Lula defends dialogue with Venezuela and Nicaragua in Mercosur: “it cannot be isolated”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) defended, this Tuesday (4), that Mercosur “cannot isolate” Venezuela and Nicaragua from the dialogues. The statement was given shortly after taking office as the rotating presidency of the trade bloc, in an interview with journalists.

Shortly before, during the opening speech of the Mercosur Summit and taking office, Lula left out any mention of the two countries that restrict the civil liberties of their populations, so as not to generate immediate criticism from other leaders present.

According to the president, the “problems of democracy” in Venezuela and Nicaragua need to be faced, but that the countries cannot be “isolated”. “The defects are multiple, we need to talk to everyone”, he said.

“With regard to the issue of Venezuela, all the problems we have with democracy, we do not hide from them, we face them. I don’t know the details of the problem with the Venezuelan candidate, I intend to find out”, she said in reference to María Corina Machado, a pre-candidate for the Venezuelan presidency who was declared ineligible by the country’s Comptroller General.

The defense of the political regime of Nicolás Maduro has been a constant in the Lula government, with fondness for a supposed democracy that he considers to be a “relative” concept from one person to another. The petista was heavily criticized by South American leaders when he received the Venezuelan with honors at the Planalto Palace in May, when he stated that “narratives” were created by the world about the country.

With regard to the Nicaraguan dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, which waged a war against the Catholic Church for more than five years with the arrest of religious leaders and closing press agencies, Lula said that he made a commitment with Pope Francis to intercede in the situation.

“I made a commitment with Pope Francis to speak with the [presidente da Nicarágua] Daniel Ortega, next week, to talk about the dispute with sectors of the Church. The only thing the Church wants is for Nicaragua to release the bishops,” he said.

Without naming other presidents of the countries that make up Mercosur, Lula said that he intends to gather “the main divergences” to “line them up” while occupying the rotating presidency of the bloc until the end of the year. “We form a block, together we add more people, together we have more capillarity to negotiate with whoever we want”, she added.