By Mario Vitor Santos on September 18, 2024
Lula and Nicolás Maduro Photos: Ricardo Stuckert and Leonardo Fernandez Viloria
Over the course of the weekend, Venezuelan TV reported the dismantling of a scheme to prepare an invasion and a coup. Two U.S. citizens, two Spaniards, one Czech and 400 rifles were arrested, according to Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.
The news follows the Venezuelan government’s revocation of the authorization for Brazil to take care of the business of the Argentine embassy in Caracas. In there were six Venezuelan collaborators of Maria Corina Machado, accused of organizing vandalism that would be part of a coup against the outcome of the presidential elections.
One of the effects of the Venezuelan decision to end the Brazilian administration of the Argentine embassy is to put an end to the slight and amusing attitude of the highest Brazilian authorities in relation to the diplomatic crisis created by themselves to, surprisingly not recognizing the elections in the neighboring country.
As a friendly country, Brazil has become an enemy of the Bolivarian government, throwing into the rubbish decades of diplomatic construction between Lula, Hugo Chavez, Dilma Rousseff and Maduro.
Brazil struck the former ally by refusing to recognize the result of the ballot box.
The worst, however, was the histrionics involved, with an Olympic and superior attitude exhibited so far, both by President Lula and by his international advisor Celso Amorim in relation to the electoral process and the result of the election in the neighboring country.
Now, Brazil loses the administration of Milei’s embassy (which comes to offend Lula again calling him a “corrupt tyrant”) and is still accused of tolerating the existence of plans and deals with the murder of Nicolás Maduro by far-right Venezuelan coup plotters housed in the Argentine diplomatic embassy.
Refugees in the embassy are the worst in Venezuelan political crime.
Upon taking over the embassy, Brazil inherited the mission of preventing them from continuing with their criminal activities.
As the Venezuelan government no longer trusts Lula, it has revoked the concession with a justification that puts Brazil in the place of an enemy, either lenient or a participant in a criminal plan.
Will the Brazilian government now consider what was evident to everyone?
It is serious not to recognize elections in another country. More serious is to spread, with international scandal, distrust of the fairness of the electoral process of the sovereign neighbor. Even more serious is interfering in the internal affairs of that neighbor. To find that it is possible, for example, to declare, as Lula and Amorim said, that the elected, confirmed by the Venezuelan highest court, should simply give up the victory at the polls and submit to new elections, as part of an agreement with the defeat of Edmundo González, a far-right, for whom the Brazilian government did not hide its preference.
In this line, Brazil began to try to give lessons and orders to the president and former friend Nicolás Maduro in attitudes that surprise by the content of interference and arrogance, but also by ridicule.
By playing with fire in this amateur twist, Brazil has already burned itself. The neighbor decided to respond by doubling down. And rightly so, because it was dedending the sovereignty of its elections, as Brazil did in relation to Bolsonaro and his coup attempt.
It is certain that Venezuela will continue to escalate the answer in each round. Those who have faced imperialism’s skirmishes for more than two decades are not frightened by sterile verbiage of newly converted smaller partners.
Now it’s time for Venezuela to do some positioning. There it is said that the BRICS will become Vrics, with the replacement of B of Brazil by the V of Venezuela. It is funny but with a serious background, because it reacts to Amorim’s threat to veto the entry of the country into the BRICS.
The Brazilian government was not ashamed to give credit to Edmundo González and Maria Corina Machado. The first is a runaway bandit, who said he has ballot papers that would prove fraud. He did not submit them to the Electoral Court, but those that were obtained proved to be a gross fraud. González had to be arrested (as Bolsonaro is expected), but he got an agreement to escape and went to Spain. Maria Corina, to whom González served, remains in Venezuela, from where she sends support to Bolsonaro. She is the Venezuelan version of infuriated far-right stimulated by the White House, to whom she has already appealed for military intervention in her country.
Now, with the milk spilled, President Lula declares that he will return to exercise diplomacy behind the scenes.
The question is why did Brazil shove itself in this alley? Why has the country broken the Brazilian tradition of silent diplomacy with Venezuela?
Never has so much hyperactivity reverberated in so many setbacks. Gonzalez, in whom Brazil was betting on a delusional proposal for a new election, fled.
The new Brazilian diplomacy believed in polls that on the eve of the election gave victory to González. Then he gave credit when he showed such a fraudulent calculation
When did the professionalism of our diplomacy give way to this strident, blazed mouth?
From the point of view of the Lula government, the episode, regrettable, exposes incoherence between domestic and foreign policy, between past and present, between the president and much of his base of supporters opposed to US imperialism.
Who wants to give meaning to the new scenario of Brazilian foreign policy is faced with a very strange fabric, with single lapses without logic, improvised on the basis of prejudice, machismo and personal antipathies (said Lula: “Maduro has to learn”).
The stigmatization of the Venezuelan president (as well as the figure of the Sandinista Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua) corresponds to the usual formula of US imperialism of justifying reputation assassinations that result in physical murders. It is happening now with Putin. It happened to Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, to name just a few.
They are campaigns preceded by reports of alleged human rights violations that pave the way for interventions.
Impossible to ignore what is evident in everyone’s eyes at the behavior of Brazil. Impossible to do so in the name of a fidelity at any cost and across the line to Brazilian leaders, without evaluating the merits of their actions.
Suddenly, in Brazilian foreign policy, an insurmountable abyss extends. Never before has the present been so far from the past. This, after all, is not so old. It is from the beginning of this mandate.
Upon receiving Maduro in 2023 and re-establishing relations, the president was unanimously vilified by Brazilian media that is submissive to the State Department. Did Lula think the weight was too much and decided to change? Something, which is not clear, happened between 2023 and 2024. The change may have affected or be the effect of a spin not only of the Brazilian geopolitical position in Latin America, but globally.
The false expulsion of the Brazilian ambassador to Managua, for which there is no formal act, indicates that Venezuela is not an isolated case. What is going on? Doesn’t today’s Lula talk to Lula of yesterday? Where did the savy foreign policy go?
Mario Vitor Santos is a journalist, a columnist and tv presenter for 247. and TV presenter 247. He is also an Editor and Director of Brasilia da Folha.
Source: Brazil 247 translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English