Venezuela’s socialist regime recalled its ambassador to Brazil and threatened Colombia’s Foreign Minister Luis Murillo on Wednesday, further straining its relationship with two of its most sympathetic leftist neighbors.
The regime’s latest actions against two friendly leftist-led nations are in response to Brazil snubbing Venezuela out of a highly coveted spot at the BRICS anti-U.S. bloc and the Colombian foreign minister announcing that Colombia will not recognize dictator Nicolás Maduro’s victory in a recent sham election if he does not present any evidence of vote tallies, which the regime has refused to do since the election took place in July. Maduro is slated to be “inaugurated” for another term as “president” on January 10, 2025. Murillo’s remarks regarding the sham election prompted Maduro regime officials to warn that he would “regret” his statement.
The Maduro regime announced in an official statement that it recalled its ambassador to Brazil Manuel Vadell on Wednesday in response to “rude and interfering statements made by spokespersons authorized by the Brazilian government,” making special mention of Celso Amorim, who serves as far-left President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s top foreign policy adviser.
The Venezuelan socialists accused Amorim of “behaving more like a messenger of U.S. imperialism” in statements questioning the fraudulent Venezuelan election. According to the Venezuelan regime, Amorim’s actions constitute a “constant aggression that undermines political and diplomatic relations between States, threatening the ties that unite both countries.”
The relationship between the Venezuelan and Brazilian leftist governments has seen itself severely strained over the past week after Lula — a longtime friend of Venezuela’s socialist regime — snubbed Venezuela out of an invitation to join BRICS as a “partner state” during the group’s annual summit, hosted last week by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in the city of Kazan.
Maduro proclaimed himself the “winner” of the July 28 sham presidential election. Venezuela’s electoral authorities — all loyal to Maduro and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) — refuse to publish voter data that can corroborate the claimed “results” as Venezuelan law requires. The aftermath of the election and the fraudulent “official results” immediately sparked a new wave of nationwide protests that Maduro responded to with a brutal crackdown that left 27 dead and more than 2,400 detained, according to U.N. estimates.
Much of the international community condemned Maduro for his brutal dissident campaign and for the fraudulent “results” of the election — particularly after the Venezuelan opposition published voter tallies obtained on the day of the election that indicate its candidate, Edmundo González, defeated Maduro in a landslide. González fled to Spain in September after the socialist regime issued an arrest warrant against him on several electoral-related charges.
Unlike other heads of state — including Chile’s far-left President Gabriel Boric — who directly condemned the Maduro regime for its recent actions and do not recognize Maduro’s claimed victory, Colombia’s far-left President Gustavo Petro and Brazil’s Lula da Silva sought to adopt a “mediator” stance in the conflict alongside Mexico. That approach yielded no tangible results beyond a handful of statements over the past months.
Presently, Brazil and Colombia continue to make calls for the Venezuelan regime to publish the requested voter data while Mexico, now under the administration of recently inaugurated far-left President Claudia Sheinbaum, said it will instead remain “impartial” in the Venezuelan situation.
Amorim stated to local media last week that Brazil’s decision to snub Venezuela is not due to the authoritarian regime itself, but due to a “breach of trust” stemming from the regime’s refusal to publish the voter data, something Maduro allegedly personally promised to Amorim in a meeting in Caracas. Lula was reportedly offended by Venezuela’s failure to uphold its promise.
Nicolás Maduro has desperately sought to enter the BRICS anti-U.S. coalition over the past decade to no avail. The socialist dictator attended the BRICS summit in Kazan hoping he would return to Caracas with his long-coveted membership in hand, but ultimately returned empty handed. He appeared to cope with getting snubbed by his friend Lula by claiming that Venezuela has been part of BRICS “for the past 200 years” even though the bloc was founded in 2009.
The Venezuelan socialists were left highly infuriated by Brazil’s actions. Some regime officials accused Lula of allegedly orchestrating a highly contrived plot to “veto” Venezuela out of BRICS by having Lula “fake” a head injury as an alibi that would allow him to justify not traveling to Russia.
The elderly Lula suffered a bathroom accident hours before he was slated to travel to Russia that required urgent medical attention. He received five stitches on the back of his head and, under the advice of his medical team, avoided traveling to Russia, participating in the BRICS summit through a videoconference instead.
Amorim further upset the Maduro regime after he attended a Brazilian Congressional hearing on Tuesday, where he stated that Brazil will continue to not recognize Maduro’s claimed victory due to the lack of transparency.
In the case of Colombia, the nation’s foreign minister confirmed on Wednesday in a social media post that, “as the President [Petro] has already expressed,” Colombia will not recognize Maduro’s claimed results if he does not present the voter data before January 10, 2025, the day when Maduro’s current six-year term — which he secured for himself through another fraudulent election in 2018 — ends.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil appeared to be highly offended by Murillo’s comments on behalf of the ruling socialists. Gil published a post on his official Telegram account shortly after Murillo’s, accusing his Colombian counterpart — who he had met this week — of acting in a “pusillanimous manner,” and claiming that the Colombian top diplomat is allegedly being blackmailed by the “ultra-right” and the United States.
“Venezuela will answer him in due time and will regret the constant meddling in our internal affairs,” Gil threatened.
The now-strained relations between Colombia and Brazil and their shared neighbor jeopardizes the leftist “unity” of the region’s celebrated “pink tide” — a concept pushed by corporate media towards the end of 2022 after several leftist electoral victories in the region that year. 2022 concluded with Lula’s narrow and controversial victory against then-incumbent conservative former President Jair Bolsonaro.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here
