As relações perigosas

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira is a prolific Brazilian writer who has authored several books on Brazilian- US relations from a clearly anti- imperialist and nationalist perspective. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that in this volume on recent diplomatic interactions between the two largest countries of the Americas, the author warns readers that any proximity with the giant to the north is, as the title suggests, wrought with danger for Brazil. Defending the independent foreign policy strategy shaped by Presidents Jânio Quadros and João Goulart in the early 1960s that charted a third way between East- West Cold War divisions, Moniz Bandeira points out that in spite of the authoritarian nature of the military- led regime that came to power in 1964 and the pro- US sentiment of General Castelo Branco, Brazil’s foreign policy has remained stubbornly determined over the years to avoid undue subordination to the United States.Initiating his analysis with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the United States as the dominant world power, Moniz Bandeira emphasizes the ideological and practical impact of the Washington Consensus, which promoted an expansion of free trade throughout the region and the end of state control of key industries in Latin America. Pulling no punches, he equates Bush Senior’s free trade initiatives with those of his successor Bill Clinton, as both, according to the author, attempted to expand US economic penetration of Latin America as Washington policymakers saw unexpected competition from the European Union and emergent Asian powers. Despite slight differences in their approaches to their neighbors to the south, Moniz Bandeira sees Democrats and Republicans as sharing similar imperial strategies toward Brazil and the rest of Latin America.Like many members of the Brazilian Armed Forces and other ardent Brazilian nationalists, Moniz Bandeira presents US designs on the Amazon as one of Washington’s major policy objectives. There is no question that the Bush (Senior and Junior) and Clinton administrations all focused on the eradication of both the cocaine trade and the remnants of the Colombian revolutionary movements as foreign policy priorities for South America. This joint goal served as the common denominator for these administrations’ desire to recruit Brazil and its Amazonian neighbors for US antidrug and antiguerrilla maneuvers in the region, but the author relies on speculation to interpret this as a unified strategy for US domination of the Amazon region. Indeed, Moniz Bandeira’s preoccupation reminds one of the digital image of the alleged US high school geography textbook showing a map of the Amazon with markings indicating a plan to internationalize the region that circulated so widely on the Internet in several distinct cycles over the last two decades in spite of the flagrant and obvious fabrication of the document. The image circulated throughout Brazil and to US- based Brazil specialists who debunked its authenticity. That the US government continues to want to maintain military installations around the world to ensure its control of the Seven Seas is not in doubt; that this means that the US Marines will invade Manaus with the ideological backing of US schoolchildren is another question altogether.Moniz Bandeira aptly shows how the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas is a proposal that benefits US commercial interests over those of Latin America, which is why Mercosul and other regional agreements that challenge US hegemony seem to concern Washington policymakers so much. He also carefully documents how Brazilian diplomats have foiled unilateral demands by the US government to implement trade agreements that are unbalanced in their application of rules and guidelines. Similarly, he shows how Bush Junior’s ignorance about Brazil and of the fact that the country has the largest African- descended population in the Americas reflects an ongoing lack of knowledge about the details of Brazil in the United States. But Moniz Bandeira fails to engage fully with the political reality that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva embraced his counterpart in the White House and built a warm relationship with George W. Bush in spite of Brazil’s opposition to the war in Iraq.This reader at times found that Moniz Bandeira, drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, failed to distinguish among the varied material that he used to test their reliability. For example, to affirm that Monica Lewinsky, Clinton’s White House dalliance, was a Israeli Mossad agent (p. 198) is to repeat entirely unsubstantiated and paranoiac rumors that diminish the value of the author’s cogent analysis of the real dangers of establishing too deep a reliance on the United States. An ideological framework can offer logic and structure, but it can also create blinders and produce an analysis that at times lacks in subtlety and sophistication, especially for a topic as important as the long- term relations between the two most important powers in the Americas

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