“Yes, surely there is a dissenting voice, but that was not the object of this summit and it was not what occupied us at this summit and it did not stop us either,” he told reporters.
The president of Brazil agreed with this. “He didn’t spend two days discussing Ukraine,” Lula said in his conference on Wednesday.
Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, echoed this point, but also said the West had to understand charges of hypocrisy in its stance on Ukraine.
“Historically we have had a lot of great power activities against smaller and poorer countries, less powerful countries,” he said, citing experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“When you raise certain principles of non-interference in internal affairs, the use of force and everything else, they ignore you,” said Gonsalves, whose country holds the CELAC presidency.
“However, some of those same countries are the ones that are raising those same principles in Ukraine,” he said. “We have to get rid of hypocrisy.”
In an effort to address some of those concerns, the statement claimed that Europe’s slave trade past inflicted “untold suffering” on millions of people and hinted at the need for reparations for what it described as a “crime against humanity.”