Brazil’s government has sprung a leak, and a flood of secrets is gushing out

Vincent Bevins, Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2016

There’s a saying in Brazil: “Even the past is unpredictable.”

It seems particularly apt in the wake of leaked audio recordings that point to ulterior motives for the recent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and that have already forced the resignations of two members of the new Cabinet.

Congress voted to put Rousseff on trial on charges that she shifted funds to cover holes in the national budget. The recordings–made before she was booted from office–bolster the suspicions of many Brazilians that her impeachment was both a power grab by political opponents and an effort to stop widespread corruption investigations that targeted them.

The first Cabinet resignation came last week. Romero Juca, the planning minister, stepped down after a leaked recording suggested that his main reason for wanting to remove Rousseff from office was to stop the corruption inquiries. “We have to change the government to stop the bleeding,” the then-senator said in the recording.

Then on Monday night, Fabiano Silveira, who held the newly created post of transparency minister, resigned after the release of a recording of him criticizing corruption investigations and advising two allies on how to avoid punishment. At the time, he was a member of the National Council of Justice, which monitors the court system.

“The recordings show that some of the worst fears about what was happening in Congress weren’t just speculation,” said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at Rio de Janeiro State University.

He said the revelations undermine the government of Michel Temer, who was elected vice president in a cross-party alliance with Rousseff in 2014 and became acting president after the impeachment.

“This is a government that was essentially created because of a widespread protests against corruption,” Santoro said.

After taking over as president, Temer quickly installed a conservative administration that established a government far more conservative than even right-wing presidential candidates have proposed in recent elections.

He has made the economy his top priority, a move that has pleased international investors and political elites.

In a poll shortly before he took power, he was more unpopular than Rousseff, whose ratings plunged over the last two years as the country slid into its worst recession in decades.

Rousseff, who was never personally accused of corruption or charged with a criminal offense, continues to speak out against the impeachment, which she and many supporters equate to a coup d’etat.

Her trial has not been scheduled, but it must be completed within the 180-day period she has been suspended from office. If convicted, she will be permanently removed.

The leaked recordings dogging the new administration were created as part of a massive corruption investigation by federal police. Known as the Lava Jato, or Car Wash, the inquiry began in 2014 as an investigation into the state-owned Petrobras oil company and quickly came to engulf the political establishment.

Sergio Machado, a former head of a Petrobras subsidiary who recently negotiated a plea bargain, had secretly recorded Juca and Silveira.

It’s not only political elites who have been secretly recorded.

Renan Antonio Ferreira dos Santos, a leader of the Free Brazil Movement, a group of young activists promoting free-market economic policies, was caught discussing how the group received support from political parties to promote pro-impeachment rallies. The source of the recording was unclear.

Many Brazilians have grown even more cynical about their politicians.

“It’s obvious that Brazil’s politicians set this whole thing up to help themselves, not Brazil,” said Patricia Magalhaes, 19, a student who also works selling snacks with her family in downtown Sao Paulo, where she watched the pro-impeachment marches this year.

“I don’t think anything Dilma actually did wrong was the real reason she was removed,” she said.

The country is braced for more revelations that could further damage the Temer administration.

On Tuesday, local media reported that Marcelo Odebrecht, one of the country’s most powerful businessmen, signed a plea-bargain deal after his construction company was accused in the Petrobras scandal. Brazil is eagerly awaiting to find out whom he might implicate.

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Brazil Gains Business and Influence as It Offers Aid and Loans in Africa

By Simon Romero, NY Times, August 7, 2012

RIO DE JANEIRO—In Mozambique, Brazil’s government is opening a plant making antiretroviral drugs to fight the AIDS epidemic. Brazil is lending $150 million to Kenya to build roads and ease congestion in the capital, Nairobi. And in Angola, West Africa’s rising oil power, a new security agreement seeks to expand the training of Angolan military personnel in Brazil.

