The ouster of Brazil’s left-of-center president was the latest right-wing victory in Latin America, but was this “quiet coup” driven by local politics or part of a broader U.S. strategy to reclaim dominance over its “backyard,” asks Ted Snider.
By Ted Snider
There can no longer be any doubt that the impeachment of Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff was an illegitimate act of power politics. The maneuvering by opposition politicians has been revealed for what it clearly was all along: a quiet coup dressed in the disguise of good governance.
The recent publication (by Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo) of transcripts from secret conversations that took place in March, just weeks before the impeachment vote, has done for Brazil what the intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt did for Ukraine: it provided proof that the removal of the elected president was a coup.
Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff addressing the United Nations General Assembly. (UN Photo by Marco Castro)
The call — between Romero Jucá, who was a senator at the time and is currently the planning minister in the new Michel Temer government, and former oil executive Sergio Machado — lays bare “a national pact” to remove Rousseff and install Temer as president. Jucá reveals that not only opposition politicians but also the military and the Supreme Court were conspirators in the coup.
Regarding the military’s role, Jucá said, “I am talking to the generals, the military commanders. They are fine with this, they said they will guarantee it.” And, as for the Supreme Court, Jucá admitted that he “spoke with and secured the involvement of numerous justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court,” according to The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald (who lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
Jucá further boasted that “there are only a small number” of Supreme Court justices that he had not spoken to.
What the Romero Jucá phone call does not do, unlike the Victoria Nuland phone call, is reveal U.S. involvement in the coup. The Jucá transcript does not name the United States as a participant in the intrigue. Neither did President Rousseff when Greenwald interviewed her. She pinned the blame securely on the lapel of lower house president Eduardo Cunha.
Rousseff’s ouster was dressed up as punishment for her obtaining loans to cover budgetary shortfalls. There were no allegations that Rousseff personally profited from these transactions, but it appears that some of the coup plotters hope the new regime will kill off a corruption and money-laundering investigation that implicates some of them, including the phone-call participants Jucá and Machado.
But there are three lines of evidence suggestive of U.S. involvement as well. In chronological order, there is suggestive historical evidence, there is a suggestive pattern of evidence in other Latin American countries, and there is current suggestive evidence in Brazil.
The Historical Evidence
Over the years, there have been a number of well-documented American coups in Latin America. The most well known are the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz and the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende. But the little known 1964 Brazilian coup was significant, too.
President John F. Kennedy addressing the nation regarding the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Noam Chomsky explains that in 1962, amid Cold War tensions over Cuba, Kennedy made the policy decision to transform the militaries of Latin America from defending against external forces to “internal security” or, as Chomsky puts it, “war against the domestic population, if they raised their heads.”
The Brazilian coup was significant because it may have been the first major manifestation of this shift in America’s Latin American policy. The Kennedy administration prepared the coup, and it was carried out shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. Chomsky says that the “mildly social democratic” Goulart government was taken out and replaced by a “murderous and brutal” military dictatorship.
Though not often included in the list of significant U.S. coups, the evidence that it was a U.S. coup is solid. The CIA station in Brazil’s field report shows clear U.S. foreknowledge of the coup: “a revolution by anti-Goulart forces will definitely get under way this week, probably in the next few days.” President Lyndon Johnson also gave Undersecretary of State George Ball and Assistant Secretary for Latin America Thomas Mann the green light to participate in the coup: “I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do.”
And the steps were substantial. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon told CIA Director John McCone, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk that those steps should include “a clandestine delivery of arms . . . pre-positioned prior any outbreak of violence” to the coup forces as well as shipments of gas and oil.
Ambassador Gordon also told the senior officials to “prepare without delay against the contingency of needed overt intervention at a second stage” after the covert involvement. Rusk would then send Gordon a list of the steps that would be taken “in order [to] be in a position to render assistance at appropriate time to anti-Goulart forces if it is decided this should be done.”
The list, sent in a telegram on March 31, 1964, included dispatching U.S. Navy tankers with petroleum and oil, an aircraft carrier, two guided missile destroyers, four destroyers and task force tankers for “overt exercises off Brazil.” The telegram also lists as a step to “assemble shipment of about 11 tons of ammunition.”
