The government will send a delegation to Brazil
between today and tomorrow
to participate in the G20 summit and
ease tensions
with President Lula.
The official delegation will be made up of Foreign Minister
Diana Mondino
, where there is an expectation of a bilateral meeting, and
next week the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo
, and the head of the
Central Bank, Santiago Bausili, will join.
"The chancellor travels tomorrow
," confirmed government sources.
The Argentine mission will coincide with the visit of Secretary of State,
Antony Blinken
, to Brazil and Argentina, two countries that according to the White House are two of its "most important" partners in Latin America.
Blinken will arrive in Brazil on Wednesday to meet with Lula
and on Thursday he will travel to Buenos Aires to meet with Javier Milei.
This Wednesday and Thursday will be the first large sessions of the forum that bring together the foreign ministers of the group of 20 in Rio de Janeiro, led by the chancellor of Brazil, Mauro Vieira, and there will be a virtual meeting of the ministers of Finance and central bankers, prior to the face-to-face meeting that they will hold between Wednesday and Thursday of next week in Sao Paulo.
The meetings of the financial channel will be coordinated by the Minister of Finance of the neighboring country, Fernando Haddad.
The agenda also includes a summit on Tuesday of the
finance ministers and central bankers of the BRICS
(Basil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), from which Milei withdrew after Alberto Fernández's government announced the integration of Argentina .
Brazil presides over the forum this year with an agenda focused on the fight against hunger, sustainable development and global governance.
Lula proposes "modernizing" and "democratizing" the UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF and the World Bank), while Milei promotes alignment with the US and the IMF, to the detriment of the Mercosur.
Mondino was already received by Vieira in Brasilia and will now travel with Federico Pinedo.
The foreign minister of the neighboring country confirmed that the Argentine government requested a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers' meeting.
"There is a long list of requests for bilateral meetings and, unfortunately, there will not be time for everyone. The United Kingdom, Argentina, France and Norway requested it," he told Oglobo.
Tensions escalated during the campaign, when
Milei accused Lula of being a "poisoned communist,"
amid the Brazilian president's support for the opposition candidate Sergio Massa.
The Mercosur-European Union agreement is another point under discussion.
Milei received this Monday the Chancellor of France, Stéphane Séjourné, who traveled to the country and will visit Brazil to explain his refusal to the trade agreement.
Argentina, Brazil's third trading partner after China and the United States, started the year with a slight favorable trade balance with Brazil of US$29 million, the second positive monthly figure since December 2022, when in the same month of Last year it had exhibited a bilateral deficit of US$207 million, according to Abeceb.
The trade flow in the first month of the year totaled USD 1,564 million, registering a drop of 15.6% annually, compared to the US$ 1,856 million in January 2023 and greater than that verified in December 2023. The fall in the trade flow It was mainly due to the sharp drop in imports (25.4%) as exports recorded a moderate drop (3.2%).
In Brazil, there are suspended investments by companies with businesses in Argentina.
While the Central Bank of the neighboring country estimates a growth of 2% in 2024, Argentina would close the year with a GDP drop of more than 3% due to the shock plan launched in December.
Thus, the expectation is that the trade surplus with Brazil will reduce until it returns to deficit in the second half.