Ahmadinejad Welcome by Lula May Weaken Brazil Trust

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s goals of expanding his nation’s global influence and strengthening commercial ties with Iran may collide as he hosts President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Brasilia next week.

Lula wants to show Brazil can play a larger international role as it pursues a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. The talks will center on a plan to increase financing for Brazilian exports to Iran, which more than doubled to $1.13 billion since 2002. Iran is also considering building steel plants in Brazil to tap the country’s iron ore reserves.

By welcoming a leader whose re-election was marred by complaints of fraud and whose country is under international sanction because of its nuclear program, Lula is undermining his push to be seen as the leader of the developing world, said U.S. Representative Eliot Engel.

“This is a gross mistake for a respected president of a respected country,” Engel, a New York Democrat who is co- chairman of a congressional caucus created to promote better relations with Brazil, said in an interview. “To elevate Ahmadinejad, when he represses his own people, denies the Holocaust, says he’ll wipe Israel off the map — it shows Brazil isn’t ready to be taken seriously as a world player.”

Death Sentences
Ahmadinejad lands in Brasilia along with about 200 Iranian business leaders seeking opportunities from oil to financial investments. The Nov. 23 visit comes a week after a Tehran court sentenced five people to death in connection with protests that followed the president’s June 12 re-election.

“Cooperation among underdeveloped countries is the way to fulfill our needs without the intervention of superpowers,” Mohsen Shaterzadeh, Iranian ambassador to Brazil, said in an interview in Brasilia. “The nations of the South, the underdeveloped world, have replaced the American market after this crisis.”

The Brazil trip marks Ahmadinejad’s first official visit abroad after his re-election, Shaterzadeh said. Since protests began over the results, Ahmadinejad hosted Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Tehran.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met with the Iranian president one-on-one during a regional summit in June. Lula compared the street protests at the time, crushed by police and militia, to a clash between fans of rival Rio de Janeiro soccer clubs.

Latin America Tour
Ahmadinejad visited China in 2008 and made an African tour last February.

In 2007, he met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, on a tour of Latin America.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in May called Iran’s inroads in Latin America “disturbing.” A State Department spokesman today said in an e-mailed statement that the U.S. “hopes Brazil will encourage Iran to regain the trust of the international community” by fulfilling its obligations.

Brazilian exports to Iran, which holds the world’s second- biggest oil and natural gas reserves, account for less than 1 percent of the country’s sales abroad.

Iranians are ready to buy or rent land in Brazil to grow soy and corn to help assure supplies and will also consider producing ethanol, Shaterzadeh said.

In exchange, Iranians are seeking contracts to supply Brazilian farmers with fertilizers, the ambassador said.

Oil Ties
Commercial ties with Iran include Rio De Janeiro-based Petroleo Brasileira SA, Brazil’s state-controlled company, which won in 2003 a bid to explore the Tusan bloc in the Iranian Persian Gulf.

Lula will meet Ahmadinejad less than two weeks after hosting Israel’s President Shimon Peres in Brasilia. Tomorrow, Lula will join Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the northeastern city of Salvador, capital of the Bahia state.

“Brazil sees Iran as a key actor in the region and necessary to solve the conflicts in the Middle East,” said Roberto Jaguaribe, who oversees relations with Iran at the Foreign Affairs ministry.
“A big country like Brazil, which has the intention of helping shape a new international governance that we expect to be more balanced, just and transparent, can’t avoid certain responsibilities,” he said.

Brazil won an investment-grade rating from Moody’s Investors Service in September. Its currency has more than doubled against the U.S. dollar since Lula took office in 2003, the best performer of the 16 most traded currencies tracked by Bloomberg.

Economic Strength
Lula is trying to increase his international role and show that Brazil can pursue its own policy even if it displeases other Western nations, said Brazil’s former Foreign Affairs Minister Luiz Felipe Lampreia.

At the same time, he called the decision to host Ahmadinejad a mistake. “It’s negative for Brazil because he’s a radical who has repressed the opposition with violence, who preaches wiping out Israel — it is not the kind of person you want to get on with,” Lampreia said.

Iran has been under investigation by the United Nations since 2003 because it concealed nuclear work from the world body’s International Atomic Energy Agency for two decades. It is subject to three sets of UN economic sanctions for ignoring Security Council demands that it suspend uranium enrichment and related work and allow wider inspections.

Nuclear Suspicions
The U.S. and several allies say Iran’s atomic work is cover for the development of a weapon, while the government in Tehran says the program is for civilian electricity generation.

Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, met Oct. 1 with envoys from Germany and the five permanent UN Security Council members — the U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain — in the first talks on the country’s nuclear program in more than a year.

By welcoming Ahmadinejad to Brazil, Lula “acknowledges this man is the rightful president of Iran,” said Geneive Abdo, director for the Iranian program at the Century Foundation in New York. That doesn’t help the effort to pressure him into nuclear concessions, she said.

Lula is convinced “dialogue” is the best tool to persuade Ahmadinejad to open his nuclear program to international supervision, Marco Aurelia Garcia, the president’s special adviser for international affairs, told reporters on Nov. 11.

Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, Giora Becher, said that approach won’t work. “Ahmadinejad should be persona non grata in every country,” Becher said.