Press statement by President Lula during his state visit to Chile

Dear comrade Gabriel Boric, President of the Republic of Chile. Dear comrade Alberto [van Klaveren], Minister of Foreign Affairs of Chile; Mauro Vieira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil; Sebastián Depolo, Ambassador of Chile to Brazil; and Paulo Pacheco, Ambassador of Brazil to Chile. Fellow ministers, secretaries, and members of the Chilean government. Fellow ministers, secretaries, and comrades who participate in the government of Brazil. Fellow members of the press.

I have held many meetings and given many speeches in almost every country in the world—but each time I come to Chile… and I came to Chile seven times during my other two terms, and I have already received comrade Boric twice since I took office. I owed myself a visit to Chile because when I returned to the presidency in 2023, Brazil and South America were very different from the South America we left in 2010.

The dream of integration, the dream of economic growth, the dream of creating multilateral institutions that could provide us with shelter, of creating an economic bloc, a political bloc, a scientific and technological bloc—all of that had been forgotten. Our country suffered a huge setback, a huge one. In other words, Brazil had been lifted out of hunger in 2014, and, when we returned, ten years later, there were already 33 million people on the Hunger Map. In just 18 months, we have already taken 24 million people off the Hunger Map—and we are going to end hunger again because hunger is not a natural phenomenon. Hunger is shamelessness on the part of those who govern countries around the world because we could easily end hunger.

They say that countries do not have friends, they have interests. This is not our case.

It is often said in Brazil that we have a limitless friendship with Chile because, even though we share no physical borders, ours is a diverse and comprehensive partnership.

This is why we decided to make April 22—the date on which we established our diplomatic relations, in 1836—the Brazil-Chile Friendship Day.

Our bilateral relationship has a regional and global vocation.

We are grateful to Chile for having led the follow-up to the Meeting of Presidents of South American Countries last semester.

To Brazil, the convergence between the Brasilia Consensus and UNASUR is an objective that we want to pursue.

South American integration is a reality that makes a difference in people's lives, as demonstrated by the agreement to waive roaming charges that we signed last year and the agreement on reciprocal recognition of driver's licenses that we signed today.

The challenges posed by natural disasters and organized crime affect all countries.

The 2023 wildfires in Chile and this year's floods in southern Brazil challenge climate denialism and reiterate the need for cooperation between us.

The Chilean proposal to establish a regional disaster response mechanism has our support and endorsement.

Without collaboration, it is also impossible to combat crime. Today, we signed an extradition treaty and instructed our teams to expand intelligence actions and joint operations.

Integration means connection.

It was the increase in the number of flights that allowed the flow of tourists between our countries to almost double last year. With the tourism work plan that we signed today, Chile has everything it needs to consolidate itself as one of the most important destinations for Brazilians.

My government is committed to connecting all of South America through five major road routes, two of which include Chile.

Brazil can be Chile's gateway to the African continent. Chile can be Brazil's bridge to Asia.

We have a trade facilitation agreement whose implementation progressed in 2023, harmonizing procedures for the commercialization of beef, and which will progress in other sectors such as cosmetics this year.

We are unavoidable players in the debate on climate change, due to our ties with two of the most important biomes on the planet.

The risk that the Amazon and Antarctica will reach tipping points affects us directly.

We both believe in the potential of bioeconomy and want to deepen the already solid history of collaboration between our Antarctic stations.

In Brazil, we have a green Amazon, in the rainforest, and a blue one, in the Atlantic Ocean.

Chile’s turquoise diplomacy, which merges the two colors in a shared concern for the sustainable use of natural resources, is an inspiration to us.

I reaffirmed that we support Valparaíso’s candidacy to host the High Seas Treaty Secretariat to protect marine biodiversity.

I thanked President Boric for his support in electing scientist Letícia Carvalho as Secretary General of the International Seabed Authority.

For the first time we will have a black Latin American woman protecting this common heritage of humanity.

Another Chilean example is its pioneering feminist foreign policy.

With the memorandum signed by our diplomatic academies, we will work together to ensure that women have a greater voice in Chilean and Brazilian diplomacy.

With the Cerrillos space agency, whose cornerstone we will lay tomorrow, we will inaugurate a new chapter of collaboration in science and technology.

We discussed the need to build capacities and regulate Artificial Intelligence, so that everyone has access to its benefits and can mitigate its risks.

We also discussed a promising partnership in energy transition.

By integrating chains of green hydrogen, critical minerals, and electric vehicles, we will be able to add value to our production and occupy prominent positions in the international market.

