Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, called a meeting of presidents of South American countries to promote a regional integration process. The heads of state of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela attended the meeting. Almost all the leaders emphasized that their presence was to “reaffirm South American unity in the face of the challenges of a new multipolar world”.
Lula began his presidential term with unusual international activism. First, he attended a meeting on the environment in Egypt to defend the Amazon. He went to Washington and then to a meeting of the G-20. He then traveled to China to promote business in Brazil and reactivate the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) bloc that had been dormant for the last few years. He spoke to Putin on the phone and “postulated” himself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine to resolve the war with a plan involving an immediate ceasefire. That proposal is something Ukraine has always rejected because it means recognizing the aggressor’s permanence in its sovereign territory. Lula knows this. Is this why he is proposing it?
Lula also “blamed” and made both Zelensky and Putin responsible for the continuation of the war. Lula and China coincide in this analysis of the war in Ukraine and come close to holding the United States truly accountable for the war, relying on analyses recently made by Henry Kissinger.
Now Lula proposes to become the great builder of a new regional front of South American countries. This is Lula’s recognition of the power of regional blocs as a power to face “the new multipolar world”. It should be noted that neither Central America, the Caribbean, nor, especially, Mexico are considered for inclusion in this project.
Implicit in the call are observations in two senses. On the one hand, it is assumed that BRICS is an entity broken by world realities, starting with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To promote the BRICS implies endorsing, objectively, the Russian invasion, and both China, India, and Brazil want to present themselves as “neutral” in the conflict, although they are not necessarily so.
On the other hand, the South American front is, insofar as it opposes the other regional front of North America, made up of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Central America and the Caribbean live economically at the expense of the North American bloc. And so does Mexico, although it is hard for the Latin Americanist liver to recognize it. Such are the historical, geographical, and economic realities.
South America versus North America. That is the first conclusion that led Lula to promote the creation of his bloc of countries. But he made a mistake, almost an elementary grade one, in the initial meeting that could mark his eventual failure. Instead of conceiving the front as politically neutral and defending its members’ security, economic and environmental interests as its primary objective, he introduced an ideological orientation by raising the presence and importance of Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator, at the meeting. That presence, with a state reception, immediately gave an ideological connotation to the meeting that could potentially lead the effort to the same failure that UNASUR suffered at the time. To praise a dictatorship in the context of the initial meeting of the front provoked public and private divisions, which generated the impression of precariousness and senselessness of the Brazilian initiative.
And this is even though the Brazilian Foreign Minister expressed that the meeting intended to avoid ideological connotations. Wanting to embrace too much can destroy the effectiveness of a plural invitation in a world region where the waves towards the left and later towards the right are the reality. Lula, who lives and suffers in his own country, should know this.
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