Brazil

Brian Winter, vice president of policy at Americas Society and Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, leads the conversation on U.S. relations with South America. CASA: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Brian Winter with us to discuss U.S. relations with South America. Mr. Winter is the vice president of policy for the America Society and Council of the Americas and editor in chief of Americas Quarterly. An influential political analyst, he has followed South America for more than twenty years and has served as a correspondent for Reuters in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Mr. Winter is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé. He is a regular contributor to television and radio and host of the Americas Quarterly podcast. Welcome, Brian. Thank you very much for being with us. WINTER: Thank you, Maria. Thanks for the invitation. CASA: Can you begin with a general overview of current U.S. relations with South American countries? WINTER: I can try and actually, as a matter of fact, today is an extremely fortuitous day to be doing this and let me tell you why. A couple of weeks ago on February 10, Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made a one-day trip to Washington. He met with President Biden while he was here. He brought his foreign minister with him as well as his chief foreign policy adviser, his finance minister, a couple other members of his Cabinet. One of the biggest sort of concrete results of this trip that Lula made up here was a U.S. donation to the Amazon Fund of $50 million. That is million with an M. Well, today, Lula leaves for China with about half of his Cabinet and a delegation of approximately two hundred and thirty leaders from Brazil’s private sector in what Brazilian media are calling the biggest foreign delegation ever to leave Brazil for another country. They will be in China for six days and there is a whole roster of deals on the table ranging from financing to infrastructure to education, environmental, and so on. So the point I’m trying to get across here is one of clear asymmetry and it really reflects kind of the new moment for U.S. relations with South America overall. As Maria mentioned, I started my career in the region as a reporter a little more than twenty years ago. I was in Argentina for four years. I was in Mexico for one year and Brazil for five, and in the course of that relatively short period of time we’ve seen kind of the power balance in how we think about Latin America but specifically South America. We’ve seen a significant change in how we think about that region. Back the early 2000s, certainly, during the 1990s, these were the final years of the so-called Washington Consensus, a period characterized by kind of the unipolar moment that came with the end of the Cold War, a certain consensus not only around democracy but around a certain set of liberalizing economic policies as well, and that ran its course. But really, it was around 2003 when everything started to change for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is the one that I’ve already referenced, which is the growth of China as a trading partner for the region. China had always had a presence in Latin America. In fact, for the magazine that I run, Americas Quarterly, we ran a piece two years ago about the Chinese presence in Mexico going all the way back to the 1600s when they operated barber shops and other sort of forms of commerce. But what’s happened over the last twenty years is really remarkable. In numbers, Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean overall went from 18 billion (dollars) in 2002 to a stunning 450 billion (dollars) in 2021. China is now the largest trading partner for Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, and for South America as a whole if you take all those countries in the aggregate China now outranks the United States. When you look at Latin America, by the way, that includes Mexico. If you take that grouping then the U.S. is still the number-one trading partner but, again, that’s almost entirely because of that relationship—that trading relationship as a result of the former NAFTA and now USMCA. Along with that big growth in Chinese trade have come other changes. We’ve had a lot of talk in the U.S. media in recent days about the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war. That was something—and I was living in Argentina at the time and you could really feel how that even then carried a cost for the U.S. reputation in some of these countries. I think that with the failure of the—the failures of the war over time I think that that only accentuated the view that—not only a long-standing view that the U.S. was an unwelcome, meddling, and in many cases imperialist presence but it also accelerated this narrative that the United States was in relative decline. More recent years we’ve seen kind of other things contribute to this diminished reputation of the United States and throughout many countries in the region—everything ranging from not just the election of Donald Trump, who, of course, was not popular in most of the region; but also specific decisions that were made by his government, such as the withdrawal from the TPP—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—that, of course, is the trade deal that was negotiated under the Obama administration that included several Latin American countries, including Chile and Peru—but also the weaponization of tariffs; and, you know, Trump’s repeated threats to even cut off Mexican imports. They did—those threats did have the effect of kind of forcing, first, President Peña Nieto in Mexico and then his successor, Andrés Manuel Lόpez Obrador, to cooperate with initiatives like management of migration policy. So in the short term, they, quote/unquote, “worked” but in the longer term it showed Mexico as well as other countries in the region that the U.S. was not a particularly reliable partner. Some of you may be listening to all this and thinking, well, this sounds like the viewpoints espoused by governments in the region that are leftist and have never really cared for the United States in the first place. But another interesting thing about this latest trend and the way that things have changed over the last ten years is that this desire to forge a middle path between China and the United States as their strategic competition escalates is shared by leaders across the ideological spectrum. South American countries in particular are not unlike the United States when it seems like virtually everything is polarized, and yet in this area and specifically the need—the perceived need to have closer relations with—I’m sorry, closer relations with China while maintaining a civil relationship but not siding too much with United States, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of that view in recent years have actually been governments on the center right and right such as Sebastián Piñera, the former president of Chile, Iván Duque, the former president of Colombia, Guillermo Lasso, the current president of Ecuador, who has worked extensively with China, and even Jair Bolsonaro, who was until recently the right-wing president of Brazil, ended up essentially going along with Beijing and allowing Huawei to participate in the recent auction of 5G mobile communications technology there. And so what we end up with as a result is a policy in many countries across the region that some are calling active nonalignment, the idea that governments in the region, regardless of their ideological stripe, need to seek an equidistant or middle path between Washington and Beijing, essentially taking advantage of their relative distance from not only potential conflicts between the U.S. and China but also looking at what’s happening in Ukraine right now and saying, look, we need to maintain our independence, not side too strongly with either of these emerging blocs, and see if we can benefit from this by selling our commodities to everybody, keeping in mind that these are economies, especially in South America, that rely extremely heavily on the sale of commodities exports to drive their economic growth. So, you know, in conclusion for these initial remarks that is a huge change in the course of a generation. We’ve gone in a little more than twenty years from this assumption that most Latin American countries are in the U.S. sphere of influence, to use a very outdated term, which I detest, that they were part of our, quote/unquote, “backyard” to an increasing realization in DC, and I think people are still getting their heads around that, that automatic support, automatic alignment, can no longer be expected whether it is in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and then on down into South America, which I know is our focus today, governments like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, another country where we’ve seen a lot of change on this front even in the last couple years and, again, not just because there’s a leftist president in Colombia now because his predecessor, who I’ve already mentioned, Iván Duque, was one of the main people pushing this change. So that’s a lot to digest. I’m happy to take any questions and hear from you. So thank you. CASA: Thanks, Brian, for that comprehensive introduction. Now let’s open it up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question is a written question and it comes from Andrea Cuervo Prados, who is an adjunct instructor at Dickinson State University, and asks, what is your perspective regarding the new leftist president of Colombia and U.S. relations? What is the risk that Colombia could turn into another Venezuela? WINTER: Right. It’s a good question. I think that we are still figuring out exactly what Gustavo—not only who Gustavo Petro is but what his ambitions are for both Colombia and for his relationships with the rest of the region and the rest of the world. There is some distance between what he has said he wants to do and what he may be able to do. This is a president who, you know, talks in these grand sweeping terms but ultimately has to get things through congress, and to just cite a result or an example of this that doesn’t directly have to do with Colombia’s foreign relationships, he said—he gave a very dramatic speech at the UN General Assembly last September in which he talked about the need to legalize narcotics across the board, including cocaine. But then—it was a speech that generated a lot of attention in capitals all over the world and all over the region. But then in ensuing weeks when he was pressed on this he didn’t really have a lot of detail and admitted that it was not something that Colombia could do unilaterally, which is all to say that, again, there’s this gap where I think it’s important to pay careful attention to the gap between the rhetoric and what’s actually possible with Petro. I don’t personally—you know, the question of could X country become another Venezuela it’s a question that people have been asking all over Latin America for the last ten years. I think—I understand why people ask it because what happened in Venezuela was so awful and dramatic, not only with the country becoming a full-fledged dictatorship that represses political opposition but also the humanitarian crisis that has forced some 7 million people or about a quarter of the country’s population to leave the country. But, look, Petro is Colombia’s first president on the left and I don’t think it necessarily follows that—in fact, I’m certain that it doesn’t follow that every person on the left wants to go down the path of Venezuela. So I suppose I’m a little more optimistic not only that Petro is a pragmatist in areas like the economy—for example, his finance minister is a quite pragmatic figure, a Columbia University professor who is well respected by markets—and I’m also somewhat optimistic about Colombian institutions and their ability to stand in the way of any truly radical change. