“The government’s problem is not the lack of persistence,” said the humorist Aparício Torelly, the Baron of Itararé, in the 1940s. “It’s persistence in lack.” The aphorism, which emerged as a criticism of the government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra, now serves, almost 80 years later, to punctuate the international policy actions of the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It is difficult to find among the recent choices of Itamaraty one, only one action, that is not tainted by some mistake of an ideological nature. And even those that, at first, seem guided by the pragmatism that has always marked Brazilian diplomacy, soon expose the stain of poorly made choices.
Last Friday, in an interview with Gaucha radio, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva added another pearl to the extensive necklace of improprieties he has committed in the international field. The theme, of course, was Venezuela. Referring to the neighboring country, Lula said that “Venezuela lives a very unpleasant regime. (…) It is a government with an authoritarian bias, but it is not a dictatorship as we know so many dictatorships in this world.” Well… if Venezuela does not live under a dictatorship, this concept deserves a profound revision by political science.
Words like these bother, but do not surprise those who follow the government’s path in terms of international politics. The world’s greatest sources of concern at the moment — for the insistence on creating confusion and the mania for not taking responsibility for the problems they create — are precisely the three dictatorships (or, if you prefer, “unpleasant regimes”) that the government treats as preferred allies. Where there is a lot of noise, you can be sure: either Russia, or Iran, or Venezuela or all three together are up to their necks. This could be clearly seen last week, when “los tres amigos” returned to the news with prominence.
Beer diplomacy
It is worth remembering some statements made in the past to understand the damage that this behavior has caused to Brazil’s interests. When Lula returned to power in January 2023, it had been almost a year since Vladimir Putin had amassed his armies against a Ukraine that, at first glance, would be easy prey. The impression was that the dictator’s Cossack horde would not face resistance in a dirty march on the capital Kiev. That was not what happened.
The conflict reached a moment of stalemate — without Putin expressing his intention to back down or Zelensky showing a willingness to capitulate. Brazilian diplomacy, then, began to act as if the responsibility for the war had to be shared between the aggressor and the aggressor. “This war, from everything I understand, read and hear, would be resolved here in Brazil at a table drinking beer. If not in the first, in the second, if not, in the third. If it didn’t work out on the third, I would even run out of bottles for a peace agreement,” Lula said in front of an audience of students in one of his best-known demonstrations on the conflict.
The president’s words can even be taken as an anecdote. In bad taste, but, in any case, an anecdote. But the statements of his advisor for international affairs, Celso Amorim, should be taken seriously because of the danger they pose to Brazil’s position in the world. Since he returned to speak on behalf of Brazilian diplomacy and, in practice, to command Itamaraty, Amorim has spared no effort to align Brazil with the most abject dictatorships in the world – and this, of course, generates a bill that will be charged to the country later on.
In the case of the conflict in Ukraine, the positions defended by Amorim are nothing more than the translation into Portuguese of what the dictator Putin says about the war in the language of Dostoevsky. Among the advisor’s statements about the conflict, one, in particular, draws attention. According to him, using Putin’s words as if they were his own, any solution to the war should take into account Russia’s right to defend itself from aggression. Without ever mentioning, of course, that the aggressions had been ordered precisely by Moscow.
In the same coin
Amorim’s positions on the war started by Russia contributed to paling Brazil’s image in the eyes of the great democracies. As the Western powers united around Ukraine, the more Brazil distanced itself from its traditional allies. Or rather, the more the traditional allies turned their backs and made it difficult to reach agreements that would benefit Brazil.
The war continued, with a frightening toll of lives lost since the invasion, without Putin achieving his goal of subduing Zelensky or Zelensky showing any intention to give in. And everything seemed to proceed without news until, on Monday of last week, there was a surprising fact: about a thousand Ukrainian fighters invaded Russian territory and took some smaller villages in the Kursk region. In other words, the aggressor began to be assaulted in his own backyard.
Putin, of course, reproduced the script followed by any upset dictator: he was furious, angry, angry, out of control! He promised to retaliate and it is very likely that in the coming days he will push the enemy back into Ukrainian territory. But, as small as the incursion was, the return in the same coin of the aggression suffered two and a half years ago was enough for the world to see the dictator with different eyes than it did in the days following the invasion of Ukraine.
