 Welcome, everybody. I'm John Sorciari. I'm the director of the Wiser Diplomacy Center here at the Ford School, and we're really happy to have this opportunity to partner with the American Academy of Diplomacy in hosting a live recording of American Diplomat on the theme of U.S.-Brazil bromance, What's in Store for Us. We are joined here by, of course, my colleague Mel Levitsky, by Laura Bennett, who's a producer and host of American Diplomat, by, on the far end, Ambassador Thomas Shannon, who will be introduced shortly, and also by Ambassador Peter Romero, who is a 25-year veteran of the Foreign Service. He served most recently as Assistant Secretary of the Western Hemisphere at the State Department. Before that is Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary. He also served at state as Ambassador to Ecuador during the Peru-Equador War, and with Charger de Ferre and El Salvador. He's also one of the original architects and instigators of Plan Colombia, and so I'm going to turn it over to Ambassador Romero, who will take the introduction to the podcast from there. Thank you all. Welcome to American Diplomat. Real stories behind the news. I'm Pete Romero, and with me is... Laura Bennett. La compañera Laura Bennett. And before we get started today, what I wanted to do is also remind people, if you haven't already heard, we've got one of these kitschy still photos on our website, amdifstories.com, which features our three... Org. Org, sorry, Org, which features our three golden doodle dogs at the microphone, and it wasn't just whimsy, they were actually the reason why we were all together. Laura and I met walking our two dogs, our respective doodles, in Eastern Maryland, and the third doodle, Santos, is the pet of the owner of our studios in Washington podcast Village. So please check that out if you haven't already. They are cute. They are very cute. It's very cute. It's very cute. But they're our dogs, so, you know. We have a special treat today for our listeners, and we're pleased to be coming to you from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Diplomacy at the University of Michigan. Our visit is sponsored by the Weiser Diplomatic Center, our host professor, Cho Chari, and it is part of a series that we have ongoing in our podcast called Is It Happening Here? We have about 80 podcasts thus far. We've been in business for about 15 months. And I think that you will find some very interesting things, particularly as it relates to first-person stories of our diplomats in practice overseas. Is it happening here as a series that we run from time to time? We've looked at Putin's Russia, Erdogan's Turkey, Chavez and Maduro's Venezuela, and what we want to do is to look at Bolsonaro's Brazil and its relationship with the United States and what is likely to happen. I am pleased to have with us two of the probably the most informed practice diplomats that you could bring to this particular discussion. To my left is Tom Shannon, had a 33-34. 34.5. 34.5. Excuse me, 34.5. Year career in the Foreign Service. He was the Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs. He was Ambassador to Brazil from 2010 to 2013, and we're going to pick his brain about that period particularly. And also the number three person in the State Department as Undersecretary for Political Affairs to include the Council of the Department for a while. We also are pleased to have with us today Ambassador Melvin Levitsky, a retired career minister in the Foreign Service, Professor of International Policy and Practice at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He taught for eight years as a professor in practice and public administration in international affairs at Syracuse University. Ambassador Levitsky was elected by a vote of the United Nations Economic and Social Council to a seat on the International Narcotics Control Board, an independent body of experts headquartered in Vienna and responsible for monitoring and promoting standards of drug control established by international treaties. During his 35-year career in the Foreign Service as a U.S. diplomat, he was Ambassador to Brazil, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matter, Executive Secretary of the State Department, Ambassador to Bulgaria. He is the recipient of several Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards and Distinguished Honor Awards. Ambassador Levitsky, welcome. Well, thank you. Ambassador Shannon, welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming to the Ford School. Well, you guys, like, you know so much. It's like almost... Don't forget your intro. I wasn't... Okay. American Diplomat is a project of the UNA Chapman Cox Foundation in partnership with the American Academy of Diplomacy. We're talking. Welcome. So welcome. Guys, what I'd really like to do is to scroll back a little bit in time. It wasn't but about five, six years ago that the old adage of Brazil as the country of the future and always will be seemed to be outdated. It looked like it was really Brazil's time. They were a leader in the region, if not internationally. They had become members of the BRIC countries. So what the BRIC is? Brazil, Russia, India, China, and some people include South Africa. Okay. Okay. Kind of a counterweight to U.S. influence. I see. Diplomatically. That was essentially... It was supposed to be the emerging great powers. Diplomatically as well as economically? As well as economically. Exactly. And so that coupled with a find of perhaps the largest oil and gas reserves in the world found off the coast, an incredible production of ethanol, an export of ethanol regionally. It just really looked at growth rates which were through the ceiling. It just looked like Brazil's time had finally come. So Tom, what did you do wrong? Well, I can say that I left before it all came undone. Right. But first of all, let me just start by saying what a pleasure it is to be here, to be with you, Pete and Laura, but especially to be with Melavitsky, who when I was a younger officer was an icon in our Foreign Service and someone who I admired greatly. But more importantly, when I was ambassador in Brazil, in the entryway to the ambassador's office, as you walk into the larger suite, all of the former ambassadors' photographs are hanging on the wall. So every day that I came to work and every day that I left work, Melavitsky looked at me and asked me, what have you done for your country today? And sometimes I had a good answer and sometimes I didn't. This was long before making America great again. So Melavitsky had a corner on that mark. But I knew that something was about to happen in Brazil. In the summer of 2013, I left in September of 2013, when at the Confederations Cup opener, in which Brazil was playing Japan, this was a lead-up to the World Cup that Brazil was also going to host, and then of course the Olympics, and was going to be a series of global sporting events that was going to cement Brazil's stature globally as a soft power that had emerged as a global power, maybe one of the first. And as the teams came onto the field, and as Doma Rousseff and the then head of FIFA prepared themselves to make opening speeches, when her image came up on the screen, she was the president at the time, I'm sorry, President Doma Rousseff, everyone in the stadium started whistling, and whistling in Brazil was like booing. And I remember sitting back and thinking, uh-oh, something is happening here in Brazil, with a largely middle-class crowd, a largely a crowd from Brasilia, a government city, responding to their president in this fashion, and it was striking. And of course, very soon after that, actually even before that, had started the political repercussions of demonstrations that had taken place throughout much of the summer of 2013. Tom, didn't they start with protests against the amount of money that the Brazilian government was spending on all of these Olympic facilities and World Cup facilities? Actually, it starts with a hike in bus fare in Sao Paulo, and a fairly small hike, but it had a huge impact on the many citizens of Sao Paulo who traveled by bus. They started demonstrating, but then it caught fire and just rolled across the country. Some of it was linked to spending on stadiums, but it was mostly focused on concern about high tax rates and low service provision. And so this is what generates it. This is what begins it. And this, of course, is combined with a political crisis which leads to President Rousseff's impeachment and then effectively the collapse of Brazil's political class and opens the space that we saw most recently with the election of Jair Bolsonaro. Wow. So Mel, did you foresee this happening in Brazil? I mean, there's a certain nostalgia