The
stakes could not be higher. Not only the future of the BRICS, but the
future of a new multipolar world is in the balance. And it all hinges
on what happens in Brazil in the next few months.
by
Pepe Escobar
Let’s
start with the Kafkaesque internal turmoil. The coup against
President Dilma Rousseff remains an unrivalled media
theatre/political tragicomedy gift that keeps on giving. It also
doubles as a case of information war converted into a strategic tool
of political control.
A succession
of appalling audio leaks has revealed that key sectors of the
Brazilian military as well as selected Supreme Court justices have
legitimized the coup against a President that has always protected
the two-year-old Car Wash corruption investigation. Even Western
mainstream media was forced to admit that Dilma did not steal
anything but is being impeached by a bunch of thieves. Their agenda;
to stifle the Car Wash investigation, which may eventually throw many
of them in jail.
The leaks
also unveiled a nasty internecine carnage between Brazilian comprador
elites — peripheral and mainstream. Essentially the peripherals
were used as lowly paperboys in Congress for the dirty work. But now
they may be about to become road kill – along the illegitimate,
unpopular, interim Michel Temer “government”, led by a bunch of
corrupt-to-the-core PMDB politicians, the party that is heir to the
sole opposition outfit tolerated during the 1960s-1980s military
dictatorship.
Meet the
vassal chancellor
An insidious
character in the current golpeachment scam is the interim Minister of
Foreign Relations, senator Jose Serra of the PSDB party, the social
democrats turned neoliberal enforcers. In the 2002 presidential
election – which he lost to Lula — Serra had already tried to get
rid of peripheral Brazilian oligarchies.
Yet now he’s
incarnating another role — perfectly positioned not only to
retrograde Brazilian foreign policy to some point around the 1964
military coup, but mostly as the Beltway’s point man inside the
coup racket.
Exceptionalistan’s
key ally in Brazil is the oligarchy in Sao Paulo, the wealthiest
state and home to the financial capital of Latin America. This is
Brazil’s A-list. It’s from their ranks that an eventual “national
savior” may eventually spring up.
Once the
peripherals are history, then no holds would be barred to criminalize
– and imprison – an array of leftist leaders, Lula included, as
well as manufacture a fake election legitimized by a noxious Supreme
Court justice, Gilmar Mendes, a PSDB stooge.
It all
hinges on what happens in the next two months. The prosecutor general
finally asked the Supreme Court to throw three top peripherals in
jail; they are all accused of plotting to derail the Car Wash
investigation — an extremely complex juridical-political-police
network of myriad concentric/parallel circles.
Meanwhile,
the final judgment of Dilma’s impeachment at the Senate is bound to
happen on August 16 – 11 days after the start of the Olympic Games.
The coup plotters suffered a heavy blow as they were trying hard to
accelerate the proceedings. As it stands, the outcome is uncertain;
after the leaks, four to five senators are already wavering, as the
leaks also implicate Temer personally. The “leader” of a
zero-credibility, corruption-crammed scam, he’s among the targets
of several corruption investigations and has just been banned from
running to political office for the next 8 years.The Brazilian
mainstream media monopoly (five families) – popularly referred to
as PIG, the Brazilian acronym for Pro-Coup Media Party – has
changed its anti-left tune and is now also going after selected
members of the Temer racket.
According to
the constitution, if both the Presidency and Vice-Presidency are
vacated in the last two years of a given term, it’s up to Congress
to elect the new President.
This implies
two possible scenarios. If Dilma is not impeached, it’s
increasingly likely she will call for new presidential elections
before the end of the year.
If she is
impeached, the PIG will tolerate the stooge-crammed Temer interim
racket until January 2017 at the most. The next step would be what
Serra and about-to-be-jailed Senate leader Renan Calheiros are
campaigning for; the end of direct presidential elections and the
onset of Brazilian-style parliamentarianism.
The man best
positioned to be the national savior in this case is former president
Fernando Henrique Cardoso – also former “Prince of Sociology”
and a major star (during the 1960s and early 1970s) of the dependency
theory, then metamorphosed into an avid neoliberal. Cardoso is a very
close pal of both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The Beltway/Wall
Street axis loves him. Cardoso would be “elected” mostly by the
pack of Congress hyenas who got the Dilma impeachment rolling on
April 17. The hard node of golpeachment goes way beyond peripheral
Brazilian elites. It is comprised of a political party (the PSDB);
the Globo media empire; the Federal Police (very cozy with the FBI);
the Public Ministry; most of the Supreme Court; and sectors of the
military. Only the Beltway/Wall Street axis has the means and the
necessary pull to regiment all these players – by hard cash,
blackmail or promises of glory.
