Few Presidents have so systematically dismantled their country’s foreign policy as much as Jair Bolsonaro.

For decades, Brazil has played an active role in multilateral diplomacy with “a progressive foreign policy focussed on human rights, the environment, women’s rights and the protection of indigenous rights.  That is, Brazil’s international behaviour mirrored the country’s own democratisation process” according to Carlos Milani, Vice-Director of the Institute for Social and Political Studies (IESP) at the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ).

Under Bolsonarismo, each of these causes was dismissed as “cultural Marxism” and the international organizations where such issues were discussed condemned as talking shops of the left. The outgoing president “adopted a diplomatic narrative directly at odds with any prior tradition [in foreign policy] such as leadership in multilateral institutions and the role Brazil often played as a mediator of conflicts in Latin America.”

Full article at OpenCanada’s website. Date of publication: 20/12/2022.