The strong man of the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, sent an emergency supply of oxygen to the border of his country with Brazil in a politically charged gesture that he said was to help alleviate the “public health disaster of Jair Bolsonaro” .
In recent days, the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which borders southern Venezuela, has plunged into the chaos of the coronavirus for the second time in less than a year.
Last week, patients with Covid-19 died in the state capital, Manaus, after hospitals ran out of oxygen amid an increase in the number of infections and deaths. Since then, civil society groups, celebrities and the Brazilian government have struggled to bring vital 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 broadcast on Sunday night.
“Venezuela is reaching out to the people of Amazonas in solidarity … and we hope that oxygen will reach the people of Brazil quickly … Trucks are on their way,” he said as state television broadcast images of a train supposedly going to border town of Santa Elena de Uairén.
Maduro said that Brazil is facing an “alarming situation in the face of Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster”.
“What a painful and sad situation,” added the lefty, claiming that a “true international scandal” was taking place in Amazonas. “It hurts us, as Bolivians, as children of Bolívar, to see our Latin American brothers [like this]. “
Maduro called the remittance an act of Christian charity, but it is also an obvious attempt to score political points about Bolsonaro, whose disorderly and unscientific treatment of the pandemic has been internationally condemned.
The President of Brazil was a key member of the US-backed coalition that tried 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 US presidential election this year. past. While in Brazilian territory, Pompeo labeled Maduro a drug dealer who had destroyed his country.
Many members of the Brazilian left celebrated Maduro’s gesture.
“From the first day of his presidency, Bolsonaro has insulted… the governors and the people of Venezuela. And now, you wouldn’t know, are … the governors and the people of Venezuela helping to save the people of Manaus, ” tweeted former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, accusing Bolsonaro of showing “inhuman indifference” to the city’s situation.
Venezuela’s opposition members, however, denounced Maduro’s intervention as a cynical ploy aimed at improving his poor international reputation.
They remembered how thousands of Venezuelan refugees have fled to the Brazilian Amazon in recent years, fleeing poverty, hunger, violence and a devastated public health system.
“It is as if someone, with one of his relatives dying of hunger, gave food to a neighbor as a gift to make him look like a nice guy,” opposition leader Julio Borges told Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
“Maduro wants to pose as the leader of the poor, the needy, the infected with the coronavirus, when in fact he is a corrupt dictator and human rights violator who managed to destroy Venezuela, which was once one of the most prosperous countries in the Americas. “