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Morton Holbrook, who is an adjunct professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Morton? Q: Hello. Yes, I’m here. Morton Holbrook, Kentucky Wesleyan College. University of Louisville also. Thanks for your really interesting comments, especially about China’s relationship with Latin and South America. Can I turn north a little bit to Russia? Considering particularly the Brazilian president’s upcoming visit to China do you think he might want to go to Russia, too? Bearing in mind that the International Criminal Court just issued an arrest warrant for President Putin, how might that affect Latin American relations with Russia? Do you think some of them might now have second thoughts about Russia or inviting Putin to visit their countries? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela have all signed the ICC statute promising to cooperate in the carrying out of arrest warrants. Thank you. WINTER: That’s a great question and one that is—I can tell you is very front of mind for Brazilian officials and I think others around the region right now. I was just in Brazil two weeks ago working on our—our next issue of Americas Quarterly will be on Brazil’s foreign policy and what it means for the rest of Latin America. This is a question that’s very front and center. Brazil’s foreign minister did say in the last couple of days—he did explicitly almost word for word repeat what you just said, which is that Brazil is a signatory to that treaty. That would seem to eliminate any possibility of Vladimir Putin visiting Brazil. I’m not sure that that was really on his list of things to do anyway. But it was not only a practical signal but a diplomatic one as well. Lula’s position on Russia and the Ukraine war has been inconsistent. He said during his campaign last year that Zelensky and Putin bear equal responsibility for the conflict. My understanding is that after that statement, you know, nobody wants to contradict the boss openly and sometimes not even in private. My sense personally based on conversations with others in Brasilia is that at the very least his foreign policy team regretted that he made that statement. Brazil has, in other form, condemned the Russian invasion. Other governments including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and others have done the same. However, these are countries that, like most of the Global South, are firmly opposed to any sanctions and so their position, again, ends up being I suppose you could call it nuanced. They believe it’s important in part because of their own experience as nations to condemn invasions of one country by another. I, personally, think that it’s fair to think of what Putin is doing is a kind of imperialist aggression, which these are countries that have certainly objected to that when it’s the U.S. over the last, you know, 200-plus years and so you would think that it would be in their DNA to do so in the Ukrainian case as well, and in fairness most of them have. I would just add that, you know, the Brazilian position, I think, though, gets influenced also by two other things. One is, again, this notion of nonalignment. Most people talk about nonalignment in Brazil and Argentina, in Chile and Colombia, and they think about the U.S.-China relationship, as I noted during my introductory remarks. But they also think of it as a helpful guide to thinking about the conflict, the war in Ukraine, as well for reasons that are not firmly rooted in morals or values, let’s say, but in interests as, you know, foreign policy often is. To say it in a different way, I had a conversation a couple of years ago with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who I helped him write his memoir in English back in 2006. He was president during the 1990s, and in talking with him about the China question he said, we have to take advantage of our greatest strategic asset, which is that Brazil is far. (Laughs.) And to just unpack that a little bit, I think the meaning of that is clear to all of you. But these are countries that really see an opportunity right now just by virtue of their geographic distance from these conflict zones to avoid being dragged in and also to potentially, at some level, benefit from it through strategic superpower competition for their support as well as through higher prices for some of the commodities that they produce. There’s one added element in the case of Brazil, which is that Lula, I’m told by people close to him, sees himself as almost a Nelson Mandela-type figure. He’s back now for his third term in the presidency twenty years after he was president the first time. Of course, I’m sure people on this call know that he went through some real struggles in the intervening years including nearly two years in prison over—on corruption charges that were later thrown out and, you know, he may see his presidency as an opportunity to kind of write the last chapter or two in his biography, and there’s talk that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize and that he sees potentially helping negotiate a peace deal for the Ukraine war as the best opportunity to do that. I actually think that that idea, which is—tends to be dismissed in Washington as well as in European capitals, I personally think that idea is not as crazy as some people here in Washington think. But maybe I can go into that a little bit later if anybody wants. CASA: Thank you. Next, we have two written questions from the same university that we can take together. They’re from Marisa Perez and Trevor Collier, who are undergraduate students at Lewis University. They would like to know what world leaders such as the United States can do to prevent deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and how they can do so without compromising Brazil’s sovereignty. WINTER: Well, it’s a really great question, in part because it mentions an issue that Americans don’t often think about, which is precisely the sensitivity on the sovereignty issue. Brazil, and specifically not only Brazil’s military but Brazil’s foreign policy establishment, have a long-standing concern that is part of their doctrine, I suppose you could say, that is concerned always about the possibility of territorial loss and about foreigners gaining influence or, in some cases, even control over the Amazon. And I have to say, you know, this is another one of those ideas that I think—I wish we were all together in a room. This Zoom is kind of the next best thing. I could see your faces that way. But sometimes when I talk about this I see people kind of roll their eyes as if it was some sort of imagined conspiracy. But the truth is that as recently as 2019 when the—the first year of Jair Bolsonaro’s government when the fires in the Amazon really became a huge controversy, driven in large part by social media and tweets from people like Justin Bieber and Cher, who, to be clear, were, I think, justifiably and quite heroically shining light on what was happening there. In the midst of all that Emmanuel Macron actually proposed that perhaps some sort of international force in the Amazon was necessary, that that deployment of that would be a good idea if Brazil was not capable of taking care of the Amazon itself. That proposal was disastrous because it just reinforced this long-standing fear that so much of the establishment in Brazil has always had, and it’s true that Bolsonaro was on the right but you, certainly, in conversations, I think, with people across the ideological spectrum this is something that people think about. So OK. So back to the original question, how can the U.S. help. Well, the U.S. could help by providing both logistical and financial resources beyond the $50 million, which is, you know, the equivalent of about seven seconds of what we’re spending in terms of supporting Ukraine right now. I don’t know—Norway is the biggest sponsor of the Amazon Fund. I don’t have that number in front of me but I think that their contribution is upwards of at least a billion dollars, probably more. Ultimately, though, I do believe that the Amazon is a local challenge and I know that can be unsatisfying to hear in forums like this where we’re sort of designed—you know, this is a CFR event. We’re supposed to be thinking of ways that the international community can get involved. But it’s going to be a big challenge. The good news is that Brazil has shown that it is capable of getting its hands around this problem before. During Lula’s first terms in office from 2003 to 2010 his government was able to reduce the level of deforestation by upwards of 75 percent. It was a very dramatic difference in a very short period of time. This was done through a variety of means, both things like satellite monitoring and new technology that let the authorities follow this in real time. They were also able to step up environmental enforcement agencies like IBAMA, whose inspectors are necessary. It’s necessary to have them on the ground in order to, you know, stop—actually stop illegal loggers from setting the fires that are the main driver of deforestation. They were also able to build political consensus around the need to reduce deforestation during those years. I don’t think it’s going to be—in fact, I’m certain it will not be as “easy,” quote/unquote, this time around. A lot has changed. The upwards of 60 percent increase that we saw in deforestation during the Bolsonaro years had the support, unfortunately, in my view, of local populations who believe essentially that slashing and burning will lead their day-to-day economic lives to improve. In the election that happened in October where Lula won and Bolsonaro lost but by a very small margin—the closest margin in Brazil’s modern democratic history—the strongest support nationally for Bolsonaro was in areas that have seen the most illegal deforestation over the last four years and what that tells you is that, again, these are local populations that believe that this will lead to greater wealth and greater well-being for all of them, this being deforestation. So that’s a big challenge for Lula with a—you know, at a time when resources are fairly scarce. It’s not like it was during his first presidency when all of this increase in Chinese trade was really boosting the amount of money in Brazil’s coffers. So he’s going to have to figure out a way to dedicate financial resources as well as convince local populations that this is in their interest to do it. It’s not going to be an easy road. CASA: Our next question comes from Mike Nelson, an affiliate adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Mike? Q: Thank you very much for an outstanding overview of what’s going on in U.S. relations to South America. I study international technology policy and data governance but my question is about corruption. You mentioned corruption in Brazil but it’s a problem throughout South America, and my three-part question, is it getting worse or better; are there any countries who have really done the right thing and have taken serious measures to address it; and how can the internet and some of the technologies for citizen journalism help expose corruption and make leaders less likely to dip into the public fund? WINTER: OK. Yeah. No, great questions, and reflective of if you look at opinion polling and remember that these are