Before the 1971 war, India and Pakistan were skirmishing on another front: Brazil
The South Asian neighbours tried hard to enlist the support of the local media and the authorities, while Brasilia stayed neutral.
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When the Pakistani Army launched Operation Searchlight in East Bengal in March 1971 in order to eliminate Bengali political and military opposition, news of its atrocities spread all the way to Brazil. Liberal newspapers such as Jornal do Brasil and Correio da Manhã published articles based on reports from the Press Trust of India and Free Bengal Radio, while giving little weightage to official statements from West Pakistan. Watching this narrative build was the Indian government.
“This discreet sympathy for East Bengal should be understood in the internal Brazilian context in which the middle class intelligentsia is clamouring for more democratic rights,” Sushil Dubey, charge d’affaires at the Indian embassy in Rio de Janeiro wrote in a secret memo on April 1, 1971, to Rukmini Menon, joint secretary of the Americans division of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.
Another newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo, wrote an editorial on the developments in South Asia in which it stated that East Bengal had more in common with India than West Pakistan.
All this negative coverage in the Brazilian press angered the Pakistani establishment, prompting its embassy in Rio de Janeiro to send off a protest note that some newspapers published. Condemning the “continuous Indian interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs”, the embassy said...
