Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has expressed his outrage over the capture on January 3 of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, by US forces, and has criticized Trump for attacking multilateralism by creating a “new UN” of which “only he will be the owner,” in reference to the Gaza Peace Council.
“I spent the whole night outraged by what happened in Venezuela. I can’t believe it. Maduro knew there were 15,000 US soldiers in the Caribbean Sea, he knew there was a daily threat. Those guys entered Venezuela, entered the fort, and took Maduro, and nobody knew that Maduro was gone. How is it possible that the territorial integrity of a country is not respected?” he said at the National Meeting of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), in statements reported by Agencia Brasil.
Lula has hardened the tone of his criticism of the White House occupant and maintained that Brazil does not have a preference for relations with any country, but that the Latin American country will not “become a colony again where someone else governs us.”
Although the US president has invited Lula to participate in the Gaza Peace Council, a governing body for the Palestinian enclave that Trump himself has promoted and will lead, the Brazilian president accused the American leader of dismantling the UN in favor of unilateralism.
“The law of the strongest is prevailing, the UN Charter is being dismantled, and instead of fixing the UN, which we have been demanding since I was president in 2003 (…), what is happening is that President Trump is proposing to create a new UN, in which only he will be the owner of the UN,” Lula asserted.
The Brazilian president also advocated dialogue as a way to respond to Trump’s constant statements boasting about the military power of the United States. “I don’t want to wage an armed war with the United States, nor with Russia, nor with Uruguay, nor with Bolivia. I want to wage a war with the power of persuasion, with arguments, with narratives, demonstrating that democracy is invincible; that we don’t want to impose ourselves on others, but rather share the good things we have,” he declared.
Lula’s continued criticism of Trump also breaks a kind of truce that the two leaders seemed to have established since the end of last year after reaching a series of agreements to lift some of the harshest tariffs that the U.S. president had begun to impose on more than half the world.
