Brazil engages in controversial wargame as Venezuela tension rises

Midway through September, the Brazilian government hosted U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a meeting at the country’s northern border with Venezuela. The move was lambasted by politicians and career diplomats alike as a major diplomatic faux pas. A group of six former Foreign Ministers published a statement repudiating what they called “the spurious utilization of Brazilian soil by a foreign power as a platform for provocation and hostility towards a neighboring nation.”

Apparently, however, there was even more to the story than meets the eye.

While Mr. Pompeo accompanied Brazil’s Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo on a visit to a soup kitchen serving poor migrants, calling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro a “drug trafficker” in the process, the Brazilian Army was running an unprecedented hush-hush military exercise in the Amazon — with references that seemed to be a little too on-the-nose. 

Between September 8 and 22, platoons from a fictitious “Blue Country” were tasked with repelling an invasion by a “Red Country”...