Lula sets a trap for Donald Trump

Last October 26, during a bilateral meeting held in Malaysia, Lula da Silva offered President Donald Trump his intermediation in the midst of tensions between the United States and the Venezuelan dictatorship. It is a deception, a crude trap, which seeks, once again, to gain time to favor the interests of the narco-dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Lula is not only the founder of the Sao Paulo Forum, the organization to which Maduro belongs, but currently its maximum leader, after the death of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

Last October 17, in an impassioned speech he gave at the Congress of the Communist Party of Brazil, Lula defended the "sovereignty" of Cuba and Venezuela against the alleged aggressions of the United States. Lula said nothing about the Cartel of the Suns or the crimes against humanity committed by the Venezuelan regime. In May 2023, Lula said that human rights violations in Venezuela were the product of a "constructed narrative".

That same day, Hugo Chávez's former counter-intelligence chief, Hugo "El Pollo" Carvajal, testified before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, in the Southern District Court of New York, that the Venezuelan regime had financed Lula's electoral campaign.

Already last year Lula offered himself as Maduro's "mediator", behaving in practice as his main ally. On the occasion of the July 28, 2024 elections, Lula assumed - without anyone asking him - the intermediation between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition; but what the Brazilian president did was, in reality, to gain time so that the Venezuelan regime could remain in power, fiercely repressing dissidence.

Lula's strategy consisted of ignoring the official minutes presented by the opposition; then he convinced Joe Biden and Europe to wait for the presentation of the minutes by the National Electoral Council (CNE); and finally he proposed to repeat the elections and establish a direct negotiation between Nicolás Maduro and the president-elect, Edmundo González, but without the participation of María Corina Machado.

In addition, under the complacent gaze of Lula da Silva, Maduro besieged for months the members of María Corina Machado's team, asylum-seekers in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas. On that occasion, Lula set a trap for President Javier Milei, offering to guard his embassy, given that the Argentine government and the Venezuelan regime had broken diplomatic relations. Lula allowed, without making any complaint, Maduro to apply psychological torture to Machado's team. The situation was resolved after an extraction operation that took the team out of the Embassy and into the United States.

Lula's alliance with the Venezuelan dictatorship is longstanding. In December 2002, Lula sent the Amazon Explorer tanker to save Chavez from the oil strike. In 2006, Lula traveled to Venezuela to campaign for Chavez. In 2008, Lula declared that "Chavez is the best president Venezuela has had in the last hundred years". The examples continue and are many.

Alejandro Peña Esclusa is a Venezuelan engineer, writer and former political prisoner. Expert in the Sao Paulo Forum. Advisor to the Disenso Foundation (Spain) and the Center for Fundamental Rights (Hungary).