That is how Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s Special Advisor on Foreign Policy, Celso Amorim, characterized the BRICS in an exclusive interview released on Feb. 24 with the “BRICS Brazil 2025” website recently set up to provide information on BRICS activities during its Brazilian Presidency this year. Amorim knows how and why the BRICS were formed, and the intention behind its current activities from the inside. He was President Lula’s Foreign Minister in the early 2000s when, as he recounts, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came to him and suggested the BRICS forum be created, which led to the first BRIC summit in 2009 (South Africa only joined later), in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
“What is behind our group is the notion that the organizations from the Global South need to be institutionalized.… There is an understanding that there cannot be an international organization without the active participation of the developing countries….
“The idea of the BRICS is to have a cooperation group among large developing countries that can, among other things, study the possibilities of cooperating on energy, in the monetary field, and even in the field of peace and security, which is more complex. This is very important, because it has shown the big Western, capitalist countries that they cannot dictate the rules; they can present initiatives, but they will have to discuss them with us.”
That was not the case before the BRICS, when the G7 would speak and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization would just follow. “Now it is different,” Celso Amorim said. The BRICS can build a bridge to strengthen the Global South, so, for example, they do not become “victims of financial maneuvers that can harm us.”