The United States engagement with its Latin American neighbours over the past century has been a catalogue of failure, culminating in China filling the vacuum. After initial support in the 19th Century for Latin America’s independence from former European colonial powers, known as the Monroe Doctrine, the United States rapidly moved from defender of post colonial freedom to […]
Written by Jake Johnston. Original version published at The Americas Blog by CEPR. Republished with permission. On Sunday, October 4, 1998, as international bankers, investors, finance ministers and officials from the leading multilateral development banks met in Washington for the annual World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, many eyes were looking south, to Brazil. […]
In her 1977 book “United States Penetration of Brazil“, former CIA researcher, Professor Jan K Black exposed the complex role the US had played in Brazil’s 1964 coup and its governance since. This extremely detailed forensic investigation should be a standard reference for anyone studying the 1964 coup, the dictatorship period and relations between the countries, both then, […]
The legacy of colonialism is no more apparent than in the asymmetry between attitudes to sovereignty in the developing world and the developed. It would certainly be difficult to imagine a Brazilian Minister taking the international stage to propose the privatisation of the British Lake District, but this is analogous to what David Miliband put forward in […]
“There’s an unwritten understanding amongst Foreign Correspondents that the U.S. wants PSDB in power.” – Foreign Correspondent, São Paulo, 22/6/2013 Originally published March 2015. As we discussed in the article ‘Brasil’s Citizen Kanes’ the mainstream press in the country has a long tradition of antidemocratic bias. In 1989, as documented in the British film “Beyond […]
When, in one of its first foreign policy positions, the Brazilian government – charged, together with the US, with concluding the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) – blocked the North American project of a free trade zone, the positions of the two countries started to grow apart. Since then, the […]
By Darío Pignotti. “The United States strategists are firmly in agreement with the foreign policy guidelines advocated by candidate Marina Silva. If she is elected, it will be the victory of a diplomatic model similar to what Brazil used in the 1990s,” says Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, former Foreign Ministry secretary-general during the Luiz Inácio Lula […]