In the aftermath of what looks to have been a blatantly fraudulent election in Venezuela on July 28, the administration of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has decided to join Mexico and Colombia to help facilitate a dialogue between the Maduro administration and the opposition.
This has reignited familiar discussions about Brazil’s foreign policy strategy. Similarly to its response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brazil has sought to craft a “neutral strategy,” predictably enraging those who say the facts are too clear to justify fence-sitting. Thirty former Latin American presidents recently exhorted Lula to take a tougher stance to defend democracy in Venezuela. Be it growing tensions between the West and China, the war between Russia and Ukraine, or Venezuela’s descent into full-blown dictatorship, Brazil—just like other large powers in the Global South, such as India or Indonesia—often opts for an ambiguous stance to keep all doors open. This is often described as “pragmatism” by its supporters and decried as hypocritical or morally questionable by critics.
Those opposed to Lula’s strategy of seeking to persuade Venezuelan electoral authorities to release the vote tally sheets before deciding whether to accept Maduro’s claim of victory see it as playing into the hands of Venezuela’s president. After all, calling for an “impartial verification of the results” in a country without properly functioning checks and balances or an independent electoral justice system implicitly ends up lending an autocratic government a veneer of legitimacy, as if an impartial verification were possible. Lula has a history of making similar remarks about Russia, such as calling for an independent investigation into the death, earlier this year, of Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, who endured conditions in prison that have been described as amounting to torture.
In addition, the initiative by Brazil, Colombia and Mexico certainly helps Maduro buy time as he hopes the international community will move on once the next crisis emerges someplace else, repeating a strategy he has successfully pursued for years. Lula’s off-the-cuff description of the Venezuelan elections as a “standard and orderly” process and the enthusiastic support of much of the Workers Party for Venezuela’s dictator substantiated Lula’s critics’ position. For them, Brazil was unwilling to condemn Maduro’s transition to “Ortega-style” rule, inadvertently helping Maduro…
