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Credit, Portal
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Celso Amorim was Secretary of State and Defense and now serves as Lula’s special adviser
The head of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s special adviser, Celso Amorim, said he did not believe Brazilian forces planned a coup to overthrow the government.
Amorim spoke to the BBC’s Hard Talk programme. The interview was broadcast this Thursday (01/19).
When asked if the Jan. 8 vandalism was an attempted coup, Amorim said, “Yes, but it depends who you talk to. If they had done that, they would have gone much further.”
Celso Amorim is Lula’s direct adviser on national and international affairs. In Lula’s first term, he was Secretary of State. And in the government of Dilma Rousseff he was Secretary of Defense.
Amorim says the people who took part in the riots which he described as acts of terrorism probably “expected something like this [um golpe]but that didn’t happen”.
“In the end there was no military action. I think we live in a not easy situation, but I think we will be able to deal with them (the military). And I think that over time we will regain full confidence in our armed forces.”
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Celso Amorim’s interview for the BBC aired this Thursday (19/01).
Amorim said there has been a lot of “manipulation” by Bolsonarists in recent years who have tried to coopt security forces, including the armed forces and police, but he said it hasn’t affected the institution as a whole.
Lula’s special adviser spoke from a room in the Planalto Palace in Brasilia via videoconference with BBC presenter Stephen Sackur, who was in London. Sackur began the interview by asking how safe Amorim felt working at Planalto right now.
“Personally, I feel pretty safe at the moment. I don’t think anything will happen now or in the next few days,” Amorim said. He also said that the people who keep the Planalto safe have been changed and selected by the new government.
He explained that there will be no “witch hunts” in the lawsuits against Bolsonaristas, nothing like the Bolsonaro government where people were sacked for supporting various political parties.
Asked if the Brazilian government will seek the extradition of Bolsonaro, who is in the United States, Amorim said that “it is clear that extradition can be attempted” but that it was too early to speculate . the expresident was not even charged.
Amorim said Brazil is facing a difficult situation but the country is not ungovernable, citing support for Lula from the “enlightened part of the elite” as well as the “healthy and normal parts of the country”. And he reiterated what Lula had already said that the government is being opposed by people interested in activities like illegal mining and logging in the Amazon.
The former foreign and former defense minister criticized “the lack of foreign policy in the Bolsonaro government”. And he also criticized sanctions imposed on Russia by governments like the US and European countries for invading Ukraine.
“It is clear that Brazil condemns the invasion of Ukraine. It is clear that Brazil considers this a violation of the UN Charter in several respects,” Amorim said.
“The question is: What is your goal? Is it to achieve peace or just weaken Russia? Such a problem arose after World War I, and history can teach us a few lessons. International action must be geared towards peace.”
He said that international sanctions would not solve the problem in Ukraine and that such measures often “further strengthen the positions of those whose behavior we want to change”.
On Venezuela, Lula’s adviser said he defended dialogue as a solution.
“I don’t want to give Maduro an adjective. Certainly Guaidó [Juan Guaidó, líder oposicionista que se autoproclamou presidente da Venezuela, com apoio de governos no exterior], which you all supported is a fiction. And now it’s being viewed as fiction by the Venezuelan opposition itself. So we need dialogue and example and belief in what can be done in a way that is not imposed from outside. It doesn’t work Do you know how many years there have been sanctions against Cuba? sixty years. Historians of the next century will look at this and find it ironic.”