Brazil Spurns U.S. State Visit Invitation Over NSA Spying
Brazil Spurns U.S. State Visit Invitation Over NSA Spying
President Dilma Rousseff’s postponement of her U.S. state visit raises questions whether "this may be more about domestic politics than diplomatic state craft," suggests AS/COA’s Christopher Sabatini.
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil has postponed a planned official visit to Washington amid fallout over revelations that the U.S. has been spying on her government, the Associated Press reports. Leaks from former-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed, among other things, extensive spying by the U.S. on countries in Latin America, for which regional heavyweights like Mexico and Brazil already rebuked the U.S. Brazil in particular has reportedly been a primary target of NSA spying—with reports by Brazil’s Globo TV, alleging the agency had spied extensively on the internal communications of the Rousseff administration and on the country’s state-owned oil company Petrobras. The allegations awoke the region’s age-old distrust and resentment of yanqui imperialism.
Rousseff’s visit, originally scheduled for next month, was to be the first such visit of Obama’s second term, an invitation extended to mark “Brazil’s economic, political and diplomatic rise in the world,” Christopher Sabatani, senior director of policy for the Council of the Americas told TIME.
Indefinitely postponing—in effect, canceling—an official state visit is a symbolic and significant move. Brazil’s last official state visit to the United States, with full state dinner and all attendant pomp and circumstance, was nearly two decades ago, in 1995....
