Washington’s Dog-Whistle Diplomacy Supports Attempted Coup in Brazil
April 25, 2016
Washingtons Dog-Whistle Diplomacy Supports Attempted Coup in Brazil
by Mark Weisbrot
The day after the impeachment vote in the lower house of Brazils congress, one of the leaders of the effort, Senator Aloysio Nunes, traveled to Washington, D.C. He had scheduled meetings with a number of U.S. officials, including Thomas Shannon at the State Department.
Shannon has a relatively low profile in the media, but he is the number three official in the U.S. State Department. Even more significantly in this case, he is the most influential person in the State Department on U.S. policy in Latin America. He will be the one recommending to Secretary of State John Kerry what the U.S. should do as the ongoing efforts to remove President Dilma Rousseff proceed.
Shannons willingness to meet with Nunes just days after the impeachment vote sends a powerful signal that Washington is on board with the opposition in this venture. How do we know this? Very simply, Shannon did not have to have this meeting. If he wanted to show that Washington was neutral in this fierce and deeply polarizing political conflict, he would not have a meeting with high-profile protagonists on either side, especially at this particular moment.
Shannons meeting with Nunes is an example of what could be called dog-whistle diplomacy. It barely shows up on the radar of the media reporting on the conflict, and therefore is unlikely to generate backlash. But all the major actors know exactly what it means. That is why Nunes party, the Social Democracy Party (PSDB), publicized the meeting.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/25/washingtons-dog-whistle-diplomacy-supports-attempted-coup-in-brazil/
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)to support this "coup" theory...
So why didn't we overthrow Lula, who was the farther left and infinitely more popular president? Just asking...
Why would we overthrow someone who's already falling over the edge?
Judi Lynn
(160,542 posts)Brazil: Social movements reject coup, take to streets
Saturday, April 23, 2016
In response to a recent vote in the lower house of Brazil's parliament in favour of impeaching Workers' Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's two main coalitions of social movements issued the statement below on April 17.
Rousseff is under attack over a series of corruption scandals, but the forces allied against her the political, media and corporate elite have themselves been implicated in corruption. Many in Brazil, including left opponents of Rousseff's government, see the impeachment as an institutional coup by the right wing.
In response to a recent vote in the lower house of Brazil's parliament in favour of impeaching Workers' Party (PT) President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's two main coalitions of social movements issued the statement below on April 17. Rousseff is under attack over a series of corruption scandals, but the forces allied against her the political, media and corporate elite have themselves been implicated in corruption. Many in Brazil, including left opponents of Rousseff's government, see the impeachment as an institutional coup by the right wing.
. . .
This April 17, a date in which we remember the massacre of Eldorado dos Carajas (when 19 landless peasants were killed by police in 1996), will once again enter into the history of the Brazilian nation as a day of shame. This is because a circumstantial majority of a Chamber of Deputies stained by corruption, dared to authorise the fraudulent impeachment of a president of the republic who has not been accused of committing any crime of responsibility.
Conservative and reactionary economic and political forces that have promoted this farce hope to wipe out the labour and social rights of the Brazilian people. They include corporate entities, politicians such as [president of the Chamber of Deputies] Eduardo Cunha, who are facing charges of corruption in the Supreme Court, parties that have been defeated at the ballot box such as the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, and forces from outside Brazil who are interested in pillaging our resources, privatising state companies such as (oil company) Petrobras.
They do so with the help of a coup-plotting media, in which Rede Globo plays a central role in the dissemination of coup-plotting ideological propaganda, and through their coverage of a judicial-police operation that is aimed at attacking certain parties and leaders, but not others.
More:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/61613