João Augusto de Castro Neves

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on January 2nd, 2012
Hi, old friend! Obama and Rousseff in Brasilia in March. [Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR]

In one of her last official appearances of 2011, on December 22, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, arrived in a sweltering gymnasium in downtown Sao Paulo to give a speech to a few hundred working-class social activists.

In her speech, she mentioned “Lula” more than 10 times.

At one point the audience briefly broke into chants of “Lula, Lula, Lula!”

Lula wasn’t even present.

“Lula” is Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the wildly popular and charismatic former president of this country.

This is the man who in 2009 told a ballroom of CEOs at a regional World Economic Forum meeting in Rio de Janeiro he was going to scrap the speech his advisors had prepared and instead gave a blistering and empassioned critique of how the rich, developed nations were resonsible for the global economic mess and it was poor all over the world paying the price.

By Gabriel Elizondo in Americas on October 11th, 2011
The Massachusetts statesman's presidential ambitions include a plan for his Latin neighbours.

If Mitt Romney becomes president of the United States, he apparently has big plans for Latin America. 

“Neither the Bush administration or the Obama administration really focused on Latin America,” a Romney aide apparently told a conference call of reporters late last week, according to this article in Politico. 

The article quoted an aide who said President Mitt Romney would envision “larger campaigns for economic opportunity in Latin America” and that Latin America would be one of the main regions in the world Romney foreign policy would differ from George Bush or Barack Obama. 

Fair enough.

With that in mind I took great interest when on Friday Romney released his 44-page foreign policy white paper titled: “An American Century - A Strategy to Secure

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