Brazil, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside of Africa itself, is assertively raising its profile again on the continent, building on historical ties from the time of the Portuguese empire.

The array of aid projects and loans recently extended to African countries points both to Brazil’s ambitions of projecting greater influence in the developing world and to the expanding business allure of Africa, where some economies are rapidly growing even as parts of the continent still grapple with wars and famine. The charm offensive is paying off in surging trade flows between Brazil and Africa, growing to $27.6 billion in 2011 from $4.3 billion in 2002.

“There’s the growing sense that Africa is Brazil’s frontier,” said Jerry Dávila, a historian at the University of Illinois who has written extensively about Brazil’s inroads across the South Atlantic Ocean. “Brazil is in the privileged position of finally reaching the institutional capacity to do this.”

Brazil’s forays into Africa are similar to the ambitions of other rising powers, like Turkey, which has established its sway in the Arab world, and India’s promotion of its culture across Asia.

The prominence given to Africa also reflects Brazil’s shift from aid recipient to provider. Big development challenges persist in Brazil, including woeful public schools and a sharp economic slowdown this year. But Brazil is a major agricultural exporter that recently surpassed Britain as the world’s sixth-largest economy, and it now boasts more embassies in Africa than Britain does—a notable change from when Brazil relied on foreign aid in the 1960s, largely from the United States, to alleviate hunger in the country’s impoverished northeast.

Africa now accounts for about 55 percent of the disbursements by the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, which oversees aid projects abroad, according to Marco Farani, the agency’s director. Altogether, including educational exchanges and an expanding loan portfolio, Brazil’s foreign aid exceeds $1 billion, he said. Big portions of Brazilian aid also go to countries in Latin America, and there is a smaller focus on East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in Southeast Asia.

“We still have a smaller foreign aid profile than other some countries, but we’re learning how to do cooperation,” Mr. Farani said.

After a surge of openings of diplomatic missions over the past decade, Brazil now has 36 embassies across Africa, and hopes to open its 37th in Malawi this year. Brazil is already using this presence to bolster its actions on the world stage, sending jets to fly delegations from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which was held here in June.

Other projects are intended to lure Africans to study in Brazil. A new university began offering classes last year for students from Portuguese-speaking countries, including Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe.

Since Brazil does not need to import large amounts of oil or food, its plans in Africa differ somewhat from other countries seeking greater influence there. Outreach projects tie largely into efforts to increase opportunities for Brazilian companies, which sometimes work with Brazil’s government in offering aid.

Some of Brazil’s biggest inroads, predictably, are in Portuguese-speaking countries like Angola, where the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht ranks among the largest employers, and Mozambique, where the mining giant Vale has begun a $6 billion coal expansion project.

But Brazilian companies are also scouring other parts of Africa for opportunities, putting down stakes in Guinea and Nigeria. A leading Brazilian investment bank, BTG Pactual, started a $1 billion fund in May focused on investing in Africa. New links are also emerging, including Brazilian farming ventures in Sudan; a flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to São Paulo; and a fiber optic cable connecting northeast Brazil to West Africa.

Brazil, closely linked for centuries to Africa through shipping routes and the slave trade, is thought to have imported 10 times as many slaves as the United States did before slavery was abolished here in 1888. For a stretch in the 19th century, Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese empire, making the capital then, Rio de Janeiro, a nerve center for trade with Africa.

Those ties withered until civilian leaders sought to establish relations with newly independent governments in Africa in the early 1960s. That process cooled after Brazil’s military rulers seized power in a 1964 coup supported by the United States.

Then economic necessity and a quest to build autonomy from the United States laid the foundations in the 1970s for today’s diplomatic buildup in Africa. Seeking to offset spending on oil imports, including cargoes from Nigeria, military rulers set about opening new markets in Africa for Brazilian companies. They found some success, notably in newly independent Angola.

Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, built on those inroads in trips to Africa from 2003 to 2010, referring to the “historic debt” Brazil had to Africa in its formation as nation

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