in Brazil, even more so today, it seems, for the time that the military junta, the 20 years or so that the military junta ran the country. Did you see any of that? Did you feel any of that? Did you feel like a lot of Brazilians felt like the government had gone too far? And what year would this have been? So I was there, well, way back, I was a vice consul, my second assignment, in Belém do Pará, which is right on the mouth of the Amazon River for a couple of years when we had a consulate there. And then I was transferred to Brasilia as we were moving the embassy to Brazil. Oh, yeah, from Rio. So I had that experience. And then I did what I mostly wanted to do in my career. I did Soviet affairs, Eastern Europe, et cetera. And then was fortunate enough to be named ambassador to Brazil in the Clinton administration in 1994. So I served for four years there because we had had a succession of replacements for me who dropped out or were banged by the Congress, including Brian Atwood, who had been the director of the Agency for International Development, who was very well qualified to be ambassador to Brazil. And he was held up essentially by Jesse Helms at the time because he had been against the idea of bringing USAID, the Agency for International Development, into the State Department, as if you remember, USIA was and the Agency for Arms Control and Disarm was. So I had a long history with Brazil. I always retained an interest even during the time when I was assistant secretary for international narcotics matters because Brazil became a kind of transit country for drugs coming out of Columbia essentially in that area in the Andes. Well, you remember that very well when you were there. So my sense, I was very fortunate to be there at a time when things really changed for the positive in Brazil. When I got to Brazil in about June, right before the 4th of July in June 1994, inflation was running at about 40% a month. So if you had a salary, you had to spend it right away because if you didn't spend it at the end of the month, the money was 40% less. In fact, I remember very clearly this little story where we were trying to, we were going to buy some things for the 4th of July reception and we had to buy a lot of things in the local market. So I went over to the, we had a little bank, a small banking facility on the embassy grounds and they gave me a sack of money. You know, I needed a couple of thousand dollars. It was literally a sack of money. And as I was walking across the lot, I thought to myself, you know, as I'm walking across this lot, this money is getting to be worth less. So I called my wife and I said, I'm sending out a sack of money. We have people that worked in the embassy that did the 4th of July party said, have them go out and buy everything right away today because if you wait, you know, steadily goes down. Well, President Cardozo, who had been finance minister under that government, which was the Itamar Franco government, was elected and in fact stopped, even before with his plans, stopped inflation in its tracks. The middle class began to grow. Inflation was essentially licked and kept going down, which was the biggest thing in Brazil for at least the workers, you know, couldn't play the overnight bank rate to, you know, to play the money market. And it was a period when things really took off. Now, if you look at that period of time, when I left, things were really in a height. It wasn't because of me, it was because of the Brazilian government. You know, we're trying to pin this on Tom. Yeah, it's Tom's fault, not mine. But when I left, things were really moving. I can remember we had a, our residence was out a little bit further out of town. And there were even monkeys in the trees. A few months into the Real Plan, Cardoza's plan, all of a sudden the highway across, that went across our property, or in front of our property, was jammed with cars. Because middle class people that lived out in the suburb, these old towns that were, where the workers began to build Brasilia, suddenly were buying cars. It got jammed up. Monkeys went away. They don't like people. They don't like fumes. They don't like noise. That was a negative. But the positive was that you got the middle class participating in the economy. And Cardoza was wildly popular. He wasn't, there were certain things he couldn't get through the Congress, but that's what happens with every Brazilian government. Yeah, but he was also one of the big first thinkers and movers behind this third way. Third way, exactly. What's the third way? Clinton, Tony Blair. Yeah, basically a third way between kind of naked capitalism and socialism. Kind of what we're discussing today, not very effectively, but democratic socialism today in terms of, where does your country lie at any given time in terms of leveling the playing field for people to compete and that sort of thing? And they were talking about this 25 years ago, 20 years ago. And so there were more social programs during that time, that helped people out of poverty, or what was it? I think it was just the general economy. I think the social programs really were particularly bolsa de familia, which was Lula's big subsidy plan for poorer families. It didn't come until Lula actually was elected government. So there were some social, but mostly people arose because the economy, you know, it's that rising sea, let's all boats. That turned out to be quite true. You could just see it in places like Sao Paulo, Rio, the big cities. Even in some of the smaller cities, industries began to come in. Agro business was huge in Brazil, competed with the United States. So that, I mean, that was a period of time when I had a lot of hope for Brazil. When I left, I thought things were going to go well. But you remember at the end of the Cardozo period, suddenly what crops up the most, I think, the biggest problem that Brazil has, corruption? That came in, then it wasn't part of the... At the end of the Cardozo period, he served eight years. There were a few, looking at it now, were many scandals. But these things began to, you know, where government officials took advantage of their position. And I think that's a big issue. Tom knows this as well. Big issue with Brazil is corruption. And do the people have any trust in the government when they see that money is being skimmed off and deals are being made? Well, you know, it used to be in Latin America that the public response to a lot of credible allegations of corruption by officials was, why didn't I get my piece? But now things have changed. Things have changed dramatically. But Tom, what happened in this period? You were there during what would constitute the heyday of Lula, if not Jilma Rusev. What happened? I mean, you had the Bolsa Familia. You had people being lifted out of poverty, being paid to keep their kids in school. Some great, great social engineering going on. And the economy is booming as all kinds of indicators, including the kind of indicator that Mel was talking about in terms of traffic. What happened? But wait, first of all, tell us who Lula is and can we, can you help us understand what happened from the perspective of the people of the country? What's different for the average Joe? Is it violent yet? I mean, what is changing in their attitudes and what's causing that? Well, first, Ignacio Lula da Silva is a political leader, a trade unionist and political leader of extraordinary importance in Brazilian history, who eventually is elected president in the aftermath of what Ambassador Lewicki mentioned and is able to take advantage of the economic stability that Fernando Enrique Cardoso created as president of Brazil is able to build in through Bolsa Familia a social outreach program and social financing program that addresses the poorest people in Brazil and ensures it means it means like the family basket. It ensures that families have a minimal amount of money in order to buy what is necessary. And it's done through a very innovative program, effectively of debit cards, and money is paid not to heads of household but to female heads of household. It's paid to women because the assumption is that women will spend the money responsibly and that men will not. That's right. When you ask me why there are no strong women, that's because they're just too sensible rather than strong men. We'll get to that point. But what's important here is that as the Lula administration begins to address extreme poverty in Brazil, a middle class is building which Ambassador Lewicki spoke about and at one point it reaches about 100 million people, about 100 million people which is about half of Brazil's population. And this has a huge impact in Brazil because a country which historically