The human rights organization Human Rights Watch for the Americas criticized President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) for not adopting a tougher tone against Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro after the country’s justice system ordered the arrest of opposition candidate Edmundo González, who ran in the election with strong evidence of fraud.
The criticism was mainly due to the tone adopted by Lula with Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who simply stated that the arrest “makes it difficult to find a peaceful solution, based on dialogue between the main Venezuelan political forces.”
For the entity, the two countries and also Mexico – which formed an alliance with Brazil and Colombia to demand the voting records of the Venezuelan election, but later preferred not to speak out further – should adopt the same tone as 12 other countries on the continent that rejected “unequivocally” the order for González’s arrest.
Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said that both Lula and Mexico’s Petro and López Obrador should make the continuation of any agreements with Venezuela conditional on the annulment of the court order.
“The minimum entry point for any negotiation should be the revocation of this order,” she said on social media. She later softened her criticism, saying that the joint demonstration by Brazil and Colombia at least expressed “discontent between these countries,” as she said in an interview with S. Paulo Newspaper.
Last week, the organization itself also criticized Lula, Petro and Obrador’s proposals for new elections to be held in Venezuela. It stated that the election was marked by “serious irregularities and human rights violations.”
The director reinforced the criticism after the arrest warrant against González, and said that “one thing is to ask for an impartial mechanism to be able to evaluate and give credibility or not to the different minutes that were presented”.
“Thinking about repeating the elections is ignoring the most basic right in a democracy, which is to be able to choose and be chosen and have your vote counted,” he said.
Juanita Goebertus also praised the harsher tone adopted by Chile in not recognizing Maduro’s reelection and condemning the threat against Edmundo González, but considered Brazil’s mediation position to be somewhat acceptable. She believes that there needs to be an organization on the continent for a transition process to democracy.
“But all of them must be based on principles of human rights and the rule of law. What the history of Latin America shows us is that, with a good capacity for civil society to organize itself to resist and with ruptures within the elites, the Armed Forces and the private sector, this type of transition process occurs,” he added.
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