Brazil Votes for a Future
with the BRICS, South America
by Gretchen Small
Nov. 1—Brazilians delivered a stinging defeat to the British Empire, by re-electing Dilma Rousseff as President on Oct. 26. Rousseff has made clear, that under her leadership, Brazil will continue its active participation in advancing the new world financial and security architecture coming together around the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and its growing list of allies.
London-directed warfare against Brazil and its BRICS partners has not been crushed, but the election results add to the growing recognition around the world that the British Empire is not the unbeatable Leviathan which it would have you believe.
London and its Wall Street appendages had invested their all in defeating Rousseff, determined to pull the “B” out of the BRICS, and thus gain a position from which to obliterate the spreading planet-wide rebellion against the Empire’s genocidal globalization system.
London’s Economist and Financial Times campaigned vociferously for Dilma’s ouster, first attempting to maneuver British Crown agent Marina Silva into the Presidency. (That required the removal of Presidential candidate Eduardo Campos, who conveniently died in the midst of the campaign in a still-unexplained plane crash.) When Marina was trounced in the first round of voting on Oct. 5. British money and propaganda were thrown behind Aécio Neves of the Social Democratic Party (PSDB), for the run-off race against Dilma.
Neves campaigned as the candidate of the trans-Atlantic banking system. He promised to re-impose “economic orthodoxy” in Brazil, re-align the country with the Anglo-American war party, and turn against the BRICS and South America—and he went down to defeat.
BRICS Forces Celebrate
Brazilians were not so dumb as to heed the calls to jump back onboard a sinking Titanic, from a BRICS lifeboat beginning to take on the dimensions of an aircraft carrier. Brazil has allies who prepared to defend it against the ongoing warfare from the dying empire, as Brazil’s neighbor Argentina has experienced.
Along with congratulations from key South American heads of state also fighting the financial powers in order to develop their nations, such as Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, President Rousseff received warm congratulations from the leaders of the three giants of the BRICS group: China, Russia, and India.
Chinese President Xi Jinping recalled his discussions with Rousseff, in the various bilateral and multilateral forums which took place around the BRICS summit in Forteleza, Brazil last July. President Rousseff and I “unanimously decided to deepen the mutually beneficial and friendly cooperation between China and Brazil in various fields, and to jointly promote development of the world order toward a more impartial and more rational direction,” Xi wrote.
In his message of congratulations, Russian President Vladimir Putin affirmed “his readiness to continue a constructive dialogue and active collaboration on developing greater bilateral cooperation in all areas, as well as cooperation in the forums of the United Nations, G20, BRICS, and other multilateral structures.” In a post-election phone call, the two leaders agreed to meet again on the sidelines of the G20 meeting (Nov. 15-16, in Brisbane, Australia).
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that he “looks forward to continuing to work with Dilma to strengthen India-Brazil relations in the years to come.”
From within the United States, Lyndon LaRouche expressed his delight at the news of Rousseff’s re-election, as soon as it was known. Earlier on election day, LaRouche had warned that a victory by her opponent, Neves, would return Brazil to the status of a British colony, and would thus be a threat to the interests of the United States itself, at a moment when LaRouche is leading the fight to end British/Wall Street control over the United States, so it, too, can join the BRICS in establishing a world order of national sovereignty and development.
British Rage
Frustrated that Brazilian voters had once again delivered an “inexplicable defeat” to their system, London’s Economist forecast the day after the election that capital would flee the the country’s markets, and that might help blackmail Rousseff into adopting the austerity, “market-friendly” policies that voters had just defeated at the polls. The Economist pointed to the relative success of such financial warfare in tying down former Brazilian President Lula da Silva during his 2003-10 administration, while threatening that “from now on, the ride may only get rougher.” The “markets” demand that Dilma name a new Treasury Minister immediately, and that he or she fit their bill.
The speculative monied interests proceeded to drive down the value of Brazil’s currency, the real, while the Bovespa stock market fell by more than 6% in one day, at one point, just after the election. The British insist on punishing Brazil for winning, LaRouche commented.
On Oct. 29, three days after the election, Brazil’s Central Bank raised interest rates by 1/4 point to 11.25%, the first rise since April. The concession did not stop the pressure on the real.
