Meme showing Chilean President Gabriel Boric next to US flags and the caption "employee of the month." Photo: Screenshot of Con El Mazo Dando episode 433.
The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, highlighted the fact that “each country is sovereign to decide its political model,” when responding to criticism presented by the presidents of Chile, Gabriel Boric, and Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou, regarding statements Lula made about Venezuela the day before Brasília’s Summit of South American Presidents.
“I have always defended the idea that each country is sovereign to decide its political model, its internal affairs,” Lula commented this Wednesday, May 31, at a press conference aired by Brazil’s O Globo news network. “The same demand that the world makes of Venezuela, it does not make of Saudi Arabia. It is very strange. I want Venezuela to be respected. I want this for Brazil and for the whole world.”
Lula also stressed that “no one is obliged to agree with anyone,” and that the meeting of the Latin American region’s leaders in Brasília do not necessarily have to form “a group of friends.”
"O que eu disse para o Maduro é que existe uma narrativa no mundo de que na Venezuela não tem democracia e que ele cometeu erros. É da obrigação dele construir a narrativa dele com os fatos verdadeiros", diz Lula após receber criticas de outros líderes.
➡ Assista ao #Edição18… pic.twitter.com/HgUnxmeFDX
— GloboNews (@GloboNews) May 30, 2023
On Monday, the eve of the Summit of South American Presidents, Lula received the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, in the Brazilian capital. “Venezuela must showcase its narrative, so that it can effectively make people change their minds,” commented the leader of the Workers Party (PT). “You [Maduro] need to build your narrative. And your narrative will be infinitely better than what they have been telling about you.”
“It is in your hands to build your narrative and turn this game around,” President Lula reiterated, “so that we win definitively, and Venezuela returns to being a sovereign country, where only its people, through a free vote, can say who will govern that country.”
“Cover the sun with a finger”
The following day, during the proceedings of the summit, the presidents of Uruguay and Chile made public statements to the press disagreeing with their Brazilian counterpart. “I must say that I was surprised when [Lula] said that what is happening in Venezuela is a narrative,” the far-right leader of Uruguay stated. “We already know what we think of Venezuela and the Venezuelan government.”
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“If there are so many groups in the world that are trying to mediate so that democracy is present in Venezuela,” Lacalle added, “so that human rights are respected, so that there are no political prisoners, the worst thing that we can do is cover the sun with a finger,” in reference to supporting persistent attempts by US regime change agents to promote the Venezuelan opposition and denigrate democracy.
Boric, meanwhile, assured that he had “respectfully” expressed his discrepancies with Lula in relation “to the fact that the human rights situation in Venezuela was a narrative construction,” stating, “it is not a narrative construction, it is a reality, it is serious.”
In response, Lula noted that “since [Hugo] Chávez took office, a narrative was built against him. I had the opportunity to see this, a narrative that claims that the guy is a demon. From the moment you create the narrative that he is a demon, from that moment, you start turning everyone against him. It happened with Chávez, and that’s how it happened with me,” he added.
Arremetida del presidente de Chile, Gabriel Boric, contra el presidente de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, y crítica al presidente de Brasil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, por decir que la dictadura en ese país es una construcción narrativa. “Como presidente de izquierda pienso que era… pic.twitter.com/jQElL3svGr
— BluRadio Colombia (@BluRadioCo) May 30, 2023
“That is why I told Maduro that there is a narrative in the world that there is no democracy in Venezuela and that his obligation is to create a narrative with true facts,” Lula emphasised.
In a display of statesmanship, President Maduro, during the development of the Summit, declined to respond to the claims made by Lacalle and Boric out of respect for the success of the meeting, in which he breathed “a renewed spirit of South American integration,” making the statement, “Let history answer, let the truth answer [these allegations].”
Evo Morales reacts
Former president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, also joined the discussion this Thursday, stating that “the fight for the sovereignty and dignity of Latin America must be coherent and consistent,” after rejecting the statements about Venezuela by the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, during the summit.
Muy apenados por la actuación del hermano presidente de Chile @GabrielBoric que se olvida de la vocación antiimperialista de Allende y repite ataques de Trump contra el pueblo de Venezuela. La lucha por la soberanía y dignidad de América Latina debe ser coherente y consecuente.
— Evo Morales Ayma (@evoespueblo) June 1, 2023
“Very sorry for the actions of our brother president of Chile, Gabriel Boric,” Morales stated via social media, “who forgets the anti-imperialist vocation of [Salvador] Allende and repeated attacks by [Donald] Trump against the people from Venezuela.”
PSUV’s Diosdado Cabello responds
The vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Diosdado Cabello, also commented on Boric and Lacalle’s attempts to stain the successful summit in Brasília. During episode #433 of his television show Con El Mazo Dando, Cabello questioned the statements made by Boric, whom he accused of being a pawn of the US government in an attempt to sabotage the summit.
“All the leaders of the region were summoned to Brazil; only Perú was missing,” Cabello noted. “Our president, Nicolás Maduro, was there representing Venezuela, and there he had bilateral meetings with President Lula, with President Alberto Fernández [of Argentina], with President Luis Arce [of Bolivia], and with President Gustavo Petro [of Colombia]. All these meetings were made in order to share a vision and reinforce the points where, in some way, unity requires more work.”
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“They (Washington) look for the fools on the board, those who are very easy to handle, and so the biggest fool emerges: Boboric,” Cabello added—referencing Bobo, the petty bourgeois culture of champagne socialism where counter-culture is merely absorbed into the capitalist mode of production—and affirmed that the White House does this because “they no longer had Piñera, Macri, all the lackeys who have always been there, but now they left, their resources dried up.”
He regretted that the Chilean president was disrespectful; first of President Lula and the Brazilian people, and secondly of the Venezuelan people. “Although it was really bad only for him because he didn’t make his plans work, in the end the summit was a outstanding success,” he added, showing a meme of the Chilean president with the caption, “US employee of the month.”
Cabello also mentioned that while Boric is criticizing human rights in Venezuela, there are more than a thousand Chileans still in prison just for the uprising of 2019 that Boric used to promote his presidential ambitions in portraying himself as a leftist politician.
(RT) with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/AU
