If Bolsonaro really wants to transform and secure Brazil's natural resources and stabilize the economy - he would be wise to take the needed steps - like President Rodrigo Duterte did in the Philippine's? Limit US involvement in it's affairs and minimize any foreign manipulation. Another situation Balsonaro might be dealing with is the power structure of the Catholic church. As can be noted in the US's meddling in Nicaragua, the Pope is in on the game of creating chaos. Philippine's Duterte has openly denounced the Church for it's corruption and interference into domestic affairs. Brazil has a high population of Catholics.
Catholic Church in Brazil - Wikipedia
The Catholic Church is the largest denomination in the country, where 130 million people, or 64.6% of the Brazilian population, are self-declared
Catholics. These figures makes Brazil the single country with the largest Catholic community in the world.
January 2, 2019 - Pompeo, Brazil's new government target Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua
Pompeo, Brazil's new government target Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua | Reuters
Back-dated June 19, 2018 - US Gov. Meddling Machine Boasts of ‘Laying the Groundwork for Insurrection’ in Nicaragua
US Gov. Meddling Machine Boasts of 'Laying the Groundwork for Insurrection' in Nicaragua - Grayzone Project
As Nicaraguan student protest leaders meet with neoconservatives in Washington, DC, a publication funded by the US government’s regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), boasts of spending millions of dollars “laying the groundwork for insurrection” against Daniel Ortega.
While some corporate media outlets have portrayed the violent protest movement gripping Nicaragua as a progressive grassroots upswell, the country’s own student leaders have suggested otherwise.
In early June, Nicaragua’s leading young activists went on a junket to Washington, DC, on the dime of the US government-funded right-wing advocacy group Freedom House. The Nicaraguan student leaders were there to beseech Donald Trump and other right-wing US government officials to help them in their fight against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
On the excursion to the US capital, the young activists posed for photo-ops with some of the most notorious neoconservatives in the US Congress: Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The Nicaraguan student leaders were also shepherded to meetings with top officials from the State Department and the US government soft power organization USAID. There, they were reassured that they would have Washington’s full-throated support.
A month before the student protesters’ meetings with ultra-conservative lawmakers in Washington, a publication funded by the US government’s regime change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), bluntly asserted that organizations backed by the NED have spent years and millions of dollars “laying the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.
This article openly
boasting of US meddling was published in the Latin America-focused news website
Global Americans, and was authored by US academic
Benjamin Waddell, the academic director of the School for International Training in Nicaragua. Following publication of this piece, Global Americans replaced the term “insurrection” with the more innocuous word “change.” The original headline can however still be seen in the article’s URL.
Despite the cosmetic alteration, Waddell’s article offers a remarkably candid assessment of the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy’s sustained investments in Nicaraguan civil society. The author’s conclusions inadvertently echoed those of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his supporters, who have framed the protests as a carefully staged plot backed to the hilt by Washington.
“International press has depicted the rapid escalation of civil unrest in Nicaragua as a spontaneous explosion of collective discontent, triggered by the government’s changes to its insolvent social security system and rooted in more than a decade of authoritarian rule by the Ortega-Murillo family,” Waddell wrote. “And while the underlying causes of the turmoil are rooted in government mismanagement and corruption, it’s becoming more and more clear that the U.S. support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
In another striking passage, Waddell concluded, “the NED’s current involvement in nurturing civil society groups in Nicaragua sheds light on the power of transnational funding to influence political outcomes in the 21st century.” (Article continues.)
December 14, 2018 - Every Single Member of US Congress Approved Crushing Sanctions on Nicaragua
Every Single Member of US Congress Approved Crushing Sanctions on Nicaragua - Grayzone Project
After defeating a violent US-backed coup attempt, Nicaragua’s elected government faces the NICA Act. The bill aims to force the Sandinistas from power by ratcheting up economic despair.
Every single member in both chambers of the US Congress approved legislation that will impose sanctions and financial restrictions on Nicaragua in an explicit effort to weaken its government.
