“The United States must stop encouraging war and start talking about peace,” declared President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on April 14 in Beijing during a state visit. Such a position on the Ukrainian conflict has symbolic value in a context in which many Latin American countries seek to free themselves from Washington’s hegemony.

(RFI) “We have to think about how Argentina can become a kind of gateway to Latin America so that Russia can insert itself more assertively.” When Argentina’s center-left Peronist President Alberto Fernandez uttered these words after his private meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow on February 3, 2022, he was unaware that Russia was about to militarily invade its Ukrainian neighbor in contempt of international law, notably the principles of non-aggression, non-use of force in the settlement of disputes, and non-violation of the territorial integrity of states. Since at least 1997, the date of the first joint statement by China and Russia to this effect at the United Nations, Moscow has claimed to follow these principles as part of promoting a “new multipolar international order”-a perspective that the Argentine side still fully subscribes to.

In Latin America, a traditional zone of influence for the United States since the end of the 19th century, this desire to rebuild an international system relieved of the influence of Washington and its European allies is very popular indeed. It has been the roadmap of most progressive governments in the region since the early 2000s, and within that framework of analysis, Latin American capitals consider Russia a brake on Washington’s hegemonic claims.

That February 2022, during his stopover in Moscow on his way to the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the occupant of the Casa Rosada was exclusively concerned with pulling his country out of a deep economic and social crisis, aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Fernández was aware that the worsening of the crisis could compromise the Peronist camp’s chances in the presidential election of October 2023. In this context, his priority was to loosen the debt that his conservative predecessor, Mauricio Macri, had contracted in 2018 with the IMF by accepting severe austerity measures. Fernández knew: whoever says IMF, says Washington.
Russia’s strengths

Thus, the Argentine president headed to Russia, a country with which Argentina has had an “integral strategic association” agreement since 2015, thanks to which his fellow citizens were able to receive the first doses of the vaccine (Sputnik V) in December 2020, at the most dramatic moment of the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period, a dozen other Latin American countries also benefited from these vaccines. At the time, the United States was very discreet in terms of health cooperation in the region. It was therefore in an atmosphere of Russian-Argentine rapprochement that President Fernández declared to the journalists present, not without ulterior motives toward the U.S. administration: “I persist in thinking that Argentina must stop being so dependent on the Fund and the United States, and that a path toward other allies must open up. In this sense, Russia plays a very important role.

This diplomatic sequence in Moscow is emblematic of the nature of the ties developed by a large number of Latin American countries with Russia and China since the early 2000s. As for many other countries of the South, it is about diversifying trade relations, political, military and technological partnerships, so as to be able to play off each other and benefit from more favorable power relations in an international system in which they increasingly contest the hierarchy of power rather than economic structures.

In this context, Russia has solid assets. Since czarist times, it has established diplomatic relations with newly independent Brazil (1828), Uruguay (1857), Argentina (1885) and Mexico (1890). In the 20th century, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, in the middle of the Cold War, was undoubtedly the apex of the region’s rapprochement with the Soviet Union. If the latter’s dissolution in 1991 severed some ties, new ones were forged during the 2000s thanks to four factors: Latin America’s leftward turn (most leaders wanted to keep Washington out of regional affairs); the relative neglect of the region by the United States, bogged down in its wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East; China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO); and, finally, Vladimir Putin’s coming to power. Due to his project of gradual restoration of Russian power in the international arena, the ties between Latin American countries and Russia have tightened in several sectors – infrastructure, mining, energy sector (oil, gas, civil nuclear), aeronautics, university – even though the overall trade volume remains modest (less than 1% of the total trade of Latin American countries in the world).

Refusal of sanctions

In the military field, Venezuela (80% of Moscow’s arms sales in the region), Cuba and Nicaragua are Russia’s strategic customers. However, the Eurasian nation also cooperates with other countries, such as Brazil, Colombia and Peru, in the area of equipment (helicopters, airplanes, defense systems). On the commercial level, Brazil and Mexico are Moscow’s two main partners in the region (more than 50% of its trade).

Relations with Brazil began within the framework of the BRICS organization (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Brasilia has thus become the main Latin American exporter to the Russian market (soy, sugar, meat, minerals). Moscow supplies Brazil’s strategic agricultural sector with a decisive share of the fertilizers it needs. Since 2015, Russia has also maintained an official diplomatic relationship with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and its 33 member countries.

