Brazilian President Lula Reports on His Phone Call with Cristina Kirchner

June 27—As he was preparing for a recent podcast, Brazilian President Lula da Silva revealed the content of the phone call he had made to former Argentine President and Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner on June 11, the day her sentence to a six-year jail term in a trumped up corruption case was confirmed, which she was ordered to serve under house arrest.

Lula said he had called to express his solidarity with his friend, and that “she even cried” during the call. “I told her, Cristina, I want you to know that our friendship isn’t due to the fact that we have both been Presidents but because I am a person and you are a person,” Ambito Financiero reported.

The friendship between the two dates back to the early 2000s, when Néstor Kirchner was President of Argentina (2003-2007). Lula and Cristina remained close friends and political collaborators during and after her two presidential terms (2007-2015), and when Lula was unjustly imprisoned in 2017 in a fraudulent corruption case run from the U.S. State and Justice Departments, Cristina and the Peronist movement offered their full support, and she also visited him.

Lula is scheduled to be in Buenos Aires July 3 for the Mercosur heads-of-state meeting, at which he will take over the group’s rotating chair from the deranged Argentine President Javier Milei. The report of Lula’s visit to Cristina has caused some hysteria in the Milei camp, but the Argentine is trying to play down its importance. In any case, the Mercosur meeting is likely to be a very tense affair, in which a bilateral meeting between the two Presidents is unlikely. Lula has said he intends to visit Cristina at her apartment, but this will have to be approved by the appeals court that upheld her conviction, which has stipulated that visits be limited to family members, her lawyers, and medical personnel. Her lawyers are challenging this.