The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, received his counterpart from Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, at the Casa Rosada on Wednesday and had planned a meeting with the president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña. Milei and Lacalle Pou had not seen each other since the far-right leader was sworn in last December, despite two invitations from the Uruguayan for the Argentine to visit him in Montevideo. The tension escalated in April, during a meeting at the conservative Fundación Libertad, where Lacalle Pou asked for “a strong State” in response to Mieli’s harangue for exterminating it. And it escalated even further with the decision of the Argentine not to participate in the summit of Mercosur leaders held in Asunción on July 8. “All the presidents should be here,” Lacalle Pou told the Argentine foreign minister, Diana Mondino, present in Paraguay.
Lacalle Pou and Peña traveled to Buenos Aires to participate in a seminar on terrorism organized by the World Jewish Congress and the Latin American Jewish Congress, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the attack against the AMIA Jewish mutual society, which left 85 dead and 300 injured. Peña will also stay to join the commemoration ceremony that takes place every year in front of the AMIA headquarters in the Once neighborhood of the Argentine capital. At 9:53 a.m. a siren will sound to remember the victims of the car bomb that hit the building. The attack remains unpunished.
The meeting between Milei and Lacalle Pou took place behind closed doors at the Casa Rosada and lasted an hour. The Argentine president’s press office released a photo of the two of them hugging and smiling. Milei thus tried to make up for the snub to his peers at the Mercosur summit. The Argentine preferred to travel to Brazil to join an event of the Brazilian far right led by Jair Bolsonaro. The decision was evidence of the terrible relationship that Milei has with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whom he insists on calling “a corrupt communist.” When the Brazilian demanded an apology, Milei redoubled his attacks: he met with Bolsonaro and left Asunción.
The Brazilian Foreign Ministry even called its ambassador in Buenos Aires, Julio Bitelli, for consultations last weekend. The diplomat met on Sunday with the foreign minister, Maurio Vieira, and with Lula da Silva himself. In light of the uproar in the Argentine Foreign Ministry, which was not aware of the Brazilian’s call for consultations, Itamaraty clarified that it was only an informative meeting with no consequences for the quality of bilateral relations.
Peña, the host of the meeting of presidents, however, avoided a diplomatic escalation. He had already visited Milei in March and shows good ideological harmony with the Argentine. With the meeting in Buenos Aires on Tuesday, Lula da Silva has been definitively excluded from Milei’s diplomatic priorities.
Despite presidential tensions, Mieli’s arrival at the Casa Rosada aligned Argentina for the first time with Uruguay’s demands regarding the future of Mercosur. Uruguay considers the bloc to be a corset for its small economy. And it has been demanding for years that it be allowed to enter into bilateral agreements outside the zone, particularly with China, without the consent of the rest of the partners, something that is now prohibited by the founding statutes of the bloc. Brazil and Argentina have historically opposed such an opening, arguing that it would undermine trade within the bloc and allow for tariff-free import triangulations that are difficult to control. Milei’s arrival produced a change in Buenos Aires. This was made known by Foreign Minister Mondino in Asunción, when she spoke of the need to “modernize” Mercosur.
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