Lula tells UN Brazil doesn’t fit into anyone’s back yard
The Guardian reported Wednesday that President Donald Trump is pursuing what the newspaper characterized as a three-front push to reassert US dominance in a region it has long considered its back yard — covering Venezuela, Cuba, and Brazil’s October presidential election — while Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado reportedly made three failed attempts to return to Venezuela from Panama this week.
The newspaper identified three fronts of the Trump administration’s regional efforts. The first is the capture of Venezuela’s government after a special forces raid that seized Nicolás Maduro and brought him to a Brooklyn prison. The second is what The Guardian described as an attempt to topple Cuba’s communist government by “strangling its economy.” The third is an effort to swing Brazil’s October presidential election in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro, whom The Guardian characterized as far-right, through diplomatic and economic pressure.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is facing a tough battle to win re-election in October, used a Tuesday UN General Assembly address to push back against the broader US push without directly citing Washington. “We will not allow the enemies of democracy – internal or external – to attack the will of the people. Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians,” Lula said. “Brazil doesn’t fit into anyone’s back yard,” he added. Lula also called for fresh elections in Venezuela, saying the “people of Venezuela deserve to decide their own future.” He did not meet Rodríguez during her visit to New York.
Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodríguez met Trump at the Lotte New York Palace hotel in Manhattan late on Tuesday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, hours after Trump’s address to the annual gathering. Rodríguez is expected to address the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. The Guardian described the meeting as a key part of Rodríguez’s push for international legitimacy after years of diplomatic isolation under what the paper called Maduro’s dictatorship. The hotel is about seven miles from the Brooklyn prison where Maduro has been held since his capture.
Trump has repeatedly praised Rodríguez’s “fantastic” and “terrific” leadership while sidelining her main rival, Machado, The Guardian reported. The Guardian also reported that Rodríguez has consolidated power in Venezuela while Trump has focused on gaining access to Venezuelan natural resources over pushing for a fresh presidential election that would move the country back toward democracy.
Machado left Venezuela late last year to receive her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and has been unable to return home, The Guardian reported. She is exiled in Panama. Machado reportedly made three attempts to return to Venezuela this week but failed, according to The Guardian. On the eve of the Trump-Rodríguez encounter, an American reporter asked Rodríguez, who served as vice-president under Maduro, whether she would visit him during her stay in New York; she did not reply.
“We held a historic meeting with … Donald Trump, with whom we discussed strengthening the bilateral relationship between our countries and advancing a cooperation agenda in strategic areas such as energy, mining, security and other matters of common interest,” Rodríguez wrote on Instagram, in a 133-word statement that made no mention of her incarcerated ally. Oliver Blanco, one of Rodríguez’s top diplomats, said the meeting was “a new stage of dialogue and understanding between both countries” and “an important step toward new opportunities for our country and our people.” Blanco also posted a photograph in which both he and Trump smiled and gave thumbs-up to the camera.
A White House aide said Secretary of State Marco Rubio and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller also attended the meeting, which took place a few blocks from Trump Tower. Hours earlier, Rodríguez sat in the General Assembly hall as Trump celebrated what he called the “massive military operation” during which Maduro was captured. “It was a war … [and] to the victor belong the spoils,” Trump said of the oil deal between the US and Venezuela, calling it “the largest oil deal in history.” Trump referred to Maduro as an “outlaw dictator” and “a real criminal.” Rodríguez appeared to wince as Trump spoke, The Guardian reported.
Some observers detected signs of discomfort in the photograph released after the meeting, in which Rodríguez appears to be clenching her left fist as she poses beside the grinning US president. Some of Rodríguez’s critics in Venezuela called her treatment by Trump an unmitigated humiliation for a socialist party politician who has spent years railing against Yankee imperialism. One opposition figure denounced the Rodríguez/Trump meeting as an encounter between a “shameless puppet and her unscrupulous puppeteer.”
After Maduro’s capture, Trump warned that Rodríguez would “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not toe the US line. Since then, Rodríguez has ceded control of Venezuela’s oil revenues to Washington and agreed to a controversial 65bn-barrel oil deal, The Guardian reported.
The last meeting between a sitting US president and a Venezuelan head of state was in 2015, when Barack Obama and Maduro spoke briefly at a regional summit in Panama, The Guardian reported. In the decade that followed, Maduro became an international pariah as he led his country into economic chaos and increasingly authoritarian rule, and Venezuela was hit by punishing international sanctions. At the 2015 summit, Obama conceded that the days in which “the US could meddle with impunity” in Latin America were over. “But Trump has dramatically different ideas and has been forging ahead with attempts to reassert US dominance in a region it has long considered its back yard,” The Guardian wrote.