On August 28, presidential elections were held in Venezuela to choose a president for a six-year term beginning on January 10, 2025. President Nicolás Maduro narrowly won the election, at least according to results announced by the country’s electoral council. And yet, millions of Venezuelans have taken the streets to contest Maduro’s re-election in defiance of an election they said was rigged.
Be that as it may, the fact is that President Maduro has used his power to grossly violate fundamental human rights and eliminate any political opposition. Critics of Maduro’s government are often detained and tortured with the full acquiescence of the judicial system. More than 15,800 people have been subjected to arbitrary arrests since 2014 due to politically motivated judicial procedures.
Furthermore, about 20 million Venezuelans are in desperate need, unable to access adequate health and nutrition. More than 7.7 million people have fled harsh economic conditions and persecution by security forces, generating one of the largest migration crises in the world.
Still, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin immorally wants President Maduro to stay in charge. Why is the Russian leader defending Maduro’s claim to the presidency in Venezuela, despite all the compelling evidence that the recent presidential election was actually rigged?
Simply put, the South American country owes the Kremlin a lot of money. Russia has reportedly poured more than US$ 17 billion into Venezuela in loans and investments since 1999. Venezuela has paid back much of that debt but still owes Russia approximately US$ 3.15 billion. The United States tried to cut off Maduro’s ability to repay that money by sanctioning the state-owned oil company, PDVSA. The sanctions have blocked Maduro from accessing PDVSA assets worth $7 billion, White House national secure adviser John Bolton said in January 2019.
Putin rose to power in 2000 by promising to restore Russia to its former glory. Part of that means establishing economic alliances with countries in Latin America. Most of Putin’s old partners in Latin America are now gone, especially former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Putin, therefore, would look weak in the eyes of the Russian people if he failed to defend the nation’s economic interests against the United States. Popular Russian state TV host Olga Skabeeva admonishes: ‘It is time for Russia to roll out something powerful closer to the American city on a hill.’
Russia and Brazil have many business ties. Brazil sells about $1.6 billion worth of goods every year to Russia. Putin has named Brazil as ‘Russia’s most important partner in Latin America’. On October 29, 2019, the Russian leader sent a message to the then-newly elected Brazilian leader, Jair Bolsonaro, congratulating him on winning the presidential race and expressing confidence that bilateral relations would be developed. Putin was confident that the relations between Russia and Brazil would ‘grow stronger in all areas and the constructive cooperation between the two countries within the United Nations, the G20 group, BRICS, and others on multilateral platforms would continue in the interests of the people of Russia and Brazil’.
On September 7, 2022, Putin congratulated President Bolsonaro on the 200th anniversary of the country’s Declaration of Independence from Portugal. These two leaders had a strong relationship stemming from their encounter in Moscow in February 2022, just a week ahead of the military deployment Ukraine. That meeting reflected ‘Putin’s attempt to forge strong relationships in Latin America, far from Russia traditional sphere of influence, thus outflanking the West’s attempt to isolate this country’.
‘I am sure that thanks to mutual efforts, we will strengthen the strategic partnership between Russia and Brazil for the sake of our peoples. I sincerely wish good health and success to all your fellow citizens, happiness and prosperity,’ Putin said.
That meeting between Putin and Bolsonaro also hinted at how chilled relations between the United States and Brazil had become since Donald Trump’s 2020 electoral loss. Bolsonaro stated: ‘We are eager to cooperate [with Russia] in various fields. Defence, oil and gas, agriculture. Brazil stands in solidarity with Russia.’ A few days later, the then-Brazilian leader confirmed a call with Putin. ‘I just had a phone call with President Putin of Russia, in which we talked about food security and also energy security,’ Bolsonaro said, adding that his agriculture and energy ministers were also on the call.
As one may expect, the visit of the then-Brazilian President to Russia was heavily criticised by the US government. And yet, Bolsonaro did not back down and he even took the opportunity to thank President Putin for his ‘generous support’ of the Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon in international discussions. The Amazon is a huge bank of endless natural resources, having the largest percentage of sweet water, valuable minerals, and petroleum in the world. It is no wonder the Western leaders constantly resort to environmental issues in attempt to undermine Brazil’s sovereignty over the region.