The tyrant still has power and is capable of causing much suffering not only to the population of the territories under the yoke of his armies, but also to his own people. But each extra day in the duration of a conflict that should have been resolved before completing a month means one less point in the image of the indestructible leader that Putin has always made a point of flaunting. And having positioned itself from the beginning on the wrong side of the conflict (in a posture that, by the way, was the same as that of Jair Bolsonaro’s government) does nothing to improve Brazil’s image before the world.
Support for rapists
Another permanent source of concern for the world is Iran. Last Tuesday, the ayatollahs who have ruled the country with an iron fist since the Islamic revolution of 1979, stone gays and flog women who do not cover themselves properly with the Muslim veil, responded with a resounding no to a nod of peace made the day before by the governments of the United States, France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. Western powers wanted the Persian country to abandon the idea of attacking Israel in retaliation for the attack that, weeks ago, eliminated terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh — one of the leaders of the Hamas faction.
Brazil is one of the few countries in the world that relates to Iran as if the most perfect democratic normality reigned there. The country was, for example, the guarantor of the inclusion of the Persian country in the BRICS. The announcement of the entry of this and other new members into the bloc of countries that seek to measure commercial and geopolitical forces with the United States and the European Union was made in August last year, a few weeks before the attack by Hamas terrorists against Israel, on October 7, 2023.
What does the Hamas attack have to do with the friendship between Brazil and Iran? Apparently, nothing. But those who look closely will notice that this type of company has contributed to increasingly distancing Brazil from partners that may be much more useful in the future. Financed and covered up by Iran, the terrorist group was responsible for the action of criminals who crossed the border and began to behead children, rape women, trample on the elderly and kidnap civilians they met along the way. Leaving that cruel aggression without a response to match would be an unacceptable attitude. Israel reacted. He started the war that lasts until today and seems to have no time to end.
Iran, of course, has never hidden its support for Hamas, with whom it shares the goal of annihilating Israel and wiping Jews off the face of the earth. The Brazilian government, although it was led to condemn the attack in the face of the extreme cruelty practiced by Hamas, did not take long to change its position – and soon began to accuse Israel of reacting with excessive rigor against the civilians that the terrorists used as human shields from the beginning.
Surgical
strike Like the conflict in Ukraine, coverage of the war in the Middle East was half hidden in the Brazilian news until a few days ago. Since October 7, Israel has been on the hunt for its enemies and one of the names that was in its sights was that of Ismail Haniyeh — one of the leaders of the terrorist group. Considered the head of the group’s “political” articulations, he lived protected and surrounded by luxury in Qatar. And although he was not a representative of a state recognized by the international community, he was received with honors when he arrived in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian as president of the Republic.
Haniyeh was treated, at the time, with more deference than the vice president of Brazil, Geraldo Alckmin — who participated in the ceremony as a representative of President Lula. At the end of the event, Alckmin returned to Brazil and Haniyeh, who remained in Tehran, took refuge in a bunker used as a shelter for terrorists. It was there that he was reached by the attack that killed him.
The Israeli government never claimed responsibility for the operation that eliminated the terrorist. Behind the scenes in the international intelligence community, there is a suspicion that, given the precision of an attack in which, apart from Haniyeh, only one bodyguard lost his life, the order may not have come from the government in Jerusalem. Attacks like this are usually more destructive and less precise — and one of the hypotheses would be that there were rivals within Iran itself interested in getting rid of Haniyeh.
Be that as it may, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who is leading the effort aimed at dragging Iran back to the Middle Ages — was as angry about the attack as Putin was at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the following days, he even ordered the dispatch of drones easily repelled by air defense against Israel. But he maintained his threat to retaliate and did not back down even in the face of the request of Western powers not to go ahead with the idea.
Definitive Collapse
The threat of Putin and Khamenei to react to the aggressions of their adversaries with a much greater force than that which was launched against them is not surprising. Dictators, in general, have the habit of transferring to their enemies the responsibility for the disasters they themselves cause. Another example in this sense comes precisely from the third greatest source of concern that humanity has at this moment. And the person responsible for it is the caudillo Nicolas Maduro, the man who spares no effort to complete the work started by Hugo Chavez and bury in misery once and for all what was once one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America.