was defined by inequality by the grand difference between the wealthiest and the poorest now has a center of a middle class. It still has great inequality but that middle class creates a degree of stability and predictability and creates a consumer market in Brazil that did not exist previously. And this helps drive the economy in an important way. But what's striking about the middle class is that they believe that they achieved their economic well-being through their own hard work and not necessarily through government programs. And so they become demanding of a government as opposed to being adoring of a government. And this is where the issues of high crime rates, of corruption and then economic slowdown have a huge political impact because they create and generate a group of now politically active Brazilians, a middle class who have no political voice. They have no political party or political candidate to represent them. And the result is a focus by the middle class on what they consider to be the inability of government to address the problems that are most important to them but also a significant focus on corruption. And this is what leads to the investigations in the aftermath of a significant scandal called the Car Wash scandal. It ultimately leads to the takedown of Dilma Rousseff's government and the collapse of Brazil's political class. But you know, it's interesting when you look at Brazil and Lula brings all of these people through his programs out of poverty. The middle class is strengthened, which is what we've all tried to do as diplomats is do what we could to strengthen the middle classes. Instead of being subservient and eternally thankful to a government that does that, as happened in Venezuela, right next door, you've got a core group, which is obviously dwindling lately, that's stuck with Chavez and Maduro for a long, long time simply because they had things that they'd never dream of having before, like a house, like enough food, like medical care, decent education for their kids. They never had this, never had a hope of having it, but now they've got it. But the result is that they are so thankful that they put themselves subservient to a government that every day becomes more and more corrupt. Why didn't that happen in Brazil? Because democracy has deep roots in Brazil and Brazil's constitution is a profound instrument of political ordering. It's important to understand that President Lula is still very popular in Brazil. In jail. Under house arrest. Yeah, he's incarcerated. But he was prevented from running in this last presidential election by decisions made by the courts. But there are some who believe that if he had run, he would have won. If he had run, he would have won. But independent of that, it's important to understand something about Brazil. First of all, I think that Brazil has already become a country of the future, certainly a country of the present. It's a remarkable place. But during my time there, what I saw was a country which had used democratic processes and its constitution to transform Brazil as a country. When I arrived in Brazil the first time, I served seven years of my professional career in Brazil. When I arrived for the first time in 1989, I was... Brazil was a different country from when I returned again in 2010. It had the same boundaries. It had the same language. But it had gone through a social transformation. Some of it was building out the middle class. Some of it was addressing extreme poverty. But a lot of it was about building infrastructure. And in terms of what it was able to do in building a country that was able to expand across the entirety of its national territory, it had done remarkable things. In fact, a country which was effectively a country of the coast along into becoming a country of the Amazon and of the West, and had emerged as one of the world's largest food producers and food exporters, had the highest amount of sustainable or renewable energy. It was accomplishing remarkable things. And these things are still in place. But what's striking about the political crisis that Brazil lived through is that imagine this in the United States. Imagine that a president is impeached, that his predecessor is arrested and charged with crimes and imprisoned. That his successor would then be arrested and charged with crimes. That the speaker of the house is removed from office and imprisoned. That the Senate majority leader is arrested and imprisoned. And that then the head of Apple, Boeing and Ford are all arrested. That's effectively what happened in Brazil. But the Brazilians clung to their institutions. They clung to their democratic purpose. And they believed in what their institutions could accomplish. And I think in many ways this is the untold story of Brazil. Because especially in the national media people will wonder, does Jair Bolsonaro represent a threat to democracy? I would argue that independent of what his future might be his election represents the Brazilian people's commitment to democracy. And an insistence that their leaders be accountable to voters and ultimately respond to what the Brazilian people want. You know, I think I remember an incident we had with corruption right before President Clinton came to Brazil. We had put out the commercial, remember the commercial manual and it gives businessman a kind of how do customs work? How do you do business in Brazil? How do you do business in Brazil? And there was a sentence in there that like page 130 that the press picked up on. And the sentence was corruption is endemic in Brazil. Corruption is endemic in Brazil. So it became a big thing and I got calls from the and I made a mistake because that was an honest statement. What I should have done with the president coming is just disavow it right away even though it was true. But you know sometimes honesty is not the best policy and it didn't work very well and we had to then say well it's a problem but we'll change the wording. Back that far. We're talking 1998. This is 1995 when Clinton came. So that's a long time ago. This has been a problem with Brazil. That along with inflation and just government bureaucracy has been a problem for a long time. And there have been various attempts to try to deal with this. Brazil is a thriving democracy. One thing that we didn't mention before is that look, Bolsonaro loves the military and he has nostalgia for the for the military period of time. The military is very responsible. I don't think they want to get back into control anymore. That's the way I found them. I'm sure Tom did too. I don't think they're alone. I think the Argentine military, the Bolivian military none of them want to run this thing because they had their experience with it. It's become way too complicated than it used to be. Sure, sure. But I think just one more comment on this. I think one of the big things about Bolsa Familia was education because as part of participation in Bolsa Familia the family had to make sure that the kid had a good attendance record at school and had a health check every, I've forgotten what it was every few months. Big issue among the lower middle classes where sometimes they drop out of school and have to go work in the street. We had these street children issues and children working to make money for the family. So that subsidy helped eventually will help Brazil and one hopes get back to a point where education, particularly higher education is open to everybody rather than just to the upper classes and the elite in Brazil. What I'm wondering is about the average Brazilian like the Joe Blow of Brazil. So I get a pretty good picture. Jose Rodriguez. Jose. So Jose has his he okay that's good. So Jose, he's married and he has a couple of kids. Here's what I have read preceding of Bolsonaro, but you can tell me how similar this is to what you experienced. There were students in the north where it's warmer like going to school schools made of sticks and mud. They had a lot of the favelas. Favelas. The really poor slummy neighborhoods had to cancel school for weeks and months because of gunfire, literacy, illiteracy excuse me was on the rise and the solution from Bolsonaro's point of view was to get rid of the Marxist garbage that's in the education that's how to fix that and there's a lot of people didn't like the corruption they wanted privatization as a way of solving that the murder rate was immense six times that of the United States and the leading cause of death for teenagers and so yes this nostalgia for the time of law and order and also economic depression people having difficulty obtaining food shelter basic needs unemployment was high extreme poverty was up healthcare was a problem is this consistent with