President Alberto Fernández anticipated on Monday that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will visit Argentina “before assuming” as the new president of Brazil, after holding a meeting with the petet leader at the Intercontinental Hotel in São Paulo after his triumph in the runoff that was held this Sunday. He told me he was going to visit us before taking office,” the president said in statements to the press, and said: “With Lula we will have an activist for Argentina to enter the BRICS,” the coalition of nations composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
In turn, Fernández acknowledged in an interview with C5N in Brazil that during the mandate of Jair Bolsonaro he remained silent to “preserve institutional responsibility, keep Mercosur alive and keep the link with Brazil alive, waiting for things to change, and today they changed.” The Head of State also revealed that while he was at the Intercontinental Hotel in São Paulo, Lula received a call from US President Joe Biden: “While he was talking to me, he answered a call from Joe Biden,” Fernandez said and said that after that conversation he gave him his “look at how we have to face the relationship with the United States at this time.” Likewise, the Argentine president also acknowledged that he spoke with Lula about the economic relationship between Argentina and Brazil and, in that framework, the exchange of products such as minerals and food bilaterally and between both countries and the region and the world.
The president arrived at the meeting with Lula along with Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero and Argentine Ambassador to Brazil Daniel Scioli. “A lot of expectation. We just arrived and now they are going to meet. Then there will be a lunch,” said a few minutes before the start of the meeting the spokeswoman of the Presidency Gabriela Cerruti, also present in the Argentine delegation in Brazil.Participating in the visit to Brazil with the President, in addition to Cafiero, Scioli and Cerruti, the Secretary General of the Presidency, Julio Vitobello; the Secretary of Legal and Technical, Vilma Ibarra; and Frente de Todos deputies Eduardo Valdes and Carlos Heller, official sources said. Before traveling to São Paulo, the president gave an interview to Radio Perfil, where he said he felt a “deep joy” for the triumph achieved by the leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and said that “it is a happiness to have a man like him, with the leadership capacity he has in the region.” At the same time, he stressed that Lula’s assumption will help “reunite the continent.”
“I have dealt with him many times, in functions and as a partner. It has an enormous peculiarity that is an authentic leadership, and it comes at a time when the region has had many changes. The arrival of Lula can help to reunite the continent, where globalization is in question and acquires another meaning. In CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) the presence of Brazil was lacking,” said the Argentine president.
He also recalled that he did not think of “speculation” at the time Lula was a candidate and traveled to the neighboring country to support him, when he was imprisoned.
“I was very convinced to see Lula because that way he could get the attention of the world. Therefore, that double feeling of seeing him with joy in freedom and of recovering his place in Brazil. There is a Latin American happiness to have a president with the leadership that Lula has in the region,” he said. The head of state recalled the work done with the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to “unite the continent” but remarked that “Brazil was missing because Bolsonaro denied the importance of CELAC “, of which Fernández is president protempore.
