By Paulo Sotero of the Woodrow Wilson International CenterBrazilian president Dilma Rousseff declared three days of official mourning in honour of her late Venezuelan colleague Hugo Chávez Frias, who died on Tuesday in Caracas after a two-year public battle with cancer. “We recognize a great leader, an irreparable loss and above all a friend of Brazil, a friend of the Brazilian people,” she said before leading a minute of silence at a meeting with rural leaders in Brasília carried live on national television.
There was, however, an uncharacteristic twist in Rousseff’s expression of condolences. “On many occasions,” she noted, “the Brazilian government did not agree” with the policies of the Bolivarian leader. Insiders say this was not an extemporaneous remark, but a pre-planned statement calibrated for domestic and international consumption.
Rousseff also put some distance between her government and Venezuelan Bolivarians and their allies by returning to Brasília before the official funeral ceremony on Friday, attended by three dozen leaders, including Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Cuba’s Raul Castro.
Rousseff’s predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who accompanied Rousseff to Chávez’s state funeral in Caracas, was similarly nuanced in an article on the Venezuelan leader in Wednesday’s New York Times.
Lula’s relationship with Chávez was not always as warm and friendly in private as their public abraços suggested. He felt betrayed and embarrassed in 2006 when Chávez masterminded with Fidel Castro and Evo Morales the nationalization of the Bolivian assets of Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled but publicly-traded oil and gas giant. In 2010, at a meeting of Unasur in Santiago, called in a hurry to defuse potentially explosive tensions between La Paz and states of the Bolivian Amazon governed by the opposition, Lula confronted Morales, in Chávez’s presence, with the choice of continuing on the Bolivarian path of confrontation that had led to the crisis, or negotiating with the governors, as Brazil and other neighbours advised him to do.
In his piece for the New York Times, Lula celebrated “Chávez’s boundless energy; his deep belief in the potential for the integration of the nations of Latin America; and his commitment to the social transformations needed to ameliorate the misery of his people.” Yet the former Brazilian leader, whose successful two terms in office offered a more moderate and effective path to development, social inclusion and regional integration than Chávez’s Bolivarian model, also called attention their differences.
“There is no denying that he was a controversial, often polarizing, figure, one who never fled from debate and for whom no topic was taboo,” Lula wrote. “I must admit I often felt that it would have been more prudent for Mr. Chávez not to have said all that he did. But this was a personal characteristic of his that should not, even from afar, discredit his qualities. One might also disagree with Mr. Chávez’s ideology, and a political style that his critics viewed as autocratic. He did not make easy political choices and he never wavered in his decisions.”
Most significantly, Lula downplayed the longevity of Chávez’s impact and called attention to the institutional void left by the passing of the self-absorbed Bolivarian leader. “Chávez’s legacy in the realm of ideas will need further work if they are to become a reality in the messy world of politics, where ideas are debated and contested,” Lula wrote. “A world without him will require other leaders to display the effort and force of will he did, so that his dreams will not be remembered only on paper.”
For the former Brazilian president, whose own legacy hinges on his successor’s efforts to revive a stalled economy and preserve the stability achieved by his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Chávez’s sympathizers in Venezuela have much work ahead of them to construct and strengthen democratic institutions”. To maintain Chávez’s legacy, Lula wrote, “they will have to help make the political system more organic and transparent; to make political participation more accessible; to enhance dialogue with opposition parties; and to strengthen unions and civil society groups. Venezuelan unity, and the survival of Mr. Chávez’s hard-won achievements, will require this.”
Failure to do so would bring instability to Venezuela and its neighbors. This is an outcome Rousseff will want to work with Chávez’s successors to avoid. They were one target of the unusual reference to disagreements included in her statement of condolences.
One Chávez policy that Brazil vehemently disagreed with was a refusal by Caracas to come up with its 40 per cent share of investment in a major refinery Petrobrás and PDVSA, Venezuela’s oil company, agreed to build jointly in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco in the mid-2000s.
As minister of mines and energy and Lula’s chief of staff, Rousseff dealt repeatedly with the frustrations of the Abreu e Lima refinery, named after a Brazilian general from Pernambuco who fought beside Simón Bolivar in the wars of independence of Venezuela and Colombia. Estimated initially as an investment of $2.3bn, the supposedly bi-national refinery has become a headache for Brazil.
It will cost at least five times the initial estimated investment, with Petrobras bearing the cost alone to avoid further delays in the still incomplete project. According to media reports, PDVSA recently offered to pay its part in oil, which does not help the cash-strapped Petrobras. Brasília rejected the proposal, insisting it prefers to receive cash.
Another likely audience for Rousseff’s remarks is the Venezuelan opposition, which has developed a negative view of Brazil because of Lula’s expressions of public sympathy for the Bolivarian regime and Brasília’s silence about attacks on opponents and media outlets not aligned with Caracas. With more than $5bn in annual business by Brazilian companies at stake in a country facing the uncertainties of chavismo without Chávez, Rousseff is certainly interested in broadening Brazil’s connections with Venezuelan society.
According to press reports, in January, Rousseff reprimanded Marco Aurelio Garcia, her national security advisor and a Chávez sympathizer, for making public statements on how Venezuelans should interpret their own constitution regarding the succession process in Caracas.
She is also aware that most Brazilians do not share the affection held by militants of her Workers Party’s and others on the left for the late Venezuelan leader. During his long tenure in Caracas, Chávez remained rather unpopular in Brazil and was a constant source of concern for both the Cardoso and Lula governments. During the latter, Chávez was a subject of derision behind closed doors among officials close to Lula for his constant efforts to outshine the Brazilian superstar president, who enjoyed a benign international reputation.
In a telling statement on the value of pragmatism, on their way to Caracas this week Rousseff and Lula, both cancer survivors, lamented Chávez’s refusal of Brazil’s offer of treatment at the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital in São Paulo, where they were successfully treated. According to reporter Leonencio Nossa, from daily Estado de S.Paulo, Rousseff, Lula and influential members of the Workers Party believe that by opting to be treated in Cuba, “Chávez took an ideological and political decision” that may have shortened his life.
Paulo Sotero is director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC
Related reading:
What’s left of the Latin left? FT Analysis
After Chávez, will China still be financing chavismo? beyondbrics
Venezuela & Russia: ties that bind, beyondbrics
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