what you were seeing by the time you left Brazil preceding the election of Bolsonaro? I guess to follow up on that was all of the programs that the PT and Lula did and to a certain extent Dilma Rousseff was that starting to unravel? No but what first of all I mean what you described is not José Rodriguez it's not an average Brazilian this is like the really desperate classes that are similarly disenfranchised Brazil is a middle class country as I said it does have extreme polls and inequality and you can find that kind of poverty in Brazil both in the northeast and also in some of the favelas in the larger major cities and this is not to say that there are not significant economic challenges security challenges and political gripes but Brazil is a very different country from what you just described but at the same time Brazil went through the most dramatic recession of its recorded history in what year would that have happened? During the period where Dilma Rousseff was impeached and then in the immediate aftermath and it's only now coming out so it's over the last three or four years and it's only now at a point where it has a positive growth rates and so it's rebuilding its economy and one of the larger challenges Brazil faces is that even as its economy grew during the period of Fernando Enrique Cardoso and President Lula and at the beginning of President Rousseff's term who succeeded Lula and grew to become the sixth largest economy in the world and well positioned to become the fifth largest it had not seen corresponding rise in productivity and competitiveness and the Brazilian economy was largely inward looking it was largely focused on its own consumers and its trade was largely outbound it was resistant to opening its markets because of lack of productivity and lack of competitiveness in some key areas it did have some world class industry especially Embraer in the building of civil aviation aircraft but it is now at a point where it has positive growth again it is attempting to take some very significant structural forms in its economy that are necessary and one of Bolsonaro's largest challenges or most important challenges right now is generating growth that is going to allow the Brazilian economy to recuperate and to continue the kind of economic and social development that had begun under previous presidents could I just add something here so one of the real problems I think is the political system itself and how it's structured you have a country that has in the Congress 25 26 parties and the ability to change parties almost overnight is very easy so what happens when a governing coalition starts falling apart deals start being made and this is part of the corruption as well so you know nepotism comes into it my uncle needs this and I'll vote for that or I'll be part of the coalition there's been various attempts to try to for example bring single member districts into the system because now they vote by party lists which increases the number of parties or use the German system where you have a kind of mixed system of single member lists so that the constituents are actually tied to the person who's elected if you go to Brazil now and you say who's your representative they can't really tell you they can tell you all the people that were elected in their state and the three senators but there's no real responsibility and it's been tried I don't know whether Bolsonaro will try to go for that I doubt it but until that particular system is changed in some way I have I really doubt I don't have as optimistic a viewpoint of Brazil making it into even higher than it has been sometimes in the past because it just breeds corruption it breeds all the kinds of things that make governments unresponsive to people's needs and so I think that's a big issue it's pretty hard to envisage that this will change during Bolsonaro's period I don't think that's his agenda at all but one could hope I want to agree very much with Tom Shannon, Ambassador Shannon on what has happened recently to make me more optimistic which is a bunch of prosecutors and younger judges who have actually gone after corruption in a way that has not only had a mark in Brazil but all over Latin America if you think of Odebrecht which is a big Brazilian company you know their tentacles have reached out all over Latin America well we all have known if you've worked in Latin America and you're promoting US business interests overseas you know for a fact that Odebrecht's been there before you just paid lots of people off you've known that you can't put your finger on it but you know that that's what's happening and so now there's a lot more justice out there and you can also say to presidents and ministers and that sort of thing who are having bids on public works that our people will keep you out of trouble we have something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and our people have to abide by a set of rules that unfortunately other countries don't but this all sounds great okay you've got a lot of the same you know a lot of the really good things in terms of the Bolsa Familia and the guaranteed income and the debit card that Tom was talking about and that sort of thing but then what happens is Bolsonaro is elected why though that's what I'm still not understanding let's talk about why is is Haier Bolsonaro elected what one of the conditions Jair and so what does José like about Jair so José I'm José I'm voting for Jair why did by the way did you I never ran into Bolsonaro I need the family did you when you were ambassador there was he prominent he was not prominent I mean I did run into him but although he'd spent 27 years in the Brazilian legislature and was considered a character of sorts he was not a a political figure of of great import which is why he's done so well because in the aftermath of the corruption scandals and in the middle class rage over corruption and what else had been happening in in Brazil the linkage between Brazil's political class and the Brazilian people broke the lack of trust and confidence was dramatic and in some ways it was a political Jonestown for Brazil it was almost a collective suicide by Brazil's political leadership the whole scandal the Odebrecht Scandals and the other and this opens this opens a space for non-traditional politicians especially someone like Jair Bolsonaro who has been talking about law and order about fighting corruption and about taking away what he considered to be the ideological basis for Brazilian politics the leftist tendencies in Brazilian politics and he was able to emerge as a clear alternative to traditional political leadership and it's what allowed him to win the election so basically what you're saying is it wasn't so much economic as it was political and that was let's just wipe the slate clean drain the swamp? are you great? well Neil I think no I think that's absolutely right but don't you think there was a social and a cultural part of this too? that's what I'd like to understand better I think frankly again I haven't been there for a while I did take it by the way a group of students to Brazil for about 10 days that we're in one of our programs here and we went up and tried to talk with regular Brazilians and some of the NGOs etc I think the Brazilian I agree with Tom people just fed up with the system at some point when this gets exposed everybody thought about it you know what they used to say about this Mayor of São Paulo Malufi was his name they said they say he robs but he gets things going everybody knew it as it turned out by the way they found out that he had all his money stashed in Swiss banks I don't know whether he was part of the Panama Papers situation but in fact it became clear it became public that he had been stealing this money it was kind of a very charming rascal I met with him many times and he ran São Paulo it was sort of a Mayor Daily of São Paulo Mayor Daily plus much more corrupt than even Mayor Daily I think at that point I think Tom and I both agree that Brazilian people just because this stuff was exposed and was public I think they just fed up with the class and so they picked someone that we would say how can they pick a guy like that well they might be saying similar things about us I guess the thing is social scientists have for a long long time tried to figure out what gives rise in an electorate to strong men making advantage of the democratic process to get elected and then trying what they can do to eviscerate that same process that got them elected whether you're talking about Erdogan and Turkey or whether you're talking about Putin, Hungary with Erdogan Poland now unfortunately, Maduro Chavez it just seems like the economic explanation of people being