Would you lock yourself up alone with Nicolás Maduro? The answer to that question will mark the success or not of a disruptive initiative by the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva: a retreat of South American heads of state, the 12 of them in a room to talk, without advisers or support, frankly and plainly. of the future of the region. And what Brasilia wants is for the Venezuelan dictator to also be in that room.
"Maduro is invited," a high-ranking source from the Itamaraty Palace, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, confirmed to EL MUNDO. "Now we are in the consultation phase, seeing how to reconcile the agendas of the presidents," he added.
The truth is that it is about much more than combining agendas. Lula will have to appeal to all his capacity for influence and seduction if he wants to convince presidents like the Ecuadorian Guillermo Lasso, the Uruguayan Luis Lacalle Pou or the Paraguayan Mario Abdo Benítez, enrolled in the center right, to share hours of intimacy and closeness with Maduro. .
The Venezuelan diaspora, with 7.5 million people who have already left the country, is felt in the streets of Quito, Montevideo and Asunción, as well as in Buenos Aires, Bogotá or Santiago de Chile. Maduro and Venezuela are not just a matter of foreign policy, they are a matter of internal policy.
"The format chosen by the Brazilian government aims to create an intimate environment in which the heads of state can talk, without interruptions and without large delegations nearby, about Brazil's idea of reactivating the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), among other topics. of the regional agenda", recently pointed out O Globo.
Lula has already sent letters to every South American president with a tentative date of May 30. In the letter, according to the Brazilian media, Lula defends "the need to revitalize integration in South America, asks to set aside differences in the name of a common destiny, talks about the need to cooperate in defense, health and infrastructure, among other issues ".
Although Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira recently said in an interview with EL MUNDO that Brazil does not claim to be the leader at the regional level, the truth is that it acts in that sense. Lula needs to be the figurehead of South America - Latin America, with the complication that Mexico implies, would be too ambitious - to sit at the table of the world's powerful with even more specific weight than the twelfth largest economy on the planet already has.
Thus, Lula's letter to his counterparts also raises "the importance of seeking collective solutions and repositioning South America as an actor on the global stage." And he asks the presidents to sit down at the table to talk "with transparency and a constructive spirit." Translated: no vetoes. Translated even deeper: let's all sit down together to talk to the regime in Caracas, with Maduro in the room.
According to the Uruguayan newspaper El Observador, Lula is appealing to "presidential diplomacy" because the idea of bringing together 12 presidents in a hermetic retreat came from the Planalto Palace, and not from Itamaraty. It has the trademark of Celso Amorim, Lula's former foreign minister and his special adviser on international affairs, the man he sent to Moscow and Kiev to talk about mediation in the war in Ukraine that no one is yet clear about what it would look like or if it is possible. may it prosper
Beyond the thorny Venezuelan issue, Lula's idea, shared by his Argentine counterpart, Alberto Fernández, to relaunch Unasur, is a complex idea. Uruguay and Paraguay have left in recent years an organization that no longer has its headquarters in Quito and that today is integrated, in a zombie state, only by Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela. The announcement by Brasilia and Buenos Aires that they are returning to it is important, but not enough: a union of South American nations without all the nations is not a union.
Lacalle Pou has already made it clear in various forums that he does not intend to join "clubs of friends" or ideological organizations, a position that Brazil understands and shares. There is a consensus in various key capitals of the region that the current time calls for a more executive and expeditious organization, and she also wants to talk to her colleagues Lula about that. With Maduro in the room, which implies almost squaring the circle.
The Colombian Gustavo Petro, who has a good relationship with Lacalle Pou despite the ideological distances, could act as composer, since one of his intentions is also to be an actor at the regional level, a kind of primus inter pares. This is not the case of the Argentine Fernández, in the twilight of his mandate and emptied of political power in the final stretch towards the October elections.
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