Foreign policy of Brazil’s Lula takes shape, irking the West

By ELÉONORE HUGHES and CARLA BRIDI
Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s new President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has so far shown little concern about defying consensus in the West on foreign policy — even when it comes to dealing with authoritarian governments. In recent weeks, Lula’s Brazil sent a delegation to Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, refused to sign a UN resolution condemning Nicaragua’s human rights abuses, allowed Iranian warships to dock in the port of Rio de Janeiro and flatly refused to send weapons to Ukraine, at war with Russia. These decisions have raised eyebrows in the U.S. and among European countries, but experts said Lula is reactivating Brazil’s decades-old principle of non-alignment to reassert its sovereignty and carve out a policy that best safeguards its interests in an increasingly multi-polar world.