WHEN a right-wing politician with authoritarian leanings – think Donald Trump – courts a genocidal dictator like Vladimir Putin, we recoil in distaste but are not surprised. But when a former human rights advocate and working-class hero backs dictators guilty of abominable butchery, shock is followed by abhorrence.

That is how I feel watching Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, embrace Putin and Venezuelan tyrant Nicolas Maduro. Lula’s is a moral failure of appalling proportions.

Start with his love-in with Maduro, which is less well-known globally. At a regional summit in late May, progressive activists gasped when Lula claimed that human rights violations and anti-democratic practices in Venezuela are just a “narrative construction”.