left behind economically is completely insufficient to really describe the phenomena it looks like it is way more social way more political way more value laden then it gives rise to a simple you're marginalized economically so now you're desperate and you're going to go with whomever was that happening in besides the corruption thing you've got a Bolsonaro now who is promoting gun rights in a country that really doesn't have a gun culture he said horrible things about the indigenous as parasites about homosexuals he said that I'd rather have my son die in an automobile accident he just way goes over the top and he still has a pretty good approval rating may sound familiar to some of us here anyway what is that all about Tom? it's the same in Brazil as it is here voters are discerning voters are smart voters know what they want and they know how to filter out stuff that they don't consider to be important and for Brazilian voters what was important was getting the economy back on track fighting crime fighting corruption and to a certain extent reorienting the country internationally and trying to build a better relationship with the United States and sure Bolsonaro had all kinds of other stuff that was going on around him but for voters who wanted a clear pathway forward he offered it and he offered something that was distinctly different from what his the opposing candidate Fernando Adagio was offering at the time a candidate of president Lula's party and in this regard the Brazilian showed clearly that they were prepared to put up with the other rhetoric if president Bolsonaro was prepared to focus on the primary purpose of his campaign and I think what you're going to find first of all it's not at all clear that he's going to be a strongman the thing about Brazil is that it's the big blob it just takes you in and covers you because it's such a large country it's so diverse it's so dynamic and it's a federal state and the states are important the governors are important and he has a party which while it has leverage in the legislature and he still has popularity the biggest legislative challenge he's facing right now which is pension reform he is slow in pushing through the assembly and it's being done in a way that while he's going to get some of what he wants he's not going to get all of what he wants but I think what we're going to see as he gets deeper into his presidency is that the Brazilians want him to focus on the three or four core interests that are greater to them and the extent to which he begins focusing elsewhere on some of the social rhetoric or environmental rhetoric it is going to lead to greater tension within his government it's going to lead to greater concerns among Brazilians and it's going to dissipate his energy so my hope is that he can he can be disciplined and focused because Brazil doesn't have any options right now and from the point of view of the United States this guy has to be successful because if this guy is not successful then we're going to have a Brazil which is going to be in a tougher place over the next bunch of years and will not be as helpful to us as we try to build a new relationship with it well to cap off this conversation let's turn I guess a little late but nonetheless to the title and that is US Brazil bromance what's in store for us I don't know if any of you caught the meeting between President Trump and President Bolsonaro they seem to be kindred spirits in many many ways they exchanged I guess smocker jerseys they're not they don't smile in the same way they have diabolical is that what you're trying to say perhaps if so but differently as a side note as a side note yeah so anyway a great meeting and the three of us ex diplomats here will all tell you that working with the Brazilian foreign ministry it was never easy was never a picnic in too many cases I found and I'd like to hear what you guys have to say that a Brazilian diplomats viewed any gains of the united states in the region as a net loss for them you know the zero sum game I mean I don't know yeah you know but now Bolsonaro is changing that so is that and wants to cooperate on Venezuela at the UN on strategic things common problems trade etc I think he's opening up the Brazilian space center for U.S. commercials launches after you know I mean the ground seems to be open for a lot more cooperation and you don't see the anti U.S. at least in its ascendancy that used to see in the Brazilian foreign ministry all the time so do we say that's enough that's good for us the Brazilian diplomats are about as well trained as any diplomatic corps that I've ever dealt with in my career when I was and I think the most highly paid by the way quite well paid and also for example in the 25 years between the time when I was first in Brasilia and when I was ambassador to Brazil some of the names were the same because the sons of the original Foreign Service officers were then in coming in but when Cardozo a lot of it you know Russians have a nice expression it says a fish rots from its head so when in fact Cardozo came in he appointed Foreign Minister Lompreia who was not one of the Brutus the bearded ones you know the leftists and the nationalists in the foreign ministry and it changed considerably our ability to talk with them on a reasonable way to try to get some cooperation with the Brazilians at the UN for example or the WTO we always had some problems but it changed considerably so it depends on you know on how the foreign ministry is structured now he and his foreign minister want the foreign ministry to operate they can't operate you know on their own in a sort of nationalistic or anti-American way it has to come from the the way they operate has to come from the president and from the foreign minister so I think probably we'll have lots of opportunity but you know I've talked to some Brazilian journalists lately and I said you know this it's not a country that the American president wakes up and thinks about first thing in the morning unless there's a crisis in Brazil it's not on the top of the priority list so we'll see I think the relationship certainly is going to be better but I'm not sure how far it will go or how important it will be in terms of world affairs well this guy who's foreign minister I don't know if you've met him Ernesto Arujo he was kind of plucked out of the ranks from what I understand and elevated to be the concierge the foreign minister is there is he going to be able to lead an intimated she that's going to be able to get in line with Bolsonaro and to become much more proactive and positive as it relates to the United States well we're going to find out I mean Ernesto was the deputy chief of mission the number two fellow at Brazil's embassy in Washington for quite some time that's when I first met him he's a good diplomat he's a skilled diplomat but as you said he was head of North American affairs when he was elevated to be the foreign minister and that's unusual in Brazil's foreign policy structure but he can take credit for a very successful visit by President Bolsonaro to Washington and the fact of the matter is it was a successful visit for both sides and Brazil got a fair bit out of it some of it important symbolically such as support for Brazil's admission to the OECD and which is an economic cooperation and development agency typically have developed countries and so to bring Brazil into that environment is almost as big as Brazil entering BRICS and also because of its major non-NATO ally status which puts Brazil at the front of the line with our NATO allies when it comes to purchasing military equipment and certain kinds of cooperation and intelligence sharing and and maybe most importantly the technical safeguards agreement which is done by Brazil and the United States to allow for the sharing of certain kinds of sensitive technology and information and this is going to allow US companies among others to use their Brazil space launch facility in Alcantara to launch satellites and this is a big deal because it's an equatorial launch site it's a much better launch site than Cape Canaveral it's going to be cheaper for American companies but also it's going to open a space for the United States and Brazil to cooperate on space technologies which are really non-continental ballistic missile technologies and this is something that our non-proliferation people both nuclear non-proliferation and missile non-proliferation people work jealously to guard and the fact that this administration was able to open that door to the Brazilians was a pretty remarkable step so I think in this moment we've had a very good start in terms of the personal relationships between the two presidents I think that the visit itself accomplished some important first steps in building the relationship with a lot of potential the trick now is to get our bureaucracies to work together on them and that's where the challenge is going to be because that's where you might end up encountering resistance and that's where people like the foreign minister are going to play an important role you know there was one maybe not very widely known thing that happened that I thought was quite interesting Bolsonaro apparently is exploring the possibility of you know in Mercosur they're basically a customs union you're not supposed to do bilateral trade deals he's trying to change that I learned that the hard way with Chile by the way but he's trying to change that and I presumably because he wants to do a deal with the United States well because Brazil I think you know we had something called a free trade area of the Americas if you recall which was a Clinton vision US vision of a free trade area throughout all of the Americas from Canada all the way to Chile now we've done a lot of it bilaterally over the years but back then it was supposed to be one big huge trade zone which would have been the biggest trade agreement in the world and I have to tell you that Brazil did everything possible to stop it it was clear they didn't want it to happen they didn't want it to happen because they again the zero sum game in other words if the United States is leading this we might have some interest in it but their gain is our loss it was just a reflexive kind of thing that the United States would dominate if you look at the economic situation you would think that as well because our economy was so dominating even for Brazil in terms of products when I was first in Brazil it was coffee, coffee, coffee in the 60s that was the export when I went back the second time and I'm sure this is held on rolled steel automobile parts right aircraft as Tom mentioned you get on the short range aircraft chances are it might have been built by Embraer and so that took a big that took a big jump and soybeans they're a bigger exporter than we are agro business, big time so no question they've diversified they've diversified and we've had we're competitors in a certain way but also as Tom said we can be there are areas where we can cooperate in Brazil now with Bolsonaro maybe they will open the door to that so Tom you don't see Bolsonaro threatening democratic institutions in Brazil or at least succeeding I think Brazil's democratic institutions can take care of themselves and I think the Brazilian people are committed to those institutions which doesn't mean that Bolsonaro might not make headway in some areas that we find uncomfortable and the point that I've made to Brazilians and others is that we've got a really strong kind of setup for the relationship and now we have to work on making that real but in the process the what the president says is going to affect the tone of the relationship in other words if if he continues to attack the LGBTQ population if he continues to put in doubt the autonomy of indigenous peoples and the protection of indigenous peoples if he threatens the well-being of the Amazon and biodiversity this will generate a response here in the United States that's going to make the relationship harder and that will not help him and it will also as I mentioned earlier I think begin to challenge the support that some people have prepared to give him internally in Brazil so my hope is that he can be disciplined but I'm quite confident about his contributions Do you want to do questions? Any questions? Thanks, I'm John Chorchari from the Ford School I appreciate your comments and my question is about Brazil's foreign policy we've touched on it a little bit in terms of its relationship with the United States but of course in this country in the US Trump's brand of populist nationalism has a connection to a Jacksonian foreign policy and an emphasis on military power and a retreat from engagement with international institutions do you expect to see similar manifestations in Brazil's foreign policy with regard to its role in UN-linked bodies or even with the BRICS? I don't think, well we have an example now there's been talk about military intervention in Venezuela Brazil would be a natural if that happens I don't think it's going to happen and I think there will be pushback from the military in getting involved in that way they've had their experience with things before that didn't work I think it's still too early to say what kind of foreign policy Bolsonaro is going to have I think he will be very anxious to be a partner with the United States he likes Trump and he likes the fact that that Trump is sort of pressing democracy to get more power as we mentioned the number of other democratically elected leaders around the world have become more autocratic and I think that's sort of his natural tendency but I think as Tom said he's going to be stymied by the Brazilian system and the democracy and the press in Brazil as well because the press is free in Brazil I would say in many cases irresponsibly free but they found themselves kindred spirits during the White House meeting because Bolsonaro started out by talking about fake news in Brazil so I mean that just rang President Trump's chimes right away two peas in a pod okay I wanted to say something let me begin by saying that I have a different relationship to Brazil than the ones that you have all expressed because I actually I am a faculty member here at the University of Michigan Sociology and American Studies Sylvia Pedrasa and I do most of my research has to do with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela you know so it's not Brazil but I do have a relationship that has to do with Brazil and that is that when I was in graduate school at the University of Chicago we had a lot of Brazilians there at the time and later on my first job was in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis and there also there were a number of Brazilians on the faculty in Chicago it was mostly graduate schools and these folks where the refugees and the exiles and the children off the people who had been exiled during the military junta so it doesn't surprise me one bit when you say that Brazilians are very committed to democracy because all the people that I knew became so because they had lived through the hardships of the years of the dictatorship and they would not want any kind of return to that so they're going to preserve democracy in Brazil whether it's off the right or off the left and they picked up a lot of values being in Europe at the time with respect to democratic socialism and so on people who had been part of the guerrillas spousing armed conflict and being pro Che Guevara and so on during the years of the military then went to for example Poland one of my good friends went to Poland thinking that he would become a communist and go back to Brazil becoming a real communist and he said he started having nightmares every night when he lived in the real communist society and then little by little he became a democratic socialist so I think Brazil is a place where there are a lot of people and in fact also it's also an exile of those years so I think that the political spectrum in Brazil in that vast middle class that you're talking about because people did return after Apertura that they did go back and they did establish themselves there I think it's a very rich political spectrum and I actually have more confidence in them politically than I have in Americans in fact very extreme situations well I think it's interesting that just before I came here I read that Bolsonaro had fired his minister of education because the minister of education had dictated that they would remove the negative references of the 20 year military dictatorship apparently all the school children in Brazil would read kind of the negative parts of a military dictatorship which is obvious but he demanded that all of that be removed there was so much pushback and this goes back to Tom and what Tom and Mel were saying and that is that they firmly believe that Brazil democracy will survive this there was so much pushback by teachers and parents that this was being overlooked or in some way having a shiny mask put on it when it wasn't that he was forced to resign so at the end of the day you may be right you know the education system for example now Tom you can tell me if this has changed much in that period of time we had when President Clinton came we had a country to country education agreement one of the things that our people found out was a very strange part of their system if you were a rich person you would send your kids to a private school and inevitably they'd be elected to a free public university which are the best ones in Brazil like some University of São Paulo they're free there's no tuition there are some like the Catholic university which is a good university has tuition if you were poor right you sent your kid to a not very good public school and you couldn't get into a free public university unless you sacrificed and were able to scrounge up the money to be able to send them to a regular university where you pay tuition now I remember the Education Minister at that time was very intent on trying to change that system because it perpetuated the rich elite didn't allow for much movement upwards and I don't know whether that has changed very much I haven't seen news that that whole system has changed but that's an important part also of this rising middle class you need education to be able to break out of just the class that for example the PT appealed to Tom do you think history will be designed to Lula I do I think it will be kinder to Fernando Enrique Cardozo because of what Cardozo did but I believe in some ways Lula's accomplishments will be seen as expanding the number of people who benefit from the Brazilian economy addressing the issue of poverty in Brazil especially in the northeastern part of Brazil but I also think to a certain extent he inoculated Brazil against the kind of populism that we were seeing in Venezuela in Bolivia in Ecuador and in Argentina and clung to the economic policy and approaches that Fernando Enrique Cardozo had put in place and created enough continuity of policy and stability in policy to allow the Brazilian economy to continue to grow. Now there will be any number of criticisms of him as any president has to endure but I think he will be seen as someone who was able to ensure that Brazil didn't fall under the influence of the kind of populism that we saw elsewhere in South America you know so when I got to Brazil it was in the middle of the election campaign and I said to one of the staff in the political section why don't we see if I can just meet with some of the candidates not to say anything political but just to get to know them and hear what they have to say etc so I met with almost every one of the candidates and there were a number of them at the time except for Lula, he wouldn't meet so after he was defeated I said see if Lula will come over to the residents for lunch sometime and he did and he brought America Dent he brought some of his people with him and I was here is this very kind of rough and tumble guy he's got a few fingers missing from having worked in the factory he was a machine operator but you know he was a good listener he didn't say too much but you know he had sort of he didn't have to be ideological at the time and so when I reported back the government was interested in he's still a leader in Brazilian society I said my impression of Lula was quite positive the impression of him before at least in sort of the American government's eyes was he was going to renounce the debt he was going to be anti-American he was going to do all these bad things and so there was some fear Tom is absolutely right he was smart enough to figure out that he needed to take what was good and what was left to him and preserve it and then add on to it which he did basically in the social side remember one of the first things he did is hire a finance minister who was the president of the bank of Boston in Brazil and so they kept they were able to keep inflation down they didn't overspend he was yeah but you know at the end of the day they get him on kind of butt-kiss charges really when you think about the scope and the amount of money that was involved with the car wash scandal and Petrobras and Odebrecht and all of that they got him on taking a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of services and construction money in refurbishing a condo on the beach President Clinton was impeached by the Congress because he had an affair with a young person I mean that was not that was not a huge theft of government if leaders don't think to themselves what's my legacy going to be you know this happens you'd say well it's a small thing but you don't expect that of a president of the country and that's what happened to Lula I think and he was being made he was being made an example of because they were in the mood the prosecutors and the judges that were doing this were in the mood to try to bring this to public attention actually convict people put them in jail for whatever crimes they committed and so that's what happened with Lula along with some who had taken millions and millions of dollars I think we have a couple questions Hi my name is Christian I'm a graduate student at health informatics school information and I'm an incoming public policy student next year so my question is more related to talking about the order break scandal and my mom's Peruvian I'm from Argentina so that was a big deal when that all happened and that was linked to Peruvian political institution and several presidents were involved in it and there was a whole big betrayal involved in that given the situation that has happened out of that and a lot of people are very frustrated with the political institutions of several different South American countries such as Peru some places in Argentina and some as well as the Paraguay and all the players involved in that scandal do you think that his election could cause a ripple effect in terms of other rising populism that people feel like they want to make sure that their corruption is tackled first and foremost and would that depend how would that be because you always mention that it depends on how the democratic institution is strong enough are other countries strong enough to withstand something like this as well well Guatemala did Guatemala can do it Peru can do it Argentina can do it Chile can do it so I mean corruption will be a big deal across many elections but to a certain extent there already is a reorientation of sorts politically in South America and Bolsonaro's election is not the first part of that South America which at one point was colored pink because of left of center or progressive governments is not pink anymore I mean if you look at Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru Columbia and you could almost put Ecuador in that plot you have if not center right governments at least governments that have moved away from these progressive ideologies and approaches and as they've done so they've actually created a possibility for South American politics to move beyond ideological claims for votes and increasingly voters are going to look not to ideologies but accomplishment and to the extent that political leaders and political parties show that they can get things done they'll be re-elected and elected and it's no longer a case of presenting yourself either as the leftist candidate or the rightist candidate because I think ideologies have corroded and people have lost trust in them and they really want leadership that can deliver the goods Does it ring a bell at home here? Hi I'm a master's student here at the Fards Collection I'm the only Brazilian who stands here Thank you so much for having this event I'm really happy that it happened I wanted to play a little bit of the devil's advocate and ask you for your opinion on the Judge Moro and the Lavajato Car Wash like I know I was in the class and the lecture that we just had this afternoon and you spoke a little bit like you complimented the Lavajato Car Wash which I also think is a very good thing that came out of Brazil but I'm very skeptical with his political intentions especially recently for those who don't know the main judge that was the architect behind his operation is now the Minister of Justice which I think at least put his reputation at risk so I wanted to hear a little bit of your views on it Would you like us to talk about Sergio Moro in particular or... Sergio Moro was a judge in Curitiba if I remember properly in the focal point for the Car Wash investigation and he was the one who drove the investigations and ultimately ordered the arrests of all the many people who got caught up in this and working with the Federal Police developed all of the cases in the early going and he has been named the Minister of Justice by President Bolsonaro and obviously we were very concerned that Judge Moro who had established himself as this beacon of positive action against corruption was suddenly going to put himself into the soup with all of the corrupt powers that be and that this ultimately would taint him in some fashion and there were also concerns that President Bolsonaro was going to use him against his political enemies against