The US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored the telephone numbers of top Brazilian officials, WikiLeaks said, less than a week after Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff visited the US to mend relations derailed by earlier spying accusations.
The 29 numbers selected for “intensive interception” included those of Rousseff aides, members of the Brazilian Ministry of Finance, diplomats and even the satellite phone on Rousseff’s private jet, WikiLeaks said in a report titled Bugging Brazil posted on Saturday.
WikiLeaks did not say when the phones were monitored, and the officials’ listed positions correspond to posts held during Rousseff’s first term, which ended last year.
Saturday’s report is a fresh reminder of why Rousseff canceled her state visit to the US in 2013 after the NSA’s monitoring of her communications came to light.
It also follows just weeks after revelations of US spying in France.
Rousseff’s trip to the US last month came as her government seeks investors for infrastructure projects worth tens of billions of dollars to help recharge growth of Latin America’s largest economy.
Rousseff considers the spying episode to have been “overcome,” and she trusts in US President Barack Obama and the commitment he has made on that topic, according to a statement published on the Web site of the presidential office on Saturday.
The US and Brazil will make their strategic partnership ever stronger, the statement added.
Brazil’s central bank and the Ministry of Planning, Budget, and Management declined to comment on the WikiLeaks report.
The NSA deferred a request for comment to the US National Security Council, which declined to comment, referring to previous general statements on Brazil spying.
Among the Brazilian officials listed by WikiLeaks as having been targeted for monitoring were Luiz Awazu Pereira, a former director of international affairs at Brazil’s central bank and now director of economic policy; members of the Ministry of Finance, including then-executive secretary Nelson Barbosa, who is now planning minister; and Rousseff’s former chief of staff, Antonio Palocci.
“The US targeted not only those closest to the president, but waged an economic espionage campaign against Brazil, spying on those responsible for managing Brazil’s economy,” WikiLeaks said.
WikiLeaks did not say when or if the NSA intercepted calls on the targeted phone numbers.
Other numbers included that of Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, formerly Brazil’s ambassador to the UN who was then minister of foreign affairs and is currently ambassador to the US, as well as former Brazilian ambassadors to Germany and France and other members of foreign affairs ministry.
“US President Obama and the US government have declared, on several occasions, that they would no longer have acts of intrusion upon friendly countries,” Rousseff said in Washington on Tuesday last week, according to a transcript. “I believe President Obama and, what is more, he told me that when he wants — should he ever need non-public information about Brazil, he would call me.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
RSS