Commentary
From Ukraine to Taiwan and ditching the dollar, Brazil is on board with the new communist China-led order.
On April 14, Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a member of the Worker’s Party, met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. The CCP rolled out the red carpet and military honor guard as the two leaders sought to repair relations damaged during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-oriented administration.
The visit, as well as a recent meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, are seen as part of Beijing’s new diplomatic offensive to bring more countries into the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) orbit. The ultimate goal is to remove support from the U.S.-led international order.
Lula stated that he supports Beijing’s 12-point peace plan for Ukraine, and the two agreed that negotiation is the only way out of the war. The two have presented themselves as mediators. It is important to note that Xi’s plan does not call for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine or to return Crimea and other territories to the Ukrainians.
Brazil is a member of BRICS along with Russia, India, and South Africa. Bolsonaro voted to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine but publicly stated that Brazil would not take sides. Officially, Brazil has not joined Western sanctions against Russia. Under Lula, elected in 2022, Brazil has maintained its condemnation of the Russian invasion, but Lula has also blamed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO for exacerbating the situation. Furthermore, Brazil has refused to sell weapons to Ukraine.
When South Africa, Russia, and China held joint military exercises earlier this year, Brazil did not participate. But after meeting with Xi, Lula called for China’s territorial integrity to be respected—a CCP euphemism supporting a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Beijing and Moscow have recently pledged to increase their cooperation in an act of defiance against the U.S. hegemony. The two countries have been working together to bypass the U.S. dollar and to increase the internationalization of the yuan or to create a BRICS currency.
Lula has told reporters he wants to eliminate the U.S. dollar from international trade. Bilateral trade between Brazil and China reached a record last year, with the trade surplus going to Brazil. The Shanghai-headquartered BRICS development bank, the New Development Bank, is led by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
China accounts for 15 percent of global trade, but the yuan only makes up about 4 percent of trade settlements. Brazil is not joining Russia and China in their efforts to de-dollarize, as obstacles are preventing this from happening.
All of Brazil’s other imports and exports, foreign debt, and currency reserves are in dollars. That said, the yuan has been gaining some traction. The Standard Chartered Renminbi Globalization Index (RGI), which measures the internationalization of the yuan, rose 26.6 percent in 2022. The widespread use of the yuan remains low and is limited to countries under U.S. sanctions or those closely allied with China, such as Iraq.
While Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin are pushing the BRICS bloc and Brazil is on board, India’s position remains more ambiguous. India purchases weapons and oil from Russia, but it did not join the military exercises held in South Africa. New Delhi is also pushing against allowing trade settlement in yuan.
Lula’s office released a statement on March 14 regarding the visit. It said that China is one of Brazil’s most important trading partners and that a deal with Huawei allows the country’s most remote parts to be connected. The statement went on to say that Lula wants Brazil’s relationship with China to “transcend trade. ... It is together with China that we have been trying to balance world geopolitics by discussing the most important issues.”
In a joint statement, Xi expressed Beijing’s appreciation of Lula’s commitment to negotiated peace in Ukraine and the CCP’s assertions regarding Taiwan.
Independent of a general CCP charm offensive in the world, the politics of Latin America have been shifting to the left as socialists win election after election. Colombia, Argentina, and Chile are led by leftist governments and have refused to send weapons to Ukraine. Mexico’s left-leaning President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has similarly refused to support Ukraine.
Earlier this year, Honduras broke with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with the Chinese regime. And last month, Nicaragua broke ties with the Vatican and closed down the embassy of the Holy See. The tide in Latin America is turning against the United States, Taiwan, and a Western-led international order. Brazil, as the largest nation in the region, may be influential in expanding the CCP’s reach.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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