Argentine President Skips Mercosur Summit to Meet Bolsonaro – NBC 6 South Florida

Between a far-right convention to criticize his enemies and a presidential summit to discuss regional trade policy, Argentine President Javier Milei preferred a stadium filled with cheering fans.

The libertarian leader was in Brazil on Sunday, preparing to lead the national version of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, alongside former President Javier Bolsonaro in the southern Brazilian city of Balneario Camboriu.

By avoiding the Mercosur trade bloc summit in Paraguay and cozying up to Bolsonaro just days after federal police charged the right-wing populist in a scheme to smuggle Saudi diamonds, Milei delivered a sharp new rebuke to Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, deepening a risky feud with his country’s biggest trading partner.

It is the latest example of Milei’s provocative foreign policy, which seeks to attract global attention by forging friendships with far-right allies rather than following diplomatic conventions.

On Sunday, Bolsonaro posted a video in which he greeted Milei with a warm hug and a pat on the back before huddling with him and his sister and adviser, Karina Milei, among other aides. The two men stood next to their respective national flags for a photo op that would have had presidential overtones if Bolsonaro were not a disgraced former president under police investigation for his alleged attempt to subvert the outcome of Brazil’s 2022 election.

A day earlier, Bolsonaro had opened Brazil’s CPAC on Saturday with a fiery speech declaring his desire to see former U.S. President Donald Trump return to the White House next year. He and Milei were seen together in a downtown hotel lobby littered with emptied wine glasses later that evening, watching Uruguay knock Brazil out of the 2024 Copa America.

Since the irascible Milei came to power last December promising to resolve Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades, relations between the two longtime allies and commodities trading powers have deteriorated rapidly. Milei has called Lula a “communist” and refused to do business with him. Lula has turned a deaf ear to Milei and demanded an apology for what he called Milei’s “nonsense.”

The two ideological foes first met at the Group of Seven summit in Italy last month, where their efforts to avoid each other physically whenever possible made local headlines.

Experts say joining the talks on the sidelines of the South American trade bloc’s meeting on Monday would have offered Milei a low-stakes opportunity to defuse tensions with Brazil, which buys nearly a sixth of Argentina’s exports, supplies most of Argentina’s auto industry and is backing its neighbor’s attempts to get badly needed aid from the International Monetary Fund.

Instead, Milei doubled down on a foreign policy gamble that experts called a mistake.

“He seems to be shooting himself in the foot,” Michael Shifter, a Latin America specialist at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said of Milei. “It’s shocking and counterproductive for him to thumb his nose at Lula because it could cost Argentina dearly, which could affect his ability to carry out his policies.”

The president’s ideological strategy sparked a political firestorm earlier this year in Spain, Argentina’s second-largest foreign investor, as Milei avoided meetings with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s socialist government and instead delivered a speech denouncing socialism at a far-right rally organized by the country’s Vox party.

The disavowal degenerated into a diplomatic crisis between the historic allies when Milei called Sánchez’s wife corrupt and Spain recalled its ambassador from Buenos Aires.

Despite five trips to the United States since taking office, Milei has yet to enter the White House – he hugged Trump at CPAC in Washington, befriended billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Texas over his love of free markets, and met top tech CEOs in Silicon Valley.

“He wants to present himself as a rock star of international politics, which arouses admiration in some sectors of Argentina,” said Fabio Rodriguez, director of the Buenos Aires-based consultancy M&R Asociados. “But the polls already indicate that this could change, that people see this as a burden, a feeling of abandonment in the sense that their president spends his time on tour while things are not improving on a daily basis.”

This time, in Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy with a population of some 200 million, the stakes are even higher, experts say. Pressure is mounting in Argentina, where the local currency hit a record low of 1,430 pesos to the dollar last week on the black market, where Argentines are selling their depressed pesos.

“Argentina has much more to lose than Brazil,” said Cristian Buttié, director of the CB Consultora polling institute.