The illiterate despot Nicolas Maduro, dictator of Venezuela, does not miss an opportunity to show the world his true face – and, whenever he exposes it, he makes clear the reason that led almost 9 million people to Venezuelans, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCTAD), to leave the country in search of survival abroad. Maduro is nothing more than a tyrant, an autocrat, an arrogant, an arrogant, an oppressor, a satrap. And the worst thing is that there are people who still insist on not seeing what it really is.
Maduro lies with such conviction that he seems to believe the lies he tells. Unlike the military who governed Brazil between 1964 and 1985, who said they were in power “because the people don’t know how to vote,” he insists on saying that he governs by the decision of the people. From time to time, he calls for fake “elections”, in which he chooses the candidate he prefers to face, defines the rules of the game and makes decisions that shape the result according to his convenience to, in the end, say that he has obtained a legitimate victory.
Successive proofs of the shamelessness with which he tries to deceive people with his fake speech were given during the campaign for the “choice” of the president of the Republic, in the elections that take place this Sunday in Venezuela. Since the campaign began and despite the authoritarian measures taken to remove candidates with chances of defeating him from the front, the caudillo made a point of boasting that the process is serious and reliable. As if that were not enough, he also thought he had the right to be indignant with those who call the government he has headed with an iron fist for more than 11 years a dictatorship.
Like every liar, Maduro has opportunistic and cowardly attitudes. And, as is typical of cowards, he has the habit of attacking those who cannot face him. Either because they don’t have enough strength to challenge you or because, even though they have strength, they have something to lose if they decide to lower themselves to the point of responding to it. It is in this second category – that is, in that of those who have something to lose in an argument with the caudillo – that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finds himself.
Target of Criticism
If there is a soul alive in the world that does not deserve a single criticism from Maduro, it is Lula — the only (that’s right, the only!) leader of an important democracy who still treats the Venezuelan government with respect. All the others with whom Maduro still has relationships are as much dictators as he is. These are the cases, for example, of the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin and the Nicaraguan executioner Daniel Ortega. But Lula did not. As little as the Brazilian president cares to be seen in the company of these people, no one can accuse him of coming to power illegitimately or of governing without the support of a Magna Carta that may have defects, but which in no way was imposed from the top down, like the document that the Venezuelan despot calls the Constitution.
All the other leaders of democracies in the world have already turned their backs on Maduro. There are governments that do not hide that they would have the dictator arrested if he set foot in their territories. Either because they are fed up with the defaults he applies, or because they repudiate the human rights abuses he commits as a common practice, or because they do not want to tarnish the reputation of their governments by having relationships with a usurper accused of links to the heads of large cartels of narcoterrorism and other forms of organized crime.
For a ruler condemned to isolation, as is the case of the Venezuelan satrap, President Lula should be the last person in the world to whom he should point the finger and direct improprieties. Maduro, however, does not miss an opportunity to make Brazilians the target of his criticism.
“¿Por qué no te callas?”
Last week, the last of a flawed electoral campaign, which was born with the open objective of legitimizing his next six years in power, Maduro put Brazil in his sights. And he said so much nonsense, but so much nonsense about Lula and the Brazilian electoral process, that there would be no harm if the president or any of his most senior aides addressed to him the same question that King Juan Carlos of Spain asked his predecessor Hugo Chávez in November 2007.
The scene, for those who don’t remember, took place at the 17th Ibero-American Conference, in Santiago de Chile. In his speech, Chávez used the word to launch gratuitous insults at the former prime minister of Spain, José Maria Aznar. Until the sovereign, who was present, became angry. In front of the crowded plenary and the TV cameras, the king embarrassed the caudillo with the accurate question: “¿Por qué no te callas?
The current episode began when Maduro, who is currently running in an election that exudes the odor of fraud from the first moment, declared that he “fears a bloodbath” if his opponent Edmundo Gonzáles Urrutia — a diplomat with a discreet career and little known within his own country — emerges victorious at the polls. Maduro expressed this fear because, even though he made all kinds of manipulations and used all kinds of threats to derail the opposition’s chances, he saw his name melt in the electoral polls. The surveys carried out in the last days of the campaign gave Gonzáles a wide advantage. Last week, they indicated 60% preference for the opposition candidate and only 28% for the dictator.
