The meeting of far-right parties organised by Vox for three years closed in Buenos Aires with reproaches to the European Union and, above all, “the Spanish government” for its “ambiguity” in the face of the electoral crisis in Venezuela. “We will not rest until the decision of the Venezuelan people, expressed massively in the elections of July 28, is accepted by the dictatorial regime of Nicolás Maduro,” says the final declaration of the Madrid – Río de la Plata Forum 2024, read before a half-full auditorium by deputy Santiago Abascal. The president of Vox demanded the recognition as “elected and legitimate president of Venezuela of Edmundo González Urrutia,” the opposition candidate to Chavismo. The situation in Venezuela, where Maduro has proclaimed himself the winner of the elections of July 28 amid accusations of fraud by the opposition, hovered over much of the discussion tables of the Forum. But there was also ruthless criticism against the governments of Colombia, Brazil, Chile and Mexico, as well as Spain. According to the far-right, all these countries are governed by presidents linked to “organized crime” who apply “methods to destroy democracies from power.”
The Madrid Forum opened on Thursday with a long speech by the President of Argentina, Javier Milei. “One of our own,” said Abascal before giving him the stage at the Palacio Libertad, a gigantic building from the beginning of the last century called the Kirchner Cultural Center until last December. Milei ranted against politicians, businessmen and journalists, called Maduro a “murderer” and lamented that there were still, in his opinion, “degenerates” who “have nostalgia for the Bolivarian revolution,” started in the early 2000s by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Venezuela was the focus of the panel Europe in the face of the liberticidal regimes of the continent this Friday. Hermann Tertsch, a MEP for Vox, accused Josep Borrell and his predecessor as High Representative for Foreign Affairs of the EU, Federica Mogherink, of being “accomplices” of Venezuela and other governments such as Cuba. “The EU has campaigned for the left. And all its degraded rivals, like [Jair] Bolsonaro [en Brasil]. The campaign against Bolsonaro was a scandal,” he said. Bolsonaro narrowly lost re-election against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022. In turn, Italian MP Carlo Fidanza, from the party of the President of the Council of Ministers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called for the victory of Donald Trump in the presidential elections of November 5 in the United States. “Meloni in Italy, Milei in Argentina and Trump in the United States are the main messengers of the battle for freedom in the world,” said Fidanza.
The final declaration of the Madrid Forum held in Buenos Aires also attacked the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, which it considers its rivals in a region that, according to the extreme right, is in the hands of a left that has as its only objective to destroy democracy. The text attacks, by name and surname, the Brazilian Lula, the Colombian Gustavo Petro, the Chilean Gabriel Boric and the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, leaders who are far from having common positions on such hot topics as Venezuela. While Boric, for example, openly maintains that there has been fraud in Venezuela and that Maduro “is not the left”, Petro, Lula and López Obrador are fighting to keep open the possibility of a dialogue between the Chavista regime and the opposition.
The parties that make up the Madrid Forum also rejected what they consider “the penetration in Latin America and Europe of totalitarian powers and enemies of the West such as Iran, China and Russia that attack the sovereignty of nations as is happening with the invasion of Ukraine.” And they expressed their solidarity “with the people of Israel and their right to defend themselves.” The Latin American left-wing organizations, says the final declaration, “collaborate with terrorism in all its forms” and maintain “equidistance between the terrorism of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran on the one hand and the democracy of Israel on the other.” They also voted for Trump as the only option to stop his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, accused of having “a pro-socialist ideology, ties to the radical left and the desire to limit freedom of expression.”
“From Buenos Aires we proclaim that Ibero-America, a colossal moral and cultural reserve of the West, is gradually recovering democracy and the rule of law, pushing back 21st Century Socialism and emerging as a region where freedom, development and prosperity will prevail, as demonstrated by the case of Argentina under the government of Javier Milei,” says the text that closed the Madrid Forum. The Argentine has become the global figure of the extreme right, a mirror in which parties that aspire to come to power in their respective countries look with hope. Milei knows his good fortune, and on Thursday he proclaimed at the Palace of Liberty that he was at the head of “the best government in Argentine history.”
Subscribe to the EL PAÍS América newsletter here and receive all the key information on current events in the region.
#Madrid #Forum #organized #Vox #accuses #European #Union #Spain #ambiguity #Venezuela
