Afraid of electoral damage, the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) should moderate the speech in support of left-wing authoritarian regimes in Latin America during this year’s presidential campaign, in which former president Lula appears at the forefront in the polls, say interlocutors involved. in the electoral race.
The idea is to avoid attacks by the opposition, which in the campaign should explore the party’s connection with ideologically aligned dictatorships, such as Venezuela and Cuba. Even so, the idea is that there is no public condemnation of allied governments, and the strategy will be to avoid the issue, considered a thorn in the side.
The PT’s assessment is that the issue is not a central issue in the elections, but it can be harmful when exploited by opponents. The issue should also not be a crucial point to define an alliance with Geraldo Alckmin (without a party), speculated as a candidate for Lula’s vice president. For a close ally of the former governor of São Paulo, he must “agree to disagree” with the PT.
Pedro Tobias, a longtime friend of Alckmin’s, says that the former toucan “is a democrat”, but that “when you get married, husband and wife have their differences”. The former president of the PSDB of SP says it is valuable to have Alckmin on Lula’s ticket to “tame a little of the extremism” of support for left-wing dictatorships and says that the former governor must not fail to express his positions – as he did with the proposal to revoke the labor reform, a banner of the PT that recently shook up the negotiations for the alliance between politicians.
The discussion around PT-aligned dictatorships reappeared last weekend, when an excerpt from an interview with former president Dilma Rousseff, given in August to the Opera Mundi portal, circulated on social media, during which she attributes Hugo Chávez’s success in Venezuela to an alliance with the Army.
“Chavismo made a bet on the Army. Fundamentally. Unless we are naive,” said the PT. “Wherever there is an army, never believe that paramilitary mobilizations take place without his complicity,” added the former president, herself a target of the military dictatorship in Brazil. The assessment drew attention because it clashed with the position of important figures in the party, a historical ally of Chavismo.
AT leaf Former Chancellor Celso Amorim, who coordinated Brazilian foreign policy throughout the Lula government and is appointed as one of the former president’s main advisers on the matter in this year’s campaign, also says he is against dictatorial regimes, but preaches dialogue .
“I’m not in favor of it. [ditaduras], and President Lula himself has said that he is not in favor of indefinite elections and political arrests. I tell you, frankly, that I am totally against political prisons.”
Amorim, however, argues that public criticism of authoritarianism in the neighborhood has no effect and ends up isolating countries even more. “It’s not a matter of defending authoritarian regimes, but it doesn’t mean that we are in favor of isolation or sanctions, because that didn’t work. Cuba has suffered this for 60 years without meeting the supposed objective of restoring a liberal-type regime.”
The threat that Brazil “turns into a Venezuela” under PT governments, although it never came close to reality, has always been in the speech of President Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
“We don’t want that for our country,” Bolsonaro said in October, on an official trip to Boa Vista, capital of Roraima, a state that borders Venezuela. “The Brazilian President of the Past [Lula] went to Venezuela to campaign for [Hugo] Chavez and [Nicolás] Mature. It is always deceiving the people. To go to the left and join socialism.”
Political analysts, however, point out that, in fact, there are more elements that make the current government similar to Chavismo than in the terms of the left in the country – such as the strong connection with the Armed Forces, the attack on institutions and the STF and the co-option of investigation bodies.
The potential for conflict around the defense of authoritarian regimes was already demonstrated months before the electoral race. When dictator Daniel Ortega was re-elected in a sham election in Nicaragua in November, the PT’s Secretariat for International Relations published a note congratulating him on his victory in an election described as “a great popular and democratic demonstration.”
The note was soon criticized for praising an election marked by the arrest of opponents, which caused internal discomfort and led leaders to put on a hot plate. PT president Gleisi Hoffmann said that the content had not been submitted to the party’s leadership, but stated that the position “in relation to any country is in defense of people’s self-determination against external interference and respect for democracy.” This, by the way, is the tone that party figures point out that will be used as an argument to get rid of public criticism of regimes like Ortega’s.
Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba have a history of persecuting the opposition, repressing demonstrations, threatening press freedom and co-opting institutions. In cases like the Venezuelan one, there is also a serious economic crisis and a shortage of basic products.
The PT lives a division in its foreign policy nucleus, between a more social democratic wing, critical of experiences that interrupt the democratic alternation of power, and a more Marxist one, favorable to models such as the Soviet and the Cuban. The discussion, however, did not gain enough traction to reverse historic party resolutions that supported neighboring authoritarian regimes.
Tarso Genro, Lula’s former Minister of Justice and Education and former governor of Rio Grande do Sul, enthusiastic about Celso Amorim’s name at the head of Itamaraty in an eventual third Lula government, tells leaf not see “any trace of the Nicaraguan revolution today in the government of Ortega, which has become an authoritarian regime”, but emphasizes that he does not consider the dictator “worse than Bolsonaro”.
The PT also states that “Chavismo is not an example for any country in Latin America”, but that its model was born in a democratic way and “later it underwent changes, including the hypervaluation of the Armed Forces” highlighted by Dilma in the interview with Opera Mundi .
For him, the next government should break the current isolation of Brazil and establish a policy of automatic non-alignment, which can independently dialogue with different economic blocs, such as the US, China and the European Union. This involves, according to Genro, negotiating with authoritarian regimes in the region. “Brazil cannot engage in any policy of hostility with governments recognized by the UN and that work, even without traditionally democratic mechanisms.”
In 2018, the matter had already been explored against Fernando Haddad, then PT candidate for the presidency, recalls the campaign coordinator, Sergio Gabrielli, former president of Petrobras. That year, however, the absence of then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro in debates took the accusations to other spheres. “As there was no confrontation between the two, these things always appeared in the virtual world.”
The orientation was the same as now. “Our official position was that it’s a matter of national sovereignty, that we shouldn’t get into another country’s internal processes, and that Venezuela’s problems should be solved by Venezuelans themselves. We shouldn’t meddle in a sovereign country.”
Sought after, Dilma and the national leadership of the PT did not want to manifest.
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