The Economist, 06/17/2013
ON JUNE 6th Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, gave his first major interview in 22 years. In it, Mr dos Santos said that the statesman he most admires is Brazil’s former president, Lula da Silva, because of his work to forge a more inclusive society. An unexpected role model, perhaps, for the president of a country in which a vast gap between rich and poor has increased over his 33-year rule. Yet it was, after all, a Brazilian, João Santana—mastermind of Lula’s re-election in 2005—who led Mr dos Santos’s own re-election campaign in 2012. His party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, was never really likely to lose (as it happens, it won 72% of the vote), but the export of Brazilian political communications skills added a new layer to the construction and extractives expertise that Mr dos Santos made central to the reconstruction of Angola. Brazil and Angola boast a “great friendship”, he said.
On Portugal he was more tempered. The Portuguese are welcome in Angola, he insisted; noting, however, that Angolan investors were not always so well received in Lisbon. Maybe, he wondered, this was down to nostalgia for the past? A self-assured pique from a president who knows that Angola in 2013 needs Portugal less than its former colonial master needs Angola. Ever since he made headlines offering to help Portugal cope with crisis in 2011—and his daughter’s acquisition of Banco Português de Negócios paved the way for Portugal’s IMF bail-out—the power dynamic has shifted. Some Portuguese have found that hard to swallow. In turn, Mr dos Santos finds it hard to swallow Portuguese moralising. Prosecutors in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, recently announced an investigation into the Angolan attorney-general, João Maria de Sousa, for fraud and graft. The investigation is routine—Portuguese banks are allegedly involved—but the political implications are big.
Lectures are conspicuously absent in Brazil’s engagement with Africa. Just this month, Brazil announced it would cancel $900 million of African debt, the latest in a series of diplomatic overtures that have characterised the country’s Africa strategy since Lula’s first term in 2003. In May Brazil’s foreign minister, António Patriota, announced his support for the inclusion of Spanish-speaking Equatorial Guinea in the Community of Portuguese Language Speaking Countries (CPLP). Meanwhile Gol, Brazil’s low-cost airline, announced that it would press ahead with plans to establish three weekly flights to Nigeria; and Ethiopia’s foreign ministry revealed that the Brazilian development bank was in talks to fund a $1billion railway construction project in the country.
Posted by Brazil Institute 
Brazil’s mensalão trial has brought many historic moments (see 
Featured Q&A from the Latin America Advisor
April 23, 2013Inter-American Dialogue, 04/22/2013
Director of the Brazil Institute, Paulo Sotero, was interviewed by the Latin America Advisor on the mensalao trial.
Q: Prosecutors in Brazil announced April 5 that they have opened an investigation of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in connection with the so-called “mensalão” vote-buying scheme. The scandal has already led to several convictions, including that of Lula’s former chief of staff, José Dirceu. Have the prosecutions dealt a significant blow to corruption in Brazil? How is the scandal, and now the probe involving Lula, affecting the country’s politics ahead of next year’s presidential election?
A: Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: “Politically, the mensalão episode is over. Brazil’s electoral politics will be governed this year and next by the effects of an underperforming economy on inflation and jobs. If the economy deteriorates in ways that reverses President Dilma Rousseff’s very high approval ratings, it could open political space for the opposition to revive corruption as an electoral issue, particularly if the current federal investigation of mensalão-related charges against President Lula lead to an indictment. In an unfavorable economic scenario, that improbable outcome could complicate Rousseff’s re-election campaign and Lula’s re-emergence as an alternative presidential candidate, which was an unlikely development even before the Supreme Court returned verdicts with prison sentences against 12 of the 25 people who were found guilty in the mensalão trial. That said, the historic mensalão trial resulted from pressure from a changing society fed up with Brazil’s tradition of high-level impunity. It represented progress in the fight against corruption, even if the sentences are ultimately reduced in the ongoing final stage of judicial review. The trial, broadcast live, was a teachable moment for Brazil’s expanding middle class and a younger generation of political leaders now emerging. Whether they learned from it remains an open question. Nothing, however, will change the fact that 37 people with special connections to power, including key advisors to the most popular president in Brazil’s history, were brought to justice and two-thirds of them were found guilty by a majority of judges nominated to the Supreme Court by that very president and by his handpicked successor, who felt compelled to declare that she does ‘not tolerate corruption.’ ”
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