Brazil warned US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday that failure to resolve the row over Washington’s electronic spying could sow mistrust between the two countries.
Brazil was outraged by media reports of widespread US telephone and Internet eavesdropping based on information leaked by fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota told reporters after talks with Kerry that revelations about the vast US global surveillance network posed a “new challenge in our bilateral relationship.”
“If the implications of this challenge are not satisfactorily resolved, they run the risk of casting a shadow of mistrust over our work,” he said.
“Practices which harm the sovereignty and relations of trust between states, and violate the individual freedoms which our countries so cherish, must be stopped,” he added.
Kerry, who is on his first trip to South America since he assumed his post in February, said: “Brazil is owed answers with respect to those questions and they will get them.”
“We will have this dialogue with the view to make it certain that your government is in complete understanding and complete agreement with what it is that we must to do provide security, not just for Americans, but for Brazilians and the people of the world,” Kerry added.
US officials have defended the surveillance programs as entirely lawful measures that have helped foil dozens of terrorist attacks around the world.
Brazil, Latin America’s economic powerhouse, has meanwhile sought to assert regional independence from Washington.
Kerry arrived in Brazil late on Monday from Colombia, where he also defended Washington’s electronic espionage.
“I think it’s very obvious to everybody that this is a dangerous world we’re living in,” Kerry told reporters in Bogota on Monday.
“We are necessarily engaged in a very complex effort to prevent terrorists from taking innocent lives in many different places,” he said.
Based on documents leaked by Snowden, the daily O Globo reported last month that Washington eavesdropped on Brazilians’ telephone calls and Internet communications.
A spy base in Brasilia, part of a worldwide network of 16 such stations operated by the US National Security Agency (NSA), also intercepted foreign satellite transmissions, it claimed.
O Globo also published an NSA document which seemed to indicate that the Brazilian embassy in Washington and the Brazilian mission to the UN in New York were also targeted by the US spy agency.
Snowden, who was granted asylum in Russia on Aug. 1 after spending more than five weeks in a Moscow airport transit zone, is said to now be at an undisclosed location in the country.
Washington wants to put him on trial for leaking sensitive secrets, but Moscow has steadfastly refused to hand him over.
In fence-mending remarks, Kerry took pains to acknowledge emerging Brazil’s growing international profile.
“The United States recognizes, and welcomes and greatly appreciates the vital leadership role, the increasing leadership role, that Brazil plays on the international stage,” he said.
He cited Brasilia’s participation in global peace initiatives, its promotion of human rights and its efforts to help maintain peace in some parts of the world, notably in Haiti.
“We’re also exploring opportunities for closer collaboration on peacekeeping in Africa,” Kerry said.
Kerry and Patriota also discussed Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s scheduled state visit to the US in October.
Kerry met with Rousseff later in the day.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the