The significance of this historical record is the demonstration that the last time Brazil had a “mildly social democratic” government, the U.S. cooperated in its removal. The next social democratic government would be the now removed PT government of Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.
Since Lula da Silva took office in 2003, government policies have been credited for lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty and making Brazil a powerful independent player on the world stage.
In 2009, Lula da Silva was a key figure in the creation of the BRICS organization of emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), representing a challenge to the dominance of the U.S.-based International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Among other initiatives, BRICS has called for a new global reserve currency, a direct threat to the power of the U.S. dollar.
Brazil’s ex-President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva.
Now, Lula da Silva’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, has been removed from office, creating uncertainty about the BRICS future.
Pattern of Evidence in Latin America
The next line of evidence is the recent pattern of right-wing or reactionary movements reclaiming power across Latin America. After a powerful swing to left-wing governments in the first decade of the new century, conservative forces have been re-establishing their control over the past few years.
For the U.S. government, which was uncomfortable with the leftist trend, the surge to the right has been welcome news since Washington has long viewed Central and South America as its strategic “backyard” with compliant states accepting U.S. hegemony and granting American companies easy access to natural resources.
As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger put it, if America could not control its own backyard, it could hardly hope “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.”
Key to this reclamation of Latin America is the repossession of Venezuela after the death of populist leader Hugo Chavez in 2013. Chavez’ successor, Nicolás Maduro, is not considered nearly the skilled political leader that Chavez was but Maduro did continue the run of Bolivarian Revolution victories, albeit by a narrow margin over Henrique Capriles, Washington’s choice.
Though some 150 international monitors observed the election and an audit of more than half the vote tally found no problems, the United States refused to recognize the election results, the only country to do so. Since then, political pressure on the Maduro government has continued, often cheered on by the U.S. news media and made worse by the drop in world oil prices that contributed to an economic crisis.
President Maduro recently declared a state of emergency, accusing the U.S. of conspiring with right-wing groups in Venezuela to overthrow his government. Maduro said, “Washington is activating measures at the request of Venezuela’s fascist right.”
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. (Photo credit: Valter Campanato/ABr)
But Venezuela’s leftist government has hardly been alone in facing hostility from Washington. On June 28, 2009, Honduras’ democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was seized at gunpoint by hooded soldiers and forced onto a plane that, after refueling at the U.S. military base of Palmerola, took him to Costa Rica.
Zelaya immediately declared that he was the victim of a coup, an assessment shared by almost all the international community and the Organization of American States (OAS). But then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Zelaya’s ouster and supported the new Honduran regime’s moves to select a replacement. The Obama administration refused, publicly, to use the word “coup.”
But it was a coup and Washington cooperated with it. Zelaya complained that “after the coup d’état . . . the U.S. has increased its military support to Honduras.” Despite a demand from the OAS and the United Nations for Zelaya’s return, Clinton’s State Department refused to follow that course.
Later, the U.S. recognized the coup leaders as the winners of an election that the OAS, the Latin American Mercosur trade bloc and the 23-nation Rio Group refused to accept. So illegitimate was the election that the U.N. refused to even bother monitoring it.
Latin American expert Mark Weisbrot told me that “the Obama administration acknowledged that they were talking to the [Honduran] military right up to the day of the coup, allegedly to convince them not to do it.” But, he added, “I find it hard to believe that they couldn’t convince them not to do it if they really wanted to: the Honduran military is pretty dependent on the U.S.”
Despite the refusal to call it a coup and the insistence on recognizing the new government as legitimate, the U.S. knew it was a coup. By July 24, 2009, less than a month after Zelaya’s ouster, the White House, Clinton and many others were in receipt of a cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Honduras. Clearly never meant to be public, the cable was titled: “Open and Shut: the Case of the Honduran Coup.”
In it, the embassy said, “There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup” and “none of the . . . arguments [of the coup defenders] has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution.”
So, the U.S. had foreknowledge of the coup, cooperated in the coup — at least by helping the rendition plane to refuel — and provided crucial diplomatic cover for the coup.
