This article sets out to examine the removal of President Zelaya in Honduras in 2009 and the impeachment of President Lugo in Paraguay in 2012. Many comparisons have been drawn between the Honduran and Paraguayan cases, but a full analysis of the similarities and differences is important to show the differences in the Western Hemisphere of perspectives regarding military involvement in political life and constitutional flexibility and interpretation. This article begins by briefly reviewing the concept of coup d'état and its evolution in order to establish a working framework. Before investigating each case on an individual basis, cultural and historical factors are considered. Although legality, constitutionality, and legitimacy of the processes of presidential removal are indeed a significant portion of this investigation, the importance of perspective remains a prominent facet of the analysis.
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Brazil's economic performance, political stability, and search for greatness ensure that Brazil will play a strong role on many global issues and will strengthen regional economic cooperation. US-Brazil relations have evolved from an alliance during and after World War II into a wary but crucial engagement today. The April 2012 meeting of Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Barack Obama deepened cooperation on common interests. Brazil's foreign policy is set by economic factors more often than ideology, and Brazil wants to advance its core interests. The US seeks to encourage Brazil's rise. Nevertheless, differences between the US and Brazil on trade and other issues will not be overcome easily. This paper examines how the shifting balance of power in the world has expanded Brazil's spheres of action while outdated concepts like formal trading blocs prevent Brazil from achieving the narrower goals it set for itself.
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Brazil lives within a regional security context, a “securosphere” that is immensely hard to avoid. Strenuous disagreements among defense and security agencies over approaches to precise methods of identification, measurement, and reactions of living and emerging threats on this securosphere proved their shared ability to be mistaken. This article proposes a national security border system of systems with enough power of discrimination and capacity for integration to address danger or take advantage of changing circumstances across Brazil's borders, tied to appropriate outcomes of the security agents. I discriminate sensible topological differences to lay out interconnection patterns of the various elements defining three specific border environments, using them to plan a more successful action. I also discriminate between subtle similarities among practical operational concepts of the armed forces and the police forces to provide better-analyzed premises, using them to build wholeness of understanding. From a better understanding of the whole, we can infer system requirements for the parts, providing capacity to conduct a disciplined exercise of planning with politically and financially affordable costs.
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The National Defense Strategy (NDS) was the first defense strategy made public by the Brazilian government. Approved in 2008, the document marked a milestone in the sector, determining important changes in the stated objectives and the means - political and military - to be used to achieve them and the military means to be used to achieve them. However, the feasibility of its implementation has been widely questioned especially in academic circles. This is due both to inconsistencies in the strategy per se, and uncertainty regarding the government's capacity and/or ability and/or willingness to mobilize the resources required to adopt such the measures. This article discusses the main challenges the NDS faces. This article discusses the main points of the NDS and the main advances in its implementation between 2008 and 2011, as well as the obstacles to its implementation.
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