In fact, no concession will be enough. The intent is to set off a “color revolution,” oust Rousseff, and then drive Brazil into chaos and ungovernability, such that the nation’s scientific and technological capabilities can be finally dismantled.
Never subtle, the Economist titled its post-election story in the Nov. 1 print edition, “Diehard Dilma,” a typical display of British public-school sadism with hints of an implicit death threat. “If her second term is not to be an even bigger disappointment than her first,” warned the Economist, “Ms. Rousseff needs to take heed not just of her supporters but also of those who did not vote for her. They include much of the middle-class, who in 2013 took to the streets in mass protests to demand better public services and less corruption.”
Thus far, the cannon-fodder for such a “revolution” has remained confined to would-be “cashmere revolutionaries,” recruited largely from São Paulo’s middle and upper middle-class, being whooped up around cries of “fighting communism.” Those so-called social media networks are being geared up to present an aura of activity that does not exist. Organizers of Nov. 1 marches in São Paulo and other cities to demand Rousseff’s impeachment and military intervention (!), hyperventilated about 100,000 Internet commitments to attend, but no more than 1,000-1,500 actually showed up on the streets.
British hysteria to get this off the ground is such, that on Oct. 30, Neves’s PSDB filed a spurious request with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) for an audit of the federal elections, four days after accepting the election results with nary a peep about fraud. The filing presents no evidence, but argues that the audit is necessary to restore “confidence,” because a growing number of “the people” are questioning the election results. Cited as proof of that assertion is an Internet petition which calls on Neves to reject the election results; the petition gathered a grand total of 60,000 signatures in two days.
In a country of over 200 million people, the idea that 60,000 signatures on an Internet petition is a compelling force to mandate a recount is preposterous. What is even more preposterous, is that the petition was organized by the astrologist von Mises flake cum “philosopher,” Olavo de Carvalho, whom LaRouche recommended long ago be given “the Pasteur treatment for rabies,” after he proposed that Russia and China were behind the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Joining Carvalho in the petition is a Brazilian drug addict, pornographic rock-star “Lobao,” and others of that ilk.
This is not a mass movement, and has no grounds to proceed, but it is meant to build the basis for the “color revolution” which the Economist, et al., insist be carried out.
Two Systems
Had the BRICS not asserted themselves this year as a self-developing counterpole to the dominant British imperial system, the Economist’s hopes of forcing Brazil to capitulate were likely to have been fufilled. But this is not the same world that Lula faced in 2002.
Two developments during the campaign, in particular, weakened the British position.
Six days before the run-off between Rousseff and Neves, the country’s widely read newspaper Jornal do Brasil, published an article reporting, at some length, on EIR’s evaluation, that “The Strategic Stakes in Brazil’s Election” come down to the fight over whether Brazil will take off economically as part of the global renaissance kicked off by the BRICS, or will perish under London’s dying system. (See Oct. 15 issue; available in Portuguese on EIR’s Portuguese website).
Journal played it straight, detailing the crucial issues raised by EIR, “an American journal known for its political analysis”: that London, like EIR, views the Brazilian election as a war, but that the British back contender Aécio Neves, and his ally, Marina Silva, in order to “subjugate Brazil and prevent the country and Latin America from continuing to develop”; while EIR backs President Dilma Rousseff’s reelection, because in alliance with the BRICS, Brazil can “overcome more than 25 years of subjugation to supranational financial dictatorship,” and thus unleash its great scientific and industrial capabilities.
Brasilia-based Diario do Poder, read for its purported “inside scoops” and scandal mongering, published an editorial on Oct. 19 complaining that government circles were giving attention to LaRouche’s EIR endorsing Rousseff in that article. The next day, Journal’s piece made sure that EIR’s evaluation was read far and wide across Brazil’s political class.
Rousseff emphasized the importance of Brazil’s participation in the BRICS in several public appearances in the final week of campaigning. In an address to a huge São Paulo rally on Oct. 20, for example, she went after Neves for conceiving only of “a small Brazil ... harnessed to the big countries.... They want to hand over Brazil. They want to go back to the Free Trade Accord of the Americas. They don’t want the BRICS, and they are capable of belittling Mercosur and Latin America.”