And that
ties in with key unanswered questions regarding the recent audio
leaks. Who taped the conversations. Who leaked them. Why now. Who
profits from a nation in total political/economic/juridical chaos,
with virtually all institutions totally discredited.
Neoliberalism
or chaos
Those were
the days when Washington could mastermind, with impunity, an
old-fashioned military coup in its backyard – as in Brazil 1964. Or
as in Chile during the original 9/11 – in 1973, as seen through
crack Chilean film maker Patricio Guzman’s moving documentary about
Salvador Allende.
History,
predictably, now repeats itself as farce as the 2016 coup has turned
Brazil – the 7th largest economy in the world and a key Global
South player – into a Honduras or Paraguay (where recent
US-supported coups were successful).
I have shown
how the coup in Brazil is an extremely sophisticated Hybrid War
operation going way beyond unconventional warfare (UW); four
generation warfare (4GW); color revolutions; and R2P (“responsibility
to protect”), all the way to the summit of smart power; a
political-financial-judicial-mainstream media soft coup unveiled in
slow motion. This is the beauty of a coup when promoted by democratic
institutions.
Neoliberalism
may have failed, as even the IMF research
wing has concluded. But its rotten corpse still encumbers the whole
planet. Neoliberalism is not only an economic model; it
surreptitiously takes over the juridical realm as well. In another
perverse facet of shock doctrine, neoliberalism cannot prevail
without a juridical framework. When constitutional attributions are
redirected to Congress that keeps the Executive under control while
generating a culture of political corruption. Politics is
subordinated to economics. Companies engage in campaign financing and
buy politicians to be able to influence the political powers that be.
That’s how
Washington works. And that’s also the key to understand the role of
former leader of the Brazilian lower house Eduardo Cunha; he ran a
campaign financing racket out of Congress itself, controlling dozens
of politicians while profiting from proverbially fat state contracts.
The Three
Stooges in what I called the Provisional Banana Scoundrel Republic
are Cunha, Calheiros and Temer. Temer is a mere puppet while Cunha
remains a sort of shadow Prime Minister, running the show. But not
for long. He’s already been suspended as the speaker in Congress;
he bagged millions of US dollars in kickbacks for those fat contracts
and stashed the loot in secret Swiss accounts; now it’s a matter of
time before the Supreme Court has the balls – it’s not a given —
to throw him in the slammer.
NATO vs.
BRICS, all across the spectrum
And that
brings us once again to The Big Picture, as we proceed in parallel
with an analysis by Rafael Bautista, the head of a decolonization
study group in La Paz, Bolivia. He’s one of the best and brightest
in South America who’s very much alert to the fact that whatever
happens in Brazil in the next few months will drive the future not
only of South America but the whole Global South.
Exceptionalistan’s
project for Brazil is no less than the imposition of a remixed Monroe
doctrine. The main target of a planned neoliberal restoration is to
cut off South America from the BRICS – as in, essentially, the
Russia-China strategic partnership.
It’s a
short window of opportunity after all those years under the
Bush-Obama continuum where Washington was obsessed with MENA (Middle
East/Northern Africa), a.k.a. the Greater Middle East. Now South
America is back in a starring role in the geopolitical (soft) war
theatre. Getting rid of Dilma, Lula, the Workers’ Party, by all
means available, is only the start.It all comes back to the same,
defining 21st century war; NATO against the BRICS; the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO); and ultimately the Russia-China
strategic partnership. Smashing the “B” in BRICS carries with it
the bonus of smashing Mercosur (the South American common market);
Unasur (the political Union of South American Nations); ALBA (the
Bolivarian Alliance); and South American integration as a whole,
compounded with integration with key emerging Global South players
such as Iran.
The ongoing
destabilization of “Syraq” fits the Empire of Chaos; when there’s
no regional integration, the only other possibility is balkanization.
And yet Russia graphically demonstrated to Beltway planners they
cannot win a war in Syria while Iran demonstrated after the nuclear
deal that it won’t become a Washington vassal. So the Empire of
Chaos might as well secure its own backyard.
