Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says he’s trying to broker a political solution in Venezuela and a peace agreement in Ukraine, but he is trying to accomplish both in a bizarre way: He is openly siding with the oppressors.
By Yahoo News – Andres Oppenheimer
May 31, 2023
This week, Lula gave a red-carpet welcome to Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Lula had invited him to a summit of democratically elected South American leaders and celebrated what he described as the Venezuelan president’s “return” to Latin America’s diplomatic community after years of regional sanctions against the Venezuelan regime.
Worse, Lula said at a joint press conference with the dictator that charges Maduro stole the 2018 elections and committed massive human-rights abuses are part of “a narrative that has been constructed against Venezuela.”
In fact, according to the Human Rights Watch advocacy group, Maduro’s death squads carried out more than 19,000 political executions between 2016 and 2019. United Nations human-rights groups have documented thousands of political murders in Venezuela and, in 2021, the International Criminal Court opened an official investigation into Maduro’s “crimes against humanity.”
Others push back
But Lula did not mention any of this in his lovefest with his guest. He only asked Maduro to “deconstruct” that alleged narrative by holding scheduled elections in 2024, as if Maduro’s political murders were merely a public-relations issue.
To his credit, Gabriel Boric, Chile’s leftist president, said after the Brasilia summit of 11 heads of state on Tuesday that what’s happening in Venezuela “is not a narrative construction, it is a reality.” Boric added, “It is serious, and I had the opportunity to see it up close in the faces and pain of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have come to our homeland.”
Likewise, Uruguay’s President Luis Lacalle Pou, who was also at the summit, said he was “surprised” to hear Lula describing Venezuela’s tragedy as a “narrative.”
Some members of the diplomatic community, however, are giving Lula the benefit of the doubt.
Rubens Barbosa, a former Brazilian ambassador to Washington, told me that Brazil has “concrete reasons” why it needs to re-establish ties with Venezuela, including that country’s unpaid $12 billion debt to Brazil and the estimated 300,000 Venezuelan refugees in Brazilian territory.
“Brazil has had to re-establish normal relations with Venezuela to solve all of these problems and help in a transition to democracy in Venezuela,” Barbosa told me.
Asked whether Lula isn’t just legitimizing a ruthless dictator by inviting him on an official visit to his country, Barbosa said, “In my interpretation, Lula’s statement asking Maduro to change the ‘narrative’ about Venezuela can be translated as an implicit request to Maduro to hold free, transparent elections.”
‘Predictable’ support
Thomas Shannon, a former U.S. ambassador to Brazil and board chairman of the American Academy of Diplomacy, told me that Lula’s controversial statement about Venezuela is “lamentable, but predictable,” given Lula’s foreign policy during his previous administrations from 2003 to 2011.
Shannon added, “I don’t know what was said privately to Maduro, but diplomatically, there is an opportunity here for the region to work with the United States to create the circumstances inside Venezuela necessary for presidential elections, and in the process begin a calibrated lifting of (U.S.) sanctions.”
When I asked him whether he believes that Lula has put serious pressure on Maduro to hold free elections, Shannon conceded, “I don’t know.”
Judging from Lula’s recent behavior, I’m skeptical that Brazil’s president will be a tenacious fighter for democracy in Venezuela. He has received Maduro with honors, but has not yet personally meet with Venezuela’s opposition leaders. Instead, Lula had his foreign-policy adviser do that during a visit to Caracas in March.
Just as troubling, Lula recently volunteered as a mediator in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but proposed that Ukraine cede the Russia-occupied Black Sea peninsula of Crimea to Russia to end the war. As expected, Ukraine rejected that notion outright. Ukrainian officials asked rhetorically if Brazil would be willing to cede one of its biggest provinces to a foreign occupier.
Maybe those who say Lula is trying to position himself as a neutral broker in Venezuela and Ukraine conflicts are right, and he will prove to be a brilliant behind-the-scenes negotiator.
But, judging from what we’ve seen so far, he’s more likely to go down in history as an accomplice of some of the world’s most brutal dictators.
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