The president of Brazil, Argentina’s main trading partner, continues to be under attack from Javier Milei: the far-right president renewed his attacks on Friday against his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had demanded that he apologize for previous insults. “The things I said are true. What are the problems? That I called him corrupt? Wasn’t he imprisoned for being corrupt? That I called him a communist? Isn’t he a communist? Since when do we have to apologize for telling the truth?” Milei said a few days before the Mercosur Summit, where the two will meet face to face. In passing, the Argentine again questioned the presidents of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, and Colombia, Gustavo Petro.
Brazil and Argentina maintain a strategic alliance and are the heart of Mercosur. The Brazilian economy has a 15% participation in Argentina’s foreign trade, making it its largest partner. In turn, Argentina is Brazil’s third partner, participating in 5% of its business abroad, according to official data. Despite this close bond, since Milei has already been in the Casa Rosada for almost seven months, the presidents of both countries have never spoken.
“I have not spoken to the president of Argentina because I believe that [antes] “He has to apologize to Brazil and to me, he has said a lot of nonsense, I just want him to apologize,” Lula said last Wednesday. However, he added: “Argentina is a very important country for Brazil, and Brazil is very important for Argentina. It will not be a president of the Republic who sows discord between Brazil and Argentina. The Argentine people and the Brazilian people are greater than the presidents.”
Milei did not accept this implicit truce. This Friday, exultant after the approval in Congress of his laws to deregulate the economy and dismantle the State, he redoubled his attacks against Lula. “The truth is that it is such a small discussion. It seems like a discussion between pre-adolescent children. The same mechanism of [Gustavo] Petro, from [Pedro] Sánchez,” he said about the apology that the Brazilian president demanded of him. “Do you believe that Lula didn’t do similar things? “Petro and Lula did similar things, actively getting involved in our campaign,” he added during a television interview with the channel The Nation +.
Milei then defended as “true” his previous qualifications of Lula as “corrupt” and “communist.” She refused to apologize “for telling the truth.” “Are we so sick of political correctness that we cannot tell the truth to the left?” he asked. And he added: “Those who lied demand that they be apologized for having told the truth, come on. We must put ourselves above these trifles because the interests of Argentines and Brazilians are more important than the inflamed ego of some lefty,” he concluded.
The tension between both leaders began last year, during the electoral campaign. It was then that Milei called Lula a “corrupt communist.” The Brazilian, for his part, asked to vote for the Peronist Sergio Massa, the candidate defeated by Milei. Then, once elected president, the far-right invited former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to the inauguration ceremony on December 10. Lula de Silva withdrew from participating in the ceremony and sent her foreign minister, Mauro Vieira. Milei now accuses Lula of having promoted Massa’s “negative campaign” against him.
The bilateral relationship has become even more complicated in recent weeks because dozens of Bolsonaristas, convicted or investigated for participating in the coup attempt in 2023, fled to Argentina in search of refuge, violating the precautionary measures issued by the Justice Department.
Pope Francisco
In contrast to his aggressiveness towards Lula, Milei tried to ingratiate himself with Pope Francis, whom he had also insulted during the electoral campaign. Now he admitted that it was a mistake to define him as the “representative of evil on earth” and attributed it to divergent interpretations of religious doctrine.
“I was wrong because I was telling him something for thinking differently or for having a reading of the sacred scriptures that I don’t have,” said the Argentine president. The Pope, he said, “has a vision of things that is directly opposite” to his own. Even so, he acknowledged that this “did not merit his using the epithets” that he used last year.
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