Celso Amorim: Is Brazil becoming ungovernable?
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brazilian President Lula must figure out whether another assault on government institutions is likely, and hold those responsible to account. All of that while he faces a mountain of economic, social and political challenges. How close is Brazil to being ungovernable? Stephen Sackur interviews Celso Amorim, formerly Brazil's foreign minister, now President Lula’s foreign policy advisor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is Brazil's |
| 0:07.0 | most experienced diplomat. Selsso Amarim has twice been foreign minister and now he's back in government |
| 0:13.7 | as foreign affairs advisor to his longtime ally, newly elected president Luis Inacio Lula de Silva. Neither Amarin nor his boss can have foreseen |
| 0:25.1 | the drama that would unfold just a week after President Lula's inauguration. A mob invaded key |
| 0:32.2 | buildings in Brasilia, including the presidential palace, the Congress and the Supreme Court in what looked like a half-baked coup attempt. |
| 0:41.2 | Order has since been restored, but Brazil is now wrestling with a host of difficult questions. |
| 0:48.1 | How could this assault so reminiscent of an earlier attack on the US Congress have been allowed to happen. |
| 0:54.5 | Who was behind it? |
| 0:55.8 | Should the authorities investigate the role of former president, |
| 0:59.7 | the right-wing populist Jaya Bolsonaro, whose millions of supporters |
| 1:04.1 | remain fanatically opposed to the leftist Lula? |
| 1:08.0 | The repercussions of that January 8th assault threatened to overshadow the scale |
| 1:12.9 | of the other challenges facing Lula, economic, political, social and environmental. Is today's Brazil |
| 1:20.1 | dangerously close to ungovernable? Well, SELSO Amarim joins me now from Brasilia. Welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:29.6 | Thank you, Stephen. Mr. Amarim, I believe you are talking to me from your office in the presidential palace. |
| 1:36.2 | Just a few days ago, that building was invaded by a mob. How safe and secure do you feel right now? Personally, I feel very safe now. I don't think |
| 1:49.6 | anything will happen these days or the next days. But of course, that was a very worrying |
| 1:55.3 | situation, to say the least, not very much unlike what happened in the Capitol Hill two years ago. |
| 2:03.7 | We didn't expect, of course, that to happen, but certainly there were failures in the security |
| 2:10.3 | apparatus. Part of it was omission. Part might be incompetence, but part might have been conigal. |
| 2:18.4 | But when you came into work today and you showed your security pass, |
| 2:23.7 | and I dare say you went through a security scanner, |
... |
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