Brazil: colossus of the south
Editorial
Stabroek News
May 7, 2002
Starting with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's stopover at Timehri on 5 March, and continuing with the Brazilian Embassy's art exhibition and announcement of scholarships to study in federal universities, Governor Neudo Ribeiro Campos's farewell call on President Bharrat Jagdeo, Secretary General of the Ministry of External Relations Osmar Chohfi's signing of five agreements with Guyana Government agencies, and ending with the visit of a three-vessel naval task force on 24-26 April, relations between Brazil and Guyana seemed to have reached an all-time high over the past two months.
Despite having exchanged ambassadors thirty-four years ago, Guyana and Brazil have always found it difficult to maintain that upper-level, longer-term, higher-technology co-operation which goes much beyond cultural exchanges, courtesy calls and mutual expressions of goodwill. An examination of the five agreements signed by Ambassador Chohfi tells a tale of Guyana's low expectations: co-operating with the Federal Police, clearing military ordnance debris, growing better cassava, improving meat and dairy yields and controlling acoushi ants. There were times when scores of Guyanese students studied in Brazilian universities; military officers attended Brazil's staff colleges and combat schools; the Cruzeiro do Sul airline flew regularly between Boa Vista and Timehri; the Paranapanema company busied itself with trying to build the Georgetown to Lethem and Charity to Supenaam highways, and even the Guyana Electricity Corporation borrowed generators from Electronorte. But there has been little economic or diplomatic dividend from this assistance.
Relations, like the countries themselves, have always been unequal. But Guyana seemed to have neither the diplomatic skill and political will to exploit fully the opportunities made possible through friendship with its southern neighbour, nor the administrative capacity to execute efficiently the enormous amount of bilateral agreements on every imaginable subject - agriculture, culture, education, energy co-operation, health, highway construction and scientific research.
Brazil, with a GDP of $588 billion, is the world's tenth largest economy. Its population of 170 million and land area of 8,500,000 km2, make it the fifth largest country in the world. With some justification, the Federative Republic of Brazil calls itself 'O Colosso do Sur' (the Colossus of the South), a deliberate comparison with the United States of America to which it refers as the 'Colossus of the North', suggesting that the two are of equal status within their respective spheres.
So, Brazil has little need to aim at Guyana's midget markets. And as for land, it benefited immensely from the King of Italy's generous arbitral award (at Guyana's expense) in 1904. Brazil now impatiently brushes aside Guyana's grumbling about the depredations of its garimpeiros with Osmar Chohfi's rationalisation that those hardy entrepreneurs are merely fulfilling an economic need and, if there was no market for them, they would not be here!
Brazil's aims, however, go far beyond economic necessity; they are essentially an expression of its geopolitical strategy. From the start of Guyana's interminable turmoil in the 1950s, Brazil's military strategists and geopolitical theorists regarded Guyana as a dangerous liability, a view which Cheddi Jagan's infatuation with communism in the 1950s and 1960s, and Forbes Burnham's flirtation with socialism in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to confirm. The policy of the army generals who ruled Brazil for two decades after their coup of 1964 was driven by national security concerns, not market forces. These were the concerns behind the Brazilian-sponsored 1978 Treaty of Amazonian Co-operation and various military initiatives to secure its 6,535 km northern frontier with its five fractious northern neighbours: Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and Guyane. The agreement for a highway through the heart of Guyana's hinterland was a strategic masterstroke.
This year's events emphasise not only Guyana's inequality but also its inability to craft a realistic Brazil policy. Neither the President (apart from his attendance at the South American Presidents' Summit in 2000) nor Foreign Minister has found it possible to pay an official visit to Brazil. Guyana's tiny embassy in Brasilia is little more than a post office. The road project languishes.
One is left to wonder whether Guyana will be able to make full use even of the paltry help it has been offered in catching criminals, cleaning up Camp Groomes, producing better cattle and cassava and controlling acoushi ants!