The incoming foreign minister under Brazil’s far-right president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, has called on the international community to unite to “liberate” Venezuela from the rule of its authoritarian leftist leader, Nicolas Maduro.
Ernesto Araujo, a pro-Trump climate change sceptic, made the appeal yesterday as he announced that Maduro was not being invited to Bolsonaro’s inauguration next month “out of respect for the Venezuelan people”.
“Maduro has no place at a celebration of democracy,” Araujo tweeted. “All of the world’s countries must stop supporting him and come together to liberate Venezuela.” 
The start of Bolsonaro’s four-year term on January 1 portends a fractious new phase in relations between Brazil and its crisis-stricken northern neighbour.
Bolsonaro, whose election campaign was built partly on a pledge to rout socialism, is famed for his attacks on Maduro and the “despicable and murderous ideology” he believes he represents. In an interview last year, Bolsonaro pledged to “do whatever is possible to see that government deposed”.
Such declarations have gone down badly in Caracas. 
Last week Maduro accused Bolsonaro’s running mate, Hamilton Mourao, of plotting a “crazy” invasion of Venezuela as part of a wider conspiracy to assassinate him allegedly being concocted by the White House.
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Jorge Arreaza, said such an intervention would be repelled with “the mother of all battles”.
Like his boss, Araujo has strong views on Maduro’s Venezuela, which he has compared on his blog to Stalin’s Soviet Union and chairman Mao’s China.
In September Araujo reproduced a Donald Trump address in which the US president denounced “the socialist Maduro regime and its Cuban sponsors”. “All nations of the world should resist socialism and the misery that it brings to everyone,” Trump said.