by NORMAN MADARASZ
As the pullout from Afghanistan unfolds into new geopolitical prospects for its powerful neighbors, the U.S. has once again centralized what it envisions for South America at State level. George W. Bush had inadvertently outsourced policy for the southern continent to then president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. In turn, Obama made it an affair of NSA surveillance, as Edward Snowden later revealed. Trump chose instead to bring the continent to heel by privatizing it through his own clones of approval. Biden’s difference is to do it in the name of the welfare of the folks back home.
The return of State-centralized operations for South America, and Brazil above all, can already be felt. The compromised anti-corruption and extra-judicial court of exception, Operation Lava Jato, had the prints of the DOJ on it from its creation in March, 2014. It is now known that classified information was funneled to its “task force” to wrench plea bargains from some of the country’s most powerful industrial executives. Exemption from embezzlement charges, both in the U.S. and abroad, was the tally for helping to indict political leaders of the Workers’ Party (PT) on corruption charges. Failing that, as fresh reports have revealed, arrangements for the purchase of Pegasus would do as well.
With the visit of CIA director William J. Burns and more recently National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to the southern continent, critics of the Bolsonaro regime who invested diplomatically and emotionally in a Biden victory have had to come to terms with reality. Biden’s staff will not belittle the far-right military government’s worn out Cold War rhetoric of fighting communism after all. The communist threat, warranting submission of Brazil’s dominant sector to the interests of the U.S., does exist after all – and it comes from Asia.
President Xi Jinping has repeatedly asserted his realignment of China’s political economic structure and policy planning with the principles of Maoism, whether neoliberal ideology is willing to concede that or not. Not that such short-sightedness reduces neoliberalism to a mere effect of parallax, though. The Maoist model is the first to admit how class struggle festers within the Chinese Communist Party and the last to claim it brings History to its end. Still, not even the mutual contempt the American and Brazilian presidents have for each other can revert what has merged into a common mission against China’s promise for South America.
The centralization of operations at the State level could also be felt at the last G7 summit. In its first in-person meeting since the beginning of the pandemic, Jair Bolsonaro was nowhere to be seen – granted nor was any other non-G7 head of state. While pundits are having a field day speculating over the shape of the post-pandemic economy, the G7’s insularity is all but suggestive of the changing times. As far back as the 1990s, its brand name had been loosening its grip. By the end of the century, after the GATT had become the WTO, an international free trade zone for the Americas was in the works.
As if to stimulate convictions that Empire had now become an ideal communications community, the G7 even opened a flank to absorb Russia. A further metamorphosis had the 7 bud into the G20. For a brief period, capital accumulation and wealth concentration started rippling outward in ways other than through IMF bailouts. The capitalist inflection in China had seemed to project the next phase.
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