In a broad-ranging interview Oct. 9 with the Tutameia YouTube channel, also posted to the Brasil 247 website, Ambassador Celso Amorim, Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s top foreign policy adviser, warned that Donald Trump’s Shield of the Americas apparatus seeks to lay siege to Brazil under the pretext of combatting organized crime and create the conditions for military intervention. In reality, he said, this is a strategy to not only dominate Brazil, but all the countries of the region.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio demonstrated this strategy on May 28 when he designated two Brazilian criminal groups, the First Capital Command (PCC) and the Red Command (CV), as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” The Lula government strongly opposed this, as the Ambassador explained, charging that such a designation threatened Brazil’s sovereignty and could lay the basis for foreign intervention. Then-Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, now running for President against Lula, had lobbied the State Department to make such a designation.

Amorim also referenced the Sept. 22 meeting at the UN of all Shield of the Americas members “in defense of hemispheric sovereignty” at which all signed an agreement to formally classify 24 “transnational” criminal groups, including the two above-mentioned Brazilian ones, as “shared threats” which should be sanctioned—or worse.