BRAZIL: Pacifying Colombia to Ensure South American Leadership

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 5 2003 (IPS) - The Colombian situation is standing in the way of Brazil’s plans to affirm its leadership in South America, a challenge that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will take up Friday when his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, is to pay Brasilia a visit.

Brazil’s northwestern neighbour is a problem because of its major cocaine production, the armed conflicts that threaten to overflow its borders and also because of the U.S. presence – including military – in Colombian territory, which limits possibilities for Brazilian influence in that country and across the continent.

Lula is promoting a bold diplomacy, instead of the "bureaucratic, excessively cautious" approach that has kept Brazil in a role "inferior to its political importance," Theotonio dos Santos, professor of international economy at the Federal Fluminense University, near Rio, told IPS. The first sign of this new diplomatic face was the January initiative to mediate in the Venezuelan conflict between the Hugo Chávez administration and the political opposition. The polarisation of politics in Venezuela has led to several clashes in which people have been killed and which threaten to push the country into total chaos.

Brazil led the creation of the "Group of Friends" of Venezuela, including Chile, Mexico, Spain and the United States, to support the efforts of César Gaviria, secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in brokering the dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition.

The Brazilian government also wants to serve as mediator in Colombia, to find a negotiated way out of the armed conflict that began four decades ago and involves government troops, leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary squads.

This aim has led Brazil to resist pressure from Bogotá and Washington to officially declare the guerrilla groups FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and ELN (National Liberation Army) "terrorist organisations".

Brazil is also opposed to "Plan Colombia", Bogotá’s anti-drugs strategy that receives several billion dollars in U.S. funding and military assistance to fight both the illegal drug trade and the guerrillas.

Critics in that country and abroad warn that Plan Colombia could lead to the total militarisation of Colombia and push the armed conflict into neighbouring countries.

To prevent that from happening and to contain the military- focused policy of Uribe so peace negotiations can be restarted is a "duty in defence of Brazil’s national sovereignty," because it is intended to maintain control over the far-flung Brazilian Amazon that borders Colombia, says Dos Santos.

This explanation reflects the convictions of many sectors in Brazil, ranging from the political left to the military, that the Amazon is a permanent subject of international envy, particularly on the part of the United States.

Lula tried to avoid the difficulties of launching a solo initiative, and formally asked United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to promote peace negotiations in Colombia.

Brazil’s new foreign policy is geared towards a "strategic vision" that makes exclusively economic matters a secondary priority, say its promoters in the Lula administration.

Brasilia’s top priority is to assert its leadership in South America, which requires overcoming existing tensions in order to ensure a united regional front for taking on trade negotiations and other international matters.

Brasilia is trying, for example, to promote an immediate meeting of South American foreign ministers to discuss the threat of war in Iraq, the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) currently being negotiated, and the political conflicts in Colombia and Venezuela.

On the trade front, the new Brazilian government – Lula was sworn in Jan 1 – says it is preparing to deploy a policy of "generosity" towards its partners in the Southern Common Market (Mercosur – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) and its other South American neighbours.

Foreign minister Celso Amorim recently told a meeting of senators that concessions on some points are the cost of leadership, and are necessary for defending Brazil’s "geopolitical interests".

One such case was the Feb 11 authorisation for re-treaded tyre imports from Paraguay and Uruguay, putting an end to a long- standing trade dispute.

The measure was not purely generous, given that the Mercosur dispute settlement mechanism had condemned the Brazilian ban on the tyre imports, which was in effect since Jan 9, 2002.

But Brazil continued to obstruct the entry of the re-treaded tyres, citing environmental and health motives.

The re-treads do not last as long as new tyres and the country is trying to get rid of more than 100 million tyres that have been accumulating in open-air dumps, serving as a breeding ground for dengue-carrying mosquitoes, argued Brazilian authorities.

The problem persisted because the previous government, of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "succumbed to pressure from the multinational and Brazilian tyre manufacturers and allowed the implementation of incoherent trade obstacles," Gustavo Albano, president of the Uruguayan Serisur tyre company, told IPS.

Serisur is the only Uruguayan firm that was able to restart its exports of re-treaded tyres to Brazil. Other companies lost their export capacity as a result of the fact that they were kept out of the large Brazilian market for several years.

But there will be no more conflicts of this type, promises Marco Aurelio García, Lula’s international adviser.

But talking about generosity is "rhetoric", because international agreements imply "reciprocal concessions" in cooperation based on common interests, says Sonia Camargo, director of international relations at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

With this new approach, Brazil is looking to strengthen its position vis-à-vis the United States in the FTAA negotiations and in other international arenas. The difference is a more active foreign policy, one based on coherence with domestic policy, she said in a conversation with IPS.

Today, Brazil is democratically stable and there is strong popular support for Lula’s policies aimed at tackling hunger, extreme poverty and social inequalities in general.

This will have an example-setting effect and could boost Brazil’s strength in the South American region, where most of the countries are in crisis, said Camargo.