The diplomatic rehabilitation of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has culminated, at least on a regional scale, who this Tuesday was received as an equal by the South American heads of state, meeting at an informal summit convened in Brasilia by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The purpose of the meeting was not, formally, to put an end to the isolation of Chavismo but to promote South American integration. Lula, who with half a century of politics behind him is the dean of the presidents of the southern cone, wants his counterparts to put aside their undeniable ideological differences, cooperate more and seek a mechanism to act as a block in the face of challenges. global and local. As planned, only the Peruvian president Dina Boluarte has been missing.
Lula opened the meeting with the recognition of a failure: “In the region, we let ideologies divide us and interrupt the integration effort. We abandoned the channels of dialogue and cooperation mechanisms and, with that, we all lost”. For this reason, she has encouraged her colleagues to renew “the commitment to South American integration” before proclaiming that “no country can face current systemic threats alone. Only by acting together will we be able to overcome them”.
Maduro’s first meeting with the other 10 presidents and the representative of Peru has been held behind closed doors. It probably has not been as uncritical as the reception that the host gave him on Monday. The bilateral meeting between the Brazilian and the Venezuelan was followed by a joint appearance in which the former made no reference to human rights violations, although he did include the message that the next elections be free. The president and leader of the Brazilian left has been widely criticized in his country —where he won the elections with a project in defense of democracy and part of whose press describes Maduro as a dictator— for defending that accusations of authoritarianism or lack of democracy they are part of an enemy narrative.
The Colombian Gustavo Petro is the only one who has spoken to the press upon arriving in Itamaraty. “Latin America must have a unified voice because it has great potential. It has in its own territory several of the important solutions to the integral crisis of humanity”, said Petro, who, true to the fame that precedes him, has arrived last at the Itamaraty glass-enclosed palace, headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From its windows, the heart of Brazilian democracy can be glimpsed, which five months ago suffered the violent assault of thousands of Bolsonaristas.
Before Petro (Colombia) they have been arriving one by one, Lula (Brazil), Alberto Fernández (Argentina), Luis Arce (Bolivia), Gabriel Boric (Chile), Guillermo Lasso (Ecuador), Irfaan Ali (Guyana), Mario Abdo Benítez (Paraguay), Cha Santokhi (Suriname), Luis Lacalle Pou (Uruguay) and on behalf of Peru, its Prime Minister, Luis Alberto Otarola, so that this meeting, varied in ideology, is a meeting without even a female president.
Gone is the previous term in which, with the far-right Jair Bolsonaro in the Presidency, Brazil became an international pariah. Lula has not hidden that she would like to resurrect Unasur, but she wants to listen to her counterparts. And it’s far from clear that everyone else embraces that plan. Although it was born as a club of all the South American countries in the midst of a wave of left-wing governments 15 years ago, the turn to the right that the South American electorate took as of 2018 resulted in a fright of more than half of its members, who They created a club of conservatives, Prosur. It would be about overcoming the stage of entities converted into clubs of friends of the left or right to organize themselves in the style of the African Union or European Union
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The meeting has no agenda. The idea is an informal meeting in which frankness and trust reign. That is why the leaders attend with their chancellor and one or two advisers. No entourage. Each participant will make a morning intervention. After lunch it will be time for dialogue, for the exchange of ideas.
In Lula’s inaugural speech, in Portuguese and the only one open to the press, he stressed that “a strong South America, self-confident and politically organized, expands the possibilities” to effectively face the multiple challenges. Be it another pandemic, the climate crisis, inflation, or the effect of the Ukraine war on the price of food or the supply of fertilizers.
The host stressed that together they would be the fifth largest economy in the world and in this vein he has been in favor of regional development banks acting in concert to finance projects and has opted for a monetary mechanism to reduce dependence on the dollar and the yuan (“extra-regional currencies”). Among the proposals, even an Erasmus student exchange.
Although South America is one of the most unequal regions in the world, where poverty and violence are entrenched, Lula has not missed the opportunity to remember: “We are a region of peace, without weapons of mass destruction, and where disputes are resolved by the diplomatic way.
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