President of Argentina Javier Milei over the weekend welcomed President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime during the latest Heads of State summit of the Mercosur trade bloc.
Milei urged the bloc’s member states to back the United States against socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Mercosur is a regional trade bloc founded in 1991 by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with other associated countries. Venezuela was suspended from Mercosur in 2016 by its founders in response to the socialist Maduro regime’s gross human rights abuses and violations of the trade bloc’s rules.
Milei, speaking at the 67th Mercosur heads of state Summit in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, referred to Venezuela throughout his roughly nine-minute speech and stressed that the country continues to face a “devastating political, humanitarian, and social crisis.”
“The atrocious and inhumane dictatorship of narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro casts a dark shadow over our region. This danger and shame cannot continue to exist on the continent, or it will drag us all down with it,” Milei said.
“Argentina welcomes the pressure exerted by the United States and Donald Trump to liberate the Venezuelan people. The time for timid approaches to this issue has come to an end,” he continued. “We also urge all other members of the bloc to support this position and strongly condemn this authoritarian experiment.”
Milei also called for the liberation of all political prisoners and reiterated that Argentina will continue to demand the liberation of Nahuel Gallo, an Argentine national unjustly detained in December 2024 under dubious “conspiracy” accusations, much like several other foreign political prisoners of the Venezuelan regime.
After the Summit, Milei, alongside Paraguay’s Santiago Peña, Panamá’s José Raúl Mulino, and high ranking officials from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Peru released a joint statement denouncing the ongoing human rights situation in Venezuela and ratified their “firm decision to achieve, through peaceful means, the full restoration of democratic order and unrestricted respect for human rights in Venezuela.”
The statement notably does not count with the signatures of leftist presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Yamandú Orsi of Uruguay, two of the four Mercosur-founder nations. Lula, during his participation at the Summit, said that “U.S. intervention” in Venezuela would be a “humanitarian catastrophe” for the Southern Hemisphere and would set “dangerous precedents for the world.”
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Argentina’s Todo Noticias reported that the issue of Venezuela was discussed during the Summit, but due to “differences between Brazil and Argentina,” any mention of the situation in Venezuela was excluded from the final declaration.
According to Todo Noticias, Brazil was “open” to including a reference to the defense of human rights in Venezuela in the final declaration, but also wanted to include concerns about the U.S. military deployment in the region and reject what Brazil reportedly described as “unilateral coercive” measures.
“As no agreement was reached on these points, Venezuela’s paragraph was excluded from the Mercosur declaration and the other six countries chose to release their own text,” Todo Noticias wrote.
“Maduro is a dictator and he has to go,” Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno told the local newspaper La Nación on Sunday. “This is a position shared by the majority of Mercosur and associated states. We have suffered firsthand with the kidnapping of gendarme Nahuel Gallo, but it is the Venezuelan people who are suffering.”
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