Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has broken off relations with Brazil and called his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “a creep” and wanting to be the “representative of the Yankees” in Latin America.
During a virtual summit with heads of state of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Ortega criticized Lula for his critical position on the controversial result of the elections held on July 28 in Venezuela, which gave victory to Nicolás Maduro with 51.9% of the votes compared to 43.2% for the opposition candidate Edmundo González.
The Sandinista leader said that Lula is one of the Latin American presidents who has had a “brutal” and “cowardly” reaction by not recognizing Maduro’s victory, and that he is part of the “servile, traitorous, groveling governments.”
It is a “government that has presented itself as very progressive and very revolutionary. Now that the elections (in Venezuela) have to be repeated, they say so. Brazil, Lula says so,” he reproached.
Ortega said that Lula “in a shameful way” is “repeating the slogans of the Yankees and the Europeans, and of the groveling governments of Latin America.”
Ortega to Lula: “You are dragging your feet”
“You are also crawling, Lula! You are crawling, Lula!” exclaimed Ortega, who also criticized the previous management of the Brazilian president’s government.
He recalled that during his first administration, corruption scandals such as the Lava Jato scandals broke out.
“Remember all that well (…). Apparently, it was not a very clear, very clean government. Remember Lula and I could mention a dozen more things,” he continued.
“If you want me to respect you, respect me, Lula. If you want the Bolivarian people to respect you, respect Nicolás Maduro’s victory and don’t go groveling,” he added.
On August 8, the Brazilian ambassador to Nicaragua, Breno de Souza Brasil Días da Costa, left the country after being expelled by the Ortega government, according to the official version, for not attending the event celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution on July 19.
In reciprocity, the Brazilian government decided to expel the Nicaraguan ambassador, Fulvia Castro.
Lula has had a close relationship with Ortega since 1980, when the Brazilian leader traveled to Managua for the first anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, an occasion on which he also personally met then-Cuban President Fidel Castro.
In recent months, however, relations have deteriorated, mainly due to the “political persecution” that the Managua government maintains against former Sandinistas and religious figures.
Lula himself explained the situation last month, in a press conference with foreign correspondents in Brasilia, in which he revealed that Ortega has not answered his phone since Pope Francis asked him to advocate for the situation of a bishop detained in Nicaragua.
Dictators?
In this regard, Ortega confirmed that he did not answer Lula’s call because in order to receive a message from the Vatican, which he said is a State “in favor of the empire”, the Holy See could communicate directly with him.
“We don’t need intermediaries. We didn’t ask Lula to be an intermediary. We didn’t respond to Lula and he got upset,” he said.
Lula regretted that this happened to “a guy who made a revolution like the one Ortega made to defeat (Anastasio) Somoza” Debayle, in 1979, and said that today he does not know “if that revolution was because he wanted power or because he wanted to improve the lives of his people.”
In this regard, Ortega said that if he is a dictator, Lula is one too: “What can I say to you, Lula, since you have spoken about this publicly, and how many terms have you been in government? Two terms already. In other words, it seems that you like being president.”
“And from that presidency of that great country, which is Brazil, you want to become a representative of the Yankees in Latin America,” he added.
Ortega said that “that is why we broke relations with Brazil,” because despite Nicaragua being a small country, “we have dignity.”
Nicaragua is one of the few Latin American countries that has recognized Nicolás Maduro as president-elect, even though Venezuelan electoral authorities have not yet presented the minutes of a process that the opposition has denounced as fraudulent.
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