PEPE ESCOBAR: Brazilgate is Turning into Russiagate 2.0
June 20, 2019
The Intercept‘s bombshell about Brazilian corruption is being ludicrously spun
by the country’s media and military as a “Russian conspiracy,” writes Pepe
Escobar
By Pepe Escobar
in Paris
Special to Consortium News
It was a leak, not a hack. Yes: Brazilgate, unleashed by a series of
game-changing bombshells published by The Intercept, may be turning into a
tropical Russiagate.
The Intercept’s Deep Throat – an anonymous source — has finally revealed in
detail what anyone with half a brain in Brazil already knew: that the
judicial/lawfare machinery of the one-sided Car Wash anti-corruption
investigation was in fact a massive farce and criminal racket bent on
accomplishing four objectives.
◾Create the conditions for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016
and the subsequent ascension of her VP, elite-manipulated puppet, Michel Temer.
◾ Justify the imprisonment of former president Lula in 2018 – just as he was
set to win the latest presidential election in a landslide.
◾Facilitate the ascension of the Brazilian extreme-right via Steve Bannon asset
(he calls him “Captain”) Jair Bolsonaro.
◾Install former judge Sergio Moro as a justice minister on steroids capable of
enacting a sort of Brazilian Patriot Act – heavy on espionage and light on
civil liberties.
Moro, side by side with prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, who was leading the Public
Ministry’s 13-strong task force, are the vigilante stars of the lawfare racket.
Over the past four years, hyper-concentrated Brazilian mainstream media,
floundering in a swamp of fake news, duly glorified these two as Captain
Marvel-worthy national heroes. Hubris finally caught up with the swamp.
The Brazilian Goodfellas
The Intercept has promised to release all the files in its possession; chats,
audio, videos and pics, a treasure trove allegedly larger than Snowden’s. What
has been published so far reveals Moro/Dallagnol as a strategic duo in synch,
with Moro as a capo di tutti i capi, judge, jury and executioner rolled into
one – replete with serial fabrications of evidence. This, in itself, is enough
to nullify all the Car Wash cases in which he was involved – including Lula’s
prosecution and successive convictions based on “evidence” that would never
hold up in a serious court.
Moro: Installed as justice minister.
(Wikipedia/Marcos Oliveira/Agência Senado.)
In conjunction with a wealth of gory details, the Twin Peaks principle — the
owls are not what they seem — fully applies to Brazilgate. Because the genesis
of Car Wash involves none other than the United States government (USG). And
not only the Department of Justice (DoJ) – as Lula has been stressing for years
in every one of his interviews. The op was Deep State at its lowest.
WikiLeaks had already revealed it from the start, when the NSA started spying
on energy giant Petrobras and even Rousseff’s smart phone. In parallel,
countless nations and individuals have learned how the DoJ’s self-attributed
extraterritoriality allows it to go after anyone, anyhow, anywhere.
It has never been about anti-corruption. Instead this is American “justice”
interfering in the full geopolitical and geo-economic spheres. The most
glaring, recent case, is Huawei’s.
Yet Mafiosi Moro/Dallagnol’s “malign behavior” (to invoke Pentagonese) reached
a perverse new level in destroying the national economy of a powerful emerging
nation, a BRICS member and acknowledged leader across the Global South.
Car Wash ravaged the chain of energy production in Brazil, which in turn
generated the sale – below market prizes – of plenty of valuable pre-salt oil
reserves, the biggest oil discovery of the 21stcentury.
Car Wash destroyed Brazilian national champions in engineering and civil
construction as well as aeronautics (as in Boeing buying Embraer). And Car Wash
fatally compromised important national security projects such as the
construction of nuclear submarines,
essential for the protection of the “Blue Amazon”.
For the Council of Americas – which Bolsonaro visited back in 2017 – as well as
the Council on Foreign Relations—not to mention the “foreign investors”–to have
neoliberal Chicago boy Paulo Guedes installed as finance minister was a wet
dream. Guedes promised on the record to virtually put all of Brazil for sale.
So far, his stint has been an unmitigated failure.
How to Wag the Dog
Mafiosi Moro/Dallagnol were “only a pawn in their game,” to quote Bob Dylan– a
game both were oblivious to.
Lula has repeatedly stressed that the key question – for Brazil and the Global
South – is sovereignty. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil has been reduced to the status
of a banana neo-colony – with plenty of bananas. Leonardo Attuch, editor of the
leading portal Brasil247, says “the plan was to destroy Lula, but what was
destroyed was the nation.”
As it stands, the BRICS – a very dirty word in the Beltway – have lost their
“B”. As much as they may treasure Brazil in Beijing and Moscow, what is
delivering for the moment is the “RC” strategic partnership, although Putin and
Xi are also doing their best to revive “RIC”, trying to show India’s Modi that
Eurasian integration is the way to go, not playing a supporting role in
Washington’s fuzzy Indo-Pacific strategy.
Dallagnol: Serial fabricator. (Wikimedia Commons/José Cruz/Agência Brasil)
And that brings us to the heart of the Brazilgate matter: how Brazil is the
coveted prize in the master strategic narrative that conditions everything
happening in the geopolitical chessboard for the foreseeable future—the
no-holds-barred confrontation between the U.S. and Russia-China.
Already in the Obama era, the U.S. Deep State had identified that to cripple
BRICS from the inside, the “weak” strategic node was Brazil. And yes; once
again it’s the oil, stupid.