A similar pattern occurred in Paraguay where democratically elected Fernando Lugo was removed in a right-wing coup in 2012 while the U.S. was negotiating for a new military base. Again, the U.S. refused to call Lugo’s impeachment a coup, though as early as 2009, U.S. embassy cables noted that Lugo’s political opposition has as its goal to “Capitalize on any Lugo missteps” and “impeach Lugo and assure their own political supremacy.”
The cable noted that to achieve that goal, the opponents are willing to “legally” impeach Lugo “even if on spurious grounds.” So, the U.S. knew that was a coup because they had been tipped off about the strategy and told what it would look like.
A slightly different strategy has been pursued in Bolivia where WikiLeaks cables revealed that Washington had approved 101 grants worth over $4 million to help regional governments “operate more strategically” to cause a shift in power away from the national government of Evo Morales to regional governments. The idea was to rebalance power and weaken the Morales government.
That Brazil was going to be a part of this Latin American pattern was clear as early as 2005 when, Mark Weisbrot said, the U.S. intervened in Brazilian politics to undermine the government.
Current Suggestive Evidence in Brazil
Though the precise U.S. role in Brazil’s current political crisis remains unclear, there has been some suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence. Weisbrot said, “there is no doubt that the biggest players in this coup attempt — people like former presidential candidates José Serra and Aécio Neves — are U.S. government allies.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Brazil is awash in financing from American sources, including “CIA-related organizations.”
Perhaps the most direct implication is that the day after the impeachment vote, Senator Aloysio Nunes of the coup government began a three-day visit to Washington. Nunes is no small player. He was the vice-presidential candidate on the 2014 ticket that lost to President Rousseff and helped spearhead Rousseff’s impeachment in the senate.
Nunes scheduled meetings with, among others, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker and Ben Cardin, respectively, as well as with Undersecretary of State and former Ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon. Though Nunes denies it, there are reports that his trip to Washington was ordered by acting President Michel Temer.
The willingness to go ahead with the planned meetings with Nunes right after the impeachment vote suggests at least tacit acceptance or approval on the part of Washington.
President Evo Morales of Bolivia has called on the remaining left-wing governments of South America to counter American plans to retake control of the region. Morales said, “It is the plan of the American empire that wants to regain control of Latin America and the Caribbean, and especially in South America, and there surely is an ambition to establish a United States presence in these countries and recover subservient governments as a model, as a system.”
So far, the U.S. government has been conspicuously silent about the coup in Brazil.
Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in U.S. foreign policy and history.
By the way, the so-called “intercepted phone calls” were not intercepted. This make all the difference. They were personally recorded by the accuser/persecuted Petrobras director (Machado), intentionally in order to grasp some bargain element to his defence in his criminal process, inducing some politicians to skip/confess any compromising element. But the concrete results from this intentional recording were totally superficial, exposing only general comments on political situation, far from criminal.
The recordings were made 1 month before the Dilma impeachment was voted, what makes all the difference, since they reveal only worry and frightened comments concerning their uncertain future. In all the recordings appear clealy, with all words, that the Temer, Jucá and Sarney group (that eventually assumed the power) had no clue about if they would assume the power. So, it is impossible to talk about conspiration or political maneuvering in this case. They were clearly the passengers and not (at all) the drivers in this process.
All this analysis, seems to me, too cheap and simpler, black-and-white hats, not considering the complexities and details of every political conutru reality.
Snider does not state that the Juca-Machado calls were intercepted. However, it was revealed in 2013 that Petrobras computers had
been hacked by the NSA, and that Dilma’s phone calls had been intercepted by the same.
Information is a very important asset, and its use is selective. I would expect that in Brazil, as in the US, the largest media outlets are controlled by very few, very wealthy individuals or corporations, and that, in this case, selective information has been used to discredit
and remove an impotent, but largely symbolic, (slightly) left-leaning government.
I think the story give an over-emphasis to external factors. The crumbling legitimacy of Dilma government come totally (99%) from domestic factors, such as completely ideological incoherences (heavy neoliberal policies for a self-proclamed left party), economical crisis, mismagement, heavy geographical concentration of supporters, among others. Noticec, I am not mentioning the corruptions scandals, for me, only the “cherry on the cake”. As symptons of this, the legal impeachment of Dilma was supported by 80% of population, 70% of congress and by the biggest political street rallies of the history of Brazil. defirelly, it is not a matter of 2 or 3 newspapers or a cabinet or inner lobby complot.
