Celso Amorim’s book shows Chávez as a timely nuisance in Lula’s governments

“A laborious alliance”, “a stone in the shoe”, “diatribe” and “strident” are some of the expressions used to describe Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela in the recently released book by Celso Amorim, Lula’s former foreign minister, and in the beginning of Dilma Rousseff’s government. Amorim was the architect of the “active and haughty” foreign policy that the PT intends to re-edit in a possible new Lula presidency and which was characterized by extrapolating the country’s real capabilities to project itself as a global leader.

South America was the space where leadership ambition had any chance of making headway. For this reason, “Laços de Confiança: O Brasil na América do Sul”, composed of excerpts from the diaries written by Amorim at the time, interspersed with current comments, reveals an interesting behind-the-scenes testimony of foreign policy in the period that coincided with the first wave of leftist governments in the region.

Reading the reports allows us to remember how troubled that period of regional relations was. Brazil has invested in the formation of a preferential alliance with leftist governments in the region, despite the fact that many of them are classified by the chancellor, in his notes, as “problem countries”.

Amorim describes Lula and himself as firefighters, putting out fires caused by figures like Rafael Correa of ​​Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez — ubiquitous in times of crisis. Argentine Néstor Kirchner is portrayed as easily influenced by the Venezuelan’s outbursts.

In relation to smaller countries, the attitude was one of condescension, even when something hurt Brazilian interests. After Evo nationalized oil and gas exploration and deployed troops to occupy Petrobras facilities in the country, in 2006, Amorim recorded the following sentence by Lula: “Celso, you better take care of Bolivia. I can’t. pity when I see those poor little Indians.”

Despite being uncomfortable, Chávez’s interference on issues that would be better resolved bilaterally, such as Ecuador’s threat of defaulting on a debt with the BNDES, in 2008, was tolerated.

The Venezuelan leader also showed himself to be a technically unprepared candidate and without the democratic credentials necessary to join Mercosur, and even so Amorim considered it strategic to accelerate the process (“It is necessary to trust that coexistence in Mercosur and better relations with other countries serve to inhibit authoritarian impulses of the Venezuelan president”). Not to mention the episodes, described in the book, in which Venezuela tried to undermine Brazil’s hard-won consensus of interest obtained in negotiations at the WTO (World Trade Organization).

In justifying tolerance with Chávez, Amorim argues that “engagement is better than isolation.” The ideological factor appears, but only tangentially, when the former chancellor praises Venezuela in the category of “reformist” countries. Another explanation that emerges from the work is the fact that Lula and Amorim present themselves to the world as the only ones capable of containing Chávez’s radicalism — and of using this as a diplomatic trump card, especially in relations with the United States.

Even more revealing about the reasons for engaging with the uncomfortable partner is the absence of direct references, in “Laços de Confiança”, to the preferential relationship that Brazilian companies, especially contractors, built with Chávez over the years, sometimes in contracts with substantial BNDES financing. The role of these companies in the regional integration strategy promoted by the Lula government is minimized, and the subsequent emergence of allegations of corruption in the countries in which they operated does not deserve more than a footnote in the book.

“What a cold foot, huh?!”, whispered Lula to Amorim, in April 2003, in Recife, while listening to a speech in which Chávez recounted the misadventures experienced by the liberator Simon Bolívar alongside the Brazilian general Abreu e Lima -whose name named the overpriced refinery that years later became one of the emblematic cases of Operation Lava Jato. Lula, in his witty phrase, was referring to the Pernambuco revolutionary, of course. But if he knew what was coming next, he might as well have been talking about Chávez.