South America’s ‘Business Friendly’ Bloodbath

Senator and Chilean Upper House Human Rights Commission president, Alejandro Navarro, insisted that President Piñera “will not die without first paying for his responsibility,” after Santiago’s 7th Court of Guarantees admitted a complaint of crimes against humanity against Piñera. “He will be punished with imprisonment in any of its grades, the maximum degree being a penalty ranging from 15 to 20 years,” Navarro said.

Council of the Americas personnel tried to insinuate that “foreign forces” were behind the Chilean protests, and those which rocked Ecuador in the same period, without presenting evidence. In contrast, when these kind of allegations happens under left governments or those not allied to the United States, skeptics are frequently accused of “denying agency” by questioning what might be behind such destabilising movements, such as the involvement of foreign or foreign funded non-governmental organisations.

In October 2020, one year after the protests, 78% of Chileans voted to rewrite the constitution—one of the vestiges of the Pinochet era.

The Communist Party’s Daniel Jadue, currently mayor of Recoleta, leads most opinion polls for Chile’s 2021 presidential election.

Brazil: The image problem
In May 2019 the United States’ biggest banks sponsored a lavish New York gala event for Brazil’s new president Jair Bolsonaro, held at the Marriott Marquis hotel. Six months later Bolsonaro faced the first of a series of  charges at the international criminal court, for crimes against humanity and incitement of genocide.

The New York event was sponsored by Council of the Americas patron member Citigroup whose CEO Michael Corbat defended its sponsorship of the gala in the face of a well organised protest campaign to cancel it. It was originally scheduled to take place at the American Museum of Natural History but was cancelled due to public outrage that the museum would host a man intent on dismantling protections of the Amazon for foreign mining and agribusiness corporations.

Whilst other companies withdrew, Council of the Americas members who sponsored the eventincluded Credit Suisse Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co., BNP Paribas SA, HSBC, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Corbat told CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla: “We spend a lot of time making sure our people understand the values of our company, and I hope in the case of that, there’s no question in terms of our support, our unwavering support, for our LGBT community,” in an attempt to pinkwash their endorsement of Bolsonaro’s necropolitics.

Bolsonaro’s well publicised history of not only homophobic, but violent, racist, misogynistic and genocidal statements made a mockery of these corporations facile appeals to LGBT customers, and they knew full well what he was before he was elected. On two occasions he made threatening rape related remarks to Workers Party congresswoman Maria do Rosario.

Despite this, Council of the Americas normalised Bolsonaro extreme right positions by calling him an “arch-conservative”. In 2017, following behind closed door meetings with the Bolsonaro clan at COA New York headquarters, Brian Winter referred to what assumedly were its members, as “some previously skeptical business leaders, in Brazil and abroad, were starting to come around. One described Bolsonaro as a “defense of last resort” if Lula were not prevented from running by his legal troubles and still led polls by mid-2018.”. Operation Lava Jato prosecutor Deltan Dellagnol called the jailing of Lula, “a gift from the CIA“.

“No room for feelings” the investors said, of a man who claimed on television that 30,000 needed to be killed for Brazil to function properly.

Council of the Americas member, Barings Bank, could not contain their enthusiasm for the election of Bolsonaro, calling it “a new frontier”. “Jair Bolsonaro’s election as Brazil’s president in October 2018 was momentous: this was the first time since the establishment of the country’s 1988 constitution that a clear right-leaning mandate had won a national vote. Many market commentators have recognized that his appointment has the potential for positive economic transformation,” it proclaimed.

The propaganda-laden statement paid gushing tributes to Economy Minister Paulo Guedes and now disgraced Justice Minister Sérgio Moro, even lauding his politically-motivated imprisonment of former President Lula da Silva, which enabled Bolsonaro’s victory.

Guedes “Pro-Business” economic policies, delivered by a monster like Bolsonaro, was acceptable to them, as it had been many times in the past. A veteran of Pinochet’s Chile, Paulo Guedes reduces the atrocities under his rule to a “political point of view.”

The Wall Street Journal explicitly endorsed Jair Bolsonaro during the 2018 election, and lauded his spurious anti-corruption rhetoric.

The magazine gloated: “Global progressives are having an anxiety attack over the near-triumph Sunday of Brazil’s conservative presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. After years of corruption and recession, apparently millions of Brazilians think an outsider is exactly what the country needs.”