Known as the NICA Act, the bill is now on its way to the desk of President Donald Trump, who will almost certainly sign it into law. Its passage was spearheaded by neoconservative lawmakers centered around the Miami lobby of right-wing Latin American exiles dedicated to eradicating any iteration of socialism in the Western hemisphere.
The United States has spent decades trying to topple Nicaragua’s government, now led by the left-wing Sandinista movement. In April,
US-backed opposition figures launched an unsuccessful and exceedingly
violent coup attempt in the Central American country — one of the last bastions of leftist politics in an increasingly right-leaning Latin America.
The newly approved
Nicaraguan Investment and Conditionality Act (NICA) will give the US president the authority to impose targeted sanctions on Nicaraguan government officials, former officials, or people purportedly “acting on behalf of” Managua.
The bill also seeks to prevent international financial institutions from providing “any loan or financial or technical assistance” to Nicaragua’s government.
The NICA Act enjoyed bipartisan support, but the campaign behind it was largely led by neoconservative Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, with help from Senators Marco Rubio and
Ted Cruz. Ros-Lehtinen and Cruz met for a
Facebook live this December 13 to celebrate the bill’s passage.
In June, these three right-wing Cuban-American lawmakers gathered with young leaders of the Nicaraguan opposition in Washington, DC.
The NICA Act encourages the US government to increase assistance to anti-government “civil society in Nicaragua, including independent media, human rights, and anti-corruption organizations” and to “support the protection of human rights and anti-corruption advocates in Nicaragua.”
The legislation also suggests that political negotiations should be “mediated by the Catholic Church in Nicaragua,” which has for decades supported violent right-wing forces in the region.
This October, leaked audio revealed the Catholic Church’s auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio Baez, conspiring with the opposition to oust Nicaragua’s elected president, Daniel Ortega.
The unity that we need at this moment must include everyone opposed to the government, even if they are suspected of being opportunists, abortionists, homosexuals, [drug] traffickers…,” Baez declared, according to a translation of the leaked audio.
Baez urged the opposition to put up more of the
tranque roadblocks that had plunged the country into violence and strangled its economy, describing them as “an extraordinary invention.”
In November, USAID Director Mark Green announced an infusion of $4 million to civil society and media groups opposed to the Sandinista front.
Neoconservative gloating
In September, the NICA Act was
combined with a remarkably similar bill from Democratic New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez: the
Nicaragua Human Rights and Anticorruption Act, which imposed additional sanctions on Nicaraguan government officials.
Menendez – a Cuban-American whose legal defense from corruption charges was bankrolled by the pro-Israel lobby – joined his neoconservative colleagues in referring to Nicaragua’s democratically elected president, Daniel Ortega, as a “dictator” who leads a “regime.”
Ortega — who voluntarily stepped down from power after losing an election to a US-backed right-wing oligarch in 1990 — won his third presidential term in 2011 with 62 percent of the vote, in what international observers recognized was a fair election. Even the staunchly anti-Sandinista New York Times admitted at the time that Ortega had widespread support.
Ros-Lehtinen declared that “the NICA Act that will help the Nicaraguan people break free of Ortega’s despotic rule.” She has previously insinuated that Nicaragua was a national security threat to the US, proclaiming, “We must also remain vigilant of efforts by Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China and Iran that continue to help Ortega with military equipment, surveillance, and other technology support.”
For his part, Rubio boasted, “We are one step closer to expanding sanctions and other pressures against the oppressive Ortega regime.”
In lieu of a formal vote, the NICA Act was sent to the bipartisan House Committee on Foreign Affairs for
amendments, and these changes were then agreed to by each chamber, without any objections.
On November 27, amendments for the combined legislation were approved with
unanimous consent in the Senate. Then on December 11, the changes were
unanimously approved in the House without objection. (Article continues.)
. What I kind of get from it, though, is that it seems that this government superficially took these "slogans" that are proving to be successful to push for their own agenda. Just as some politicians took the leftist ideas that were appealing to people only to push their agenda forward, this people can be using this new fashion of fighting against "globalism", "cultural Marxisms" and so on, because they know that's "catchy" nowadays. I do hope that I'm wrong in this though and still think that we must wait and see.
