The Future of U.S. Empire in the Americas: The Trump Administration and Beyond by Timothy M Gill

Author:Timothy M Gill [Gill, Timothy M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429756894
Goodreads: 48616236
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

One of the cities proposed for such a court was Curitiba, home to one judge Sérgio Moro, who, only a few years later, led a crusade to prosecute, convict, and imprison Lula based on tenuous allegations, all while being praised as a “corruption buster” in the foreign press (Spektor 2016; Leahy and Schipani 2018). One of the speakers of honor at the conference was Moro himself, who discussed “the 15 most common issues he sees in money laundering cases” (Kubiske 2009: 6). And one of the techniques discussed for prosecuting illicit financial crimes was something that at the time was not permitted in Brazil but was common in the U.S. – plea bargains.

In 2013, Wikileaks released State Department cables that showed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on the communications of world leaders, including Rousseff. In 2015, additional Wikileaks releases showed that the spying had gone beyond Dilma to include her chief of staff and key cabinet and military officials, a campaign that Wikileaks called “economic espionage,” designed to give U.S. corporations an advantage in Brazil (Bugging Brazil 2015). Of course, in and of itself, the spying was not particularly shocking and did not offer direct evidence of promotion of regime change – the U.S. had similarly spied on their French and German allies. Nonetheless, Wikileaks’ revelations of spying brought into sharp relief the inseparability of American national interests from those of U.S. corporations.

More striking are the possible ties between the U.S. and the anti-Rousseff protests that appeared in 2015, seemingly out of nowhere. In 2014, after Rousseff was “narrowly” re-elected by a margin almost identical to Obama’s 2012 victory over Mitt Romney, defeated center-right candidate Aécio Neves sought to cast doubt on the results, claiming that the PT had acted in “unthinkable bad faith” in supposedly using state resources to support its campaign (Góis 2014).7 Although U.S. media cast the protests as the reaction of a citizenry fed up with corruption and compared them with the 1984 mass protests that heralded the end of the military dictatorship, there is serious doubt as to their spontaneity (Darlington 2015; Romero 2016).

The anti-Rousseff protests were organized by a variety of civil society groups that all appeared at about the same time. For example, the Free Brazil Movement (Movimento Brasil Livre – MBL) was founded in late 2014 as an organization whose aim was to fight for the implementation of “liberal” (that is, libertarian) economic principles in Brazil. The MBL has received funding from the libertarian Atlas Network, which itself counts the Koch Brothers among its donors, and MBL leaders have attended Atlas-funded Students for Liberty training events in the U.S. (Feng 2017). Indeed, Students for Liberty was quite proud of its Brazilian protégés, dedicating a cover story to the MBL in the Fall 2015 issue of their magazine (Libertarian Students, 2015). As for the Atlas Network, The Intercept has described it as “a quiet extension of U.S. foreign policy, with Atlas-associated think tanks receiving quiet funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a critical arm of American soft power” (Feng 2017: 9).

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