By the way, the impeachment process was totally constitutional, with proceedings aproved by congress, senate and Supreme Court. The impeachment was also previoulsy validated by Dilmas´ Workers Party, who had proposed and championned similar procedures against former presidents Collor (during 1991) and Cardoso (1999).
Dilma government crumbled by itself, loosing the ability to defend itself. It has lost its political sustainability by internal factors.
By the way, Brazil is one of the biggest emergent economies of the World, bigger than UK or France, equivalent to Russia and India together, 200 million ihnabitants, powerful democracy and press. It would be impossible to a mere CIA complot to desestabilize a country like that, would not be possible to do it in India or Russia, even Mexico, and much more impossible in Brazil. You cannot compare Brazuil to Ukraine, Siria, Venezuela, or even to the 60´s Brazi.
Any writer who quotes Noam Chomsky on Kennedy’s foreign policy should be more careful.
First, the CIA started training the police forces in Central America in the fifties. The idea that, in places like Mexico and Nicaragua, they were not trained for internal security is ludicrous.
Second, in the book HIdden Terrors, about US involvement with police forces in Central and South America, it is revealed that David Rockefeller requested a meeting with Kennedy in the fall of 1963. Kennedy refused the meeting. Because he knew what Rockefeller wanted in Brazil.
After Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ, who was quite friendly with the Rockefellers–as Kennedy was not–took the meeting. He approved the coup. As Kai Bird reveals, the man who ran the first part of it was none other than John McCloy, As we was sitting on the Warren Commission.
Chomsky has also tried to say Kennedy was in on the Lumumba assassination. As David Talbot and others have shown, the truth is Allen Dulles sped up the attempt so Lumumba would be killed before JFK took office; since Dulles knew that Kennedy supported Lumumba’s reforms. Dulles then kept the fact of his death from Kennedy for almost a month.
Until somebody proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Washington doesn’t have its exceptionalist little clutches in this outrageous coup, I think we can be pretty sure it does. It’s just a huge tragedy that Latin America, after such a promising escape from those clutches, never had much of a hope of escaping from the Wall Street global meatgrinder of 2008-09. It makes me wanna weep.
dear Delia,
don´t worry, Dilma government crumbled by itself, without any finger from US.
Sometimes people, especially americans, over-estimate the importance of US in the World.
Us government has been incapable to conduct properly the things in places where it is openly trying to do something, like in Ukkraine, Syria, Iraq…
Brazil is a too complex and too big country to be impacted by side, subtile and minor political maneuvering from outside.
The obama adminstaration is championing regime change of leaders that can’t be made subjects. as for ex president Rouseff of brazil her sin against the united states, was she making brazil to join the bricks.
I would also like to add something from the tech side of your discussion. Since I am ignorant as to the political dynamics in Brazil I think another point of evidence is from the Snowden docs. It is now very evident the NSA had the ability to tap into the fiber optics of nations since many of the IT info was routed through the US and the NSA also went after Petrobas pre-encryption, so they are getting information in ‘real time’. It’s only a mask to say they are just going after some shifty terrorists and not other nations resources. If some satellite parts are made in the US they would probably have that ability too (just a guess)
Pepe Escobar had an interesting article on this topic as well.
The timing of “leaks” therefore is also interesting. President Rousseff also mentioned the desire for Brazil to run their own fiber optic cable to Russia 2 years ago to bypass the US snooping. Of course the US would have the ability to do an underwater tap into the fiber but it would slow them down. There is no need to send military ships in this day and age if one has the ability to read and hear what is going on even before some of the bureaucratic humans in the loop get the information they need.