Like Argentina and Brazil, dependent on Russian fertilizers, many countries can no longer isolate themselves from Moscow in certain sectors, especially since the global health crisis that plunged Latin America into the “worst economic crisis in 120 years,” according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Added to this crisis are the first consequences of the conflict in Ukraine, inflation pressures, and rising commodity prices. These phenomena contribute to increasing costs for agricultural production as well as for energy consumption in many countries dependent on fuel imports in Central America, the Caribbean, or South America (Chile). The context is more favorable for countries that produce and export fuels or raw materials (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay). In addition, by raising interest rates several times since the beginning of the war to contain inflation, the Federal Reserve (Fed), the US central bank, has provoked a reflux of international capital from Latin America to the US markets.

In this difficult context, Ukraine suffers from a severe deficit of weight (economic) and notoriety (political) relative to its Russian adversary, except in one case that has not automatically favored leftist governments in the region: Cuba. Since 2019, in fact, Kiev, within the framework of its alliance with Washington, has systematically abstained during United Nations (UN) General Assembly votes demanding an end to the embargo imposed since 1962 by the United States on Havana.

In Latin America, in fact, the Ukrainian government has only one supporter: Alejandro Giammattei, the right-wing president of Guatemala. On July 25, 2022, the latter traveled to Kiev, becoming the first – and only – Latin American leader to make a trip to support Volodymyr Zelensky. It was mainly to send a message of loyalty to the United States, since his government was in difficulties with the U.S. administration due to several investigations (notably on corruption), and the general elections are approaching – they will be soon, in June 2023. If on the one hand Giammattei hopes to receive the dividends of his “compromise,” on the other Washington cannot find any Latin American country that is an ally to apply sanctions against Moscow, much less send weapons to Kiev – despite the wish expressed by General Laura Richardson, head of the US Southern Command Military Command, before the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, on January 19.

Diplomatic initiative

These refusals are expressed even in Washington’s Central American backyard. El Salvador, led by populist authoritarian president Nayib Bukele, in disgrace with Washington, systematically adds its voice to countries that, like Bolivia and Cuba – habitual adversaries of the United States – abstain on UN resolutions condemning Russia. Nicaragua is now part of the group of countries that directly support Russia (along with Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, and Syria), after abstaining in the February 28, 2022 UN vote. Venezuela, finally, does not participate in these consultations because it is not up to date with its contributions. Its diplomacy navigates between loyalty to its Russian ally and resuming contacts with Washington with a view to a hypothetical normalization in the framework of the new agreement created by the global energy crisis.

Latin American votes are determined by the combination of several logics. First, fidelity to their traditional diplomatic positions: respect for international law, the integrity of borders and the sovereignty of states, rejection of unilateralism and the use of force in conflict resolution, search for peaceful solutions to conflicts inducing a position of non-alignment. Next is the level of economic distrust towards the United States and the Western powers. Finally, national political and economic interests, determined pragmatically, within an uncertain and recomposing international order, in which the country’s relationship with China constitutes a compass. On this basis, the vast majority of capitals condemned the Russian invasion at the United Nations, but did not vote for texts calling for solidarity with sanctions taken or planned against Moscow.

However, it becomes increasingly difficult to support Russia directly, as its government now intends to use the same methods as Washington to resolve differences in its own historic zone of influence. “The invasion of Ukraine has antecedents in NATO’s expansion toward Russia, but this should not legitimize the military invasion of one country by another,” explains Celso Amorim, special advisor to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for international relations and promoter, alongside him, of a proposal to create a “group of countries for peace” between Russia and Ukraine, advocating a negotiated ceasefire and solution.

Presented since February 2023 in Latin America, in Washington, in Europe – notably in France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal – in Moscow, in Kiev, in the G20 under Indian presidency, in Beijing, and in Abu Dhabi, this initiative proposes, in order to gain weight and achieve its objectives, to start a multilateral process by mobilizing Besides China, other Southern countries, members of the BRICS and G20, which have relations with all actors (Western and non-Western) in the conflict, including Indonesia, India (which will hold the G20 presidency in 2023), and South Africa (host of the next BRICS summit in 2023 and responsible for the G20 presidency in 2025). In this diplomatic process, Brasilia also anticipates the Russian presidency of the BRICS in 2024 and its own presidency of the G20 in 2024, and of the BRICS in 2025.

This peace initiative, which bypasses the UN Security Council, could ultimately result, according to President Lula, in the creation of a “political G20” in charge, in the long run, of various international issues (climate, peace, economy, technology, democracy…). From his point of view, the process should lead to the emergence of new formats of deliberation, more favorable to the countries of the South.

Will such a project succeed in arousing interest among the Western powers? Until now, the United States and the European Union have rejected the legitimacy of Brazilian mediation in the Ukrainian War, accusing Brasilia of naivety and being too close to Moscow and Beijing. The Brazilian president’s initiative is, however, one of the few to stand out from the maximalism that reigns, at the risk of world peace, in Brussels and European capitals, in Washington, Kiev and Moscow.

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