Lula Warns of a Return to Colonial Attitudes at CELAC Summit in Colombia
Yemen Herald News 
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned that a colonial approach to developing nations was returning, in an address to a summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States held in Colombia on Saturday 21 March 2026. He framed recent United States policy in the region as interference of a kind Latin America had spent two centuries trying to leave behind, and he pointed to the removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela and to the fuel blockade of Cuba as his examples — without naming President Donald Trump directly at any point in the speech.
“It’s not possible for someone to think that they own other countries,” Lula told delegates. He returned to the theme of extraction, telling the summit that the region had already been stripped once and was being eyed again for a different set of commodities. “After taking everything we had, now they want to own the critical minerals and rare earths that we have,” he said, linking the historical plunder of gold, silver, diamonds and minerals to the present global contest over the inputs of battery and defence manufacturing.
The Venezuelan case he referred to was the most consequential rupture in the hemisphere in years. Maduro was captured on 3 January 2026, together with his wife Cilia Flores, in a United States military operation in Caracas supported by the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency. Both were flown to the United States and taken into federal custody in New York, where they are held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Maduro faces charges in the Southern District of New York including narco-terrorism, cocaine trafficking and the possession of machine guns and destructive devices. He has pleaded not guilty. Judge Alvin Hellerstein set a trial date of 1 June 2027 at the joint request of lawyers on both sides, a timetable that reflects the volume of material in the case. In February 2026 Argentina filed a formal extradition request of its own, after federal judge Sebastián Ramos signed a warrant accusing Maduro of crimes against humanity, including torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance carried out by the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service.
Those proceedings are the reason Lula’s framing was contested rather than uncontroversial. Supporters of the operation argue it was a law-enforcement action against an indicted defendant, pursued under charges filed years earlier and now to be tested in open court. Critics across the region, Lula among them, argue that the manner of the removal — a foreign military operation on the soil of a sovereign state, ending in the transfer of a sitting head of state to another country’s courts — set a precedent that no Latin American government should be comfortable with, whatever the merits of the underlying indictment.
Cuba supplied his second example. The island has faced severe fuel shortages, with restrictions on shipments compounding an energy crisis that has produced repeated grid failures and rolling blackouts. Havana attributes the shortages principally to the long-standing United States embargo and to measures tightening enforcement against suppliers and shipping; Washington has linked its pressure to the Cuban government’s human rights record and its relationship with Caracas. The effect on daily life on the island has been severe regardless of where responsibility is assigned.
Lula was not alone in his tone. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whose government hosted the gathering, delivered a similarly pointed critique of the multilateral order, telling the summit that the institutions built to prevent conflict had not delivered. “And yet, what we have today is war,” he said. The convergence between the two presidents reflected a bloc that has grown more willing to voice collective objections to United States policy, even as its members remain divided on much else.
That division is the practical limit on what such summits achieve. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States was founded in 2011 as a regional forum deliberately excluding the United States and Canada, but it has no treaty enforcement powers, no permanent secretariat with executive authority and no capacity to compel its members. Its membership spans governments of sharply different orientations, and several attend chiefly to keep channels open rather than to sign up to declarations.
For Brazil specifically, the rhetoric sits alongside a substantial economic relationship with Washington that Lula has no interest in rupturing. His government has sought to position Brazil as a broker — willing to criticise intervention in public while continuing to trade, negotiate and coordinate on climate and commodity policy. That balance has drawn criticism at home from both directions: from those who consider the language too confrontational, and from those who consider it insufficiently backed by action.
The summit closed without any binding regional response to either the Venezuelan operation or the situation in Cuba. What Lula’s speech registered instead was a shift in how a significant part of the region now describes its relationship with Washington — in the vocabulary of sovereignty and resource extraction rather than of partnership, and with an explicit historical frame that Latin American leaders had largely set aside in recent decades. Whether that language translates into coordinated policy remains the open question for the bloc.
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