressive and stop Washington. How? “Basically by speaking stronger and asking for the support of other South American countries, in other words, practicing leadership.”
A progressive colleague of Weisbrot, Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, disagrees in part. He believes that Brazil at the beginning of the 21st century is what the USA was at the beginning of the 20th century.
“Just as the USA entered the last century relatively untouched by the war dynamics of Europe, Brazil enters this century untainted by the heavy burden carried by the USA today, following the unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Birns says that “Brazil is a celebrity, the new kid on the block.”