"U.S. Fighter Jet Bid With Brazil In Jeopardy..." Topic

… As Russia Muscles Into Deal Amid NSA Controversy.

"Russian military officials are in Brazil this week trying to woo President Dilma Rousseff into letting them in on a bid for a multi-billion dollar fighter jet contract – a move that could scuttle a proposed deal with U.S. manufacturer Boeing and further strain relations between Washington and Brasilia.
Boeing made a $4 USD billion proposal to supply Brazil with F-18 fighter jets and was long expected to be the front-runner in a bidding war with Rafale by Dassault and Saab's Gripen NG.

While Brazilian officials and the Russian delegation, headed by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, will sign a contract to send Russian-made Panzir-S1 air defense systems to Brazil, Russian and Brazilian media reported that the major reason for the visit is for Russian officials to convince the Brazilian government to consider a bid for its Sukhoi T-50 fighter jet.
The jet is currently in the final stages of development and would be in the bidding to replace Brazil's aging fleet of Northrop F- 5 Tigers and the French-made Dassault Mirage 2000s.

While insiders in both Brazilian and U.S. military circles said that Boeing was the front-runner, there are rumors that controversy over the recent National Security Agency spying scandal in Brazil has thrown Boeing out of the top spot…"
Full article here
link

Brazil is not going to buy a Russian bird.

Amicalement
Armand

They just might, since rumor has it, their President is/was a communist sympathizer/guerrilla.

Is a communist guerilla any worse than one funded by the US?

"In a California court recently, a would-be US citizen Jorge Vinico Sosa Orantes has been convicted of falsifying information while trying to gain citizenship. Orantes is now facing 15 years' imprisonment for this otherwise minor crime, because the lie concerns his membership of the Guatemalan army in 1982, and his participation of a massacre in Dos Erres, where up to 200 villagers were killed after the army raided the village looking for stolen weapons. Killed doesn't really cover it -- Guatemalan "Kaibile" special forces raped and murdered the villagers over two days, separating the children and killing them with hammers, cutting open pregnant women, and keeping teenage girls alive for days of rape before strangling them.

The event has suddenly become known in the US media as the Dos Erres massacre as if it were as singular and famous as My Lai. It is simply one of the better documented, with four soldiers and officers involved sentenced in 2012 to die in jail serving their terms of thousands of years. In fact it was simply one of hundreds of exceptionally brutal massacres conducted by the Guatemalan military in their repression of guerilla campaigns -- referred to as a civil war, it was more one-sided than that -- over a period from 1960 to a final truce in 1996.

More than 250,000 people were killed in the conflicts, in which a string of US-backed dictators and fraudulent presidents forced people towards armed struggle for basic rights, and then reigned brutal repression on whole regions. Ninety per cent of the dead were killed by the military, and 90% of those were civilians, many of them indigenous people.

The military relied on US arms and funds, which only paused -- partially -- during the Carter era, and were expanded to include helicopters and air-to-ground missiles during the Reagan era. Barely covered in the Western media, the years of repression -- initially at the behest of local landowners and the United Fruit Company, and then for military and oil interests -- made the country about as lethal for its benighted population as anywhere on Earth.

The Guatemalans never forgot, obviously, and many of the years since have been consumed with investigation and reconciliation. In May this year, former president Rios Montt was convicted of genocide, though it was sent for re-hearing by a (politicised) court of appeal. Montt was leader in 1982-1983, when the Reagan administration supplied hardware that allowed Montt to turn low-level reprisals into systematic massacres of whole areas, taking the death toll into the tens-of-thousands per quarter -- overwhelmingly, the dead were Mayan-descended people in the north of the country. Indeed, it was in this period that the country was flooded with CIA advisors and trainers -- including for the Kaibilie forces -- playing an active and knowing role in the killings."

They might if the price is right. But the word on the streets from my aviation chums was that the Brazilians are mightily pee'd off at the US just now and a non-Boeing decision is more than 50/50 just now…..

Khusrau – Mako11's comment probably had more to do with them possibly being more friendly with USSR/Russia in the past so it seems more likely that they would be aligned in the present/future. Soviets and US supported quite a few thugs in the past, nothing for either side to be proud of imo.

The NSA fiasco did peeve our southern allies and others off quite a bit according to links I've seen on the BBC's site(understandably so). I'm sure there will be other fallouts (ex: arms sales, failure of US oil companies to win bids on their leases, etc.) to come and we will need to rebuild our credibility or lose out to China or Russia who are seeming to be more active world-wide in the political and economical arena.

Think that over the next few years we're going to see quite a few realignments.

Perhaps. But more likely I think would be quite a few countries being rather more widespread in their sources of equipment. I wouldn't necessarily see a Brazilian purchase of Russian kit as an alignment with Russia. More a decision that, on this occasion the Russian kit gave them a better solution. Which is probably a good thing. Western arms suppliers have tended to rest on their laurels to some extent. A sharpening of the market should see them raise their game. Particularly when the South Koreans really kick off in the arms export business.

"…we will need to rebuild our credibility or lose out to China or Russia who are seeming to be more active world-wide in the political and economical arena."

One wonders what exactly could be done to rebuild the U.S.'s credibility compared to China or Russia.

It should also be considered that the F-18 Hornet, even the most current ones, is still a generation below fighters like the F-22, F-35, J-20 and PAK FA. If the Russians are offering the T-50 to the Brazilians, they would be dumb not to consider the offer because it's a 5th gen aircraft.

