The strongman president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, sent an emergency shipment of oxygen to the border of his country with Brazil in a politically charged gesture he said to help alleviate “Jair Bolsonaro’s disaster for public health”.
In recent days, the Brazilian state of Amazonas, which borders southern Venezuela, has been plunged into coronavirus chaos for the second time in less than a year.
Last week, Covid-19 patients apparently died in the capital Manaus after hospitals ran out of oxygen amid an increase in infections and deaths. Since then, civil society groups, celebrities and the Brazilian government have been trying to get life-saving supplies to the remote metropolis on the river.
Maduro, who has a toxic relationship with Brazil’s far-right president, announced his offer of help in a Sunday night broadcast.
“Venezuela reaches out to the people of the Amazon in solidarity … and we hope that this oxygen will quickly reach the people of Brazil … The trucks are on their way,” he said when state television allegedly showed a convoy of the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén.
Maduro said Brazil was facing a “worrying situation with Jair Bolsonaro’s public health disaster”.
“What a painful and sad situation,” the leftist added, claiming that a “true international scandal” was taking place in Amazonas. ‘It hurts us, as Bolivarians, as the children of Bolívar to see our Latin American brothers [like this]. ”
Maduro called the consignment an act of Christian charity, but it is also an obvious attempt to score political points on Bolsonaro, whose confused and anti-scientific handling of the pandemic has been condemned internationally.
The president of Brazil was a key member of the US-backed coalition that wanted to overthrow Maduro and Bolsonaro allowed Donald Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to visit the Venezuelan border on the eve of the US presidential election. While in Brazilian territory, Pompeo described Maduro as 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 if you do not know it, then it is … the governors and people of Venezuela who are 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 plight.
However, members of Venezuela’s opposition denounced Maduro’s intervention as a cynical ploy to improve his bad international reputation.
They remembered how thousands of Venezuelan refugees had escaped into the Brazilian Amazon over the past few years, on the run from poverty, hunger, violence and a devastated public health system.
“It is as if someone, with one of their family members dying of hunger, is giving food to a neighbor as a gift to make it look like they are a nice guy,” opposition leader Julio Borges told Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo said.
“Maduro wants to present himself as the leader of the poor, needy, of those infected with coronavirus, when in fact he is a corrupt dictator and a human rights violator who has succeeded in destroying Venezuela, once one of the most prosperous countries. in America. ”