Brazil - hard cop, or soft cop?
Colonel Pedro de Pessoa is the man who teaches Brazil's army how to do "soft power". As the commander of the army's Peacekeeping Operations Training Centre, he's responsible not only for training thousands of Brazilian soldiers for their peacekeeping mission in Haiti, which they lead, but also for introducing them to new ideas about what it means to be a soldier in the 21st century.
Brazil is rapidly emerging as a Latin American super-power. And these days, that means understanding how to win friends and influence people without threatening them at the end of a gun barrel.
Colonel de Pessoa is the man for the job. He spent five years at the United Nations in New York before taking up his current position - but for all his talk of teaching his men how to "respect diversity" when they find themselves posted in strange places, he still believes in "hard power" too.
He has adapted Machievielli: "It is good that people should think you are nice," he told me. "But they should also think that you are capable of being bad."
So the Brazilian armed forces are spending huge sums on modernising their weaponry and equipment - the government recently signed an arms purchase agreement with France worth more than $7 billion. Brazil has thousands of kilometres of borders to defend and vast tracts of Amazonian rain forest to patrol. Along the borders there are drugs smugglers to deal with; in the forest there are illegal loggers to be stopped.
But "soft power" can have its uses right here in Rio as well. The colonel drove me out in his Land Rover to the army's main training ground, where they've built a "mini-favela", a rough miniature approximation of a shanty town. It could be any shanty town anywhere; after all, he tells me, most peace-keeping operations these days are in urban environments, so soldiers have to learn how to work where they are surrounded by civilians, women and children.
And now the army is helping the police work out how to "pacify" Rio's favelas, many of them controlled by vicious drugs cartels. So the question is: can the lessons that the army has learned in Haiti now be applied here in Rio? Colonel de Passoa is convinced that the answer is Yes.
You can hear our interview on Friday, together with a fascinating interview with the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim.
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