Venezuela’s strong president Nicolás Maduro has sent an emergency shipment of oxygen to his country’s border with Brazil in a politically charged gesture he says was to help alleviate “Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster.”
In recent days, the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which borders southern Venezuela, has fallen into coronavirus chaos for the second time in less than a year.
Last week, Covid-19 patients reportedly died in the capital, Manaus, after hospitals ran out of oxygen due to an increase in infections and deaths. Since then, civil society organizations, celebrities and the Brazilian government have worked hard to bring life-saving supplies to the remote riverside metropolis.
Maduro, who has a toxic relationship with Brazil’s far-right president, announced his offer of help in a Sunday night broadcast.
“Venezuela is reaching out in solidarity to the people of Amazonas … and we hope that this oxygen will reach the people of Brazil soon … The trucks are on the way,” he said as state television broadcast images of a convoy supposedly on its way. was to the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén.
Maduro said Brazil was facing an “alarming situation in the face of Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster.”
“What a painful and sad situation,” added the left, claiming that there was a “truly international scandal” in Amazonas. “It pains us, as Bolivarians, as children of Bolívar, to see our Latin American brothers [like this]. “
Maduro called the dispatch an act of Christian charity, but it’s also an obvious attempt to score political points over Bolsonaro, whose confused and anti-scientific handling of the pandemic has been internationally condemned.
Brazil’s president was a key member of the US-backed coalition that sought to overthrow Maduro, and Bolsonaro allowed Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to visit Brazil’s border with Venezuela on the eve of the U.S. presidential election last year. In Brazilian territory, Pompeo labeled Maduro a drug trafficker who had destroyed his country.
Many members of the Brazilian left celebrated Maduro’s gesture.
From day one of his presidency, Bolsonaro has … insulted the governors and people of Venezuela. And now, wouldn’t you know, it is … the governors and the people of Venezuela who are helping save the people of Manaus, ” tweeted former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who accused Bolsonaro of showing “inhuman indifference” to the plight of the city.
However, members of Venezuela’s opposition denounced Maduro’s intervention as a cynical ploy designed to enhance his pitiful international reputation.
They recalled how thousands of Venezuelan refugees had escaped to the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, fleeing poverty, hunger, violence and a devastated public health system.
“It’s like someone, with one of their relatives who is starving, is giving food to a neighbor to make it seem like a nice guy,” opposition leader Julio Borges told Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo.
Maduro wants to pose as the leader of the poor, the needy, of those infected with the coronavirus, when in fact he is a corrupt dictator and a human rights violation who has succeeded in destroying Venezuela, once one of the most prosperous countries in the US. America. “