In 2020, Brasil Wire revealed a strategic partnership between the British government and Bolsonaro from 2016. Brittany Kaiser (ex-Cambridge Analytica employee) reported unrecorded meetings in 2016 between the British Consul General in São Paulo and Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica’s subsidiary, SCL group. Freedom of information requests forced the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office to provide dates, but all details of these ‘informal’ meetings were withheld. The discussions with Cambridge Analytica coincided with the disinformation strategy used by Bolsonaro’s campaign committee. Cambridge Analytica helped with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and with Brexit.
The Brasil Wire reports show a relationship between British Ambassador, Vijay Rangarajan, and Bolsonaro’s campaign committee from April 2018, before Bolsonaro’s confirmation for the 2018 presidential electoral race. Before the election, in June 2018, Rangarajan and Bolsonaro met at the ambassador’s home to discuss ‘strategic partners’ including AstraZeneca, BP, Shell, Anglo American, Rolls-Royce and G4S. The AstraZeneca vaccine became the central pillar of Brazil’s national inoculation programme. By 2018, Shell and BP – which the UK ambassador has met more than twenty times since 2017 – had amassed 13.5bn barrels of oil in Brazil, more than the country’s state-owned company Petrobras.
Brazil is home to approximately 13% of Shell’s global oil and gas production. British mining giant Anglo American has made more than 300 applications for permission to explore 18 indigenous territories in the Amazon, some of which are home to isolated peoples. Over 800 British companies currently operate in Brazil.
Bolsonaro used his influence within Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency) to continue barring other vaccines that were not AstraZeneca’s, leaving the country in almost completely dependent on the still-undelivered vaccine, until an order from Brazil’s Supreme Court on 16 December 2020 demanded that Bolsonaro present a vaccination plan. On 18 January, Anvisa gave the green light to vaccines from AstraZeneca and China’s Sinovac. Two million ready-to-use AstraZeneca shots were imported from India. Sinovac provided 8.6m doses on 3 February, and another 8.7m doses quickly followed. Finally, ingredients for AstraZeneca’s vaccine arrived from China on 6 February, to start production of 15m doses. The establishment had pushed aside Bolsonaro’s year-long resistance. On 22 March Brazil’s Butantan Institute released its first one million doses of Coronavac.
The British government knew of Bolsonaro’s policies and his position regarding the military dictatorship, indigenous populations and their territories, racism and violence. This demonstrates the corporate interest that Britain has in Brazil, to exploit the country at any cost, even if this includes the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 281 April/May 2021
