The Brazilian government has information that there are fissures in the Venezuelan Armed Forces after opposition leader Juan Guaidó announced that he had military support to overthrow Nicolas Maduro and the neighboring country’s government may collapse, President Jair Bolsonaro said Tuesday.
In a conversation with journalists alongside Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo in Brasilia, Bolsonaro also said that there was no defeat of Guaido after the movement on Tuesday.
“The report we have is that there is a fissure that is increasingly approaching the top of the Armed Forces, so there is a possibility that the government will collapse because some of the summit will move to the other side,” Bolsonaro told reporters. after meeting at the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense to address the situation in Venezuela.
Asked by journalists, Bolsonaro said that so far no contact has been made by the United States government to have Brazilian territory used in eventual US military action in Venezuela.
“If it does come, which is normal, the president meets the Defense Council, makes the decision, participates the Brazilian Parliament,” said Bolsonaro.
The president expressed concern about the effects of the Venezuelan crisis in Brazil due to its impacts on the price of oil. He cited Petrobras’ policy of fuel price readjustment and said it would talk to Petrobras to “anticipate problems.”
“We have to prepare ourselves, given the policy of Petrobras, we will not intervene on our part, but we can have a serious problem within Brazil as well. side effect of what happens there,” he said.
“The policy of readjustment adopted by Petrobras at the moment is this and we will talk to anticipate problems from outside, that come quite seriously here to Brazil,” he added.
Bolsonaro’s comments on Petrobras’ readjustment policy and the possible impacts of the Venezuelan crisis on fuel prices come after the president recently telephoned the president of the state-owned company, Roberto Castello Branco, who later withdrew from an already announced readjustment of Petrobras price of diesel.
The president also expressed concern about the supply of electric power to Roraima and said that by the 15th of this month the government should receive a position of indigenous communities in whose lands would pass the works of a transmission line that will link the state to the national system.
“The situation is an emergency. We can not stay with diesel energy forever, because we here in the rest of Brazil pay a little over 1 billion a year for Roraima energy,” he said.
