The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, affirmed this Monday night that with his colleague from Argentina, Alberto Fernández, he assumed the commitment that both countries once again have a commercial exchange for “40 billion dollars or more “, as happened in 2010, during the Government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Lula spoke this Monday night at the Kirchner Cultural Center (CCK), where the Concert of the Argentine-Brazilian Brotherhood was held, after the inauguration of the photographic exhibition “Original Peoples-Warriors of Time”, by Ricardo Stucker.
Da Silva said that with the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro “Brazil entered a setback that I never imagined in four years.”
held that Bolsonaro “took the initiative to isolate himself from the world, in four years he did not receive anyone or visit anyone.” He added that there was a kind of “blockade of humanity against Brazil”, but “Brazil was not blocked, it was the mind of the President of the Republic of Brazil that did not allow Brazil to continue with its process.”
Lula then emphasized that He came to Buenos Aires “not only to participate in Celac, to meet with his comrades, but to tell those comrades and the Argentine people that Brazil is back!”
President Lula participates in cultural events in Argentina https://t.co/gNQ9vk2ZRW
– Lula (@LulaOficial) January 24, 2023
“We are going together to strengthen and rebuild Mercosur, even with the participation of Bolivia,” he exclaimed, while the former president of that country, Evo Morales, was at his side.
He added that “we are going to recreate Unasur (Union of South American Nations), because in this period we all have to understand that alone we are weak, but together we can create the great nation dreamed of by (Simón) Bolívar and so many people who dreamed of that.”
Interrupted by constant applause almost after every sentence he utteredLula referred to soccer again and returned to “congratulate Argentina for having become world champion.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t Brazil but I want to confess that (Lionel) Messi deserved the title of world champion. It’s not possible that he was the best player in the world for so many years and would have finished his career without being world champion,” he affirmed, and completed that a “congratulations Argentina, congratulations Latin America”.
Despite the fact that he had anticipated that they were his last words, he resumed his political and economic discourse and recalled that there was a time when bilateral trade between Argentina and Brazil was “barely 7,000 million dollars, and in 2010 we reached 40,000 millions”.
But “Now we have gone back to 23,000 million, and the commitment with Alberto Fernández is that we will return to 40,000 million or more,” he said emphatically.
He then highlighted his wish that “our relationship is not just commercial, that our differences remain only in football and that we build a strong commercial, political and social alliance.”