Curious… Yes, I seem to recall that Rousseff was rather angry with the US for intercepting her phone calls or something like that (which I believe is around the same time that we found out about NSA spying on Angela Merkel as well) and I think that is where Brazil came up with the idea for its’ own internet. I just hate all of this deviousness by the US and I think there is really going to be a point where all of this will blow-up in the US’ face – I think that time will begin when the world has really alternatives to western dominated financial institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, SWIFT etc. I think the more that the US tries to control the world then the more resentment will build to an eventual revolution or revolt against US hegemony. I definitely think that day is coming…
Yes, agreed. It’s been over 70 years since Bretton Woods, and I just think making transactions pegged to the dollar, or keeping countries under the economic thumb of the US has to have its inherent cracks. It’s rather obvious why some financial wizards and paid for pundits don’t want countries to develop a monetary system separate from Wall Street.
And Joe L, a lot of people think back to the days of intercepted phone calls being a older tap into an analog copper system. The systems are hardly built that way anymore except in more remote, or unimportant regions. If Brazil, and the other BRICS had ‘home runs’ of their own fiber networks it would be a digital game (it’s not a game of course) changer. It’s no surprise that the US is ticked off about the Russians having GLONASS as an alternative to our GPS system. This is not really off topic since it’s all about control, not only of other countries, but tech systems integration. Today, to snoop on someones phone they almost have to have the phones’ IMEI or specific IDs for just that phone. I think this is part of the reason some important people would be mad or upset.
The article would do well to note that these coups are plotted by the US right wing pretending to represent the US people, not by the US as a whole. There is no better way for the US to have a neighborly “backyard” in SA than to be neighborly. But the US right wing represents the rich, who want to subvert socialist governments everywhere to prevent socialism in the US. That is not an interest of the US, it is treason against the US, and we can count on Hillary and probably Trump to continue that treason for personal gain.
Joe,
Dilma government was everything but a “socialist” government. Believe me, US government never had ANY concern about Brazilian “left” government. Don´t let be fooled about this.
I do believe that the US hand is somehow behind what is occurring in Brazil… I have no doubt based on history, even recent history. It was a graduate of the School of the America’s (now WHINSEC), located in Fort Benning, Georgia, that pulled off the coup in Honduras in 2009 according to the Guardian. In 2002, from documentaries that I have seen, it was USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy that funded the coup in Venezuela against Chavez. USAID in Cuba creating ZunZuneo to inspire regime change in around 2010, I believe. Then USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy funding opposition government officials, opposition protesters, and I believe opposition media in Egypt before the coup against Morsi as reported by Al Jazeera. Also, in 1964, with coup against Goulart in Brazil I believe that it was sold as a “red scare” but much like Iran in 1953 or Guatemala in 1954, Goulart was making reforms that the US and US corporations did not like:
• Tax reform: control of any transfer of profits by multinational companies with headquarters abroad; the profit should be reinvested in Brazil. The income tax would be proportional to personal profit.
• Land reform: non-productive properties larger than 600 hectares would be expropriated and redistributed to the population by the government. At that time, the agricultural population was larger than the urban.
This history just keeps repeating and I think this is a real reason why America hates “socialism” so much because it would take control of countries resources out of the hands of US corporations. Now I am not saying that the world should go to the extreme of having the government control everything, communism, but I support a balance of socialism and capitalism. There are just too many examples where countries are rich in resources, which should lift their people out of poverty, but instead the people remain poor and the countries resources are sold off to foreign corporations meanwhile the profits flee the country – that’s criminal. I think that is the reason why oil is seen as a “curse” in some countries like Nigeria! I think that Goulart had it right in 1964 to have profits by multinational corporations, with headquarters abroad, reinvested in Brazil itself – absolutely. I really hope that the Bolivarian Revolution lives and grows in Latin America to break the chains of US, and western, imperialism and colonialism.
Wikileaks also had some interesting tweets about Temer being an informant for the US Government. Wikileaks is also saying:
• Current US Ambassador to #Brazil Served in #Paraguay Prior to 2012 Coup
• #Brazil’s #Dilma slayer, now president, #Temer, passed sensitive polical info to US intel
Joe,
believe me, US government had ANY concern about Dilma government. She, always pressed by her ally Temer´s party (the big and powerful PMDB) conducted a CENTER-RIGHT government, with heavy neoliberal policies, in economy but even in social areas. Talk to left wing militants, she did very little to land reform, or against land owners, big fortunes, bankers. What she did was expand a complementary wage support (by the way, totally political oriented=votes). The Dilma as a left wing government narrative is a myth.
