Venezuela isolated in war of words with neighbors
BRASILIA: Venezuela’s foreign minister hit out this week against both Peru and Brazil, calling Peru’s president a “servile dog of US imperialism,” and slamming Brazilian politicians for all being allegedly corrupt.
On March 6, Delcy Rodriguez told a seminar in Caracas that Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski “goes round, poor thing, with my respect because he is an elderly man, (like) a good dog who wags its tail at the empire and asks for an intervention in Venezuela. He’s alone, going round like a crazy man, with no one paying attention.”
Kuczynski, who is 78 years old, was elected president last year after spending years in New York as a Wall Street banker. He became a naturalized US citizen during his time there, and renounced his American citizenship before being elected president of Peru. He is also a vocal critic of Venezuela and the Chavismo policies practiced by the current government of President Nicolas Maduro, which are a continuation of the leftist policies started by the late-President Hugo Chavez.
Rodriguez was reacting to a speech that Kuczynski gave recently on an official visit to the US in which he said Latin America was in general like a well-behaved dog sitting on the carpet except for Venezuela, which “was a big problem.” He was the first Latin American leader to meet with US President Donald Trump in the White House on Feb. 24.
Rodriguez next hit out at Brazil on the same day, saying that the country had become a global shame ever since Michel Temer took over the presidency last year. “Today we must say, lamentably, that Brazil is a global shame. Ever since they undertook a coup d’état against Dilma Rousseff, every day their politicians are involved in scandals,” reported the Veja newsweekly. She also said that Brazilian politicians were corrupt, “but they do not care as the imperialist Right wing extends the red carpet for them.”
On March 7, the new Brazilian minister of foreign affairs, Aloysio Nunes, hit back at Rodriguez at his swearing-in ceremony, saying that she was not important. “She doesn’t have much importance. In this country of hers, the most important people are the jail guards, and not the minister of foreign affairs,” Nunes said.
Rodriguez responded on social media by saying that Nunes had started out on the wrong foot with Venezuela, and sarcastically noted that she would send him the ABC of Diplomacy. She also said that Nunes should mirror his predecessor who left because of corrup- tion accusations against him. She was referring to Jose Serra, a close ally of Nunes and a member of the same political party, who recently resigned and returned to the Senate claiming he was doing so for health reasons. Serra’s name has been mentioned in the Car Wash corruption investigation as allegedly having accepted millions of reais in illegal campaign donations when he ran for the presidency of Brazil in 2010. Serra denies it.
Nunes, who until this week was a leading senator of the rightleaning PSDB political party, has long been a tough critic of Venezuela’s jailing of opposition politicians. Last year in June he led a delegation of Brazilian senators on a surprise visit to Caracas to try and visit jailed Venezuelan opposition leaders. The Maduro government strongly objected to their visit as interference in its internal affairs and ordered police and military troops to block their exit from the airport. In the end, the Brazilian senators returned defeated to Brazil without having been able to visit the prisoners.
Venezuela’s lashing out at its neighbors has not surprised observers. “Given that Venezuela’s government behaves diplomatically as if it had little to lose, it is likely that the Venezuelan foreign minister decided to play chicken with Brazil,” said Guilherme Casarões, professor of international relations at ESPM and FGV in São Paulo, in an interview with Arab News. “They probably expect Brazil’s newly-appointed foreign minister, Aloysio Nunes, to lose his temper and try to hit back at Venezuela, forcing the countries into a diplomatic crises that may well serve the Maduro regime.”
Venezuela, which has the world’s largest known reserves of oil and earns 90 percent of its income from oil exports, has been struggling with an economy that has suffered much since the international price of oil plunged a few years ago. The change of governments in Argentina, Peru and Brazil, which were until recently headed by left-wing populists, has also left Venezuela feeling more isolated in the region. But Casarões believes that Maduro’s government faces bigger challenges than just being isolated.
“Maduro’s greatest challenge is the dire economic situation in Venezuela, not diplomatic isolation,” said Casarões. “He surely benefitted from the incumbent left-wing governments in the neighborhood, for they fostered Venezuela’s integration into the Mercosur, but the rollback of leftist presidents only helps expose the country’s reality even further. Moreover, even before Rousseff’s impeachment, the Brazilian government was already adopting a firm position against human rights violations in Venezuela, not to mention that bilateral trade flows have been in steep decline since at least 2012.”
Negotiations between the opposition and the Maduro regime have come to a standstill after even the Vatican was unable to achieve to breakthrough. Being the largest and richest country of the continent means that Brazil should have been the natural choice to help iron out a political deal in Venezuela, but that is no longer the case since Temer became president. Maduro was a close ally of the leftist Worker’s Party of Rousseff, but now that she is out of power, there has been no love lost between the Brazilian and Venezuelan governments.
“Brazil cannot play the role of honest broker while President Temer remains in office,” explained Casarões. “It would demoralize Venezuela’s charges of a coup d’état in Brazil, and it would hurt the interests of many supporters of the current Brazilian administration, who have voiced a strong anti-Venezuelan sentiment on ideological grounds. This is unfortunate because Brazil –alone or through regional organizations such as Mercosur and Unasur –has played a crucial role as the center of gravity of South America for the last three decades. And I don’t think that extra- continental actors have enough interest or legitimacy to mediate a smooth transition, or a national pact, in Venezuela.”