Brazilian President Lula da Silva urged the United States to return to policies it espoused in better moments in its own history in his keynote address opening the International Economic Forum of the Latin American and Caribbean Development Bank (CAF) on Jan. 28.
Addressing regional leaders, businessmen, and policymakers with the United States’s Jan. 3 military intervention into Venezuela on their minds, Lula was emphatic: “History shows that the use of force will never pave the way to overcoming the ills that afflict this hemisphere that belongs to all of us. The division of the world into zones of influence and neocolonial attacks for strategic resources are anachronistic gestures and historical setbacks.”
However, “there have also been moments when the United States has known how to be a partner in promoting our development interests,” he reminded. “President Franklin Roosevelt implemented a Good-Neighbor Policy that aimed to replace military intervention with diplomacy in his foreign policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean.”
FDR also “argued that we should build a world based on what he called four fundamental freedoms,” Lula pointed out, citing those four freedoms of expression and worship, from want and fear. Today the freedom to express one’s opinion means without the manipulation of data and information by digital networks; “freedom from fear: in which disarmament would limit the use of force and aggression between nations….
“The only war we need to wage in this part of the world is against hunger and inequality. And the only weapons to be used are those of investment, technology transfer, and fair and balanced trade.”
Lula also had a pointed message for his fellow leaders in the region: the region has allowed “external conflicts and ideological disputes to impose themselves on us” such that there was not even one joint statement issued when “illegal military interventions are shaking our region.”
The region’s historic drive for integration cannot be abandoned. “There is no way any single Latin American country will solve its problems alone. We’ve had 525 years of history. We need to change our behavior and form an economic bloc capable of ending hunger.” Poverty must be eliminated in the region, and basic services guaranteed for all, he insisted.
Most audacious was his call for the region to decide to jointly develop the processing industries for its rare earths and critical raw materials. “Why do we talk so much about rare earths and critical minerals? So that we can keep exporting raw materials … in their natural state, to be processed in other countries and then buy the processed goods at a high price? No. Critical minerals and rare earths only make sense for enriching our countries if we have the courage to build partnerships and have them processed in our countries to generate wealth in our countries, to generate jobs in our countries, and to generate development in our countries.”
That idea will not please the would-be financier rulers of today!
