At the request of President Lula da Silva, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is slated to become the new President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), Brazilian media are reporting. According to the major Sao Paulo daily O Estado, and confirmed by EIR sources in the country, the other BRICS countries have already approved her nomination; her approval by the five governors of the NDB Board (each appointed by a BRICS member) is reportedly all that remains pending. Dilma is expected to accompany President Lula when he visits China, in the last half of March.
This is excellent news. The bank’s current president is Marcos Troyjo, who was named by Brazil’s then-President Jair Bolsonaro to that post in 2020. Troyjo had been a high-ranking official under the arch-monetarist former banker, Paulo Guedes who served as Bolsonaro’s Economic Minister. Troyjo’s term was to run to 2025, but President Lula decided otherwise.
By contrast, Dilma has been an avid advocate of the BRICS, as seen in her hosting the 2014 BRICS summit during her Presidency, where the decision was taken to create the NDB and for China to finance and help build South America’s first transcontinental railway. In the past two years, she has been outspoken both against NATO’s “hybrid war” against Russia creating the Ukraine-Russia conflict and asserting that the weaponization of the dollar by sanctions means that the days of dollar hegemony are over. She has argued that China’s stunning development is a far better model than “Western decadence” where countries are being de-industrialized under neoliberalism’s “financialization of the economy,” and therefore Ibero-America’s future lies with the Belt and Road Initiative.
President Lula made clear in his visit to the United States on Friday, however, that even as he moves towards the BRICS-Plus and the Belt and Road, he has not burnt his bridges to the Western agenda of so-called “democracy” and a “climate emergency.” (Lula unfortunately urged some system of “world governance” be adopted to “compel” countries to adopt emergency “climate change” measures, in his public remarks before meeting with President Biden.) The Joint Statement issued following the Presidents’ discussions welcomes the second Summit for Democracy to be held in March 2023 and states that both are “determined to place urgent priority on climate change, sustainable development, and the energy transition.”
As for the subject of the Ukraine-Russia conflict which was recognized from the get-go as the most contentious part of their agenda, the Joint Statement states only that the two “deplored the violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine by Russia and the annexation of parts of its territory as flagrant violations of international law and called for a just and durable peace.”
The President and former trade union leader Lula otherwise met with those he still believes are his friends on the political “left,” including Senator Bernie Sanders and leaders of the House’s Progressive Caucus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal, and with representatives of the AFL-CIO.