“… Mr. Bolsonaro, who has spent 27 years in Congress, is best understood as a conservative populist who promises to make Brazil great for the first time. The 63-year-old is running on traditional values and often says politically incorrect things about identity politics that inflame his opponents. Yet he has attracted support from the middle class by pledging to reduce corruption, crack down on Brazil’s rampant crime and liberate entrepreneurs from government control. He has stopped short of promising to fully privatize Petrobras, the state-owned oil giant, but his chief economic adviser says he would sell its subsidiaries, deregulate much of the economy and restrain government spending. On crime he has promised to restore a police presence in urban and rural areas that have become lawless.”

On May 5, Jair Bolsonaro met new Rio de Janeiro governor Cláudio Castro at his official residence, the Laranjeiras Palace. Castro took office after the impeachment of far-right Wilson Witzel, whom he served as vice.

The next day saw the worst massacre by Rio de Janeiro police in history, with 28 killed at the Jacarezinho favela. The previous worst was the Vigário Geral massacre in 1993, with 21 victims.

Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court ordered suspension of police operations in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in June 2020, but the state government has failed to comply. Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil said: “It’s completely unacceptable that security forces keep committing grave human rights violations such as those that occurred in Jacarezinho today against residents of the favelas, who are mostly Black and live in poverty.”

Bolsonaro’s rhetoric on police killings has been a trademark , with the motto “a good thief is a dead thief”, and advocating clearing favelas of gangs with gunfire from helicopters. During the 2018 election he also spoke of machine gunning Workers Party members at a campaign rally.

He congratulated Rio de Janeiro police following the Jacarezinho massacre. Whilst Rio police abuses have continued for decades, Brazil has never had an elected president who celebrates them.

An admirer of Chile’s Pinochet, it is with the Brazilian president’s brazen necropolitics that those promoting the interests of Wall Street investors have their major image problem in South America. Their 2018 pick soon became an international bogeyman, and distancing from the neofascist by those who once lauded his “good ideas” has been visible since the moment he took office.

As even the CIA embarks on a cringeworthy corporate embrace of “diversity”, that image problem has led to the financial press now attempting to instead bracket Brazil’s Bolsonaro together with left wingers Mexico’s AMLO and Argentina’s Fernández, classifying them all as “populists,” when in fact he is in open ideological alliance with their preferred regional leaders, such as Chile’s Piñera and Colombia’s Duque.

With Bolsonaro’s support from the Atlantic Council, a pledge to make it a NATO associate member, and broadening of cooperation with Southcom, Brazil, like Colombia, is central to any US strategic plans in South America. Bolsonaro became the first Brazilian leader in history to visit CIA headquarters, two months after his inauguration.

Latin America’s largest economy has been in steep decline since the US-backed lawfare operation Lava Jato first froze its civil construction and energy sectors in 2015. Already suffering from the global commodities slowdown, this economic sabotage was overlooked, and instead used to build a secondary pretext for the removal of Dilma Rousseff, along with the systemic corruption the same Lava Jato was supposedly pursuing. As many predicted then, this was used to turn Brazil’s vast public sector into low hanging fruit for private and foreign investors.

Brazil’s situation was depicted bombastically as the worst economic crisis in history when it was nothing of the sort. Bridge to the future was to be the “solution” to this crisis when it was classic economic hit job of the wrong policy, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Rousseff calls her impeachment the opening act, or the original sin of Brazil’s catastrophe. Michel Temer admitted at a special Council of the Americas meeting in September 2016, shortly after her ouster, that she had been removed for her refusal to adopt “bridge to the future,” an austerity policy manifesto, and not for the minor budgetary infraction for which she was officially impeached.

Bridge to the future, which was suspected to have been drawn up by Council of the Americas and Paulo Guedes’ Instituto Millenium, enforced a twenty year freeze on Brazil’s public education and health investment. These policies continued and intensified under COA darling Guedes, which has exacerbated the country’s Coronavirus pandemic. At the time of publication, 1 in 500 Brazilians have already died of Covid-19. A University of São Paulo report conducted with NGO Conectas found that the Bolsonaro government had encouraged pandemic deaths through intentional spread of the virus and refusal of measures to control it, up to and US encouraged including suppression of vaccines. Guedes ally Solange Viera who had been involved in pension reforms pushed the previous year, remarked in a meeting: “It is good that deaths are concentrated among the elderly… This will improve our economic performance, as it will reduce our pension deficit”. There is now a Senate inquiry into Brazilian government handing of the pandemic which could yet sink the Bolsonaro-Guedes regime.

