Brazil summons US chargé d’affaires over embassy's Bolsonaro trial post

Amid brewing tensions between Brazil and the United States, the Brazilian foreign ministry has summoned the US chargé d’affaires after the embassy posted comments about the trial of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. On Thursday, the embassy published a social media post in Portuguese criticising the Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the cases against Bolsonaro.

The former Brazilian president is in the middle of a trial over an alleged coup attempt against the country’s current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “Minister Moraes is the chief architect of the censorship and persecution of Bolsonaro and his supporters. His flagrant human rights violations have led to sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, imposed by President Trump," the embassy wrote in the Thursday post.

“Moraes’s allies in the judiciary and elsewhere are hereby warned not to support or facilitate his actions. We are monitoring the situation closely," it furthered. The message shared by the consulate was a translated repost of a statment by Darren Beattie, the US’s senior official for public diplomacy.

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Brazil condemns the message

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government saw the message as a direct threat to the other supreme court justices presiding over Bolsonaro’s trials. Given that Trump is yet to appoint an ambassador to Brazil, the foreign ministry summoned the acting head of mission, chargé d’affaires Gabriel Escobar.

It is pertinent to note that this was the third time Escobar had been summoned since Donald Trump began defending Bolsonaro. The Trump administration drew Brazilian ire after it used a former Brazilian president over the 2022 coup attempt as one of the justifications for the steep tariffs imposed on the goods of the Latin American nation.

A source close to the matter told Reuters that the interim secretary for Europe and North America, Flavio Goldman, expressed to Escobar the Brazilian government’s “deep indignation” over the tone and content of recent posts from the embassy and the US state department, which Brasília viewed as “interference in domestic affairs and unacceptable threats against Brazilian authorities”. The US embassy is yet to comment on the matter.

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Interestingly, before Friday’s summons, Escobar had attended a meeting on Thursday with Brazil’s vice-president, Geraldo Alckmin, who has been leading the Lula administration’s efforts to reverse the tariffs. Brazil argues that it has been seeking open negotiations with the United States since April. However, it has received no response.

“The day my intuition says Trump is ready to talk, I won’t hesitate to call him. But today my intuition says he doesn’t want to talk. And I won’t humiliate myself," the Brazilian president told Reuters this week.