Brasilia Summit: Lula and Maduro Reboot Regional Integration
Francisco Dominguez
Brazil’s President Lula invited all 13 presidents from South America to a summit on May 30 aimed at developing a collective and “common vision and relaunching decisive actions for sustainable development, peace and the well-being of our peoples.”
Lula presented 10 proposals to bring about the region’s rapprochement — a consensual approach to economic, social and cultural issues.
Peru’s de facto ruler Dina Boluarte was not present because Peru’s right-wing congress did not authorise her to attend.
Among the proposals, Lula put forward the undertaking of regional investments to assist social and economic developments, mobilising the resources of banks such as Bank of the South, a development bank set up by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (Fonplata) and the Venezuelan Economic and Social Development Bank (Bandes).
Lula also made a strong pitch for deepening South American independence and sovereignty in monetary matters through compensation mechanisms and the creation of a common reference currency for trade to reduce the region’s dependence on currencies such as the dollar.
He stressed the need to collaborate at the level of regional planning for which he asked for the updating of the South American Council for Infrastructure and Planning (Cosiplan), emphasising physical and digital integration. He also stressed the need to reactivate regional co-operation on health, especially on vaccination and health infrastructure.
He went on to focus on regional collaboration in two key strategic areas, energy and defence. The South American nations had already established the Defence Council of the South (Codesur), which due to the US reactionary counteroffensive that led to right-wing governments coming into office in the region between 2009 and 2019, had not been functioning. Collaboration on energy, given that many South American countries are oil producers would enormously enhance the region’s economic muscle and bargaining position at the international level, especially in the current world geopolitical climate.
Lula proposed to create a high-level structure made up of representatives of all involved presidents to relaunch a renewed regional integration process in South America, stressing the urgency of these tasks — something enthusiastically echoed by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
During the summit, President Maduro held meetings with various presidents aimed at strengthening strategic bilateral ties with those nations to consolidate paths of co-operation and integration.
Presidents Maduro and Lula met at Brazil’s presidential palace where they celebrated the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, including the reopening of embassies after four years of Brazil’s total break with Venezuela carried out by extreme right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. A memorandum of understanding on agri-food matters was signed by representatives from both countries aimed at strengthening exchanges on livestock, food sovereignty and security.
Furthermore, Lula and Maduro discussed the possibility of Venezuela joining the Brics coalition (made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which Lula strongly supports, opening the possibility of the two countries making use of the common currency Brics intends to issue.
Maduro also held a meeting with Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro at Itamaraty, Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations, that resulted in the signing of the Agreement for the Creation of the Neighbourhood and Integration Commission to co-ordinate co-operation on their extensive common border.
The border has been the favourite area of operations for narco-trafficking paramilitaries as well as a base for Colombia-sponsored paramilitary and other operations against Venezuela.
President Petro has become a key figure in the dialogue persistently advocated by President Maduro between Caracas and the far-right opposition in Venezuela. Petro organised an international conference on Venezuela, held in Bogota, to encourage talks between them.
Maduro also met Bolivia’s President Luis Arce, also at Itamaraty, seeking to strengthen strategic ties between the two nations. While Venezuela is rich in oil resources, Bolivia is rich in natural gas.
The meeting took place within the framework of 13 co-operation agreements signed last April between the two presidents as part of the Venezuela-Bolivia Joint Integration Commission.
Following Lula and Maduro’s encouragement to strengthen Unasur, Petro announced Colombia’s re-entry into the regional organisation.
Perhaps most significantly, Lula vindicated the political legitimacy of the Maduro government: at a joint press conference with Maduro, Brazil’s president expressed joy in saying “Venezuela is back!” He stressed that Venezuela is a democracy and any view to the contrary is the result of a false “political narrative” of “authoritarianism and anti-democracy” from the enemies of Venezuela.
He added: “I have argued a lot with European social democrats who defend democracy and do not understand that Venezuela is a democracy.”
Lula went further to state that it is incredible that the nation has been inflicted by over 900 sanctions because the US does not like it. He went on to say that to deny Maduro was the president of Venezuela, and to recognise Juan Guaido instead, was the “most absurd thing in the world.” Lula also expressed a strong wish that Venezuela goes back to being a fully sovereign nation where “only its people through a free vote, decide who will govern the nation.”
In stark contrast to “civilised” Europe, Paraguay’s recently elected president, Santiago Pena, a rightwinger, in an interview with the BBC declared: “There is only one president in Venezuela and his name is Nicolas Maduro.”
On the 31 tons of Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England, Lula was unequivocal: “That gold reserve, instead of being placed under the custody of Guaido, must be placed in the custody of the Venezuelan government.”
Lula added that Brazil’s relationship with Venezuela should not just be commercial; it needs to be political, cultural, economic and technological. He said this could be around university partnerships and even their armed forces, working together in their common border “to combat narco-trafficking.”
Lula’s proposal for Venezuela to join the Brics coalition and Venezuela’s enthusiastic willingness to do so was instantly welcomed by China and Russia.
This is in the context of Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff, who was deposed by convoluted right-wing machinations in 2016, being appointed president of the Brics New Development Bank.