In 2019, Council of the Americas’ Brian Winter told World Economic Forum attendees to “prepare to be dazzled” by Bolsonaro’s new Minister of the Economy. The economy tanked, dazzlingly, long before the Coronavirus pandemic, with flat to negative GDP, capital flight and devaluation of the Real.

Now, Council of the Americas and the same Wall Street interests which backed Brazil’s coup of 1964, Chile’s in 1973, Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the jailing of Lula da Silva and the election of Bolsonaro and Guedes, now seek continuation of the ultraliberal project with a “Bridge to the future 2.0,” this time seeking to solve the image problem by marrying it to a more acceptable face.

Former president Lula of the Workers Party leads polls for the 2022 election commandingly, as he did before being removed from the race in 2018.

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Rebuilding hegemony
Redemocratised Latin America eventually rejected both the IMF-enforced neoliberalism which terrorised the region economically, and its past subservience to US foreign policy.

Since the defeat of the FTAA or free trade area of the Americas, and the ascendence of the so-called pink tide, there have been ongoing efforts to establish a new hegemonic order to succeed the Washington consensus of the 1990s through economic and strategic blocs like the Pacific alliance, the Lima Group, and direct intervention through the US dominated Organisation of American States.

These have stood counter to regional integration efforts like UNASUR, ALBA and CELAC, the protagonists of which were depicted by financial press as the “bad” South America; one of “populism” and “statism,” i.e., obstacles to low wages and privatisation.

From Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012, there have been a succession of coups, coup attempts, destabilisations and reversed elections; Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua. The failure of Argentinian neoliberal Macri to be re-elected punctured U.S. vision for the southern cone, as did the overthrow of the Bolivian coup regime both they and the IMF backed. The coup government led by CIA-connected Jeanine Añez now face punishment for massacres and torture during their putsch.

In Ecuador, home to the US Manta airbase, and under the shadow of Council of the Americas patron Chevron, a combination of lawfare, proxy spoiler/splinter opposition, and disinformation against the left candidate most recently helped bring COA-lauded banker Guillermo Lasso to power. Lasso, neoliberal former head of Ecuador operations for the Coca-Cola company, succeeds “Shakespearean villain” Lenin Moreno. Moreno was elected on a left-wing ticket to succeed Rafael Correa, only to quickly switch to a U.S. allied position once in office, engage in persecution of former allies, and encourage brutal repression of anti-austerity, anti-IMF protests. This led him too to face a lawsuit from indigenous organisations for crimes against humanity.

Two new Brazilian books ‘Ninguém regula a América‘ by Ana Penido/Miguel Enrique Stédile and  ‘Brasil no espectro de uma guerra híbrida‘ by Piero C. Leirner both detail how beneath a veneer of public diplomacy, lawfare, encouragement and utilisation of the far right, along with other components, have been used by the United States over the past decade or more to wage an undeclared hybrid war across the region, in order to install governments aligned with US interests; put simply it is the old empire with new weapons.

Anti-Corruption in particular went from a standing start in the early 1990s to become a principal tool of US statecraft, capable of swinging elections and toppling presidents. In Brazil’s case this had global dimensions via BRICS and its relations with China and Russia.

These kind of campaigns in Latin America are backed by Council of the Americas, NATO’s Atlantic Council, AEI, Transparency International, the libertarian Atlas Network and other NGOs, think tanks, and foundations, which act as US / FVEY government cutouts, providing strategic planning, material support, and editorial cover via clusters of locally stationed flacks. There has been little distinction between governmental agency and outsourced corporate activity in this area.

It is wrong to assume there was ever pause from the role US corporations played in the horrors of 1960s and 70s Latin America, when the very same organisation that binds them, Council of the Americas, has been a constant, pulling political strings to provide an environment that is friendly to business, and swimming in blood, ever since.

With elections imminent in Brazil, Chile and Colombia, this malign influence should be central to any serious reporting.