Perhaps in order not to add fuel to the fire and further aggravate the dramatic situation that Venezuela is experiencing in the eyes of the world, Lula has tried to minimize the conflict and has criticized the press for presenting the issue “as if it were a third world war.”
It is true that the former personal friend of Hugo Chavez, and then of Nicolas Maduro, has been frustrated at not having achieved, as he had hoped, a peaceful and democratic solution to the Venezuelan elections. To help him resolve the conflict peacefully, Lula even sent his personal advisor, Celso Amorim, a former foreign minister and expert in diplomatic conflicts, from the very beginning. He had to give in to Maduro’s stubbornness. He refused to present the minutes of the elections that declared him the winner, which Lula demanded from the very beginning.
Nor did Maduro accept the mediation that Lula attempted with his two colleagues, the presidents of Colombia and Mexico, who went so far as to propose repeating the elections. All in vain in the face of Maduro’s stubbornness, who turned an election that was held without violence into a war to remain in power.
This Thursday’s editorial from the newspaper The Globe Commenting on the event, the Brazilian leader says: “Maduro exposes Lula’s strategy to failure” and questions the fact that it is not enough to criticize Maduro’s “deep concern with the referee”, since this suggests that he is playing outside the scope of the game. There are those who prefer to analyze Lula’s trivialization of the Venezuelan crisis as the fact that the Brazilian president was sure that his personal friend, Maduro, whom he had praised in public before the elections, saying that Venezuela “was not a dictatorship”, would listen to him in order to provide a democratic solution to the crisis.
For Lula, the possibility of a democratic resolution of the Venezuelan conflict was doubly important given his position of wanting to appear as a mediator of world peace by intervening in current armed conflicts, which would give prestige to Brazil, which seeks to graft itself into the global world of developing countries as an element of dialogue and opposition to the so-called “imperialism of the West.”
It was in an interview a few days ago on Central America television, affiliated with TV Globo in Mato Grosso, in which Lula confessed and tried to minimize the diplomatic failure in Venezuela. In this interview, Lula stated bluntly in relation to the conflict that he did not see anything “serious”, “abnormal” or “scary” in it. Describing how the elections went, Lula explained: “The electoral court recognized Maduro as victorious, although the opposition has not yet. So we are in a process. There is nothing serious about it, nothing scary. I see the Brazilian press treating it as if it were the third world war. There is nothing abnormal.” And he added: “There were elections, there was one person who claims to have received 51%, there was another who said he got 40 and a bit percent. One agrees, the other does not and explains that now it is a matter of “going to court.”
According to Brazilian political analysts, the truth is that the case of Venezuela and the futile efforts of Lula and his party, the PT, to resolve the conflict are not on a par with the tragedy unleashed by the Maduro government, which seems to even mock the accusations it receives of unleashing a climate of open fascism in the country with spilled blood and fantastic decisions such as bringing forward the Christmas celebrations to October 1st in order to make people forget the drama of the elections.
The impression that is being felt in democratic circles in Brazil is that saying that the progressive government “expresses deep concern” with the arrest warrant for candidate Edmundo González is not enough. And it is recalled that Venezuelans are living the drama of a population in which malnutrition is at the level of the African average, just ahead of Somalia, and in which a quarter of the population has already emigrated abroad and will continue to do so. No, we are not, as Lula says, in a third world war, although for the already long-suffering Venezuelans what they are living and suffering does not cease to resemble it.
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