One important omission from your article is the US role in Guyana. In the 1960s, the CIA, through its AIFLD front, paid US$800,000 to hire rioters to destabilize the elected People’s Progressive Party government, and engineer (with help and supervision from the British) an ethnic conflict between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese which has persisted to this day.
In March of this year, the US once again stepped in to manipulate the presidential election in Guyana. The standard “color revolution” techniques were employed: funding of opposition groups, meddling by NGOs, inappropriate statements by the US ambassador. Then, in a election marred by egregious fraud, the US gave its blessing to the outcome, which was the toppling once again of a PPP government. The PPP government, like those of Brazil and Argentina, had oriented itself toward the BRICS and had received important development aid from China.
Oz,
excuse me, but Ukraine, Venezuela or Guyana (!!!) have not to see with Brazil. The CIA have some role in the 60´s, but not now anymore. CIA and US intelligence/military is unable to interfere/conduct things in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq… Brazil is too much for any external power to intervention. believe me, Brazilian domesctic political forces representes 99% od the determinants.
Odd timing for a coup, on the eve of the Olympics, risking street protests by Rousseff’s supporters.
One thing that I thought was stupid for Roussef to have was a Vice President from a totally different party. I was looking at the election in 2010, I believe, on Wikipedia and every other party running had their running mate from the same political party with the exception of Roussef. If Roussef had chosen a Vice President from her same party then at least the country would still be moving in the direction since they were the ones elected. I just thought overall that was stupid for Roussef, or her party, to do and ultimately became her Achilles heel. Now can the BRICS trust Brazil?
Joe L. I agree, but then there is the VP LBJ syndrome. Your thought is good, but every country on earth should avoid allowing the NED to operate within it’s borders.
Joe Tedesky… I would also add USAID to that as well (and any offshoots of them). It seems that pretty much wherever coups occur that US NGO’s are present. Al Jazeera ran an article about how US NGO’s such as the National Endowment for Democracy along with USAID were sponsoring regime change through other shell companies, I believe, in their article “Exclusive: US bankrolled anti-Morsi activists” – http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/07/2013710113522489801.html. Then you can look at AP writing about USAID setting up a Cuban Twitter, ZunZuneo, which was supposed to become political to try to inspire “regime change”.
I think though if the US truly did care about democracy in the world then using NGO’s especially against democracies causes countries to become constrictive whether it be with their media or allowing aid from other countries. It is a very dirty strategy indeed.
Joe, it was not stupid.
Dilma´s Workers Party is a small party with a very popular politician, Lula. It would impossible to govern or even survive without the support of other big party. The big party avaiable at that time was Temer´s (vice-president) PMDB. This party is a kind of the Indian Congress Party of Brazil, it is the “party of Brazil”, a historical and big center-right party, nationally wide, with a huge number of congressmen, governors, mayors. This was the base od LUla and Dilma government, it was a kind of elephant with a deer head. Now, the big elephant expelled the deer head.
I believe the developing coup in Ukraine was also around the time of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. I am not sure, but i had friends working the Olympics and that’s what I remember. If true, there is a sick symmetry to all this coup ‘business’
Curious,
I think that in all analysis lacks a little bit of perspective. You just can not compare Brazil to Ukraine. In economic terms, Brazil is of the same size of France. Of course Brazil doens´t have nuclear weapons. But Brazil has 200 million people, it is a consolidated mass democracy, has vibrant press and judiciary. It´s difficult to imagine someone conducting a simple putsch ou coup from outside in Brazil, as it would be difficult to do it in France or UK. These are too complex countries.
Yes, good point. I was not trying to compare the countries, but a certain focus of an event watched by many in the world. It is a chance to create a massive campaign through the media (and we can use the word propaganda). Having worked the Olympics myself I know how many eyes are watching and also how many of the stories are askew of the truth as it bends through the media and the talking heads. Also the Summer Games have a much broader audience than the Winter.
I think that is all I was trying to say, as the dynamics of the countries of Brazil and Ukraine, and the people, are certainly different. To throw in the troublesome aspects happening now in Brazil is not a positive development (understatement intended).