Brazil’s pre-salt oil reserves may be worth as much as a staggering $30
trillion. The point is not only that the USG wants a piece of the action; the
point is how controlling most of Brazil’s oil ties up with interfering with
powerful agribusiness interests. For the Deep State, control of Brazil’s oil
flow to agribusiness equals containment/leverage against China.
The U.S., Brazil and Argentina, together, produce 82 percent of the world’s
soybeans – and counting. China craves soybeans. These won’t come from Russia or
Iran – which on the other hand may supply China with enough oil and natural gas
(see, for instance, Power of Siberia I and II). Iran, after all, is one of the
pillars of Eurasian integration. Russia may eventually become a soybean export
power, but that may take as long as ten years.
The Brazilian military knows that close relations with China – their top trade
partner, ahead of the U.S. — are essential, whatever Steve Bannon may rant
about. But Russia is a completely different story. Vice-President Hamilton
Mourao, in his recent visit to Beijing, where he met with Xi Jinping, sounded
like he was reading from a Pentagon press release, telling Brazilian media that
Russia is a “malign actor” deploying “hybrid war around the world.”
So the U.S. Deep State may be accomplishing at least part of the ultimate goal:
to use Brazil in its Divide et Impera strategy of splitting the Russia-China
strategic partnership.
It gets much spicier. Car Wash reconditioned as Leak Wash could also be decoded
as a massive shadow play; a wag the dog, with the tail composed of two American
assets.
Moro was a certified FBI, CIA, DoJ, Deep State asset. His uber-boss would
ultimately be Robert Mueller (thus Russiagate). Yet for Team Trump, he would be
easily expendable – even if he’s Captain Justice working under the real asset,
Bannon boy Bolsonaro. If he falls, Moro would be assured the requisite golden
parachute – complete with U.S. residency and talks in American universities.
The Intercept’s Greenwald is now celebrated by all strands of the Left as a
sort of American/Brazilian Simon Bolivar on steroids – with and in may cases
without any irony. Yet there’s a huge problem. The Intercept is owned by
hardcore information-war practitioner Pierre Omidyar.
Whose Hybrid War?
The crucial question ahead is what the Brazilian military are really up to in
this epic swamp – and how deep they are subordinated to Washington’s Divide et
Impera.
It revolves around the all-powerful Cabinet of Institutional Security, known in
Brazil by its acronym GSI. GSI stalwarts are all Washington consensus. After
the “communist” Lula/Dilma years, these guys are now consolidating a Brazilian
Deep State overseeing full spectrum political control, just like in the U.S..
GSI already controls the whole intel apparatus, as well as Foreign Policy and
Defense, via a decree surreptitiously released in early June, only a few days
before The Intercept’s bombshell. Even Captain Marvel Moro is subjected to the
GSI; they must approve, for instance, everything Moro discusses with the DoJ
and the U.S. Deep State.
As I’ve discussed with some of my top informed Brazilian interlocutors, crack
anthropologist Piero Leirner, who knows in detail how the military think, and
Swiss-based international lawyer and UN adviser Romulus Maya, the U.S. Deep
Stateseems to be positioning itself as the spawning mechanism for the direct
ascension of the Brazilian military to power, as well as their guarantors. As
in, if you don’t follow our script to the letter – basic trade relations only
with China; and isolation of Russia – we can swing the pendulum anytime.
After all, the only practical role the USG would see for the Brazilian military
– in fact for all Latin America military – is as “war on drugs” shock troops.
Intercept Exclusive: Brazilian Judge in Car Wash Corruption Case Mocked Lula’s
Defense and Secretly Directed Prosecutors’ Media Strategy During Trial.
There is no smoking gun – yet. But the scenario of Leak Wash as part of an
extremely sophisticated, full spectrum dominance psyops, an advanced stage of
Hybrid War, must be seriously considered.
For instance, the extreme-right, as well as powerful military sectors and the
Globo media empire suddenly started spinning that The Intercept bombshell is a
“Russian conspiracy.”
When one follows the premier military think tank website– featuring loads of
stuff virtually copy and pasted straight from the U.S. Naval War College – it’s
easy to be startled at how they fervently believe in a Russia-China Hybrid War
against Brazil, where the beachhead is provided by “anti-national elements”
such as the Left as a whole, Venezuelan Bolivarians, FARC, Hezbollah, LGBT,
indigenous peoples, you name it.
After Leak Wash, a concerted fake news blitzkrieg blamed the Telegram app
(“they are evil Russians!”) for hacking Moro and Dallagnol’s phones. Telegram
officially debunked it in no time.
Then it surfaced that former president Dilma Rousseff and the current Workers’
Party president Gleisi Hoffmann paid a “secret” visit to Moscow only five days
before the Leak Wash bombshell. I confirmed the visit with the Duma, as well as
the fact that for the Kremlin, Brazil, at least for the moment, is not a
priority. Eurasian integration is. That in itself debunks what the
extreme-right in Brazil would spin as Dilma asking for Putin’s help, who then
released his evil hackers.
Leak Wash – Car Wash’s season two – may be following the Netflix and HBO
pattern. Remember that season three of True Detective was an absolute smash. We
need Mahershala Ali-worthy trackers to sniff out patches of evidence suggesting
the Brazilian military – with the full support of the U.S. Deep State – might
be instrumentalizing a mix of Leak Wash and “the Russians” Hybrid War to
criminalize the Left for good and orchestrate a silent coup to get rid of the
Bolsonaro clan and their sub-zoology collective IQ. They want total control –
no clownish intermediaries. Will they be biting more bananas than they can
chew?
Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for
Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.
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Tags: Dilma Rousseff Jair Bolsonaro Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Pepe Escobar
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