Born from the unholy mating of unsophisticated Stalinists entrenched within the Workers’ Party (PT) and theatrical Trotskyites infiltrating the Itamaraty (Brazil’s Foreign Ministry) — both factions dreaming of a second Cold War destined to crush Yankee imperialism —, the foreign policy of villainy found its midwives in Celso Amorim, the “Planalto Goldfinch,” and Marco Aurélio Garcia, a mouth crying out for a dentist. Since 2003, when millions of voters inexplicably chose to see a statesman in the indolent Pernambucan who had never even bothered to skim a history or geography book, this geopolitical monstrosity has dictated Lula’s conduct when dealing with international affairs. When confronted with bifurcations and crossroads, he invariably picks the wrong path.
Right at the outset of his first term, he caved to the insolence of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and swallowed, without so much as a gag, the confiscation of Petrobras assets in Bolivia, ordered by the “llama with bangs.” “Richer countries must help poorer ones,” mewled the cowardly neighbor. Later, when the Honduran Congress, with the Supreme Court’s endorsement, legally ousted President Manuel Zelaya, Lula yielded without a peep to the whims of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Hell-bent on reinstating the ham actor — who incongruously sported a bridal-white cowboy hat with a black grackle-like mustache — to power, the “Asylum-Bolívar” forced Lula to transform the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa into “Zelaya’s Boarding House,” where the deposed leader camped for weeks on end.
In 2007, to curry favor with Fidel Castro, Lula deported boxers Erislandy Lara and Guillermo Rigondeaux, who were apprehended by Federal Police while attempting to flee to Germany via Rio. With the theatrical outpourings of a Mexican heartthrob, he paid sycophantic homage to repulsive figures such as Libyan psychopath Muammar Gaddafi, African genocidaire Omar al-Bashir, atomic Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Angolan thief José Eduardo dos Santos. Consistently, the final act of this mythomaniac, who delusionally believed himself capable of resolving millennia-old Middle Eastern antagonisms with dive bar banter, was to grant political asylum to Italian assassin Cesare Battisti. Between civilization and barbarity, Lula invariably championed the latter.
This subservience to abominations of every stripe continued with his successor, Dilma Rousseff. Faced with a choice between the constitutional Paraguayan government and deposed president Fernando Lugo, she sided with the “porn movie bishop” who augmented every flock of the faithful he led with the efficiency of a cassock-wearing stud. Dilma also involved herself in the conspiracy that ousted Paraguay from Mercosur to force Venezuela’s entry, and she debased herself to Chávez’s chambermaid until the death of the dictator “who turned into a little bird.” To delay Nicolás Maduro’s collapse, she even sent him free shipments of toilet paper. After transforming Granja do Torto (a presidential residence) into Raúl Castro’s country estate, Dilma was deepening her flirtation with the beheading comrades of the Islamic State when Operation Car Wash boosted the economic crisis, accelerating the eviction of the planet’s most inept ruler.
For Fidel Castro’s lackey, the only problem with the almost septuagenarian dictatorship was “Yankee imperialism.” “If not for the United States blockade, Cuba could be a Holland,” he taught. (God knows why, this was the second time he used a country he knew nothing about to spin another whopper. The first time, he swore he’d quit drinking during the 1974 World Cup, “the day Brazil was defeated by the Dutch national team.”) Out of the presidency, he pocketed cash disguised as speaking fees. This hawker for construction companies — which would later become police cases with the discovery of the Petrolão scandal — amassed piles of dollars, a bouquet of properties, and gratitude paid in kind by countries whose debts to Brazil were forgiven.
“Brazil will lose its global prominence and relevance,” Dilma deliriously proclaimed upon returning home. What the country truly lost was the role it had played since 2003: that of an idiotic giant, slavishly obedient to the dwarves of the neighborhood. With the arrival of Michel Temer, and then Jair Bolsonaro, at the Planalto Palace, partnerships with scoundrels and villains came to an end. The Itamaraty once again served Brazil, and the foreign policy of villainy was buried without a funeral wake.
It was exhumed at the end of 2022 by the consortium that brought together the PT’s ringleader with despicable opportunists, state-controlled journalists, thieving parliamentarians, “manifesto democrats,” and robed tyrants ready to come out of the closet and arrest anyone who dissents. Anyone with more than ten neurons at least suspected that this disastrous diplomacy would also return to the crime scene. Between brutal Russia and raped Ukraine, he chose his friend Putin. Between China, which even dictates the number of children a couple is allowed to have, and the United States, he sided with the dictator whose name he still hasn’t learned to pronounce. Between Palestinian terrorists and Israel, he opted for those who want to throw the region’s only democracy into the sea. Between the ayatollahs’ Iran and the Jews, he allied himself with those nostalgic for sanguinary primitivism. Between good and evil, he roots for the villain.
Between darkness and light, Lula has always fought for the triumph of the shadows.
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