Venezuelan opponent Alejandro Peña Esclusa, who was a candidate for president of his country in 1998 and imprisoned for Chavismo between 2010 and 2011, called the offer by Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), to mediate the dispute between the dictator Nicolás Maduro and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, a “trap”.
The PT member made the proposal during the meeting with the American president in Malaysia, on Sunday (26), amid tensions between Caracas and Washington due to the US military operation against drug trafficking in the Caribbean Sea, near the coast of Venezuela.
Peña Esclusa criticized the Brazilian president’s offer in an article titled “Lula prepares a trap for Donald Trump”, published this Tuesday (28) by the conservative website Voz, aimed at the Latino community in the United States.
“This is a deception, a gross trap, which seeks, once again, to gain time to favor the interests of the drug dictator Nicolás Maduro”, wrote the opponent.
“Lula is not only the founder of Foro de São Paulo, an organization to which Maduro belongs, but currently its top leader, after the deaths of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez,” he accused.
Peña Esclusa also mentioned in the article Lula’s reaction to the 2024 electoral fraud in Venezuela, which kept Maduro in power, when Brazil, together with Colombia and Mexico, offered to mediate the dialogue between the dictator and the Venezuelan opposition.
“Already last year, Lula offered himself as Maduro’s ‘mediator’, behaving in practice as his main ally. On the occasion of the elections on July 28, 2024, Lula assumed – without anyone asking him – the intermediation between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition; but what the Brazilian president did was, in reality, buy time so that the Venezuelan regime could remain in power, fiercely repressing dissent”, wrote the opponent.
