A very tight race in Brazil appears to have been won by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, an ex-convict who welcomed Iran’s Holocaust-denying former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and laid a wreath on Yasser Arafat’s grave.
On da Silva’s watch, “Brazil’s diplomacy took a rather hostile stance toward Israel,” wrote B’nai B’rith International’s Special Advisor on Latin American Affairs, Adriana Camisar, in 2019. “[Da Silva’s] government got very close to the Iranian regime and, in 2010, even tried to prevent the United States and the European Union from sanctioning Iran for its nuclear development program. Brazil was a non-permanent member of the U.N. Security Council at the time and certainly helped Iran evade international sanctions, at least for a period of time.”
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