Brazil and the Venezuelan Election

So far, Brazil sees its national interest as preventing the United States from resolving the Venezuelan crisis, rather than dealing with blatant electoral fraud itself.

Aug 05, 2024

Last week’s presidential election in Venezuela was neither disappointing nor surprising in numerous ways. Nicolás Maduro is blatantly attempting to secure a third term by fraud, with the National Electoral Council (CNE) declaring that he won exactly 51.2% of the vote, defeating opposition nominee Edmundo González. This comes despite substantial opinion research and statistically reliable exit polling indicating that González received somewhat more than 65% of the vote. The CNE has not released any detailed figures, such as vote by precinct, or even by province, sticking to a generic national total. Falsified vote totals from authoritarian sham elections are nothing new. Within Latin America, one recalls the 198 Mexican presidential election, when the national tally system “mailed” and final unsubstantiated vote totals were released subsequently declaring Carlos Salinas the victor. More recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin was reelected with a dubious vote share of 87%. The only part of the fraud that is even mildly shocking is that Maduro is sticking to his claim in the face of such overwhelming evidence that a number of other governments are openly recognizing González as president-elect.

Yet there is another disappointment that was just as easily predicted. The Brazilian government quickly accepted Maduro’s claims and endorsed his fraudulent numbers, calling on other countries, especially the United States, to do the same and refrain from interfering in a Venezuelan domestic affair. Brazil's position on Venezuela matters. It is the dominant regional power in South America, if not Latin America as a whole, and a clear signal from Brasilia rejecting the election could well put the writing on the wall for Maduro. Though the United States sees itself as the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, and often resists acknowledging Brazil as a second hemispheric power, it did so when President Biden called President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva the Monday following the election to seek its cooperation to keep Maduro from stealing the election.

For a week following the vote, Brazil has stuck to its position accepting the election and attempting to mediate the situation, though with a clear bias to supporting the Maduro regime. It issued a call jointly with Mexico and Colombia for the CNE to release detailed vote tallies, and assumed control as the protecting power over Argentina’s embassy in Caracas when Venezuela severed relations with Argentina for questioning the election and expelled its diplomats. Lula sent his personal envoy, former foreign minister Celso Amorim, to Caracas to meet with Maduro, and while Amorim related the call for detailed electoral results, he publicly dismissed claims that there was any fraud and criticized American interference in the election. The Lula Administration has held to this position in the face of pressure from South American neighbors like Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, as well as growing domestic criticism that Brazil is embarrassing itself by taking the side of a blatant attempt at electoral fraud.

Given that asserting leadership over the near abroad has been a core element of Brazilian foreign policy since the Baron of Rio Branco, the father of Brazilian diplomacy, put it there late in the 19th century, it is peculiar that Brazil has not tried to get out in front of the crisis and guide Venezuela through a transition to a new government. Why is Lula clinging to Maduro? There are two broad reasons, one related to the broad way that the Brazilian Left interprets the country’s foreign policy, and the other rooted in Lula’s need to maintain his governing coalition.

Lula’s Workers’ Party, and Brazilian leftist nationalists more broadly, fully accept that Brazil should aspire to be the regional hegemon of Latin America, but their nationalism is nonetheless a defensive one. They invoke Rio Branco’s doctrine of mutual noninterference by South American nations in others’ internal affairs, and extend that by interpreting Brazil’s leadership role as ensuring that outside powers, especially the United States, also not interfere in the continent’s affairs. In practice, this has amounted to Brazilian resistance to American efforts to question the legitimacy of undemocratic Latin American regimes. The last major example of this was the Brazilian defense of Alberto Fujimori’s autogolpe in Peru in 2000. Leftist governments in Brazil are particularly protective of their fellow leftist governments, as has been the case with Brazil’s attitude toward regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia in recent decades, as well as “pink tide” governments more generally.

Lula’s administration, as is the case for most Brazilian governments under the 1988 constitution, is politically weak. While the president is directly elected and cannot be removed in a confidence vote, only by impeachment, The Workers’ Party only holds about a tenth of the seats in a Congress elected by proportional representation. It needs to maintain a broad coalition of eight groups that extend across the political spectrum and who do not control an absolute majority. A significant part of this coalition are groups further to the left that Lula’s PT, such as the Communist Party of Brazil, which has been a steadfast supporter of the entire “Bolivarian'' project going back to Hugo Chavez’s first election in 1998.

After the first week of the crisis, it seems that the Maduro regime will have a hard time clinging to power given how obvious the result was. However, Maduro will not be easy to remove, and it will probably take Lula’s tap on the shoulder to make him go, along with a settlement that sends him into a comfortable retirement in exile. It is not altogether clear what will take Lula to that point, but it will probably come down to a rational calculation that if Maduro is destined to go, Brazil has a strategic interest as the regional leader in brokering the terms of that departure, as other South American governments are not strong enough to do it, and Brazil does not want the United States doing it over Brazil’s objections. Washington itself might well be content to have Brazil do the heavy listing when such lifting also advances American interests.

References and additional reading:

https://www.academia.edu/30352737/CERVO_BUENO_Historia_da_Politica_Exterior_do_Brasil_2002_LIVRO_COMPLETO

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20455000

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739128824/Brazilian-Foreign-Policy-in-Changing-Times-The-Quest-for-Autonomy-from-Sarney-to-Lula

https://cebri.org/revista/br/artigo/18/o-brasil-e-a-america-do-sul-notas-sobre-o-passado-recente

https://static.nuso.org/media/articles/downloads/p6-2_1.pdf

https://www.gov.br/funag/pt-br/ipri/arquivos-ipri/monica-hirst-a-politica-externa-brasileira-e-suas-agendas-de-pesquisa.pdf

https://funag.gov.br/biblioteca-nova/pdf/mostraPdf/1/137/understanding_brazil-united_states_relations:_contemporary_history_current_complexities_and_prospects_for_the_21st_century

https://www.routledge.com/The-United-States-and-Brazil-A-Long-Road-of-Unmet-Expectations/Hirst/p/book/9780415950664

https://books.scielo.org/id/2f3jk/pdf/mariano-9788568334638.pdf

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813037295

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43670084