President Lula will be in the Chilean capital for three days, accompanied by ten ministers, and, on Monday, he will have time to talk with his Chilean colleague Gabriel Boric about the bilateral relationship and the situation in Venezuela, which involves the region. The two are expected to sign almost 20 agreements in different areas and, above all, show rapprochement at a time of political and ideological fragmentation in South America, especially after the election of Argentine Javier Milei. Milei is expected to disembark in Santiago, soon after, on the 8th on his first official visit to the country. It will be the Argentine’s second trip to a South American country. The first, last month, was to participate in a conservative meeting alongside former president Jair Bolsonaro at Balneário Camboriú, in Santa Catarina. On the same occasion that he missed the Mercosur president’s meeting, in Asunción, Paraguay.
This Thursday, Milei thanked the Brazilian government for taking “custody” of the Argentine embassy in Caracas. The image of the charge d’affaires of the Argentine diplomatic representation raising the Brazilian flag went down in the history of the bilateral relationship. And also Milei’s message on her X account (formerly Twitter) saying “gracias”. In the message, he does not mention Lula’s name, but recalls the historical ties between the two countries. At least for now, his attacks against the Brazilian president are frozen.
The situation in Venezuela, after the presidential election on Sunday (28), in which Maduro was declared president-elect, with only 80% of the count, raises strong questions and opens a new stage of uncertainty in the country and in the country’s relations with its neighbors .
In a widely negotiated statement, the governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico call for an “impartial verification” of the electoral result. Mexican President Andrés Manoel López Obrador had declared that he saw no reason to question Maduro’s re-election. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, however, wrote on his social networks that he had “great doubts” about the Venezuelan electoral result. But despite the differences, the joint document came out after at least three days of negotiations. The Brazilian government has played a key role in this Venezuelan/regional chess. The former chancellor and special advisor to the Palácio do Planalto, Celso Amorim, participated directly in Caracas in the conversations with Maduro. Amorim has played the role of balancing act in this relationship between Brazil and Venezuela. Argentine Chancellor Diana Mondino’s diplomatic conversations with the Brazilian ambassador in Buenos Aires, Julio Bitelli, and Chancellor Mauro Vieira, led to President Lula’s decision regarding the Argentine embassy in Caracas – where Argentine diplomats are no longer because they left the country by order of Maduro who demanded the departure of the diplomatic representations of seven countries, including Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, among others. There, however, are six collaborators of Maduro’s opponent, María Corina Machado, pillar of Edmundo González Urrutía’s candidacy. According to Brazilian government sources, Lula said that the six Venezuelans on María Corina’s team are the responsibility of the Argentine government. In recent days, the stance of each president has shown that the political tableau today is very different from that of the early 2000s, when presidents with left or center-left biases led the region. Boric, from Chile, was one of the first to discredit Maduro’s new election. Milei, in turn, spoke to María Corina shortly before the vote, said he was rooting for her and called Maduro a dictator. These were just a few examples of examples. In an article this Friday in Clarín in Spanish, journalist Walter Schmidt highlights the role of Brazilian diplomacy and Lula’s pragmatism. “We are responsible and must deal with Maduro, but also with what is happening in Argentina and the rest of the countries in the region”, Barão do Rio Branco seems to be saying, he wrote.