After Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro disregarded a U.S. request to call off his upcoming meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the Biden administration still hopes the right-wing South American leader takes the opportunity to defend “democratic principles” in Moscow.
Brazilian media reported that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked the Brazilian government to cancel the president’s trip out of concern for the message it would send when the international community is focused on defusing the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. A defiant Bolsonaro defended his travel plans, saying Brazil is a sovereign country and that he wanted to discuss trade and defense cooperation with Putin.
Short of canceling, the U.S. hopes Bolsonaro can give Putin the the right message.
“The United States and many other nations are deeply concerned about the destabilizing role that Russia is playing and its ongoing threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” a State Department official told the Miami Herald. “As democratic leaders, the United States and Brazil have a responsibility to stand up for democratic principles and the rules-based order. We hope Brazil will take this opportunity to reinforce this message in their conversations in Moscow.”
In a YouTube video, Bolsonaro, who arrived Tuesday in Moscow and is set to meet with Putin on Wednesday, said, “The whole world has its problems. If you start wanting to solve the problems of others... If it’s possible, [if] my word there, of peace, helps, that’s fine.”
The visit to Moscow, the second by a South American leader in the past few weeks, highlights Russia’s inroads in a region that was traditionally thought of as being in the U.S.’s natural sphere of influence. Although thousands of miles away from Latin America, Ukraine’s crisis has again brought to the forefront the challenges the Biden administration faces, as foreign powers like Russia and China compete to fill the void left over the years by a waning U.S. leadership in the region.
Earlier this month, left-leaning Argentine President Alberto Fernandez offered his country as Russia’s “gateway to Latin America” during a meeting with Putin.
“I think it’s a setback to have Latin American leaders going to Moscow in the run-up to a potential war; it’s exactly the wrong signal,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Washington-based Council of the Americas.
Farnworth, a former State Department diplomat, said that Bolsonaro’s refusal to cancel the trip also opens up questions about consequences.
“The question that Washington has to ask is, if we have made a request that’s ignored, what are we prepared to do to try to ensure that future requests are not ignored?” he said. “I do think that it’s time to engage over time, to re-engage because it’s not helpful to the international community to go over and land at least rhetorical support to a dictator who’s threatening his neighbors.”
Putin also recently held calls with the authoritarian leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. A Russian official even spoke of military deployments to some of these nations, reminding the Biden administration that Russia could challenge the U.S. closer to its borders.
Fernandez’s trip to Moscow has particularly confounded experts as it happened just days after Argentina secured a deal with the International Monetary Fund to renegotiate the country’s debt, with U.S. support.
Latin American observers said Bolsonaro and Fernandez have their own domestic agendas, and some believe their trips say more about the region’s values than about U.S. influence.
“The visits to Moscow by the presidents of South America’s two largest countries are a demonstration of the region’s geopolitical irrelevance,” said Benjamin Gedan, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program. “Serious leaders are frantically reaching out to Vladimir Putin to prevent an invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, Alberto Fernández and Jair Bolsonaro appear oblivious, prioritizing minor commercial opportunities over democratic values and their relationships with the United States and European partners.”
Gedan said their trips are also an effect of the region’s “overreliance on non-alignment,” a principle that has been invoked several times in Latin American history to avoid taking sides.
“It is one thing to sidestep tensions between Washington and Beijing; after all, China is a monumentally important source of trade and investment for Latin America, and the struggling region is desperate for both,” he said. “The same cannot be said for Russia, yet Fernández graciously offered to serve as Putin’s ‘Puerta de entrada’ to Latin America.”
The gestures to Moscow by the populist leaders of two of the largest South American countries are the latest in a series of diplomatic mishaps that have not gone unnoticed.
After Vice President Kamala Harris attended the inauguration of newly elected Honduras president Xiomara Castro, carrying an optimistic message about repairing the bilateral relationship, the new government restored relations with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. And tensions over Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s attacks on journalists and a proposed energy bill that would drastically limit renewable energy are also escalating.
Some members of Congress have grown frustrated for what they perceive as a lack of clear policy strategies toward the region. Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) proposed legislation last week to advance cooperation and counter the security challenges posed by the “destabilizing impacts of dictatorships and the malign influence of foreign states,” Menendez said in a statement.
“There is no greater threat in our region than the growing meddling of Russia and China in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Rubio said. “This bipartisan bill seeks to foster and improve our security cooperation with democracies in our hemisphere as well as facilitate trade in order to deter malign actors from coercing countries in our own backyard.”
While it has been years in the making, the proposal feels more urgent given the current developments, congressional staffers said.
To Farnsworth, the Biden administration still has some fundamental questions to answer.
“At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had a huge amount of influence, and naturally that was going to be reduced over time, just as other countries found a stronger voice,” he said. “But I guess the question I would add is, how much influence have we actually tried to use in the Western Hemisphere? What are we trying to accomplish?”
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