MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Lula says Maduro not Brazil's problem

“Maduro is a Venezuelan problem, not a Brazilian problem,” Lula said

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said in an interview with RedeTV that Nicolás Maduro was “Venezuela's problem,” not his country's. “It seems to me that it was a wise reflection by Lula,” Maduro replied after recent incidents between the two Latin American nations resulting in Caracas being excluded from the BRICS associate membership granted to Bolivia and Cuba, among others.

The diplomatic crisis stems from the July 28 elections Maduro claims to have won despite failing to produce any corroborating evidence whereas voting minutes published by the opposition Unitarian Democratic Platform (PUD) would prove that the actual winner was the 72-year-old Edmundo González Urrutia, who was forced into exile in Spain after an arrest warrant was issued against him. Brazil did not recognize these results but fell short of siding with González Urrutia, which many other countries did.

In the latest issue of the elections saga, Lula now said he had no right to doubt the results and the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruling on the matter just as he does not want Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) to be questioned. “I don't have the right to keep questioning the Supreme Court of another country, because I don't want any country to question my Supreme Court, even when it makes mistakes,” he argued. “Even when it does what it did to me, of not letting me be a candidate in 2018,” Lula underlined while recalling that his special envoy Celso Amorim had monitored the elections on-site in Caracas.

Regarding his standoff with the regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua, Lula explained: “I want Venezuela to live well, for them to take care of their people with dignity. And I'm going to take care of Brazil.” He went on to stress that “I can't keep worrying... or fighting with Nicaragua, Venezuela or I don't know who. I have to try to fight and make this country work.”

During his broadcast show Con Maduro Más, the Venezuelan head of state agreed that Venezuela's problems were not Brazil's business. “I agree with Lula. Each country has to find a way to solve its affairs, its conflicts, [and] its problems. Brazil with its institutions and its national, sovereign dynamics and Venezuela with its institutions and our also sovereign dynamics.”