Yep, correctly surmised that it did have to do with her leanings towards Russia, and/or China, philosophically.

However, to answer your question directly, yes, given the overall history of communism. Their death tolls are in the tens, if not hundreds of millions, when combined together, but they have better PR.

@Tuscaloosa, re: credibility. China and Russia do have good PR imo.

Russia seems to be very active of late, reminding me a bit of the US in the 1920's as exerting pressures in its "sphere of influence", Lithuania, european gas market and such. Their diplomacy efforts in Syria (not trying to get PA or endorse the reasoning behind it), but it was pretty effective.

China is really active in overseas mining and oil/gas. Heck they even have interests in TX in the Eagle Ford play. Every country seems to owe them money too.

Sometimes you really can just take things at face value. The NSA spying scandal has been a much bigger deal in Brazil than people here seem to realise (perhaps not unsurprisingly). There are at least two investigations going on into US spying in Brazil, a Senate inquiry and a Federal Police inquiry.

First there was the business of the Brazilian partner of a BBC journalist who had interviewed Edward Snowdon being detained in London apparently at the behest of the US then there were the revalations that the US was spying on commercial enterprises in Brazil in particular Petrobras in the lead up to the leasing of the oil concessions off the coast.

For a country that has been the one of the most consistent allies of the US in the region for the past several decades, this has come as a real slap in the face. People are extremely angry about this and coming off the back of widespread protests against the spending on the World Cup and Olympics the government is in a poor position to deflect this anger even if it wished to. I should imagine if Americans woke to find that London or Paris had been performing widespread data mining and espionage on its citizens, government and commercial enterprises they would be more than a little annoyed. So yes, it probably has harmed Boeing's bid.

They just might, since rumor has it, their President is/was a communist sympathizer/guerrilla

I'm not sure what relevance that has. Last I heard the Soviet Union had collapsed and the groups that Dilma was associated with in the '60s and early '70s weren't Soviet aligned anyway.

I'm not sure why anyone would say her sympathies or activities are rumoured, they're well known. It's a bit like saying Nelson Mandela was rumoured to have been a member of the (then) outlawed ANC. The extent of her participation in guerrilla activities is debatable and documents alleging her active guerrilla history have never been verified and indeed stemmed from extremely dubious sources. Involvement in the struggle against the military dictatorship was widespread at the time among students and young people of her generation.

Khusrau – Mako11's comment probably had more to do with them possibly being more friendly with USSR/Russia in the past so it seems more likely that they would be aligned in the present/future. Soviets and US supported quite a few thugs in the past, nothing for either side to be proud of imo.

An odd statement. Brazil has been a long standing US ally, the only South American country to participate in both world wars, the only one to make a significant military contribution in the Second World War, supported the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and has been the major partner of the US in the Haiti stabilisation mission since its inception. The Brazilian military has long standing ties with its US counterparts and regularly conducts bilateral and multilateral exercises with the US.

On the other hand Brazil has not been a major purchaser of US armaments since the early 1980s. Much of the navy is ex British or indigenous construction. Apart from the aging F-5s the airforce is either locally designed or European in terms of materiel. The last major purchase of US arms that I can think of was the purchase of reconditioned M60 tanks in the late '90s and that was on the basis of fire sale prices.

My money is on Rafale. It almost clinched the deal three years ago but the financial situation provided an excuse to hold off on signing. The Rafale deal will come with superior technology transfer and an offset for sale of Embraer military transports to France is too good a deal to pass over. France has already secured the contracts for the new submarines and collaboration on the future nuclear boat.

Boeing is a competitor in other fields. Embraer is the world's leading small and mid range biz jet manufacturer. Most people don't realise that the single largest Brazilian export is executive jets. I'd take the opportunity to hurt the competition.

The other factor that might weigh in is the navy. At some point and not too far off there will be a need to replace the A-4s that fly off the São Paulo. The Rafale has already proved its compatability, the initial testing of the Rafale for deck operations was off the São Paulo in her previous guise as the Foch.

BTW Russia has already been sucessful bidding for Brazilan military contracts. SAMS, AT Missiles and M-35 attack helicopters but my money is still on the Rafale.

Yep, correctly surmised that it did have to do with her leanings towards Russia, and/or China, philosophically.

No, you didn't. A lecture on Brazilian politics would be out of place but suffice it to say that communism or what passes for it in China or Russia isn't a motivating factor. Russia and China are two of the other BRICs. China in particular has been aggressively and quite successfully making commercial deal in Brazil just as it has been elsewhere. Commercial imperatives at play here. The US by contrast has been diddling around in the Middle East for the part decade or so or pivoting to the Pacific, whatever that means. Americans really should read the memo that not everything revolves around them.

I was wrong, the Airforce got what it wanted, which was the Gripen.

Yep, the news reports are that SAAB got the guernsey with the Gripen.

By the way, if you want to have an inkling of why Brazil is ed at the US, reflect upon the fact that, as Chacrinha points out, we've been a better and more consistent ally to the US than any nation in South America, yet even well-informed americans think we're – or have been – good buddies with Russia.

Dilma's right: enough is enough. Being a pal with the US is like being in a bad abusive relationship.

"Being a pal with the US is like being in a bad abusive relationship"

There's such a thing as a good abusive relationship?

No, there's not but semantics aside, rethink of the relationship with the US is well overdue. The US has had a disgraceful record of meddling in Brazil's affairs. The ditadura would not have come about had the US not given the light to the coup. In fact it was the US military attache that brought Castelo Branco into contact with some of the other plotters.