Brazil is also the fourth largest producer of food in the world. Although the bulk of these products are consumed domestically, a considerable part is exported. But Brazil needs a steady supply of fertilisers to power its mighty agricultural industry. To sustain its food production, Brazil needs to import 97 per cent of the roughly 10 million tonnes of potassium it uses for crop production each year, making it the world’s largest importer. So, the basic question is: Where can Brazil find fertilisers from? The country’s largest international supplier of fertilisers is precisely Russia, which accounts for 44 per cent of the total Brazil consumes each year, thus making it the Brazil’s largest importer of fertilisers.
The war in Ukraine coupled with the West’s economic sanctions put the world’s food security at tremendous risk. These sanctions were meant to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine but they were causing a serious risk to the world’s ability to feed itself. Without fertilisers brought from Russia, Brazil would suffer food insecurity and potentially cause environmental degradation to the Amazon. By making an agreement with his Brazilian counterpart, Putin prevented not just potassium mining that could harm the Amazon but potentially saved the world from a catastrophic food crisis. In the worst-case scenario, we would have seen millions of people suddenly facing famine. ‘If Brazil were to scale back next year because of a lack of fertiliser, that would certainly be bad news for a global food crisis,’ says Joseph Schmidhuber, an economist who has studied the conflict’s impact on food for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The world should, therefore, be thankful to these two leaders, especially hoping that Bolsonaro would be re-elected in the second round of Brazil’s presidential election that was held on October 30, 2024. And yet, another former president and notorious ex-convict, Lula da Silva (Lula), allegedly won 50.90 per cent of the vote and Bolsonaro received 49.10 per cent. With the Brazilian electronic voting system, however, there was no absolute guarantee that votes were exactly what they have cast in the ballot box. There was no actual physical register for each vote cast electronically. In other words, the Brazilians were unable to confirm whether their votes were cast properly. There is no reason, therefore, to believe that the last presidential election in Brazil was anything close to being fair and transparent.
There was, however, a decisive American government element in Lula’s electoral victory. In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil and while there advised strongly against questioning ‘the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system’. A month earlier, President Joe Biden had already sent his CIA director William Burns to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting he warned these Brazilian authorities that they ‘should stop casting doubt in his country’s electronic electoral process’.
In a June 2022 meeting of the ‘Summit of the Americas’, in Los Angeles, the US government repeated the same threat that it would not tolerate anyone casting doubt on the reliability and security of electronic voting machines. Since these threats were made a few months prior to the outcome of the presidential election in Brazil, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian leader dare to question the transparency of the electronic process.
Brazil sells about $31 billion in goods into the United States annually, far exceeding any business Brazil has with faraway Russia. On September 28, 2022, the US Senate unanimously approved a resolution recommending the suspension of all US-Brazil relations in case of any questioning of the security and transparency of the electronic voting, ‘…otherwise the US must consider its relations with the Brazilian government and suspend cooperation programs, including in the military area,’ the resolution says. No American senator, not even from the Republican Party, opposed this appalling resolution presented by Senators Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders.
As can be seen, the US government objectively wanted an extreme leftist candidate, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva – more commonly known just as ‘Lula’ – to win that election in Brazil, and the United States has a lot of influence over the country. So, the question is: Why would the American government want that radical leftist to win that presidential election, inter alia, by unduly preventing any questioning of the transparency of an entirely electronic voting system? In trying to answer this important question, US political commentator Gamaliel Isaac writes:
‘Maybe President Biden is afraid that the Brazilians will uncover evidence of fraud in the Brazilian election that will somehow lead to uncovering of evidence of fraud in the American election … does Biden know there was electoral fraud in Brazil and that there was electoral fraud in the United States and so want to silence anyone who says there was fraud?’
Curiously, just after a few outlets announced the outcome of the Brazilian presidential election, President Biden almost immediately stated that Lula had won ‘following free, fair, and credible elections’. The US government then orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and the UK’s Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating him. In a Twitter post, Macron promised that Lula would count on France’s ‘unwavering support’. The European Union also released a similar statement, though suspiciously adding that ‘the effective and transparent’ voting system was a demonstration of ‘the strength of Brazil’s institutions and its democracy’.
After all, was there any reason to affirm that those elections were fair and transparent? Should we not expect that elections are always fair and transparent? And yet, whoever dares to question the fairness and transparency of that election in Brazil ‘must be treated like criminals’, admonishes a deeply controversial judge of the Brazilian Supreme Court.