corruption investigations but Moro is very respected here in the United States and has engaged with US counterparts in a really intelligent way and I think in some ways he is one of the few members of Bolsonaro's cabinet who cannot be fired and that s a powerful place to be I think and the Supreme Court of the United States of America pretty much and I think what this means is Moro s biggest challenge is moving from a judgeship to a cabinet ministry is a big deal and it requires a lot of help but if he has the right kind of help around him I think he has the potential of being a hugely important Justice Minister and somebody who can begin to institutionalize anti-corruption efforts in ways very positive for Brazil going forward. You know we ve had traditionally here a number of Brazilian lawyers who have come to our law school I know several of them have done research I ve had some contacts with them as well they have a very high opinion of Moro of course they all remember young prosecutors and young lawyers have the bit in their teeth right now they are the ones who have driven all this and you know when you get momentum in an area like that where corruption is being found out things should change should change so having Moro there with his reputation I would think would be a warning to those in the system that would have a tendency to corrupt or scam or whatever it is make deals put them on warning that the game has changed by the way if you think that our government has changed with a lot in terms of the cabinet people leaving people coming look at Brazil I mean they seem to have a I will see with Bolsonaro but before ministers leave ministers come and go it is like a merry-go-round you can t tell who is going to be there next time so if there is some continuity and particularly if Moro stays I agree with you in the Brazilian system of justice and the way the society looks at the government I just got one last question and that is are both of you saying that what we say what many people say in the United States who support President Trump basically say don t really look at the divisiveness and the rhetoric and that sort of thing he does of what he stands for in Brazil taking that whole thought to Brazil do you think that the electorate in Brazil will pretty much if they haven t already concluded the same thing and that is that Bolsonaro stands for an abrupt change from the old order from corruption that was endemic etc etc let s not worry about comments that he makes about the LGBTQ community indigenous people let s just go with the fact that he is part of a change and we are going to continue with him as our president because of the fact that he recognizes the place in history that he is right now with Brazil I think that was the vote that was how people thought as they walked into the polling places and cast their ballots now that President Bolsonaro is president that is going to evolve Brazil is a big diverse society but it is still fairly conservative it is still fairly traditional but even with that conservatism and that traditionalism it is a live and let live country and I just don t see Brazil buying into the social rhetoric of the president and that is why I said earlier that if he wants to be successful he has to be successful and he has to be focused on achieving the core issues or areas of concern that got him elected and taking advantage of this particular moment in time otherwise he is going to find himself trying to ideologize Brazil in a different way that I don t think is going to be understood or worked but let me just close by saying before I turn it over to Mel let me just close by saying Tom Jobim who was an incredible Brazilian artist and composer if you ve listened to the girl from Ipanema or any of his Bolsonaro songs you would know him he once famously said that Brazil is not for beginners and what he meant by that is Brazil is a complicated place it kind of appears kind of light and airy and fun from football to carnival to music but it has a deep history to it and that needs to be understood but while Jobim was right I added an axiom I added something else which is Brazil is not for short timers and it s not for hot money it s not for people who want immediate political advantage Brazil is about relationships and it s about relationships that endure across a lifetime both of individuals and countries and I think we re going to find as we get deeper into this period of time that the Brazilians will see especially in their relationship with the United States an important point of stability and an important way to drive their own economy and their own society forward and so I think we re in a very good place well that s good to hear positive news from somewhere Mel last words yeah Brazil sort of gets under your skin I think you know in my day back in the 60 s and 70 s there were a bunch of Brazilians many of them had been served in the Soviet Union another big country and I was aspiring to serve in the Soviet Union as well because the country s big it s vigorous you gotta love the Brazilians and they vary from north to south when I served in the north it was a kind of which is not the most developed area in Brazil it was a kind of genteel society people were nice people were kind people went out of your way to do things for you even in very difficult circumstances as I say it gets under your skin so I always try to be optimistic and it makes you know it kind of gets under my skin when I see the corruption coming because I don t think that s not gonna help Brazil become a great country at all in fact it s diminished it somewhat in the eyes of the world but Brazil s active it has a role to play it has a role to play region it has a role to play internationally remember one thing Brazilians have been very active in UN affairs they ve been very active in the international civil service many of them have served as representatives of the secretary general lost their lives exactly in Iraq we had an example of that kind so it s a big active country and I think it s very special I hope things work well I hope that Bolsonaro casts aside these things that he said during the campaign and tries to accomplish something and get things done because I think there s a lot of both human capital and a lot of natural resources in Brazil that will allow it to be even a more outstanding country and a leader in international affairs Ok, Companera, where are we? For music we have the girls from the outro Oh, by the way, Tom Jobin the first trip that President Cardozo made to the United States after he was elected Tom Jobin had died in the United States the night before of a I think a failure in the hospital of his liver and national icon I mean people all over Brazil and the same thing happened with some of their race car drivers they have these huge demonstrations and a couple of the famous ones were killed in crashes they re really attached to these icons, especially Tom Jobin President Trump mentioned Pele and other very famous football stars but the thing that I m struck with is that a lot of our diplomats who serve in Brazil keep coming back there s something there that keeps attracting them back to our service in Brazil the other part of it too is that I think I m hoping that through this podcast that we re doing, American Diplomat not only do we get a better appreciation for what it is our diplomats do and say and that sort of thing overseas but that also in these kinds of fora in these kinds of episodes that we re able to really look at what other countries go through the best of what works as opposed to thinking that somehow we ve got all the answers no, we don t have all the answers and there are things that have been tried and failed and there are things that have been tried and work like the Bolsa Familia and other things that maybe are the answer to a lot of the kind of debates that we have in the United States that never seem to get beyond the capitalism versus socialism in terms of closing the wage gap in the United States that seems to be going on an hourly if not minute basis. So anyway let s take a look at Brazil. I think it was an interesting episode for all of us and Laura what do we have for music? Jobim, girl from Ipanema enjoy we can all sing it. Oh will you? I ll sing it with you how does it start? Without music are you kidding me? we ll do a duet do you know it in Portuguese? no, teach me okay how does it start? alright, well that s why we have Jobim oh that s so beautiful this is a first this is a podcast episode that has Melavitsky singing among his other talents thank you so much Mel yes thank you is there anything you wanted to sing before we move on? Mela said it all thank you all for coming thank you all