The president, at first, acted as if Maduro’s threat to send blood flowing if he loses an election rigged to ensure his victory did not matter. So much so that, last Friday, during a trip to São Paulo, when asked about the subject, Lula went off on a tangent: “Why would I want to fight with Venezuela? Why would I want to go with Nicaragua? Why would I want to go with Argentina? Let them elect the presidents they want. What interests me is the relationship from state to state.”
Tainted image
Some advisor must have warned of the risk that support, even if veiled, for Maduro’s actions in Venezuela represents for the president’s pretensions, who still feeds the dream of recovering lost prestige and establishing himself as a great world leader. Even more so at a time when Rio de Janeiro was on the eve of hosting the meeting of the Ministers of Economy of the G-20, a bloc of the 20 richest countries in the world, which will be chaired by the Brazilian until November 30 of this year.
The meeting took place last Wednesday and it would not be good for Lula to arrive at a meeting of this magnitude with his image tarnished by support for a dictatorship repudiated by most of the countries and blocs that make up the forum. Created in 1999, initially to discuss macroeconomic issues at a time when the world was struggling to overcome the effects of the international crises that occurred at the end of the 20th century, the bloc gradually incorporated issues related to climate change, energy transition, health, poverty and the fight against corruption.
The meeting would be used by Lula to defend the proposal for an international pact to tax the fortunes of the super rich (an idea, by the way, rejected by Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, for whom “it is neither necessary nor desirable to negotiate a global agreement in this regard”). The president would also take advantage of the moment to propose the creation of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty. It would not be good, therefore, if he presented himself to defend a noble agenda like this with his image scratched by silence in the face of Maduro’s threats against his own people.
On Monday morning of last week, Lula received a group of international correspondents at the Planalto Palace. Journalists from the Chinese agency XIHUA, the American Associated Press and Bloomberg, the German Reuters and the Spanish EFE were in the room. The material produced by these agencies is distributed to media outlets around the planet. In other words: what Lula said would be on websites and newspapers around the world in a few hours.
In his question, EFE correspondent Eduardo Davis pointed out that the threats to democracy in the world did not come only from the “right” – as it was possible to deduce from Lula’s words. It was this journalist who brought Venezuela into the debate by mentioning the election scheduled for today and remembering the 7 million people who left Venezuela “basically out of poverty.”
In time: according to UNCTAD, the number has already exceeded 7 million. There are 5.4 million Venezuelans who are refugees in other countries, 2.5 million who live abroad as immigrants or have another form of legal shelter and 800,000 waiting to obtain asylum. That is, 8.7 million. “So,” the journalist wanted to know, “how does this articulation (mentioned by Lula) take place to contain the global ultra-right that is organizing itself without facing our own ghosts and putting them in the place where, in one way or another, they are?”
The president made a long preamble before getting into the subject. “If Maduro wants to contribute to solving the return of growth in Venezuela, the return of the people who left Venezuela and establish a state of economic growth, he has to respect the democratic process,” he said.
Then, he entered the question he had dodged three days earlier: “From the information I have so far, I was frightened by Maduro’s statement, saying that there will be a bloodbath. Whoever loses the elections takes a bath of votes, not blood. Maduro has to learn. When you win, you stay. When you lose, you leave. He leaves and prepares to run for another election. So, I’m rooting for this to happen, for the good of Venezuela and for the good of South America.” A more serene and respectful comment than that would be impossible.
There was nothing offensive in the statement. The Venezuelan oppressor, however, was offended and did not miss the opportunity to include the issue in his campaign speech. Maduro said that, “whoever was scared (by his statements about the “bloodbath”) should drink chamomile tea.” The Foreign Ministry said it would not comment on the statements. Before proceeding, it is good to reflect on the link that unites the dictator to the Brazilian government official who sets the tone for the actions of Itamartaty: the special advisor for International Affairs of the presidency of the Republic, Celso Amorim. As is well known, Amorim is one of the architects of the political policy that moves away from the “Itamarateca” tradition of responsible pragmatism and subordinates Brazilian diplomacy to the ideology of the partners.