countries that many of them have been dealing with rising crime, rising homicide levels, economic stagnation, the pandemic, which hit Latin America by many measures harder than in any other region in the world at one point—I haven’t seen updated numbers on this but it was fairly consistently throughout the pandemic Latin America, which is about 8 percent of the world’s population, was accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s confirmed COVID deaths. Anyway, amid all of that, and the economic stagnation that has been such a problem over the last ten years, in a lot of countries and in public opinion surveys, the thing that people identified as the number-one problem in their country is corruption. That was not always true. If you look back at public polling twenty years ago, people tended to identify kind of more, what’s the word, basic needs—think, like, unemployment, hunger, misery, which often is kind of asked as a separate—that’s one of the boxes you can check. Twenty years ago, those were the issues. And as the region became more middle class, especially in the 2000s because of this China-driven economic growth that described during my introduction, a lot of people were able to move beyond their basic needs and focus on essentially what was happening to the money that they paid in taxes, keeping in mind that many people were paying taxes for the first time. Some of it surely was also driven by these things, as you mentioned, mobile phones that not only things like videos of people carrying suitcases of cash, but also the attention that was given to big corruption scandals. Previously in a lot of countries, governments were able to make pacts with newspapers and TV channels, and kind of tamp things down a little bit, and lower the temperature. In an era of Facebook and Twitter, that was no longer as easy for them to do. All of this culminated in several corruption scandals at once in the mid-2010s, the most emblematic of which was the so-called Lava Jato, or car wash, scandal, which originated in Brazil, but eventually had franchises, if you will, in almost a dozen countries throughout Latin America and the world. That story is complicated. Politicians all over the region went to jail. Business leaders did too. Lula was one of them. That was the case that put him in jail. In intervening years, we’ve discovered that there were abuses and procedural violations, both things on behalf of the prosecutors and the judge involved, who the Brazilian Supreme Court decided, I think in 2021, they ruled—maybe it was earlier than that—that the judge overseeing Lula’s conviction had not been—or, rather, it’s easier to say—had been partial in his rulings. And so that’s left us in a place today where populations are still angry about corruption, as I mentioned, but it is no longer driving conversation in most countries, like it did before. I still believe—and you can probably tell, this is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years and continue to watch. The first question you asked, in some ways, is the most important one. Is corruption getting worse or better? It’s impossible to know for sure. My hypothesis is actually corruption is about the same, and may in fact be getting better, which flies in the face of all of these headlines that we’ve seen. But to me, the operative question over these last ten years or so has been, you know, not why—I’ve heard people say, well, why are these—why are these countries so corrupt? And to me, the real question is, why are we suddenly seeing these cases of corruption? Because I think it speaks to not only the technological changes that I referenced, but also the improvement—(audio break)—these are countries many of which transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s. And therefore, it really took a generation for independent prosecutors to show up, to have the training and political support that they needed to go after some very powerful people. So, in sum, I am a believer in the story of rule of law improving in many countries in Latin America. I would recognize, again, that it’s a very complex story, in part because of some of the problems around not just Lava Jato but in other countries, such as Peru and Guatemala. But progress is rarely linear. (Laughs.) And I still think that this is something that is likely to get better with time. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Mary Beth Altier at New York University. She asks: What role do you think misinformation and disinformation play in citizens’ perceptions of the U.S. versus China and Russia in Latin America? What could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective, if anything? And then—I can repeat this other question later, which is kind of a follow up. So you think— WINTER: Yeah, maybe. Well, that first one—that first one is worthy of a book. All of these are—these are great questions. They’re difficult to answer in pithy fashion in three minutes. I am continually impressed by the quality of Russian propaganda in Latin America. Those guys are really good. You look at RT en Español—(changes pronunciation)—RT en Español—it has one of the biggest social media followings of any “media company,” quote/unquote, in the region. Even people who I know are—who I know to not be pro-Russia, let’s put it that way, I see sharing content and videos from RT, which, of course, is just as pure a propaganda arm as you can get of the Russian government. But also, you know, have a whole network of sites that are more subtle and that push very sophisticated and sometimes, you know, not particularly obvious narratives that are designed to undermine the United States or promote the views of China and Russia. I would recognize at the same time that—I referenced this during my introduction remarks, sometimes the United States does not need any help with it comes to undermining its reputation in the region. I mentioned some of the, quote/unquote “own goals” that we’ve seen over the last five to ten, even twenty years, going all the way back to the Iraq War. As far as actively pushing back, all I can say is this: You know, I think that they’re—on the one hand, I think there are concrete steps that are being used. We’re still trying to get our heads around this problem to fight misinformation. But I was just in a different forum this morning where I was asked, what—how can the U.S. help the cause of democracy in Latin America. And my answer to that is that the best thing the United States can do to help democracy in Latin America is to get its own house in order, to move past the polarization, the misinformation, and the scorched earth politics that have put our own democracy at risk over the last several years, and try to, you know, recapture some of the consensus, at least around basic democratic rules of the game and how we hold elections that characterized most of the previous two-hundred-plus years of our history. Because I do think that while—you know, look, I lived ten years in Latin America. I know that people roll their eyes at the notion of the United States as being kind of the shining city on the hill. And I understand why. And that was always true, in part because of the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America often showing, you know, some of our worst behaviors. On the other hand, as a Brazil specialist, I’ve seen how some of the tactics and even some of the same people that were behind our own democratic decay of the last five years, some of those same tactics were repackaged and exported to open arms in Brazil. So I do think that it makes a difference on the ground in places like Brazil, potentially, and other countries as well, when a strong democratic example is being set in the United States. And I think that’s the most powerful thing we can do. Some of the other stuff, like what’s happening on RT and Telesur and some of these other outlets is relatively outside our control. CASA: We have a complementary question from— WINTER: There was a second part of that question. CASA: Oh, no, you did end up answering, I think, what could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective. I think you kind of covered that. We have another question from Gursimran Padda, a student at Stony Brook University, who asks: Does China’s strategy of gaining influence in Latin America differ from its tactics in Africa? And if so, why? WINTER: Gosh, all these great questions. China—I have to start from the beginning. I am not an African specialist. But I can tell you kind of the narrative of what happened in Africa through Latin American eyes, if that makes any sense, because this is a conversation I’ve had a lot over the years. The perception is that China went into some of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and engaged in infrastructure projects and other things that had abusive terms. In many cases, China imported its own labor to do some of these projects. They also engaged in some predatory lending practices. And that was all—essentially the takeaway from actions like that in places like Buenos Aires, Bogota, certainly Brasilia, was that the Chinese would not be allowed to come and engage in those same behaviors in Latin America. And I think, in practice, it seems that the Chinese have realized that. There have been examples, such as the construction of a dam in Ecuador, where the terms ended up being perceived as something of a debt trap. But my sense—again, and this is not so much my sense; it’s repeating what I’ve heard in numerous conversations about this subject with leaders across the ideological spectrum and throughout the region—is that they understand the risks involved in working with China, in part because of the experience throughout parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And they’re determined to not let those things happen in their home countries. You know, I know that that’s a view that, in places like where I am today—I’m on in the road in Washington, participated in this other conference this morning. That’s why my Zoom background is not quite as put together as it sometimes is, by the way. I know people roll their eyes at that notion here, and are constantly warning—you know, kind of wagging their finger a little bit at governments throughout South America, and saying that they need to be eyes wide open about the risks of engagement with the Chinese. The problem is that here in the U.S., I think they’re underestimating, in some cases, the sophistication of foreign ministries and trade ministries in places like Peru and Chile when they make those comments. Which is to say, I think that there’s something both visually and in terms of the context a bit paternalistic about it, that everybody picks up on and tends to make people in the region justifiably crazy. (Laughs.) And then, the other part is that the U.S. is not really offering much in the way of alternatives. We’re at a pretty unique moment in the history of the United States right now where we have both parties—the Republican and Democratic Parties—are pretty much closed to the idea of new free trade deals. That, in my lifetime, has never happened before. I mentioned the fact that Trump dropped out of TPP. Well, Joe Biden has not picked that back up. I think there are domestic political reasons that explain that, but what it means in practice for our relationships with governments in Latin America is that Washington doesn’t have a whole lot to offer. Because, unlike the Chinese, we can’t just order our companies to go invest someplace. That’s not how our economy works. It is very much how the Chinese economy works, where they can decide to make these decisions. They are not necessarily for a short-term economic payoff, but for medium-term reasons, or even decisions that have very little to do with dollars and cents or ROI, return on investment, and everything to do with geopolitics. So wanting to have beachheads in terms of, say, ports in places like El Salvador. So, you know, again, without that—without trade and without that ability to kind of dictate investment, there’s not a lot that’s left in Washington’s toolkit for counteracting this kind of influence. CASA: Our next question comes from Daniel Izquierdo, an undergraduate student at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Daniel. Q: Good afternoon, sir, ma’am. Thank you for taking the time. I just had a quick question on the increasing tensions between China and the U.S., and how that will kind of develop itself in Latin and South America. So given the strategic interests of Latin and South America, and the persistent political unrest, along with increasing tensions between China and the U.S., what do you believe the likelihood to be of proxy conflicts or foreign meddling, similar to what occurred during the Cold War, occurring in the region? And if not, how do you foresee the U.S. and China competing for influence in the region? WINTER: So another very good question. Thank you for that. Look, I think some of this ground we’ve covered already, but I would say that, you know, you’re the first to mention—I had not previously mentioned this idea of a new cold war. And this—you know, this is another reason why so many countries across the ideological spectrum are opting for this policy of nonalignment. Essentially because they believe that the first Cold War went badly, very badly, for Latin America. It resulted in all kinds of traumas, from the wars in Central America during the 1980s to U.S. support for coups in places like Chile, to, you know, Cuban meddling in places like Bolivia and elsewhere around the region during those years, which led to the rise of guerrilla movements like the FARC, that ended up killing very high numbers of people. And so essentially, you know, not to be glib about it, but the reaction that today’s generation has is: We want no part of this. Because it didn’t go well for us the first time. I think there are obvious differences between a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s, and this strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, that thankfully has not quite reached those heights, at least not yet, here in the twenty-first century. But I have to tell you, and again this is based on conversations I’m having all the time, the fear is real. The perception is that the world may be headed back to that kind of conflict, being driven not only by what’s happening in the Ukraine but the increasing speculation of potential war over Taiwan. So this, again, as far as—as far as how it could play out in practice, I think it’s still early. I think it remains to be seen. Right now there is—you know, there are clear cases where I think the Chinese are, as I alluded to in my previous answer, making investments not for economic reasons but for strategic ones, with a long-term horizon I mind. Things like the, quote/unquote, “space base” that they’ve established in Argentina, which really is deserving of the full air quotes when we say the phrase “space base.” I think everyone senses that—you know, that that conflict—or, that competition, if you will, is likely to define the next twenty to thirty years. And I think there’s a determination in most countries, it makes a lot of sense to me personally, that they don’t want their countries used again as a chessboard amid that larger conflict. CASA: Our next question comes from Damien Odunze. He’s assistant professor at Delta State University who writes: Ideas in the long run change the world. Do you think a closer educational collaboration between U.S. universities and those in Latin and South America could help shape and strengthen liberal democratic values in those countries? WINTER: What an interesting question. Look, let me talk first about kind of the—that equation today. There’s already quite a lot of connectivity, especially at the—at, you know, not a word I love to use, but at the elite level, the elites in government and business and U.S. education systems. Which is an unnecessarily wordy way of saying that a large percentage of people in South America come from the elite classes and get educated at universities and sometimes even at high schools in the United States. That is one reason why, again, many of these governments are likely to at least forge a middle path between China and the United States, rather than going full-fledged in the direction of China. I think there’s a cultural affinity, family ties, cultural ties, educational ties, and other things that are probably kind of the strongest connection that the U.S. has with a lot of these countries right now. As to whether a strengthening of those educational ties would improve dedication and the strength of democracy, whew. It could, but I watched with dismay as poll after poll suggests that younger generations, not just in the United States but across the Western world, are less committed in theory to both democracy and democratic institutions than their predecessors. And so I wonder just—I don’t have an answer to this—but I wonder if even, quote/unquote, “even” within the United States, if we’re properly instilling an appreciation for democracy in today’s generations, which then raises the question of whether we’d be able to do so amongst the youth of other countries as well. I’m not sure. I think this is another area where, you know, in the U.S. we have some work to do at home before we start thinking about what’s possible in other countries. CASA: Our next question comes from Mary Meyer McAleese, who is a professor of political science at Eckerd College in Florida. Mary. Q: Yes. Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity. I have, well, two questions. I hope they’re quick. The first one is, what do you think the effect will be on Latin America or South America with regard to the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank? I read that a lot of Latin American businesses have had investments in that bank, so I wonder if you could say a bit more about the banking situation and the longer-term effects there. And also, gender violence, of course, is a horrible problem all around the world, but especially in Latin and South America. What do you think the United States and the Americas Society could do to support groups in the region that are fighting against gender violence? Thank you. WINTER: Well, thank you for both questions. Both very good questions. There’s been a lot of talk about SVB and possible effects in Latin America. What I’ve heard from people who are far more knowledgeable about the financial—excuse me—the financial system than I am, is that as long as it does not spread and become a more systemic risk, it should not pose much of an issue for Latin America. In part because—and this is another area where just like—where we were talking about the courts having, I think, been engaged in a thirty-year long process of improvement—I think the same can be said of banking and financial systems around most of Latin America. My first job was covering the financial crisis that Argentina went through back in 2001 and 2002. Which, for the uninitiated, that saw five presidents in two weeks, a freeze of bank deposits, and a 70 percent devaluation of the currency. It was quite a traumatic thing to be a part of. And during those years, we saw similar—well, not quite as bad—but at least thematically similar crises in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere, following other crises in the 1990s. Which is all to say, Latin America has been curiously quiet this time around in terms of financial contagion. The economies aren’t doing well, for the most part, but at least we’re not talking about a financial meltdown. And that is because of lessons learned. These are banking systems that now have stricter capital requirements than they did in the past. And the macroeconomic fundamentals, generally speaking, are better than they were twenty years ago. Argentina, of course, is kind of in trouble again with an inflation rate that just passed 100 percent. And that’s terrible. But again, the depth—(laughs)—everything’s relative. And the depth of just financial devastation is, thankfully, nothing compared to what it was when I was there twenty-plus years ago. So, you know, we’ll see. If the bank run spreads and we start seeing other banks come in trouble here in the U.S., then my sense is that, with the whole Credit Suisse thing, and we’re not out of the woods yet. But if it stays more or less contained, then the consensus, at least so far, is that Latin America should be fine. Your question about femicide is an excellent one. It has driven the political discussion in Brazil in recent years. It’s something that President Lula has spoken movingly about. It has also been, on the other end in Mexico, the feminist movement that has had femicides as one of the main areas of concern, has been one of the most effective opposition groups to President López Obrador, who has often been, sadly in my view, dismissive of the seriousness of that problem. As far as what the United States can do to help, or even what my own organization can do, I think that in a lot of cases these are—you know, like a lot of problems—there are things that the international community can do to help. And certainly, I see things from a journalist’s perspective, even though I’m more analyst than journalist these days. I think that shining light on these problems, using vehicles like—platforms like Americas Quarterly, which is the small publication about Latin American politics that I run, that’s, you know, my own insufficient contribution to looking at his problem. But it’s certainly one—I mean, we look at the numbers in places like Brazil. I don’t have those numbers on my fingertips, but it is just an incredibly serious problem, and one that deserves more attention. CASA: Thank you, Brian. We have so many other questions. I’m really sorry, though, we have to cut off now. We’re at the hour. But this has been a very interesting discussion. And you’ve covered an enormous amount of ground. Thank you to all of you participating for your great questions. I hope you will follow Brian on Twitter at @BrazilBrian. The next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 29, at 1:00 Eastern Time. Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, will lead a conversation on media literacy and propaganda. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you, again, for joining us today, and we look forward to you tuning in again for our webinar on March 29. Bye. WINTER: Bye. Thank you. (END)

Nick Zimmerman, senior advisor at WestExec Advisors and global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute, and Amy Erica Smith, liberal arts and sciences dean’s professor and associate professor of political science at Iowa State University, discuss Brazil’s recent presidential election and the ensuing protests, U.S.-Latin America relations, and how Lula’s presidency will affect religious pluralism and democracy in Brazil. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. This series convenes religious and faith-based leaders in cross-denominational dialogue on the intersection between religion and international relations. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and transcript will be available on CFR’s website, CFR.org, and on the iTunes podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Amy Erica Smith and Nick Zimmerman with us to discuss Lula’s Presidency and the Future of Brazil. You have their bios in full, but I will give you a few highlights. Amy Erica Smith is an associate professor of political science, as well as a liberal arts and sciences dean’s professor at Iowa State University. Her research examines how citizens understand and engage in politics in democratic and authoritarian regimes, with an emphasis on Latin America and, specifically, Brazil. Dr. Smith has published numerous articles in top peer-reviewed outlets in political science, and authored or coauthored three books, including Religion and Brazilian Democracy: Mobilizing the People of God. Nick Zimmerman is a senior advisor at WestExec Advisors, and a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute. He previously served in the Obama administration in a variety of national security capacities, including as a senior policy advisor to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the White House National Security Council director for Brazil and Southern Cone affairs. He’s been cited, interviewed, and published in an array of media outlets in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. So thank you both for being with us for today’s conversation. Amy Erica, I thought we could begin with you. We just saw the election in October in Brazil. Lula became president. Can you talk about that election and the implications of the protests that we then saw in January, and where we are now? SMITH: OK. And you’re specifically interested in the religious angle on this, right, Irina? FASKIANOS: And the religious angle, but we could set the stage and then we can come back and focus in too on religion questions as well. SMITH: OK. So Brazil’s current president, President Lula, as I think probably most of our viewers know, is maybe the oldest political figure in terms of longevity on the Brazilian scene today. He was a part of the resistance to the military regime, and then has been running for president almost continuously since the return to democracy. Or, one of his proxies has been running for president in a few elections. So he is a longstanding, classic figure in Brazilian politics who Obama once referred to as “the most popular politician on the planet.” He’s highly charismatic, was extraordinarily popular during much of his presidency. So popular that he was able pretty much singlehandedly to get his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, elected to office in 2010. And then Dilma Rousseff was reelected in 2014, and subsequently impeached, and major scandals and political meltdown. In any case, so Lula was in office from January 1, 2003 through the end of 2010. So eight years. He has, of course, been out of office since then and is now back in the presidency, an older, wiser man, one might think. He was, historically, a member of what at one point was something close to a radical left. I don’t know if radical would be maybe an overstatement. But he was pretty far left at some point. And substantially moderated over time. As president, he had a relatively center-left government. And, speaking of religion, he had good, amicable relations with religious groups on the right, center, and the left. Subsequently, towards the end of his administration, and really under Dilma Rousseff, his successor, we had a rise in culture war politics in Brazil, which was really focused on issues of sexuality. To some extent abortion, but Brazilian public opinion is pretty conservative on abortion, relative to the United States, and there was never a lot of movement on abortion. Though, what little movement there was in terms of policy debate Lula was perceived as being more to the left than other politicians. But most of the culture war politics that arose kind of at the tail end of the Lula presidency and then afterwards was about—it was really focused on gender and sexuality—LGBTQ issues, in broad terms. The rise of sexuality politics in Brazil was associated with a religious backlash against the left. So while Lula had been really quite successful in marshalling support from religious actors all across the political spectrum, subsequently we started to see religious groups moving away from the left under Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, particularly upset about things like anti-LGBTQ bullying initiatives, and things like that. So the center and right were responsible for coalescing to impeach Dilma Rousseff in 2016. And all of this is associated with the rise of now-former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected to office in 2018. Jair Bolsonaro was long known as highly conservative, to the point of being, I think, by many people’s standards, reactionary. He was a supporter of the military regime—he had been a supporter of the military regime during the military regime. And he continued to defend the military regime in ways that were outside the political mainstream during his long career in public office, before he was elected president. So it was rather shocking to the political system to see someone who was an open proponent of the military regime be elected to office in 2018. Bolsonaro was elected in part with support of Evangelical groups. So the best analysis suggest that he would probably have narrowly lost the election in 2018 if it hadn’t been for the support of Evangelical groups. Of course, it’s hard to assess these kinds of counterfactuals, but it’s clear that Evangelicals were much more strongly supportive of Jair Bolsonaro than were members of any other religious group. A number of studies, including my own work, suggest that the support for Jair Bolsonaro is, I would say in some sense, spontaneous and sincere among Evangelicals, in that there were Evangelical leaders who came on in support of Jair Bolsonaro, but really the base of his support among religious groups, among religious conservatives, was driven by Evangelical masses, by Evangelicals themselves—lay Evangelicals, that is to say. So we had this Evangelical support for Bolsonaro that appeared to be really strongly related to Jair Bolsonaro’s conservatism on sexuality politics issues. These were the major issues that seemed to drive Evangelical support for him. So he was elected with strong Evangelical support in 2018. He was less popular among Evangelicals once he had taken office than he had been running in the election. He had a number of performance-related issues as president, including poor management of the COVID pandemic, economic malaise that was exacerbated, of course, by the pandemic. So he was not incredibly popular—he continued to be more popular with Evangelicals than he was with other religious groups, while not being a terribly popular president among Evangelicals either. He was, of course, defeated with little over 48 percent of the vote—close to 49 percent of the vote; more like 49 percent of the vote—in the second-round election of 2022. In that election, again, he was able to count on strong support from Evangelicals, though somewhat less than in other times. So what we found was that Evangelicals continued to be more attracted to Bolsonaro than were members of other religious groups. And at the same time, Evangelicals were less supportive of Bolsonaro in 2022 than they were in 2018. And a large part of this, again, is concern about performance-related issues. We, once again, in 2022 saw Evangelical leaders also climb onto the Evangelical bandwagon that was supportive of Bolsonaro. One of the major differences though, between 2018 and 2022, is that once Bolsonaro had lost and Lula had won, we saw religious leaders generally trying to build a truce with the Lula administration. So it doesn’t appear that religious groups are going to be a strong oppositional force against a Lula presidency, for the most part. Does that give an overview? Or is there something more that you’d like from me, Irina? FASKIANOS: That’s great. Why don’t we go to Nick and then we can come back to you. So, Nick, we see next week will be the first meeting between Presidents Biden and Lula. Or, actually, it’s happening this week. Is it happening this week? Next week, OK. So next week. So what do you expect the relationship to be? You worked in the Obama administration when Lula was president for part of that time, and I’m sure have studied it during the Trump years. And now what can you say—talk about a little bit about what we should expect the relationship between the U.S. and Brazil to—how will it evolve from where it's been? ZIMMERMAN: Sure and absolutely. Well, thanks, again, Irina, for having us, and putting on this event. It’s quite an opportunity. And I’m always happy when people are Brazil interested which, admittedly, has been happening more often as of late, given that it’s been having a prominent role in the headlines, it seems. Lula’s visit to the White House is happening upon a broader political backdrop that, in many ways, is quite eerie in how, within their own contexts, of course, and certain idiosyncrasies, these two countries’ political bodies have mirrored each other over their respective last several political cycles. This is a story of profound polarization, disillusionment with democracy as a form of government, a suspicion that the system is rigged, rife with corruption that range from the normal type of money laundering public corruption that might come to mind, to election fraud. And so if you take a step back, I think we need to look at this visit and the elections that just happened—both in the United States and in Brazil at the end of 2022—in the broader context of a moment in which global democracy is really being pushed, challenged, and stressed in ways that had not been the case in recent decades. And I think that both leaders are going to try to sit down and discuss that very topic. And it’s hard to get one’s arms around, frankly, in terms of government bureaucracy, how exactly can two countries that have been suffering from similar political dynamics in terms of their negative, in my view, impacts on their democratic fiber—what can they do together both in their respective countries, and then in other democracies around the world, to learn certain lessons? And so in many ways, I think this is going to be Lula and Biden trying to figure that very thing out, create a framework for cooperation. It’s very early on for Lula, obviously. It’s been literally one month. So I think that they’re going to try to touch on some really central topics, like the state of democracy in the world, like climate change and how they can lead together on that existential challenge, a number of human rights. Sort of more traditional foreign policy issues, like what’s going on in terms of the political crisis in Haiti, the ongoing political migration, refugee crisis in Venezuela, the complete disillusion of democracy in Nicaragua. And Lula has started to be very public about the fact that he envisions a role for Brazil as a mediator of some sorts, as a representative of the global south, perhaps, as a member of the G20, what have you. To try to engage also with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So there’s going to be a really rich agenda. I think it’s going to be more frame setting than a laundry list of deliverables and initiatives. But these are two veteran leaders. And Professor Smith spoke about Lula’s long history and trajectory in Brazil. Obviously, President Biden has a similarly long trajectory in U.S. politics. They knew each other. Their teams knew each other. There’s a lot of overlap, obviously, in the Biden-Harris administration and the overlap between the Obama-Biden administration, and the last two years of the Lula one, as well as the overlap that occurred