40 The Americas The Economist January 29th 2022
I
t raised eyebrowsin the West. Amid
talk of war in Ukraine, Kremlin offi
cials this month dangled the possibility
that, if natodid not stop protecting
countries close to Russia, Russia might
deploy forces to Venezuela and Cuba.
Jake Sullivan, the United States’ national
security adviser, dismissed such talk as
“bluster”. A largescale deployment is
indeed unlikely. Nonetheless, Russia’s
role in the region is troubling. For the
past 15 years or so it has propped up
crooked dictatorships in Venezuela and
Nicaragua. Vladimir Putin relishes a
chance to needle the United States and
look mighty on Russian television.
On three occasions since 2008 Russia
has sent a pair of Tupolev bombers,
capable of carrying nuclear weapons,
halfway around the world to Venezuela
for missions that have lasted around a
week. They have twice strayed into the
airspace of Colombia, an ally of the Un
ited States. In 2008 Russia sent the Peter
the Great, a nuclearpowered guided
missile cruiser, and several other ships
for exercises with the Venezuelan navy.
These deployments all coincided with
moments of tension with the United
States over Russian attacks on Georgia
and Ukraine. Their purpose is “symbolic
reciprocity”, says Vladimir Rouvinski, a
Russian academic at Icesi University in
Cali, Colombia. “You, the United States
and Europe, do things in Ukraine. We
will do things in your zone of influence.”
Perhaps the closest the world ever
came to armageddon was in 1962 when
the Soviet Union installed nuclear mis
siles in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, only 100
miles or so from Florida. They were
withdrawn in return for an American
guarantee not to invade Cuba, which
remained a subsidised satellite of the
Soviet Union until that empire’s collapsein 1991. When Mr Putin came to power in
Russia a decade later one of his first acts
was to shut a Sovietera listening post on
the island in a gesture of détente.
Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s late leftist
and antiAmerican strongman, offered Mr
Putin a way back into Latin America.
When Chávez was flush with oil money he
spent some $6bn on Russian armaments,
including 24 Sukhoi fighter jets, 50 heli
copters, tanks, antiaircraft missiles and
100,000 Kalashnikov rifles. That was the
start of what has become a broad and deep
relationship. Between them Chávez and
Nicolás Maduro, his successor, have
signed some 200 agreements with Russia.
For Mr Putin Venezuela has become a
colourful example of his claim to be re
storing his country’s global influence. He
lacks the cash to be a paymaster in Latin
America. But he is a source of shortterm
loans, limited investment, arms sales and
diplomatic support for antiAmerican
regimes. In 2018 Mr Maduro staged an
illegitimate election and the democratic
world recognised Juan Guaidó, the opposi
tion speaker of the legislature, as president. It looked as if Mr Maduro might
fall, as President Donald Trump piled on
sanctions and mused about military
intervention. Mr Putin came to Mr Madu
ro’s aid, deploying a team of around 100
uniformed Russian military advisers to
maintain the missile systems, advise on
drone warfare and act as a geopolitical
tripwire. They have stayed.
In 2017 Russia opened a fortresslike
building in Managua, Nicaragua’s cap
ital, officially to train Central American
police to curb drugtrafficking. It is run
by Russia’s interior ministry. Nicaragua’s
opposition believes it to be an intelli
gence post conducting surveillance for
Daniel Ortega, the country’s dictator. Mr
Putin’s ties with Cuba are more distant.
Russia has suffered setbacks in Vene
zuela. The relationship has been marked
by mutual corruption: a Kalashnikov
factory announced in 2006 has still not
been built, and the money for it van
ished. Rosneft, a Russian oil giant, se
cured stakes in Venezuela’s oilfields only
to announce its withdrawal from the
country in 2020 to avoid American sanc
tions. Its assets there were transferred to
the Russian government.
Mr Putin wants to be seen as the
leader who made Russia a great power
again. So he may be reluctant to retreat
from Venezuela. But he lacks the resourc
es to turn it into a successful satellite.
His interventions have been cheap.
Though there has been talk of Russia
setting up a base at La Orchila, a Venezu
elan island in the Caribbean, that would
be too costly, thinks Mr Rouvinski. Some
say Russia would welcome a negotiated
solution to Venezuela’s political conflict,
provided that the interests it has ac
quired in the country were respected. But
that prospect depends on what happens
in Russia’s own neighbourhood.Russia has become a crucial ally of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in VenezuelaBelloThe bear in the Caribbean
become a synonym for dog) and as pet
names for relatives (“vovó” is a nickname
for “avó”, or grandmother; “titi” for “tio”, or
uncle). Some examples are thought to be
the result of exposure to hundreds of in
digenous and African languages, in which
reduplication is common.
The urge to reduplicate may reflect a
culture that is younger, less conservative
and more open to experimentation, some
surmise. Reduplication came in handy to
name new things in a new world. For ex
ample, in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro
in the 1940s, residents attached a rubbertyre to a wooden barrel to bring water from
Guanabara bay and called it a “rolarola”,
from the verb “to roll”. “Brazilians use lan
guage to make a hard life more fun,” says
Mr Araújo.
Reduplication, a mostly oral tradition,
was hardly studied in Brazil until the turn
of the 21st century. But in the past two de
cades it has started to get more attention. It
helps that new reduplicated words appear
all the time, while old ones change their
meaning or gain currency.
The election in 2018 of Jair Bolsonaro,
Brazil’s populist president, helped to popularise “mimimi”, an onomatopoeic phrase
he uses to mock wokeness and concerns
about covid19. On January 17th a Brazilian
newspaper came up with “mentemente”,
from the verb “mentir” (to lie) to criticise
the president.
And as YouTube influencers from Brazil
become ever more popular, Brazilian Por
tuguese has begun to creep across the At
lantic. In November a Portuguese news
paper ran a story with the headline: “There
are Portuguese children who onlyspeak
Brazilian”. Reduplication, no doubt, is
among the peeves of their parents.n