The consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to include oeo on the lists of Specially Designated Terrorist Groups and Foreign Terrorist Organizations are not yet known. The double framework adds financial sanctions to criminal measures and immigration restrictions.
As a result, the fight against factions ceases to be a police problem for Brazil and becomes a matter of national security for the United States, opening gaps for sanctions and unilateral actions — such as secret operations or even the use of military force — outside Brazilian control.
Experts are divided on the extent of the damage that this unilateral measure could bring to police cooperation between the two countries, which has long been established, as well as to the financial sector and national companies operating in the United States.
Without a doubt, the transnational nature of , of which PCC and CV are exponents, requires a similar concerted effort to face it. But there is also no doubt that Brazil has nothing to gain by submitting to the US discretion the necessary and urgent fight against the criminal factions that terrorize the population, infiltrate economic activity and corrupt the political system.
The episode serves, moreover, to reveal the astonishing way the country leads, not only in the fight against crime, but above all in its relations with the world and with one of its most important international partners.
The spectacle offered by the White House —immortalized in the photo with Trump in the Oval Office— would be merely eerie, if it did not indicate absolute ignorance about the reality of relations between Brazil and the USA, as well as about the best tradition of Brazilian diplomacy.
Since the 1950s, there have been few occasions on which the country has unconditionally aligned itself with the United States. One of them, which was short-lived, occurred during the Castelo Branco government (1964-1967), when the country supported the invasion of the Dominican Republic; another, more recently, in the two-year period in which Itamaraty was under the command of the delusional chancellor Ernesto Araujo, during the mandate of Jair Bolsonaro.
For decades, bilateral relations were shaped, through ups and downs, by cooperation when interests converged; through negotiation when it was possible to make them converge; and by distancing when differences were non-negotiable.
Today, Brazil occupies an intermediate position on the international scale of power. It is a global trader whose biggest partners are China and the United States; participates in different multilateral arrangements and aspires to have a voice in global forums. To this end, it has important assets: environmental heritage; prominent place as a food provider; and, now, deposits of strategic minerals and rare earths.
It is not in its nature, as a State with medium power, to align itself unconditionally with any power — much less to delegate delicate decisions to any of them, such as those regarding its security. But the Bolsonaro family and their supporters will never understand this.
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