Lula’s foreign policy takes shape, riling the West

The new president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvahas so far shown little concern about challenging the Western consensus on foreign policyeven in its cooperation with authoritarian governments.

In recent weeks, the Lula government has sent a delegation to the Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro, refused to sign a UN resolution condemning human rights abuses in Nicaragua, allowed Iranian warships to dock in Rio de Janeiro and flatly refused to send weapons to Ukraine, which is at war with Russia.

These decisions have raised eyebrows in the United States and Europe, but experts affirm that Lula is reactivating the principle of non-alignment that Brazil has maintained for decades in order to draw up a policy that better safeguards its interests in an increasingly multipolar world.

Brazil’s foreign policy is based on its 1988 constitutionwhich establishes non-intervention, self-determination, international cooperation and the peaceful solution of conflicts as guiding principles.

That means “talk to all states at all times without making moral judgments, respecting certain red lines”, explains Feliciano Guimarães, a political scientist at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a research group. However, he adds, Lula’s red lines are still unclear.

Last week, a Brazilian delegation led by Celso Amorim, special adviser to the presidency and former foreign minister, traveled to Venezuela for the first high-level official visit in years. Under Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil severed diplomatic relations with the neighboring nation.

Venezuela’s leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, has been accused of trampling on freedom of expression and persecuting political opponents.

Amorim’s team met with both Maduro and the opposition. Maduro tweeted photos of the meeting with Amorim and described it as a “pleasant meeting”.

According to a foreign ministry official who was not authorized to speak publicly, the Lula government intended to promote democracy in Venezuela and push for greater transparency in the elections, which is why the delegation met with both parties.

In early March, the Brazilian delegation at the United Nations refused to sign a declaration by the Human Rights Council that condemned the Daniel Ortega regime in Nicaragua.

The Ortega government has cracked down on dissent, last month deporting and moving to strip more than 200 dissidents of their Nicaraguan nationality, prompting an international rebuke for what was widely seen as political setback and a form of exile.

During an interview with the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo, published on March 10, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira claimed that Brazil did not sign the declaration due to “differences in language and approach”. Vieira pointed out Brazil’s historical position of seeking dialogue first.

But the controversy led the Brazilian government to stress later that it was “Extremely worried” for the denunciations of human rights violations in Nicaragua and offered to welcome political refugees who were stripped of their nationality.

Lula made diplomacy a priority during his previous presidency from 2003 to 2010, and Brazil was widely respected on the international stage. The BRICS group made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was created in 2006.

Lula and Amorim held talks with senior US and Iranian officials in an attempt to build peace, joining forces with Turkey to negotiate a halt to Iran’s uranium enrichment. Ultimately those efforts failed, and Iran continued to enrich uranium.

Lula is seeking to reinsert Brazil on the world stage after a time when Bolsonaro showed little interest in international affairs beyond asserting his affinity with other right-wing nationalists such as Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Bolsonaro even reserved special adulation for now-former US President Donald Trump.

Bolsonaro’s trips abroad were few and sporadic. Instead, Lula quickly showed a different course and in the first month of his presidency he traveled to Argentina to meet his counterpart, Alberto Fernández.

The president who returned to Planalto Palace also wants to create a group of countries, possibly including India, China and Indonesia, to mediate possible peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said Moscow was studying Lula’s proposal, Russian news agency Tass reported in February. He, too, shared that proposal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a video call on March 2.

However, Lula’s refusal to send arms to the invaded country upset the West.

“Lula’s government is applying the same principle of autonomy as during its first terms, but the global scenario has changed”warns political scientist Leonardo Paz of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university and think tank.

The West’s tensions with Russia and China are now more acute, but Russia is a key supplier of fertilizer for Brazil’s soybean farms, and its exports have become dependent on the Chinese market.

China overtook the United States as Brazil’s top trading partner in 2009. Since then, their economic relationship has only grown stronger. Between 2007 and 2020, China invested the equivalent of $66.1 billion in Brazil, according to the Brazil-China Business Council.

“Brazil needs a strategy that allows it to maneuver. The principle of non-alignment allows you to have open channels with all States to protect yourself”comments the political scientist Guimarães.

Brazil showed its willingness to defend a foreign policy independent of the United States and European countries when it allowed two Iranian warships to dock, adds Guimarães.

The move drew criticism from the United States and Israel. “Hosting Iranian naval vessels sends the wrong message”warned the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, during a briefing on March 9.

“But Brazil is a sovereign country and it can allow itself to make its decisions about how it is going to relate to another country”he added.

Another indication of Lula’s fledgling foreign policy came this week with the announcement that starting October 1, Brazil will reinstate the requirement that citizens of the United States and three other nations obtain tourist visas, which Bolsonaro had abolished even though Those four countries will continue to require visas from Brazilians.

Bolsonaro’s decision represented “a break with the pattern of Brazilian migration policy, which has historically been based on the principles of reciprocity and equal treatment”explained the Foreign Ministry in a statement on Monday.

Source: AP