The convergence between us is such that Chile was the country invited to the largest number of working groups by the Brazilian presidency of the G20.

I invited President Boric to participate in the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro and I was very pleased with his willingness to join the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty.

We both believe that the policy of increasing the minimum wage is essential for the benefits of development to be shared by all.

President Boric is a natural ally in ensuring workers' rights and I hope he can join the partnership that I launched last year with President Biden.

Our ideals converge in the uncompromising defense of democracy.

This is why I was pleased to invite President Boric to the meeting of democratic leaders against extremism that Pedro Sánchez and I will organize in New York, in the context of the UN General Assembly.

I also explained the initiatives that I have undertaken with presidents Gustavo Petro and López Obrador regarding the political process in Venezuela.

Respect for popular sovereignty is what drives us to defend the transparency of the results.

Our commitment to peace is what leads us to call on the parties to dialogue and promote understanding between the government and the opposition.

Today, as President Boric led me through the Democracy and Memory Hall and showed me the recording of Salvador Allende's last speech, I lamented that Brazil has the sad stain on its history of having supported the Chilean dictatorship.

We know that arbitrariness is the enemy of well-being and that democracy cannot be sustained without a State that guarantees rights.

Over recent years, Brazil faced a narrow-minded version of the same combination of political authoritarianism and economic neoliberalism.

Brazil and Chile are committed to working together to build a more just and supportive world.

As the great Pablo Neruda said when he received his Nobel Prize: “Our original guiding stars are struggle and hope. But there is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope.”

President Boric, I would like to close our press conference by telling the Chilean press and the Brazilian press which are covering this event that Brazil has emerged from the diplomatic blackout it was subjected to from 2018 to 2022. Brazil had no relations with anyone and Brazil tried to offend others, its allies. And Brazil became completely isolated. No one wanted to visit Brazil and no one wanted to receive the president of Brazil.

When I returned to the presidency, I returned with a great desire to try to recreate a political awareness among our peoples of the need to form a more organized structure of integration in South America. We cannot continue to turn our backs on each other. We have to research, prospect, and study everything we can do together.

We have to study our similarities, we have to make things happen to benefit our dream of a united Latin America, a united South America, an economic bloc, but also a cultural bloc, but also a scientific and technological bloc. In other words, we cannot turn our backs on each other.

Brazil cannot be the great enemy of Spanish Latin America. And South America cannot be insignificant to Brazil. I think there was a historical error, and we are trying to correct this historical error.

Boric, in the 2003 campaign, we campaigned against the FTAA, saying that we did not want to implement the FTAA in South America because the FTAA would not replace Mercosur, it would impoverish our trade relationship. We managed to win the elections and ended the FTAA, strengthening Mercosur. Anyone who has any doubts needs only analyze the economic data on what happened with the integration of South America.

What happened in trade with UNASUR was extraordinary growth. We went from 15 to almost 89 billion in foreign trade with Latin America, we went from 15 to 50 billion in South America.

So, comrade Boric, I am convinced that our visit to Chile today, this composition of ministries that accompanied me, is to tell our comrades from Chile the following: rest assured that we will not be as before, we want more. We want more for the benefit of Chileans and for the benefit of Brazilians, we want more for the benefit of science and technology in Brazil and also for science and technology in Chile. We want more for Brazilian culture and Chilean culture. We want more for Brazilian businesspeople and Chilean businesspeople.

What we really want is more for the Chilean people and more for the Brazilian people. What we want to build is a full relationship, where there is no doubt, where any minor disagreements cannot harm the important agreements and the bigger things that we have to do.

I am from a political party that lives diversity every single day. In other words, if there is a citizen on planet Earth who has learned to live democratically in diversity, it is me, because, in my party, we had 19 different groups of people who thought differently and we went to every meeting and worked hard to get a single position approved, and it was approved.

It is the same thing in foreign policy. Each country has its own culture, each country has its own interests, each country has its own political nuances. We cannot expect everyone to say the same thing, to think in the same way. We are not the same, we are different, and that is extraordinary, because differences allow us to seek to find our similarities, the things that help us.

This is why, Boric, rest assured: the Brazil-Chile relationship will never be the same again. It has to improve in all areas, especially in politics, especially in friendship, especially in the idea that the Chilean people deserve more and the Brazilian people deserve more.

When I leave Chile tomorrow, after laying the foundation stone for the space center, I want you to know that I will return to Brazil telling my colleagues that a new era has begun in the Chile-Brazil relationship.

Thank you very much.