Increasingly defenseless in the face of the atrocities of a dictatorship that clings to power tooth and nail, the people of Venezuela continue to suffer under the heel of the executioner. Dreaming of legitimizing himself in power for another six years (as if Venezuela still had the strength to resist for so long without suffering a definitive collapse), Maduro decided to call elections. He surrounded himself with all precautions before calling voters to the polls. He pushed out of the way the opponents most likely to defeat him, had opponents arrested who dared to challenge him, and wrote the rules himself that seemed tailor-made to ensure a landslide victory. But no.
In recent days, the Brazilian government, with Amorim in charge of conducting the initiatives, has been striving to maintain the unconditional support it has always given to the Maduro dictatorship. Increasingly isolated as a guarantor of tyranny, Itamaraty did well not immediately recognize the result of the elections in which Maduro declared himself the winner even before the conclusion of the vote count.
The most ridiculous role in this episode fell to the Workers’ Party – which issued a note of support as soon as Maduro proclaimed himself the winner of an election that, as all the evidence indicated, was won by the oppositionist Edmundo Gonzáles. The Brazilian government preferred to wait. And it conditioned the recognition of the result to the presentation of the minutes prepared by the polling stations. And he continues to insist on this point even though he knows that if Maduro wanted or had what to show to prove the fairness of the result, he would have done so from the beginning.
Diplomatic
dwarf What Maduro does or does not do to defend a result that he does not even believe in is his and his government’s problem. But, in search of a way out of a problem created by the insistence on treating Venezuela as a democracy even when the whole world knows that it is nothing more than a tyranny of the worst kind, Amorim launched one of those ideas that have contributed to feeding the reputation of diplomatic dwarf that has surrounded Brazil on the world stage.
Brazil’s de facto foreign minister was the first to suggest that the result of the July 28 elections be forgotten and a new election be called to decide who will govern Venezuela from January 10, 2025, when the dictator’s term ends. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado reacted. He demanded respect for the Venezuelan people, recalled that the opposition submitted to the rules created by the dictatorship and still won the elections – as proven by the data already recognized as true by the United States and Europe.
The Brazilian government — knowing that Maduro’s dirt is increasingly spilling over his image — has been seeking to distance itself from Venezuela. But the hole he has dug for himself with this insistence on supporting the dictator is so deep that it is no longer possible to simply wash one’s hands and pretend that everything is normal in the neighboring country, as Lula tried to do at first.
Amorim cannot hide that he seeks to give the caudillo who calls him “my friend” the chance to remain in power. And Lula is going the same way. In an interview with a radio station in Paraná, the president said that he “still” does not recognize Maduro’s victory in the elections. “I don’t want to behave passionately or rashly. I want the result,” said the Brazilian president.
The fact is that, just as it does not recognize Hamas as a terrorist group, the Brazilian government insists on covering the sun with a sieve and not considering Venezuela a dictatorship. In the name of carrying out this idea, Brazil led the formation of a bloc also made up of Mexico and Colombia that committed to the search for a negotiated solution to an impasse that will only end on the day Maduro admits his defeat and leaves power.
Lula, however, believes that a “coalition government” under the leadership of the dictator is capable of leading Venezuela to normality. The idea is so absurd that, in the neighboring country, it was rejected by both the opposition and the situation.
The government of Mexico, no matter how leftist it declares itself, thought it prudent not to contradict the position of the United States and withdrew from the bloc that defends the so-called “negotiated solution” that Brazil still imagines to be possible with Maduro. Commercial interests with the world’s greatest power spoke louder and Mexico decided not to contradict the U.S. position of recognizing Gonzáles’ victory. Colombia, which also does not want to jeopardize its good economic relations with the United States, has also shown signs of fatigue and indicated that it should abandon the bloc created by Lula and leave Brazil alone in its insistence on finding an honorable way out for the dictator.
It is sad to see Brazilian diplomacy, which was once considered one of the most efficient in the world, have its name tarnished by the ideological conduct it has been receiving in recent years. It is sad to see the interests of the country – which has much to profit if it manages to keep the channels of dialogue with the great democracies unimpeded – increasingly subordinated to third-world dogmas that were already old at the end of the last century. The hope that the country will change the conduct of its diplomacy and return to the time when the country’s interests were put ahead of the government’s ideology is increasingly distant. And Brazil’s problem, to remember the phrase quoted in the first paragraph of this text, will continue not to be the lack of persistence. But persistence in lack.
