Washington’s Orwellian attempt to rally a “Summit for Democracy” to attack Russia and China, did not fare very well. Mexico and Brazil refused to sign a condemnation of Russia contained in the final declaration of the summit. Sputnik reports that Mexico signed the declaration, but only “with a reservation in which it maintained its opposition to the paragraph of the text that states that the signatory countries deplore the consequences of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.” Brazil’s President Lula refused to sign altogether, “because he disagreed with the use of the Democracy Summit to condemn Russia’s actions,” according to the Sputnik account.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador opened his brief online remarks to the event with the statement that “many of the greatest crimes against humanity have been done in the name of God or in the name of democracy.” After that attention-grabber, he proceeded to remind the other Presidents and Prime Ministers participating in his panel (a stony-faced Ursula von der Leyen included), that in some countries, under the façade of democracy, it is the oligarchy which rules. How can you speak of democracy, he asked, when economic elites rule, accumulating the most offensive wealth in history, while billions of people live on less than a dollar a day.
