It is great to see a less powerful nation standing up to a 'covetous' bully. At some point in the not to distant future, let's hope some African nation can develop enough backbone to adopt the same principle stand. US not out of the woods over Brazil spying claims
Brazilian-US relations have long been dogged by vague mutual suspicions.
There is a belief among Brazilian internet conspiracy theorists that the US covets the country’s sparsely populated, resource-rich Amazon region – an area the size of the European Union – and is planning an invasion.
This idea gained traction some years ago when a fake map, purportedly taken from a US school textbook, mysteriously appeared on the internet showing the Brazilian Amazon as an “international reserve”. It has also been reinforced by hawkish Brazilian army officers over the years.
While relations have since improved, in recent weeks the old suspicions have flared again amid revelations of US spying on Brasília.
So seriously is President Dilma Rousseff taking reports that the US National Security Agency spied not only on Brazilian telecoms but also on her staff and even on Petrobras, the country’s national oil company, that she has demanded an explanation from her US counterpart Barack Obama and has threatened to cancel a state visit to Washington on October 23.
“The realisation of the state visit to Washington, planned for October, will depend on the political conditions created by Obama,” the official presidential palace blog said.
The NSA reports have been drip-fed into the local media by The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and Fantastico, a programme on the television network Globo TV.
Using information from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, they revealed first how the NSA was tracking communications between Ms Rousseff and her advisers.
In the latest report, released on Sunday, they said Petrobras had been among international companies or private organisations named in an NSA training manual for new agents on how to target the computer networks of big companies.
Brazil has responded by cancelling a trip by senior diplomats to Washington to prepare for Ms Rousseff’s visit.
“This is a typical case where the structure of the state is being used by a government for benefit of their own companies,” said Rafael Alcadipani, a researcher at Fundação Getulio Vargas, an academic institution.
He said this should be a wake-up call to Brazil as it seeks to become a global player with ambitions to one day secure a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. “You have to take all measures to protect your own country and companies from this sort of thing.”
Most analysts believe that Ms Rousseff is keen to continue with the visit but her concerns are twofold – that there will be more revelations from Mr Snowden in the coming days, and that the visit has changed from being a positive one showcasing strong relations with the US, to one of damage control.
“Before, the goal of the trip was to find something that would catapult the relationship to a new level. Now the goal of the trip is to avoid the relationship from deteriorating, from getting into a negative spiral,” said João Augusto de Castro Neves of Eurasia Group.
At stake for Ms Rousseff is her main foreign policy achievement – her mending of ties with the US after her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, angered Washington by interfering in nuclear talks with Iran.
In jeopardy for the US are important business ties, including a future contract for fighter jets, in which Boeing is considered a favourite.
Equally concerning for Washington is whether US oil companies will still have access to Brazil’s burgeoning energy industry. The country is due this year to auction the first of its giant so-called “pre-salt” fields – the world’s biggest offshore find in decades that was discovered by Petrobras in 2007.
Ironically, these fields are part of what Brazil is now calling the “Blue Amazon” – the energy-rich deep waters off its vast coastline. And like the green Amazon, the US will have only itself to blame if revelations of its spying give birth to a new generation of conspiracy theories, this time about bellicose US ambitions for Brazilian waters.
Source: http://www.ft.com |