“Cover the sun with your finger”
Maduro was a young train driver in the Caracas subway when he joined the movement that, in 1998, brought Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez to power. “Combative” and loyal to Chávez to the core, Maduro was elected the following year to the Assembly that drafted the current Constitution of Venezuela. He then arrived at the National Assembly and stood out for his radical defense of the Revolution of the 21st Century, proposed by his leader.
It is good to remember that Venezuela owns the largest oil reserves in the world and that the price of the commodity, at the time, was skyrocketing. The state-owned PDVSA was one of the main oil companies in the world and was put at the service of the Chavista project. Chávez set out to squander the country’s resources on a populist program without limits and to support other South American leftist governments with the aim of establishing himself as the great leader of the left in the region.
To get an idea of how Venezuela squandered money in the time of the fat cows, it is enough to remember that, in 2006, the Unidos de Vila Isabel samba school won the Rio carnival with a plot in honor of Simón Bolivar, the Venezuelan oligarch who led the wars of independence against Spain and was the inspirer of Chávez. The parade was funded by PDVSA.
Where does Amorim come into the story? Well… in 2006, for the good services rendered, Chávez entrusted the former train driver Maduro with the command of the “Ministerio del Poder Popular para Assuntos Exteriors”, the Venezuelan “Itamaraty”. Without any experience or aptitude for the post, he asked for help from the Brazilian government, which had been under Lula’s command since 2003. The one who welcomed and taught Maduro the basics of diplomacy was the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, Celso Amorim.
The rest is history. With his foot on the accelerator of his populist policies, Chávez continued to squander money, while Maduro rose through the ranks of the regime. To the point of having been “elected” vice president in the last election won by Chávez before he died, victim of cancer, in 2013. During this period, while he was leading his country into a sinkhole, he always took care to keep firm the ties he built at the time “Ministerio del Poder Popular para Assuntos Externas”.
When Lula returned to power in 2023, Amorim was appointed Advisor for International Affairs. One of his first missions was to organize the summit of South American heads of state, at the end of May 2023. The treatment given to the dictator – honored with a gala dinner to which the others were not invited – embarrassed the other presidents, who did not like to be treated as extras on the stage set up for Maduro to shine. They didn’t like it so much that they left early and the dinner that would mark the end of the meeting had to be canceled.
At the time, Lula even said that the accusations of the lack of democracy in Venezuela were nothing more than a narrative of conservative forces. The president of Uruguay, Lacalle Pou, expressed astonishment at this opinion. “You know what we think about Venezuela and the government of Venezuela,” he said. “If there are so many groups in the world trying to mediate so that democracy in Venezuela is complete, the worst thing we can do is cover the sun with our fingers.”
Remembering
this story is important at this time when Amorim was selected by Lula to travel to Venezuela and act as an “observer” of an election that, everyone knows, is a game of marked cards. The president of the Superior Electoral Court, Minister Carmen Lúcia, did better when, in the face of Maduro’s unwarranted criticism of the Brazilian electoral process, she ordered the cancellation of the trip of officials who were going to Venezuela as election observers.
But Amorim went. On his return, he will have to explain what he did in Caracas. If, against all expectations, González breaks through the blockade, emerges triumphant and, more than that, comes to take over the Miraflores Palace, the fact will be interpreted as a sign that the Venezuelan forces that have always supported and benefited from the benefits of the “Bolivarian” regime, turned their backs on the dictator before the Brazilian government assumed the intention of moving away from the uncomfortable company. If, as is most likely, the dictator wins an election held to ensure his triumph, the result will only confirm the farce. And Amorim? How is it in the midst of all this?
well… If, in the end, he says that he saw nothing wrong, he will only validate a process that was born flawed, continued addicted and addicted came to an end. If, however, he changes his opinion, starts to see what he has never seen and denounces a tyranny that has acted under his nose all along, he will have to pay the price for belatedly joining a group that already includes most of the South American countries and the world’s leading democracies. And for a president who aspires to be a world leader, being late to the party is not an encouraging sign. Even so, even if it is late, it will be better for his image before the world to break once and for all with the Maduro dictatorship – before it is included as a definitive stain on his biography.
