Twice in five months, the Federative Republic of Brazil dispatched high-level national security delegations to Guyana and other regional states. What can be the reasons for the immediacy and intensity of interest in security?
In April, Brazil’s Minister of Defence Nelson Azevedo Jobim and his team met President Bharrat Jagdeo to discuss the formation of the Conselho Sul-Americano de Defesa (South American Defence Council), the military coordinating component of Union of South American Nations. Two weeks ago, Senator Heráclito Fortes led a delegation of the Comissão de Relações Exteriores e Defesa Nacional (Committee on Foreign Affairs and National Defence) of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil’s National Congress to meet the President.
Each visit had a different composition and intention – Nelson Jobim is a minister who promotes the government’s policy but Heráclito Fortes and his team are senators from various parties and perform a congressional oversight role – but both share common ambitions.
Mr Jobim had advised that the CSD would aim at dealing with what he called “low intensity conflicts that may spread out of control.” But is that aim realistic? It is difficult to see what practical role the CSD could play and whether it will ever come into being. After all, thirty years ago in 1978, Brazil had launched the Treaty of Amazonian Cooperation but the world is waiting to see its practical effects.
First, it will take a long time and a lot of resources to establish an effective NATO-style security organisation in South America and to reconcile its roles with those of the Inter-American Defence Board which already provides for hemispheric-wide security cooperation. Second, even when this gets done, it will take longer still to achieve a satisfactory level of doctrinal and operational coordination and integration of this continent’s armed forces to enable them to confront the numerous and serious security challenges. Third, small states such as Guyana and Suriname must be convinced that their special security concerns will be met in a continental security system dominated by huge armies such as those of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. The Brazilian initiative, therefore, must be examined at several levels.
At the national level, Brasília’s long-standing and well-known foreign policy goal is to maintain stability along its 16,885-km border with ten neighbouring countries, especially along its sparsely-populated northern belt Amazonian boundaries. This, in turn, is influenced at the continental level by security problems most likely to arise not so much from neighbouring states as from non-state organisations and transnational criminal cartels and gangs that pose threats of narcotics trafficking, gun-running, terrorism and piracy.
At the hemispheric level, the Brazilian army has made itself into the dominant contributor to the United Nations Stabilisation Mission to Haiti – MINUSTAH – which has been deployed there since June 2004. This came only four months after the constitutionally-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide became the victim of a controversial regime change conspiracy that shoved aside the Caribbean Community which was actively involved in efforts to resolve the crisis.
At the global level, Brazil is trying to promote its emergence as a state that has the capability to project its military and economic power in a world theatre and which is trying hard to obtain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Mr Jobim had pronounced that “It is Brazil’s duty to be in Haiti because Brazil is a major power.” But it is exactly in the Haitian quagmire that Brazil’s global ambitions and its self-perceptions as a ‘major power’ have collided with the security interests of small states and the complexities of Caribbean geopolitics. Brazil’s military involvement in Haiti is an excellent example of how a low intensity conflict could blunt the strategic ambitions of a would-be major power and tarnish a professional army’s performance, particularly in the relations of its soldiery with the Haitian citizenry.
Guyana, as a member of the Caribbean Community, has taken a principled position on the situation in Haiti especially concerning the circumstances which led to the strange ‘regime change’ of 2004.
If Brazil’s security policymakers are serious about creating a new continental security system, they should reconsider their country’s swagger as the ‘colossus of the South’ – a continental copy of the USA, the ‘colossus of the North.’ They should comprehend the concerns of Caribbean small states which do not want to be crushed between the two. The messy mission in Haiti seems to be an example of just how that can happen.
