By leaving Venezuela under the cover of night and skipping a funeral ceremony for its late president Hugo Chavez last week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was once again trying to chart out a more moderate brand of leftism and send a clear signal to investors and diplomats.
Rousseff began a delicate dance of mourning while also keeping a certain distance from Chavez’s legacy just hours after his death on Tuesday.
In a speech, she expressed admiration for the socialist leader, but also pointedly added that Brazil “did not entirely agree” with many of his hardline policies.
Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, have over the past 10 years espoused a more pragmatic, business-friendly set of policies than Chavez, who was well-known for lashing out at Washington, expropriating companies and intimidating his political rivals.
Those close to Lula and Rousseff say they genuinely admired Chavez and his compassion for the poor, and both were emotionally devastated by his death from cancer at age 58.
However, both Brazilians also took numerous opportunities during the week to politely highlight disagreements with him — which officials said was a carefully crafted campaign to draw a distinction between Brazil and Venezuela in the eyes of the international community and business leaders.
“The simple message is: ‘We’re different,’” one Brazilian official said on condition of anonymity. “Yes, we respect many things he did, and there is a shared cause ... But Brazil is not the same as Venezuela.”
Such a message could bolster Brazil’s reputation as a leader among the Latin American governments that in recent years have embraced its more moderate leftism, marrying robust social policies with free-market principles such as strong property rights.
Diplomats in Washington and Europe were also watching carefully at a time when Brazil is seeking more global influence and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Rousseff and Lula did travel to Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on Thursday and joined a long line of well-wishers who visited Chavez’s casket.
Rousseff also offered Venezuela’s Acting President Nicolas Maduro non-financial assistance in coming months if he wins an election to succeed Chavez, an official said.
The offer included technicians from Brazil’s vaunted “My House, My Life” public housing program to help work on similar projects in Venezuela.
Nonetheless, both Rousseff and Lula departed Venezuela prior to a funeral ceremony on Friday that was attended by dignitaries from more than 30 countries, including some polarizing figures such as Cuban President Raul Castro and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Unlike Lula, who was close with Ahmadinejad, Rousseff has mostly avoided contact with the Iranian president since she took office in 2011 as her government has more firmly emphasized democracy and human rights in its relationships abroad.
A member of the Brazilian delegation sent a tweet on Friday shortly before sunrise saying their plane had just landed back in Brasilia.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez was also absent from the Friday ceremony, although she attributed her early return to Buenos Aires to health reasons.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the