Brazil's President Cancels US State Visit Over NSA Spying on Dilma Rousseff

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff canceled a scheduled state visit to Washington in response to revelations that the NSA had intercepted her personal phone calls, text messages, and emails, as well as conducting extensive surveillance of Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras. The cancellation marked the first major diplomatic consequence of Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations and represented an unprecedented rebuke of a U.S. president.

The spying revelations were first reported on September 1, 2013, by TV Globo’s investigative program Fantástico, based on documents provided by Edward Snowden to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was based in Rio de Janeiro. The documents showed NSA surveillance targeted not just Rousseff’s official government communications but her personal conversations, as well as systematic intelligence gathering on Petrobras, Brazil’s largest company and a major player in newly discovered offshore oil reserves.

President Obama attempted to salvage the visit with a 20-minute phone call on September 16, but refused Rousseff’s demand for an official public apology for the surveillance, leading Rousseff to cancel the October 23 state visit. The visit would have been the first state visit of Obama’s second term and the first by a Brazilian president in nearly two decades, making its cancellation diplomatically significant.

Following the cancellation, Rousseff delivered a scathing speech at the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 2013, moments before Obama took the podium. She condemned U.S. surveillance as a violation of international law and “a breach of the fundamental human rights and especially of the respect for citizens’ privacy.” She called the NSA’s actions “totally unacceptable” and announced Brazil would pursue new international legal frameworks to protect privacy and push for an internet governance structure less dominated by the United States.

The incident had lasting consequences for U.S.-Brazil relations and demonstrated that Snowden’s revelations created real geopolitical costs for American foreign policy. Brazil subsequently pursued closer relationships with European partners on internet governance and privacy protection, and Rousseff mandated that Brazilian government communications use only domestic encrypted systems, spurring development of Brazil’s domestic tech sector while excluding U.S. companies from sensitive contracts. The cancellation proved that mass surveillance programs designed to provide intelligence advantages could backfire catastrophically when exposed, undermining diplomatic relationships with key allies.