With Lula’s summit, South America’s regional integration has taken a qualitative leap forward. It confronts serious complexities in the neoliberal legacy left by the right-wing administrations which wrecked several national economies in a very short period.
Washington’s policy combines heavy-handed interventionism to bring about regime change, especially against Venezuela, with a “divide and rule” policy that was successful in bringing the likes of Bolsonaro, Mauricio Macri, Ivan Duque, and many other right-wing leaders to power.
The summit is a strong reaffirmation of the region’s collective sovereignty — all factors of enormous strategic significance. It is also a victory for multipolarity, and objectively a substantial setback for the US and its accomplices.
(Francisco Dominguez is Secretary, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, UK. Courtesy: Morning Star, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.)
South America Is Back, and Venezuela Is Helping Lead the Way
In general terms, it can be said that the recent summit of South American presidents in Brasilia, convened by President Lula Da Silva, was a practical reflection of the political-electoral shift towards the progressive camp in the region. Although this change of geopolitical orbit has yet to guarantee its horizon of possibility in the medium term, it has already produced a first image in the Brazilian capital that signals a change in the times.
The meeting, on a symbolic level, also represents the official end to a cycle of fragmentation, bitter political dispute, and planned attempts to destroy the intergovernmental platforms that emerged, during the first years of the 21st century, as a power alternative to the monopoly of US “Pan-Americanism”.
The result of this process was a considerable setback in the institutional dynamics of regional integration at the hands of the liberal-conservative power bloc that took over a significant amount of the governments in the last decade. Now, on top of that rubble, the leaders face the challenge of building a comeback to reposition the region on the geopolitical chessboard. This comes at a moment when the power struggle between declining and emerging powers is becoming more acute, and the South American continent finds itself in a moment of major definitions of its geostrategic destiny.
The timing of the diplomatic meeting that took place at the Itamaraty Palace is grim: the last UNASUR summit was held in 2014, which is to say, almost ten years passed for the South American leaders to meet again in the same space. Ten years, that is to say, in which international geopolitics has undergone changes in its rhythms, balances of power and economic integration schemes, changes in which the region has not played a representative role. Until yesterday?
The outcome of the meeting could call for optimism with reservations. A road map was defined with specific times to strengthen integration mechanisms and UNASUR. UNASUR was founded in 2008 that enjoyed enormous prestige and influence during its first years. Now it returns to the stage as a platform to make the efforts for a unified region viable, with its own voice and allowing for the strengthening of its members through economic and financial complementarity, a pending matter that has been postponed for years.
Although the meeting has given the impression that South America has shaken off the image of irrelevance that weighed on it for years, the course of events continues to evolve along a trend of fragility, instability and disagreement of criteria. President Gustavo Petro, who announced Colombia’s return to UNASUR at the summit, today faces the foreshadowing of a coup scenario after the breakup of his government coalition. The prognosis as to whether he will come out of this battle on his feet is still reserved.
Argentina, one of the key poles of the institution due to its economic and symbolic weight, faces a presidential electoral process at the end of this year, where an unfavorable result for Peronism could delay the progress of integration. On the other hand, the institutional crisis in Peru seems far from being resolved, and it does not seem that President Gabriel Boric and President Luis Lacalle Pou are going to commit themselves to a renewed push for integration, beyond the strictly institutional, in view of their statements against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro during the meeting.
The Venezuelan president participated in the summit and, as expected, was the center of attention. The president’s presence reconfirmed that the questioning of his legitimacy as president is a thing of the past and that his reinsertion in the regional chessboard is a fait accompli. Due to the objective weight of Lula’s leadership and the economic and geopolitical weight of Brazil, this new milestone of normalization of Maduro’s presence in important international forums had a significant symbolic addition: he was received with honors in the same country that, until recently, during the government of Jair Bolsonaro, mobilized important political and diplomatic efforts to consolidate the isolation of the Venezuelan leader.
In this sense, the summit in Brasilia was a definitive milestone and the seal of a trajectory of decay of the narrative imposed on the alleged illegitimacy of his mandate won at the polls in 2018. If his participation in the CELAC summit in Mexico City in 2021 was the first chapter of the recovery of his international recognition, the trip to Egypt for the COP27 at the end of last year would be the intermediate one, with the meeting in Brasilia being the scenario of the denouement of that narrative driven mainly by Washington.
The revitalization of regional integration through UNASUR must necessarily include Venezuela, due to its symbolic and economic weight and its political stability, which contrasts with other countries in the region.
As the trend of instability seems to be the norm in the southern part of the continent, the Brazil-Caracas-Bogotá-La Paz axis, while waiting for the evolution of events in Colombia to be favorable to Petro and facing the uncertainty of Argentina, Ecuador, and Chile, seems to position itself as the core of mobilization of a renewed agenda to revive the decisive geopolitical role that South America is called to play.
(William Serafino is a Venezuelan political scientist, analyst and researcher focused on geopolitics. He is a member of the Mision Verdad analysis team. Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch, an international media organization with the mission of highlighting voices from people’s movements and organizations across the globe.)