The themes emphasized by the Rousseff campaign in the final weeks of the campaign strengthen the potential for Brazil to adopt a more aggressive national development policy in Rousseff’s second term. She told Brazilians they were choosing between two radically opposed visions of what Brazil must be in the world: her opponent’s vision of a Brazil subservient to foreign powers and banking interests, with low wages and high unemployment, and poverty for most of its people; or a Brazil allied with other sovereign nations in the BRICS and the South American regional groupings, UNASUR and Mercosur, and the use of public banking to build up the country’s infrastructure, national industry, and living standards and skills.
Celso Amorim, formerly foreign minister and current defense minister, elaborated this idea in an Oct. 22 Vermelho op-ed. Dilma Rousseff, and her predecessor Lula da Silva, proved that the country is “ready to defend its sovereignty and the integrity of an international order based on law,” as opposed to those “who justify timid behavior, inconsistent with the size of the country and the aspirations of our people,” he wrote. He listed their policies of prioritizing South American unity; paying special attention to Africa; actively working with the BRICS; and rejecting free-trade restrictions favoring the multinational pharmaceutical companies which would limit Brazil’s right to adequately deal with public health. We decided, he wrote, “to leave behind the vision of a peripheral and unnamed country, and assume full responsibility for the protection of our resources and population,” using the government’s purchasing power to favor national industry and investing in national technologies.
Her campaign played the Economist’s endorsement of Neves for all its worth, with former President Lula laughing that the Economist “is the most important magazine of the international financial system, of the banks, of the thieves. That magazine which defends the banks doesn’t want Dilma; they want Aécio. What is the response that we have to give? If Aécio is the candidate of the bankers, great. Because Dilma is the candidate of the Brazilian people.”
Brazil at a Crossroads
To secure the country, Rousseff will have to take dramatic action. Without that, financial warfare will create conditions under which a “color revolution” can take off. Carlos Pastoriza, president of ABIMAQ (Brazilian Association of the Machinery and Equipment Industry), in an Oct. 27 interview with Zero Hora, pointed to one of the major underlying economic problems that Brazil is facing:
Brazil is threatened with “galloping deindustrialization. Our manufacturing industry is certainly in ICU,” and it is getting worse, he stated. “Deindustrialization has a double effect in masking reality. First, because Brazil has a very low unemployment rate (less than 6%), and therefore there is a false sense that there is no serious problem. The second fact is that companies are, silently, becoming maquiladoras [low-wage assembly plants—ed.]. And the next step, will be to become only distributors of products manufactured in other countries. Not even the IBGE [Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the official statistical agency—ed.] has grasped this phenomenon.... Brazil is at a crossroads. The next government must find a path. If this is not done, we will go back to colonial Brazil.”
As far back as the early 1990s, EIR had emphasized that the path Brazil needed to adopt was that of the development of its most advanced scientific and technological capabilities—especially in the nuclear and aerospace sectors—in conjunction with its neighbor Argentina. The two nations together constitute a kind of “Productive Axis” whose high-technology activation is the key to the development of all South America.
In February 1993, EIR wrote:
“The most economically dense ‘Productive Axis’ of Ibero-America is made up of the area of southern Brazil, passing through Uruguay to northern Argentina.... This region possesses the greatest economic density, the greatest concentration of labor and capital potential able to facilitate the most rapid growth rates possible of the entire continent’s productive labor power....
“What makes this possible are not so much the existing densities ... but rather the region’s potential to generate and absorb technological advances—a potential which is due more than anything to the existence of a significant number of scientists and technicians, particularly in Argentina and Brazil. This is the continent’s most important economic resource: that technological and scientific capability which is exactly what the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street want to destroy no matter what. It is these capabilities, particularly Argentina’s and Brazil’s nuclear and aerospace programs, which make it possible to transform Ibero-America into an economic superpower.”
Almost a decade later, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche made a high-profile visit to Brazil, June 11-15, 2002, which established a dialogue with leading Brazilian circles over the direction that Brazil and the world had to adopt (see below).
And now today, a bit more than a decade after that historic visit, the issue is again front-and-center for Brazil—but this time with powerful allies, in the context of the BRICS-led drive to replace the bankrupt international financial system with a new world order of sovereignty and scientific development.