Anti-Americanism in Brazil and Latin America
By Olavo de Carvalho | December 22, 2004 There is no politician left in Brazil who is openly pro-American or pro-Israel, even among the ones who are defenders of a free market economy. Send this page to a friend
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The entire mainstream Brazilian media, without exception, is anti-American, anti-Bush, and anti-Israel, including those publications which due to their past keep a conservative façade, even though they are by no means conservative today. Everybody in Brazilian media commenting on September 11 was unanimous in attributing to the US several different degrees of the responsibility for the evil that was done to them.
There is no politician left in Brazil who is openly pro-American or pro-Israel, even among the ones who are defenders of a free market economy. There are, at best, those who defend good relations with the US exclusively in the economic arena, taking at the same time an anti-American stance in all other relevant international issues.
There are no more conservative politicians or parties in action in Brazil today. The last ones were ostracized in the last couple of years, either through suspicions of corruption that were never entirely proven, or by the defeat on the elections after a rain of accusations in the media. The bulk of the opposition to the Workers' Party (PT), the greatest left-wing party in Brazil, is made exclusively by internal dissensions of the Left.
Brazilian public opinion is massively persuaded that the US is in a full-fledged imperialistic campaign to subjugate Brazil economically, destroy it culturally, and, finally, to occupy with troops at least part of its territory. In the media, no writer except me dares to openly defy this belief.
No conservative American author has his books published in Brazil, at least by the commercial publishing houses, nor are they studied in the departments of Philosophy, Law, or Political Sciences of any Brazilian university. A recent publication, the Critical Dictionary of Right-Wing Thought, which became reference material for all the students in the area due to the fact that it was written by 144 university teachers among the most representative of Brazilian academic elite, contained several mentions of David Duke and none of Irving Kristol, Russell Kirk, Thomas Sowell, and other authors recognized in the US as spokesmen for conservatives, so that the general idea left in the mind of the reader is that the North American conservative thought consists, essentially, of Nazism.
In the media, in academic discussions and in public debates, all the initiatives viewed as bad for Brazil, coming from international organizations or great banks, are immediately attributed to George W. Bush. The figure of the North American president has been so demonized that he was drawn literally with the face of the Devil, with horns and forked tail, on the cover of one of the main weekly Brazilian magazines—a gross graphic expedient which, not even a decade ago, would be dared only by communist publications.
The American ambassador in Brazil, Donna Hrinak, made open propaganda of the leftist candidate (and current president) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, praising him as the "incarnation of the American dream," and after that enforced further the anti-American feeling on the population, declaring in an interview that "the US does not respect Brazil".
In the Armed Forces, the belief is practically unanimous that, with the end of the USSR, the East-West conflict axle was substituted by the North-South axle, or "rich nations against poor nations," and, therefore, the real enemy of Brazil in an armed conflict is the US. This idea is subscribed to even by the majority of the conservative officers, some with great prestige in the Armed Forces. The military in general believe that the North American proposition of setting up an air force base in Alcântara, Pará, is a Machiavellian plan of the government in Washington against Brazilian national sovereignty, and almost all officers subscribe to the leftist propaganda that the Colombia Plan is a vile premeditated plot to facilitate the penetration of American troops in Brazilian territory with imperialistic purposes.
In the frontier bases, many officers and soldiers are already dedicated to the study of the works of Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, aiming to assimilate the Vietcong war techniques for future combat against the North American invaders. The School for Higher War Studies (ESG, Escola Superior de Guerra), the main teaching center for the formation of the military, is literally hypnotized by the preaching of anti-American agitators like the journalist Márcio Moreira Alves and the historian Manuel Cambeses Júnior.
For the simple reason that it obeyed economic policies set by the IMF, the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration became known in the media as pro-American, even though in reality it had much more affinity with the European Union and the current anti-American mentality found in the UN. On the other hand, this government has been hostile to the Armed Forces, reducing their budget and their functions, excluding the military of the ministerial meetings, stimulating true and false accusations against military personnel that collaborated with the extinct authoritarian regime, rewarding with jobs and public money the terrorists that killed Brazilian soldiers, and so forth.
The result was that the hate towards the government grew among the military, along with the anti-Americanism. The widely recognized fact that the anti-military initiatives of the government were fomented by leftists did not change a single bit the attitude of the military, who, becoming aware of the support given to left-wing organizations by great entrepreneurial holdings like Ford and Rockefeller, interpreted the rising of the left as the effect of a sinister imperialistic plan plotted by the American government to debilitate Brazilian national sovereignty.
Well, a global movement to debilitate and neutralize the national sovereignties did exist, but it did not come from the American government, but from the EU and the UN, the same organizations that, on the other hand, did everything to politically isolate the US and Israel. As it happens, the latent conflict between US power and the great international organizations was never made public in Brazil, not even after the Durban Conference which made it patently evident.
Therefore, everything the international organizations did against national sovereignty (including the US's own) was immediately attributed to the American government, viewed as a kind of deity controlling everything that happened in the universe. When I mentioned in the Brazilian press that President Clinton served more the purposes of these international organizations than the American State, I was called 'a loony' and thoroughly ignored, even among the military, who usually had respect for me.
To stimulate even more the anti-American hostility of the Brazilian military, the dismantling of our Armed Forces strictly followed a plan in ten steps suggested by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in a book circulated in Brazil with the sponsoring of Culture Minister Francisco Weffort, a man from the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores—Workers' Party) in Fernando Henrique Cardoso's cabinet.
It is not surprising that the North American president who supported international policies that tended to stimulate these hostilities was the same who in the home front protected Chinese espionage, tied the CIA's and the FBI's hands against international terrorism, and debilitated the American Armed Forces. All this man wanted was to obtain for the US, even at the cost of the long-term destruction of the country, certain economic advantages that allowed him to pose in front of his voters as the savior of unemployed immigrants.
So, at the same time that he gave his country an image of an imperialistic power, arrogant and proud, he made it weak and helpless, in the military as well as diplomatic arenas. This is the path to self-destruction, and I do not believe that Clinton, elected with Chinese propaganda money, did it out of mere incompetence or lack of consciousness.
The hate towards the US in Brazil today is so deep and so disseminated in all social levels that it can only be eradicated through a long and laborious educational campaign. It is necessary to explain to Brazilians that the international organizations are not the US government, that the fight of globalist imperialism for the destruction of national sovereignties is not an American enterprise, being rather anti-American, and that the nationalistic façade of the leftist organizations in Brazil hides their collaboration with the anti-American globalist imperialism. If this is not made at once, any belligerent position the next government adopts against the US will be applauded by all the Brazilian people, fallen into the web of a tragic deceit.
Olavo de Carvalho is a philosopher and the author of several books. He writes for three very influential dailies in Brazil. His articles can be found at www.olavodecarvalho.org and www.midiasemmascara.org
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