after Lula departed and Dilma Rousseff took office. So we’ve got a lot of wily negotiators on both sides, to include the new Brazilian foreign minister who’s formerly the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, actually, when I worked at the White House. So I think they’re going to start to try to put a frame, so to speak, on the house, and try to fill it up as time goes by. I did just want to mention—as just a brief tangent—that I do see the trajectory bit of how we got here in Brazil, specifically, in terms of the polarization to not be as singularly driven by sexuality politics and gender ideology as perhaps Dr. Smith does. I agree, it was a driving factor, particularly I think in his second election—Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign, Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign. But we just can’t tell the full story also if we don’t talk about the legacy of corruption, and the fact that tens of millions of Brazilians across any slew of socioeconomic factors that you want to look at—from education and literacy rates to food insecurity rates. We’ve seen tremendous backsliding, after decades of success. And this was a corruption scandal, of course, that gets at the very core and root of the other part of Lula’s governing legacy, which were successive corruption scandals involving really all levels of the government apparatus, which actually netted him himself in prison. I mean, you can’t tell the full story of Lula if you don’t talk about the rise, the depth of the fall, and now where we are again here today. And the judicial overreaches and biases that led to his release do not also erase that legacy of corruption that led to, I think, a broader disillusionment that allowed someone like Jair Bolsonaro, who had been considered outside of the Brazilian mainstream previously, to not only rise in prominence but rise all the way to the presidency. And despite having a very, very bumpy tenure as president, as Dr. Smith outlined quite well, almost won again. Not unlike what we saw here in the United States in 2020. I’ll stop there for now. FASKIANOS: Maybe we can talk a little bit about the insurrection that we saw there and the links to what happened here on January 6, and just that interplay. SMITH: Sure. Are you asking Nick or are you asking me? FASKIANOS: I’d love to hear both of your perspectives. So, Amy Erica, why don’t you go first? SMITH: OK. Well, first of all, thanks to Nick for the really very good explanation. And I absolutely agree. And thanks for the correction. (Laughs.) You can’t really talk about the history of the past twelve years or the past twenty years in Brazil without talking about corruption scandals, and Lula’s strong association with corruption scandals. As far as where this insurrection came from, they were among the most telegraphed, feared outcomes. On the one hand, nobody expected them on the day they happened. And on the other hand, there had long been concern that this kind of thing would happen. Jair Bolsonaro had effectively announced that he was going to try to have this kind of thing happen. (Laughs.) And at the same time, the system wasn’t ready for it at the moment that it actually happened—which is how it happened, really. So as I said, Jair Bolsonaro had long been known as something of—somewhat ambivalent towards democracy in certain ways. He had been an apologist for the military regime, defender of the military regime’s use of torture. And this was all outside the military—or, outside the political mainstream, I would say, during the time that he was running for office. As he was running for office in 2018—that is, when he was running for office the first time. As he was running for office in 2018, he ran a nontraditional campaign in many different ways. But among the nontraditional components of it was that his skepticism of electoral procedure. So Brazil has a highly professionalized electoral administration service—or, a tribunal, court—which runs an electronic voting system that runs across the country and is consistently shown to be quite secure, and really quite free and fair. Elections are run efficiently smoothly, highly professionally in Brazil, and are widely recognized across the political spectrum in Brazil and across international circles as being really highly competent, and highly democratic in the sense of counting everybody’s vote. In any case, he raised skepticism of the election in 2018, of the electoral procedures in 2018. Claimed, without evidence, that he would have won in the first round if it hadn’t been for fraud in the first round. He ended up winning the second round of 2018. And then continued to beat that drum, off and on, throughout his presidency. And as in the lead-up to the 2022 election, started to make lots of claims about fraud, potential corruption, all kinds of issues that he said they were going to face in the 2022 election. Again, without what most independent parties thought was much evidence at all, and with a strong opposition of the Brazilian Supreme Court, which runs the Superior Electoral Tribunal. The Superior Electoral Tribunal is effectively an offshoot, a branch of the Supreme Court. So he went head to head over and over again with Supreme Court justices over whether elections in Brazil could be trusted. He ended up getting some members of the military to, I would say, not exactly endorse, but help to support his story about the potential of corruption. There were members of the military—high-ranking members of the military who, for instance, put forth a memo asking for a whole bunch of changes to electoral procedure, which were widely perceived as being irrelevant, or distracting, or harmful to election procedures in Brazil. In any case, so there was lots of electoral skepticism and attempt to foment the perception in the public that elections were rigged. There was also, along with this, skepticism of polls. Skepticism of polls fed on itself, where it appears that certain members of—some Bolsonaristas, some of the people who were most strongly attached to Bolsonaro, were less likely to answer polls because of skepticism of polls, which then led to polls to underrepresent support for Bolsonaro, in some cases. So we have all of this skepticism, perception of fraud going on. Following the election, there had been concern that Bolsonaro was going to try to stage a coup, or—most observers—most people who were observing most closely didn’t think he would actually try to stage a coup. But there were attempts that something along the lines was going to happen. That there might be a potential attempt at coup. That there might be some other kind of major unrest immediately following the election. Immediately following the election none of that materialized. He never acknowledged—he never conceded the election, and at the same time allowed his administration to proceed to work with Lula to plan the transition. So there was a grudging, if not true acceptance of the result, at least willingness to go along with Bolsonaro stepping down. At the same time, protests were proceeding across the country that were not directly spearheaded by Bolsonaro, though certainly Bolsonaro allies were involved, and Bolsonaro was maybe tacitly supporting some of these protests. One of the things that was different between 2022 Brazil and 2020 U.S. is that in the Brazilian case the allegiances of the armed forces were more in question. While the armed forces were clearly not going to support an overt coup—or, I think most people believed that they were clearly not going to support a coup, and in the end they did not support a coup—there were definitely members of the military who strongly supported Bolsonaro and were really highly sympathetic to the claims of election fraud, and the general disgruntlement among Bolsonaristas. And so a lot of these protests were happening outside military bases with effectively the tacit support of many of the people inside the military bases. Tacit, or non-tacit—or, overt. So all this heads into January 8. And in this run-up we also have an attempted bombing of a petroleum refinery. We have truckers who are blocking roads. And in some cases, we have members of the military themselves who are blocking roads, though that’s not supposed to be happening. So we have all this sort of social unrest heading into January 8. I think after Lula had taken office there was a perception that things were going to calm down, that the protests were going to calm down. The system appeared not to be ready for what happened on January 8. There were groups on Telegram and other social media sites that were organizing the protests of January 8. It was clear that this was going to happen, people knew it was going to happen, and yet the system was not ready to stop the protestors on January 8. There are real concerns about certain members of the military possibly having subverted the reaction—members of the military and other officials, having possibly subverted part of the response to January 8, which was what allowed it to get so out of control. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Nick, do you want to share your perspective? I mean, you did talk about this, the democracy piece in your opening, and what Lula and Biden will talk about vis-à-vis the protests—insurrection, I should say. ZIMMERMAN: Indeed. In many ways, for many of the reasons that Professor Smith cited, January, in retrospect anyway, seems like an inevitable—the inevitable, hopefully, culmination of really a multi-year, extremely sophisticated disinformation apparatus that has also played a huge role, I think, in polarizing the country. So Jair Bolsonaro really begins his national rise at a time when the way that one conducts politics in Brazil completely changes. Since Brazil returned to democracy, the way that you won elections was essentially by growing through a party system. There are many parties in Brazil. Many of them have fused, many have died, many have evolved. But nevertheless, you come up through them because you get access to public resources in a way that doesn’t exist in the United States, that enables you to grow a state-wide, or city-wide, or nation-wide profile. Because Brazil has always allowed for, during political campaign seasons, a certain amount of free advertising time, both on television and radio, on the basis of party’s representations in the legislature. And this was really the means by which Brazilian politicians introduced themselves to the populace. And for most of that period of time, there were really only two or three television channels and radio stations that dominated those mediums. And that’s all gone now, with social media. Jair Bolsonaro had very little public airwave time in the election that got him all the way to the presidency. But he has developed an incredibly sophisticated social media political messaging apparatus—YouTube, WhatsApp, Telegram. In 2018, it was these mass messages being sent around, and then being forwarded around by family members via WhatsApp. Sort of the second evolution of using social media for the express means of political disinformation, after the 2016 U.S. campaign where Facebook was the primary mechanism for it. And part of that was talking about how the system was rigged. Part of that was talking about all of this corruption that we just discussed in the governments prior. And part of that, yes, was that we can’t even trust the election results. And so this fraud narrative, as Dr. Smith said, it started before the last presidential cycle. And it was maintained as a narrative even though Bolsonaro became president, against all the odds. And increasingly the rhetoric ramped up, as he looked