And then, it hit me. To borrow from Keats, as re-read by Borges : Was it a vision, or a waking dream? It was instead a living nightmare. I had been transported from the ruins of Angkor to an urban Borgesian labyrinth of despair.
I returned to Sao Paulo for a geopolitical debate with Lula's former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, the Brazilian Sergey Lavrov (they are close friends, on top of having "invented" the BRICS). We had a fabulous lunch at Nino's, in the same neighborhood where I grew up in the 1960s complete with a cacio e pepe that beats anything to be found in Rome. At night I had to be trippin' again Go ask Alice! South America morphing back into Southeast Asia.
I finally got my answer to that secret meeting poetic justice back in the Buddhist East, from the brilliant anthropologist Piero Leirner, which went a long way to explain what the military were up to in Brasilia. For them it's about geosecurity, not geoeconomics and geopolitics. Bolsonaro has been on the record extolling the opening up of the burning Amazon rain-forest to U.S. mining giants. The military constitutionally responsible for Brazil's sovereignty wouldn't mind, as long as they oversee the proceedings.
As Sao Paulo academics were heartily debating, Brazil now seems to be configured as the ultimate global lab for new exhibits of authoritarian neoliberalism. It's actually nastier: with Western liberal democracy reduced to a mere shell, I see it as the ultimate Hybrid War lab. A Lula in the process of Mandelazation may be even "allowed" to be set free, or placed under house arrest. Because in the end sub-imperial militarism as well as His Masters' Voice in Washington would have had their way.
What if this is really nothing but a bad dream? As Borges wrote: "We dreamed [the world] resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we consented in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of non-reason to know it is false."
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