There won’t be an actual button this time, but when President Obama hosts Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff at the White House on June 30 it will mark an important reset in the relationship between the two largest countries in the Americas.
“We look to June 30th as a way to relaunch that relationship,” Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs said Friday. “Our relationship has been tested over the last 18 months or so.”
Rousseff’s visit marks an end to the freeze-out over accusations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden that U.S. spies were monitoring her communications and those of the state-controlled oil company Petrobras, which led her to cancel an earlier visit scheduled for October 2013 and to publicly blast the agency’s actions at the United Nations as a violation of international law.
But that hasn’t been the only concern. Though there’s deep interaction between the two countries in business, trade, culture, tourism and other areas, the political elites in both nations have been unusually suspicious of each other and are still searching for common ground, said Brazilian economist Ricardo Sennes, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
One thing that’s changed is the political environment: At the time of Snowden’s leaks, Rousseff was facing re-election and it benefited her to take a tough, nationalistic stance against the United States. Now safely re-elected and facing new challenges, it’s better for her to draw close to Washington and a president who’s still popular in Brazil, in spite of concerns that his administration has neglected the relationship.
“From the political side, I think it is very important for Dilma,” Sennes said. “For her, it’s very important the timing of this meeting.”
The two leaders already have made tentative steps toward reconciliation. Vice President Joe Biden attended Rousseff’s inauguration in January where she pledged to build a closer relationship with the United States, and she and Obama talked on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas in April.
“She wanted to come as fast as possible,” said Benoni Belli, deputy chief of mission at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington. “We are seeing this visit as a special visit. It’s not just a working visit. …You will see when she comes by the signals and the gestures that are included in this visit that it’s a very important visit.”