to be in trouble from COVID, from a decimated economy, from polarization that he can’t fully control and that had a counter reaction that also helped explain, in part, Lula’s restoration after he had really sunk to new lows in terms of his own political negativity ratings within the country. So much so that someone like Bolsonaro was able to win for exactly that reason. And so as part of the final stage of the campaigning, it became: You cannot trust the elections. And we are citing very obscure and, admittedly, sort of poorly worded language in the Brazilian constitution, ushered in after the dictatorship—some of which is a relic, frankly, of when there was a king from the Portuguese empire. It talks about, in Article 142 of the Brazilian constitution, a “moderating power.” This used to be the aristocrat, poder moderador, but which has been interpreted as a potential mechanism by which the military, of called upon by the president, or the judiciary, or congress to step in to reestablish order, could lead to some sort of new constitutional process, annulling Lula’s victory, potentially restoring Bolsonaro, or something else. But at least something else that wouldn’t be as left or anathema to what these groups want to see in the executive branch. And so all the conjecture about some sort of uprising, in some way or form, it was very clear to many of us what it was going to look like and what it was hoping to accomplish. But in broad strokes, there was a sense that if we can create enough of a ruckus, if we can create enough disorder we can create a public rationale to bring certain elements—it was never monolithic—of the intelligence establishment, security establishment, perhaps the military, other sub-regional leaders along with in saying: “Hey, something’s really awry here. We need to create a different type of constitutional order, election process, rethink how we check these things.” And that was sort of the vague rationale for doing something. Everyone thought that would, of course, happen while Bolsonaro was still president. No one still, as far as I know—it’s an unfolding investigation, so many chapters still to be written—no one fully knows why it happened after the transition had happened. I’ve heard everything from that was always the plan to it was literally that security was too tight on the day of, and that January 8 was the first day that they could penetrate the public buildings. I think that’s a story still to be told. And at some level, yeah, this was an attempt to create enough chaos to see if enough elements of Brazilian society would consider some sort of never fully defined plan B. And it was their version, although their process and the timing was totally different, of going after the electoral certification process at Congress and Vice President Pence at that time, in the U.S. context. Those were the objectives, at the end of the day. FASKIANOS: This is fantastic. I’ve got more questions, but let’s go to our group. You can either raise your hand and I’ll call on you, or else you can write your question in the Q&A. There are a couple in the chat. So if you want to write a question or make a comment, put it in the Q&A box. But I will read those. So I’m going to first go to John Chane, who has raised his hand. If you can unmute yourself. You still need to unmute yourself, John. OK. Let’s see. I’m going to give him one more—that is not working. If you want to type your question. There is in the chat a note from, let’s see, Rita Hipolito. And she says: It’s important to mention the growth of religious hatred that members of African-based religions suffered during the Bolsonaro government. So much so that the first law that Lula signed established a day of religions of African origin in January 6. Is this something, Amy Erica, you can talk about? SMITH: Yeah, briefly. So this animosity between religious conservatives, especially Evangelical groups—especially within and among Evangelical groups, especially neo-Pentecostal groups, and members of African-based religions is longstanding in Brazil. It predates Bolsonaro. There has been intense skepticism between these groups—well, with the skepticism more strongly on the side of Evangelicals being skeptical of Afro-Brazilian groups. And effectively, Evangelicals and Pentecostals framing Afro-Brazilian religious groups as “devil worship.” The animosity has intensified in the past five or six years, as the sort of culture war has built up. One has to at least briefly mention the longstanding racial discrimination and racial prejudice in Brazil, which is certainly part of this. But it goes beyond racial discrimination and racial prejudice, to sort of, I’d say, a very religious kind of debate over revealed truth and those kinds of things. So this hostility has reached the point where—well, actually, twenty years ago—a major Evangelical leader, Edir Macedo, the bishop of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, destroyed some African icons on TV. This is the first major incidence of interreligious, I guess, violence—a form of interreligious violence in Brazilian public media. But the incident, in which Edir Macedo destroyed Afro-Brazilian religious icons on TV was only sort of echoed and continued. That kind of interreligious conflict continued to be a part of Brazilian political culture. And it has intensified. We now have periodic violence against not just attacking religious icons and religious symbols, but actually temples for Afro-Brazilian terreiros, they’re called. So effectively, religious facilities for Afro-Brazilian groups, sometimes attacking actual religious services of Afro-Brazilian religious groups. So, yeah, there’s been a fair amount of religious violence. And it has been gradually increasing in Brazil, substantially increasing now over the past few years. The establishment of a day of religions of African origin, an official day to recognize religions of African origin is, of course, important. And it’s also not by itself going to stop violence against these groups, in part because the violence is lawless. More needs to happen in order to stop that violence. FASKIANOS: Nick. ZIMMERMAN: Sure. And I’ll try to add to that one, and also I see we have questions about Bolsa Familia and the environment as well. So I’ll try to take all in one. I agree with really most of what Professor Smith just said. I would argue—or, not argue—I would just add that it goes even beyond, of course, notwithstanding the focus of the question, it goes even far beyond Afro-Brazilian communities and beliefs. We are talking about one of the most religiously pluralistic and diverse [places], and ethnically too. I mean, I think we’re all increasingly horrified by the reports coming out of the Amazon right now, which leads to the climate question, and the opening, burgeoning investigation by the Brazilian judiciary into the Bolsonaro administration, now past, possibly on suspicion of genocide for the way that they treated and provided public assistance to the Yanomani tribe. So, a number of other minority communities in Brazil have traditionally historically had a pretty rough run of it. And as Dr. Smith just alluded to, that’s an entirely separate conversation and area of rich academic research and focus. But it permeates, I think, throughout today. And so much of what’s involved in the polarization of public discourse is, of course, pitting groups against each other—us versus them—in sort of increasingly demonizing ways. And I think we’ve seen in many different political, cultural, religious contexts around the world that, unfortunately, there’s a very real correlation to that and violence, societal violence. Brazil, I think, is no exception. So that ties, I think, a bit to climate and Bolsa Familia. Bolsa Familia is no longer called Bolsa Familia. We’ll see if Bolsa Familia gets named back. Bolsonaro changed it as part of his marketing campaign to try to own and improve his standing politically, support levels with lower-income Brazilians. It’s been—it was expanded during the pandemic through emergency spending measures. Bolsonaro had indicated if reelected that he would bring it down a bit, and that that temporary expansion would not be permanent. Lula was able to secure, as really his first negotiation with Congress, an additional year of that expanded funding. To be clear, it will never go away. We’re talking about what level does it get funded at. And this is a major, major piece of his political platform. Undoing the backsliding that Brazil has seen in terms of anti-poverty, I think, as you write, is probably his single highest domestic priority. Eliminating food insecurity, upping education levels, investing in education, public health care. These are all things that have traditionally really animated and motivated (inaudible) as well as his broader political movement and party, the Workers’ Party. If that’s a preferential option for the poor, I’m not sure I would use exactly that language, but I think that using the levers of the government to ameliorate socioeconomic disparity has always been Lula’s top domestic priority throughout his entire trajectory as a politician, dating back to his time as a union leader, which Dr. Smith alluded to at the beginning of our conversation. So, preferential or not, it’s what he considers his base, socioeconomically. There is an objective need by most any macroeconomic indicator that you want to look at over the last couple years. And I would expect that space to be very busy in terms of his domestic focus in these initial years. In terms of climate, I’m somewhat optimistic, though Lula’s track record on climate is mixed, historically. This is, I think, a politician and a president who believes in climate change, doesn’t deny its devastating impacts. That’s, at least, a good place to start. When he was president [previously], he enacted a number of policies that were really effective. We saw sustained declined in rates of deforestation under his presidency, almost for a decade straight. But that stalled, and then started to reverse. And that was before Bolsonaro, although then it got far, far worse under him. Again, it just shows that it’s a constant fight. It need a lot of attention. A lot of the government agencies that work on that, which are some of the most specialized in the world, were hollowed out in terms of staff and budgeting. And not unlike some of the reports we heard about what happened in federal agencies in the United States, like the EPA, for example, in years past. So this is going to take a while. He’s putting in a lot of people who have a good track record, who believe in this. And I think he realizes that it is also a gateway to him reestablishing Brazil’s global leadership. And that is something that he very much wants. He wants Brazil back amongst that first tier of countries dealing with the world’s issues. And I think that he saw how much Bolsonaro’s track record, or lack thereof, on climate, made Brazil a pariah, along with a lot of the other issues that we’ve been talking about. But climate was also first and foremost, right? And so I expect to see a bit of a change. Though he will never do anything that could be construed as compromising Brazilian sovereignty, which is always the international debate over the Amazon. And in the past, this motivated decisions from him that were controversial, that led to deforestation, like the creation of the mega Belo Monte Dam, which occurred under his and Dilma Rousseff’s government. And which he saw as vital to sort of the socioeconomic development of a region which is the poorest sub region in Brazil. I think it’s a new day. I think that we have reason to believe that we will again start to see falling rates of deforestation in the Amazon. But it’s a Herculean effort, and one that, appropriate within a Brazilian context, does require, I think, international support and intention, and for many years to come. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. SMITH: Can I just briefly answer? FASKIANOS: Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. SMITH: Can I briefly answer Ralston Deffenbaugh’s question as well? FASKIANOS: Yes. SMITH: Because I think the core of the question is, what is the role of the Catholic left in the policies of Lula’s early administration. So to answer Mr. Deffenbaugh’s question, I looked at his bio. I think you’re at the Lutheran World Service. To answer Mr. Deffenbaugh’s question, there were historically strong ties between the Catholic left and the early days of Lula’s political activism and of the Workers’ Party, and his early presidency. Would we say that the Catholic left is directly responsible for Bolsa Familia? I would not say that. But I would say that notions such as a preferential option for the poor were part and parcel of the milieu. They were inherent in the milieu of the early days of the Workers’ Party. And Lula has long had strong ties to a number of liberation theologian thinkers. And so, yeah, I would say that—can be considered a preferential option for the poor—that I’m not sure that I would say that this is specifically a policy of the Catholic left. But I would say that it is something that grows out of an administration that was strongly tied in its early days and in its development to the Catholic left. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Reginaldo Braga, if you could unmute yourself. BRAGA: Yes. Thank you so much. FASKIANOS: And identify yourself, please. BRAGA: Absolutely. Reginaldo Braga. Native of Brazil. U.S. citizen after almost thirty years. Faculty of religion and education at an African American institution here in the South. I’m very curious. Our take on the political and social processes of Brazil started, I would say, rather recently. I’m very curious on the comments also, as we would bring together our domestic policies, as you, Nick, suggested, and our foreign policies and our, United States—or force of the United States—interested on what has been going on in Brazil. Take, for instance, if you look at the upcoming relations of Brazil-U.S., I would be very curious. Many of us would still remember the NSA case that pried on Dilma Rousseff. Many of us would remember the case that was made to Lula in the times of Bill Clinton, even, to disarticulate arguments of Brazilian further international policies. And the questions of the deep-sea reserves. Which ended up bringing to us, all of us, a sense that effective regime change ended up happening in Brazil with Dilma Rousseff. And a very curious aspect of the effective invalidation of the popular vote, which since the time of Citi Group, Citi Corp reports on plutocracies, has posed the question of are we really going into this reengineering of democracy and enabling the ability of individuals as such. So I’m very curious of these forces. If you think about religion, for years then monies and articulations, there is a big back and forth from right-wing, or more on the religious side—on the right-wing religious side of the United States, going also to the United States. I’m curious to see that conversation of our own forces’ participation and where we are with our domestic policy and foreign policy intersecting. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Who wants to take that, start? Nick? You’re unmuting first. ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. I mean, I’d be happy to. I mean, Reginaldo raised a number of issues in the bilateral relationship. I confess, I’m not sure I heard much of a question in there. I’m not sure—you’re just curious about how the leaders will talk about issues of democracies, given that there have been tensions in the relationship in the past? Do I understand you correctly? Is that right? BRAGA: I think that we can go with that. I’m concerned with the engineering and the perceptions of our own senses of defense of democracy. Because it’s not just a matter on the Brazilian case. The Brazilian case, as Roberto DaMatta would probably say—you probably have encountered him already—there is an underside, or there is a distorted mirror to the U.S. democracy too. I mean, you can raise the question. To me, it’s very concerning to see that an entire election, and following the demise of Dilma Rousseff, the very invalidation of the social mandate that the elections were given were systematically disassembled. And that’s— FASKIANOS: Thank you. OK, thank you. ZIMMERMAN: OK, I think I have a little bit of a better sense. So first of all, I would agree with Reginaldo that a lot of inflection and reflection needs to occur in the United States with respect to the state of its democracy. I actually think that’s where I started my comments, when I talked about how much the political bodies of the two countries have increasingly reflected each other, at least dating back, I would argue, four or five presidential cycles. And so in no way was I suggesting that—and I never said this—that the conversation about democracy between President Biden and President Lula should only be about Brazilian democracy. And in fact, based on the comments that I’ve seen from both leaders, that is the intent of neither for the conversation. It’s actually to kind of come together, and commiserate, and talk about what can be done about these issues. The U.S. Congress, Democratic congressional leaders, have talked about, for example, sharing their lessons learned now that it’s concluded into how they conducted their investigation into January 6, if that would be of some sort of interest to their counterparts in Brazilian Congress. That’s one possibility. Perhaps Brazil and the United States can work together to start strengthening, through resourcing and technical capacity training, right, beef up election monitoring and observing organizations to make sure that we’ve got more of an infrastructure, both on the ground but also in terms of communications to debunk some of the myths about election fraud. All of these are examples. I have several others. But they’re based in real conversations that are being thought through and discussed at various different levels in the capitals of both countries. So just want to clarify there. I think Reginaldo perhaps interpreted my commented in a different way, because actually in many ways I think we agree. And the fragility that we’ve seen in the last several years about U.S. democracy in part is why I think the Biden administration has come out repeatedly in public, unlike many of Brazil’s other closest parties, to defend its electoral process, quickly recognize Lula’s victory, and make it such a priority to have him come up in the very first weeks of his presidency. I think the traumas that the two countries’ democracies have experienced in years past is why there might be an opportunity for a new kind of relationship, which has always been marked by great tension, as Reginaldo and others have noted, and also profound areas of collaboration. That’s the nature of the beast. Democracy and geopolitics is complicated. And when you’re talking about two of the five or six, depending on how you classify it, democracies in the world, their interests are never going to fully align. That’s the case with the U.S. and India, China, the EU. That has been, it will continue to be the case, with Brazil. That’s all the more reason for why it’s important that this visit’s happening now. And I hope there are many more to come. I’ll stop there. I know we’re running out of time. I’m sure Dr. Smith will want to jump in too. FASKIANOS: Yes, well, I’d like to get in one more question, if we can. And Katie Burns, who’s at the U.S. State Department. Based on your analysis, how might the Lula administration engage, or not, on questions of indigenous spirituality as an arm of how it engages on freedom of religion or belief policies, or otherwise? Climate, environment, protection of sacred land, for instance? Especially considering the establishment of Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and burgeoning investigation into abuses against the Yanomami community. There’s a lot there. We don’t have very much time, but. Amy Erica, do you want to go first? And maybe sum up— SMITH: Oh, that’s a huge question. And it’s a fantastic one. How might the Lula administration engage? I anticipate that the Lula administration will be highly sympathetic, certainly in terms of sort of the level of policy rhetoric will be highly sympathetic to support for indigenous spirituality. This is part of the historical tendency of the Brazilian left and center-left, is support for non-Christian religious groups and spiritualities. I also see that the support for indigenous spirituality will go along with support for indigenous rights and indigenous lands, more broadly. One of the things that’s happened in Brazil is that there’s a very strong association—I think this is underlying Katie’s question—is that there’s a very strong association between support for the indigenous and support for the environment. There are studies that show conclusively that protection of indigenous lands and territories is really, really good for the Brazilian environment. The more demarcation you have, and the more empowered indigenous groups are to protect that land, the better things are for the Brazilian Amazon, and the rainforests in general, beyond the Amazon. So, yes. I anticipate that the Lula administration will, at the level of rhetoric, strongly support indigenous spirituality, and also support demarcation that’s related to indigenous understandings of—when I say “demarcation,” I mean demarcation of territory. Demarcation of indigenous reservations. So support for demarcation of indigenous reservations, that’s driven, in part, by indigenous understandings of spirituality. I would say there is a tension here that just occurred to me. That there’s also going to be a tension with Evangelical groups, because Evangelicals perceive their mission as being—or, one of their missions—as being evangelization within indigenous territories, and possibly that there are potential conflicts that will emerge from this. I suspect that Lula’s going to try to thread the needle and work with Evangelical groups, while also ultimately siding with indigenous groups, for the most part. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And, Nick, do you want to add to that? ZIMMERMAN: I just—yeah, thank you. (Laughs.) FASKIANOS: Fantastic. And we are at the end of our hour. So, unfortunately, we can’t get to the final question there. So my apologies. But thank you both for this really terrific conversation, to everybody who joined with their written questions and verbal questions. We appreciate it. You can follow Amy Erica Smith’s work on her website at amyericasmith.org, and Nick Zimmerman’s work at wilsoncenter.org. So go there to see what they’re writing about and saying. And you can follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy Program on Twitter at @CFR_religion. And please do reach out to us. Write to [email protected] with any suggestions or questions. Thank you, again. We hope you will join us at our next Social Justice Webinar on social safety nets. It will take place on Thursday, February 23, at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. You will get that invitation under separate cover. So, again, thank you to Nick, and Amy Erica, and to all of you. Have a great day. SMITH: Thank you, everybody. Bye.