The problem, however, is that millions of Brazilians simply do not believe that Lula would ever be elected under normal democratic circumstances. ‘After bankrupting Brazil, Lula is back at the scene of the crime,’ said a few years ago Geraldo Alckmin, his own Vice-President.
Lula da Silva was sentenced to 12 years and one month in prison for widespread corruption and money laundering. However, he spent only a year and a half in jail because in 2021, a judge of the Supreme Court annulled all these convictions on entirely technical grounds. The court did not even bother to say a single word about Lula’s culpability – demonstrated in three court decisions, before nine judges, and in a series of criminal proceedings where there were numerous confessing witnesses, plea bargains and even the return of stolen money. Instead, the court simply stated that the former president should not have been prosecuted in the city of Curitiba, but rather in Brasilia, thus restoring Lula’s political rights that enabled him to run for this year’s presidential election.
Curiously enough, President Lula once commented, on October 2, 2002, to the French newspaper Le Monde, that he ‘strongly believes that every election is a farce and a mere step to take power’. On October 5, 2002, his then foreign affairs advisor, Marco Aurélio Garcia, in an interview with Argentina’s leading newspaper La Nación, claimed that, once in power, Lula would have no interest in preserving democracy. Lula told that newspaper: ‘We have to first give the impression that we are democrats, initially; we have to accept certain things. But that won’t last.’
After knowing all these facts who would dare to say that those presidential elections in Brazil were necessarily fair and transparent? And yet, the election of a far-left politician received the full endorsement of Western leaders, especially those in charge of the US government. Lula’s election and modus operandi were encouraged by such Western leaders and globalist forces of the world. They all claimed in unison that the election of Lula was entirely fair and transparent, so that he can now finish the job of turning Brazil into another Venezuela.
Of course, there are some good reasons as to why these Western leaders wanted to remove Bolsonaro. One of them was the former president willingness to protect Brazil’s national sovereignty. His electoral motto, ‘Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone,’ worked a combination of patriotism and a recognition of God as the ultimate provider for the nation. As one may expect, this belief in God coupled with patriotic feelings is what especially angered the globalist-secular Western leaders and motivated them to further attack the then-Brazilian President. The mainstream media, both national and international, often portrayed Bolsonaro’s impending re-election as a major threat to democracy in Brazil, when such threat actually came from their own favoured presidential candidate.
In a recent meeting of South American leaders, in May 2023, President Lula implied that democracy is thriving in Venezuela, calling the undermining of democratic institutions there a‘constructed narrative’. Lula’s leftist Workers’ Party officially praised the presidential election in Venezuela as ‘peaceful’ and ‘democratic’, in a statement that acknowledged Maduro’s victory. Of course, his re-election was far from peaceful and democratic. President Maduro is actually a brutal dictator. The Venezuelan ruler notoriously uses his arbitrary power to inflict widespread human rights violations, including the restriction of free speech, the killing of political opponents, police torture and the politicisation of the courts.
But this is the sort of leader that Brazil’s President Lula points to as the paradigm of ‘democratic leadership’. Surely, what such a notorious politician calls ‘democratic leader’ one does better to regard as just another typical Latin-American dictator. Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, effectively won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28, presidential election.
To conclude, it is highly immoral and quite unacceptable that Vladimir Putin has shown ‘loyalty’ to a ruthless dictator in Venezuela, who not only grossly violates basic human rights but also undoubtedly frauds a presidential election so as to stay in power. By the same token, it is equally shameful and immoral that Western oligarchical leaders such as Biden, Macron, and Trudeau facilitated the election of a highly corrupt leftist candidate in Brazil, a notorious politician who is presently installing a brutal authoritarian regime based on the suppression of fundamental human rights and freedoms. Under fair and transparent elections, of course, none of these two hateful politicians would ever be re-elected the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela, respectively.
Professor Augusto Zimmermann PhD is head of law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Perth, Western Australia. He is also a former member of the Law Reform Commission in Western Australia and a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. During his time at Murdoch, Professor Zimmermann was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research, in 2012. He has been included in ‘Policy Experts’—the Heritage Foundation’s directory for locating knowledgeable authorities and leading policy institutes actively involved in a broad range of public policy issues, both in the United States and worldwide. His is also an elected fellow at the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy.