Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced an “investigation” this weekend against Brazil’s far-left President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for allegedly faking a head injury in a purported plot to “veto” Venezuela out of the BRICS anti-U.S. bloc.
BRICS member nations and other invitees gathered last week in Kazan, Russia, for the bloc’s 15th annual summit. The group agreed to extend invitations to 13 other countries, offering them to join the group as “partner states” rather than full members.
Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro has spent most of the past decade unsuccessfully attempting to secure a BRICS membership spot for his regime and personally traveled to Kazan last week — only for him to get snubbed out of the partner list, reportedly at Lula’s request.
Lula canceled his attendance at the summit last week after he suffered a head injury in a bathroom accident that reportedly required urgent medical attention and five stitches for the wound. Lula’s medical team advised him to avoid long-distance air travel.
Saab, Venezuela’s current attorney general – and a man with a long track record at the service of the ruling socialist regime, even serving as Hugo Chávez’s designated “poet of the Revolution” — claimed on his Instagram account on Saturday that, according to “direct and close sources from Brazil,” Lula “faked” the accident with the intent to use it to justify his absence in Kazan.
Saab claimed it was “nothing more than a deception” to leave Venezuela out of BRICS, “evading his responsibility before President [Vladimir] Putin, the other attending leaders and, in particular, President Nicolás Maduro Moros.”
Saab substantiated his accusations with a copy of a video published by Lula on Friday that showed him returning to the presidential Planalto palace, greeting and shaking hands with other officials. Several Brazilian outlets published pictures taken on that day showing Lula sporting several stitches on the back of his head.
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“What was strongly rumored, unfortunately, seems to be corroborated by a video released yesterday, where President Lula can be seen healthy, in use of his faculties and acting with total cynicism,” Saab’s message read.
“Lula reappeared smiling and unharmed, revealing that he used this ‘accident’ to lie to Brazil, the BRICS, and the whole world – a fact for which he should be investigated,” he continued.
Brazil’s refusal to greenlight a Venezuelan BRICS partnership invitation marks the latest chapter in the presently strained relationship between Lula and the Venezuelan socialists. Lula’s top foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo last week that Brazil’s opposition to a prospective Venezuela BRICS membership is due to a “breach of trust” by the Maduro regime following the fraudulent July 28 presidential election, which dictator Maduro claims he “won.”
According to Amorim, who met with Maduro in Caracas sometime after the election, the socialist dictator had personally promised him that his regime would publish voter data and documentation to corroborate the dictator’s claimed “victory.” The Maduro regime failed to publish any data, reportedly offending Lula.
“It is not a problem of the political regime, it is a question of a breach of trust. We acted in good faith but, with Venezuela, trust was broken,” Amorim said.
The Venezuelan attorney general claimed that “there is great uneasiness in the Latin American left and the revolutionary movements of the world” due to the “undignified and disgraceful performance” of Brazil at the BRICS summit. He accused the neighboring nation of “attacking Venezuela in a cowardly way, obediently following the instructions of the historical enemies of our peoples.”
The Spanish EFE news agency reported on Saturday that, according to unnamed Brazilian government sources, Nicolás Maduro tried to pressure Brazil “at the last minute” to allow BRICS to invite Venezuela as a partner, to which Brazil reacted by “emphatically” expressing its opposition.
Maduro returned from his trip empty-handed in the midnight hours of Saturday. While he did not directly mention Brazil or Lula, the socialist dictator said upon his return, “there is no force on this earth that will silence Venezuela’s voice of rebellion and justice, neither today nor tomorrow nor ever.”
Maduro further claimed that no one will veto or silence Venezuela and threatened that whoever tries to do so will “wither.”
Although the socialist dictator left the summit without his long-coveted BRICS membership, he did avail himself of the opportunity while there to privately meet with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and with some of some of his top allies, such as Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and the head of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