A new
geopolitical framework had to be part of the package. That’s where
the concept of “North America” fits in, backed by the Council on
Foreign Relations and devised mostly by former Iraq surge superstar
David Petraeus and former World Bank honcho Bob Zoellick, now with
Goldman Sachs. Call it a mini who’s who of Exceptionalistan.
You won’t
see it enounced in public, but the Petraeus/Zoellick concept of
“North America” presupposes regime changing and gobbling up
Venezuela. The Caribbean is seen as a Mare Nostrum, an American lake.
“North America” is in fact a strategic offensive.
It implies
controlling the massive oil and water wealth of the Orinoco and the
Amazonas, something that would forever guarantee Exceptionalistan’s
preeminence south of the border.
The
Caribbean is already a done deal; after all Washington controls
CAFTA. South America is a tougher nut to crack, roughly polarized by
what’s left of ALBA and the US-driven Pacific Alliance. With Brazil
falling to a neoliberal restoration, it’s over as a promoter of
regional integration. Mercosur would eventually be absorbed into the
Pacific Alliance – especially with a man like Serra as Brazil’s
top diplomat. So, politically, South America must be annulled at all
costs.
What’s
left for South America would be its aggregation — as marginal
players, part of the US-driven Pacific Alliance — to those NATO on
trade deals, the TPP and TTIP. The “pivot to Asia” – of which
TPP is the trade arm — is the Obama doctrine’s push for
containment of China, not only in Asia but also across Asia-Pacific.
Thus it’s natural that China (Brazil’s number one trade partner)
should also be contained in the hegemon’s backyard, South America.
From the
Atlantic to the Pacific, and beyond
It’s never
enough to stress the geo-economic importance of South America. The
only way South America can be fully integrated to the multipolar
world is by opening up to the Pacific, boosting its strategic
connection with Asia, especially China. That’s where the Chinese
push to invest in a massive high-speed rail project uniting the
Brazilian Atlantic coast with Peru in the Pacific fits in. That’s
South American interconnectivity in a nutshell. If Brazil is
politically annulled, none of this will ever happen.
So every
coup is now literally allowed in South America; indirect attacks to
the Brazilian currency, the real; bribing local comprador elites with
the backing of the global financial system; a concerted attempt at
the implosion, simultaneously, of the top three economies: Brazil,
Argentina and Venezuela. SOUTHCOM went so far as to produce a report
on “Venezuela Freedom” earlier this year, signed by commander
Kurt Tidd, which proposes a “strategy of tension”, complete with
“encirclement” and “suffocation” techniques and allowing to
mix street action with a “calculated” use of armed violence.
Echoes of Chile 1973 do apply. South America is now arguably the
prime geopolitical space where Exceptionalistan is laying the bases
to restore its unrivalled hegemony — as part of a
multi-dimensional, geo-finance war against the BRICS bent on
perpetuating the unipolar world.
All previous
moves have lead to this geostrategy of imploding the BRICS and
reducing South America to an appendix of North America.
Wikileaks
revealed how the NSA spied on Petrobras. In 2008 Brazil came up with
its own National Defense Strategy, focused on two key areas; the
South Atlantic and the Amazon. This did not sit well with SOUTHCOM.
Unasur should have developed it to a continental level, but they
didn’t.
Lula decided
to award to Petrobras the prime exploitation of the pre-salt deposits
– the largest oil discovery of the 21st century. Dilma’s
administration gave a firm push to the BRICS’s New Development Bank
(based on the Brazilian BNDES) and also decided to accept Iranian
payments bypassing the US dollar. Anyone involved in South-South
trade bypassing the US dollar enters a kill list.
Hillary
Clinton is the presidential candidate of Wall Street, the Pentagon,
the industrial-military complex and the neocons. She is the Goddess
of War – and in a Bush-Obama-Clinton continuum she will go to war
against any player in the Global South that dares to defy
Exceptionalistan.
So the die
is cast. We will know for sure by the time there’s a new US
President — and arguably a new, unelected Brazilian President —
in early 2017. The geostrategic game though remains the same; Brazil
must fall so BRICS-led integration must fall, and Exceptionalistan
may concentrate all its firepower in an all-out confrontation against
Russia-China.
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