The president of Brazil, Argentina’s main trading partner, continues to be attacked by Javier Milei: the far-right president renewed this Friday the attacks against his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had demanded that he apologize for previous insults. “The things I said are true. What are the problems? What did I say corrupt? Wasn’t he arrested for corruption? What did I say communist? Isn’t he him? Since when do we have to apologize for telling the truth?”, Milei said a few days before the Mercosur Summit, in which both will meet face to face. In passing, the Argentine once again questioned the leaders of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, and Colombia, Gustavo Petro.
Brazil and Argentina have a strategic alliance and are the heart of Mercosur. The Brazilian economy has a 15% share of Argentina’s foreign trade, making it its largest partner. In turn, Argentina is Brazil’s third partner, participating in 5% of its foreign business, according to official data. Despite this close link, since Milei has been in the Casa Rosada for almost seven months, the presidents of both countries have never spoken.
“I have not spoken to the president of Argentina because I believe that [antes] “He has to apologize to Brazil and to me, he has said a lot of nonsense, I just want him to apologize,” Lula said last Wednesday. However, he added: “Argentina is a very important country for Brazil, and Brazil is very important for Argentina. It will not be a president of the Republic who sows discord between Brazil and Argentina. The Argentine people and the Brazilian people are greater than the presidents.”
Milei did not accept this implicit truce. This Friday, exultant after the approval in Congress of his laws to deregulate the economy and dismantle the State, he redoubled his attacks against Lula. “The truth is that it is such a small discussion. It seems like a discussion between pre-adolescent children. The same mechanism of [Gustavo] Petro, from [Pedro] Sánchez,” he said about the apology that the Brazilian president demanded of him. “Do you believe that Lula didn’t do similar things? “Petro and Lula did similar things, actively getting involved in our campaign,” he added during a television interview with the channel The Nation +.
Milei then defended as “true” his previous descriptions of Lula as “corrupt” and “communist.” He refused to apologize “for telling the truth.” “Are we so sick of political correctness that we cannot tell the left the truth?” he asked. And he added: “Those who lied demand that we apologize for having told the truth, come on. We must rise above these trivialities because the interests of Argentines and Brazilians are more important than the inflated ego of some leftist,” he concluded.
The tension between the two leaders began last year, during the electoral campaign. It was then that Milei called Lula a “corrupt communist.” The Brazilian, for his part, asked for the vote for the Peronist Sergio Massa, the candidate defeated by Milei. Then, once elected president, the far-right leader invited former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to the inauguration ceremony on December 10. Lula de Silva decided not to participate in the ceremony and sent his foreign minister, Mauro Vieira. Milei now accuses Lula of having promoted Massa’s “negative campaign” against him.
The bilateral relationship has become even more complicated in recent weeks because dozens of Bolsonaro supporters, convicted or investigated for participating in the coup attempt in 2023, fled to Argentina in search of refuge, failing to comply with the precautionary measures dictated by Justice.
Pope Francisco
In contrast to his aggressiveness towards Lula, Milei tried to ingratiate himself with Pope Francis, whom he had also insulted during the election campaign. He now admitted that it was a mistake to define him as the “representative of the evil one on earth” and attributed this to divergent interpretations of religious doctrine.
“I was wrong because I was telling him something because I thought differently or because I had a reading of the sacred scriptures that I don’t have,” said the Argentine president. The Pope, he stated, “has a vision of things that is directly opposite” to his. Even so, he acknowledged that this “did not merit him using the qualifiers” that he resorted to last year.
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