For the past few days, mass media have said a lot about the recent visit of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to the United States and the hospitality shown by US President Barack Obama. Somebody is already warning that Rousseff has sold Putin and BRICS, has forgiven Obama the tapping of her phone and has even ceased to be left-of-center. Their concern is that Brazil has stopped being one of the global poles of force and that the South American leftists have lost their leader.
In reality, Brazil has never gone too far from the United States - even despite its involvement in BRICS. Rousseff has repeatedly said that unlike some of her South American colleagues, she is neither willing nor going to quarrel with President Obama – especially now that he will no longer tap her phone and the phones of the top ladies like Angela Merkel and Michelle Bachelet.
On the other hand, one of the reasons Rousseff is in politics is the persecution of her Bulgarian father Petr Rusev by the Soviet NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and GRU (the Chief Intelligence Directorate). Accused of having stolen the Comintern’s money, Rusev was forced to flee from Sofia to Paris and then to the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where he changed his named to Pedro Rousseff, married schoolteacher Dilma Jane da Silva and gave birth to Dilma Rousseff.
Rusev dared to inform his family about his whereabouts only after the death of his deadly enemy, former Secretary General of the Comintern, Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria Georgi Dimitrov. By that time Pedro Rousseff was already a rich man, who enjoyed high authority among Belo Horizonte’s post-war Nazi community.
His influence helped him to save Dilma Rousseff when she joined the radical left Palmares.
She survived tortures and sexual violence in jail and got out of there unlike many other prisoners of those times (due possibly to her father’s Comintern money). After that, she stopped being radical and started a career of financier and economist. In politics she appeared due to her leftist moods. She is proud of being leftist, but, on the other hand, she is rumored to enjoy strong support from the Brazil-based children of German Nazis.
When after the Petrobras scandal, the opposition sought to impeach Rousseff, some backstage forces sent her to meet with Obama and organized a brilliant PR campaign in her support.
It should be noted that the Brazilian radical leftists do not associate themselves with the Soviet ideology.
Considering all this – and also Rousseff’s childhood nightmares - one can hardly expect her to like Russia. Her decision to take part in BRICS was merely pragmatic. Brazil was a good partner with India, South Africa and China long before the concept of BRICS emerged. So, it just had no alternative to become Russia’s partner as well. Being the key force in South America, Brazil has traditionally been a pro-Western nation with an independent foreign policy. So, we can hardly expect it to spoil relations with the United States for the sake of BRICS.
Dilma Rousseff is a brilliant economist and financier and a pragmatic politician and will work for the benefit of her country in order to stay in her office and to turn Brazil into a global power. In the Portugal-speaking world, Brazil will accept no rivalry. Its key bridge with China is Macao, a former Portuguese colony in China. Today the Chinese have started to build a railroad across Amazonia. This is going to become one of the key transport arteries in the world in the 21st century. So, Brazilian-Chinese relations will certainly be the core of BRICS and both nations will need Russia for staying independent from the United States.
As regards Brazil’s efforts to improve its relations with the United States, we should not panic here as countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are also doing it. And this is also why the Pope is visiting Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay. On the other hand, some sources report emerging conflicts between some Latin American radical leftist and left-of-center presidents and governments. The last examples are growing tensions between Peru and Bolivia, Peru and Chile, Uruguay and its powerful neighbors, Brazil and Argentina and Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This is a sign that politics in Latin America are gradually shifting from the left to the right. The key reason is the economic crisis in Venezuela and that country’s inability to support its radical leftist allies any longer.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner will soon undertake the last attempt to consolidate the Latin American leftists. In an effort to stay in power, she is provoking a new Falkland conflict with the United Kingdom. But her neighbors, Dilma and Michelle, will hardly support her in the matter.
Georgy Kolarov, EADaily analyst for Latin America
