Jair Bolsonaro does not attend the Summit of the Americas for free. The Brazilian president, who faces his re-election on October 2, not only set a series of harsh conditions to attend the meeting of leaders in Los Angeles, but now, before coming face to face with Joe Biden, he has put in He doubts that he legitimately won the 2020 US presidential election, an old complaint by Donald Trump that has been rejected by the courts and that led to the looting of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Brazil's president will be in Los Angeles for the summit leaders' meetings, which take place between Wednesday and Friday.
Before leaving Brasilia, however, he said in a television interview that he still had doubts that Biden would actually win the election, and he lavished praise on Trump. As Bolsonaro said: “The American people are the ones who talk about [electoral fraud]. I am not going to comment on the sovereignty of another country. But Trump was doing very well... We don't want that to happen in Brazil."
In the polls, Bolsonaro is behind former socialist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has been exonerated of the alleged crimes attributed to him and can stand for election. In recent months, the current president of Brazil has denounced alleged irregularities in the electronic vote in his country, imitating the denunciations of Trump, who never recognized his defeat.
Bolsonaro did not confirm his attendance at the Summit of the Americas organized by Biden until last week, and as revealed by the Ap agency, citing ministerial sources in Brasilia, he did so after receiving guarantees that he would not be criticized at all. Faced with the risk of having a summit without the presidents of the two great Ibero-American powers, Mexico and Brazil, Biden even accepted Bolsonaro's condition of having a face-to-face meeting alone with him.
After Trump's defeat in 2020, Bolsonaro echoed his false accusations of fraud, and was one of the last world leaders to congratulate Biden. When he did, he went by letter. Since then, the two have not spoken directly. With Trump, Bolsonaro and his family had a close relationship.
As he already had indications that the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was going to be absent from the summit due to his alliance with the dictatorships of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Joe Biden sent a close collaborator of his to Brazil to ensure attendance. of Bolsonaro.
Former Senator Chris Dodd was in Brasilia at the end of May. According to Ap, Bolsonaro detailed his conditions to him, especially that he not be criticized at the summit, not even for the deforestation of the Amazon, which was one of the initial points of criticism of this US Administration towards Brazil.
The truth is that Bolsonaro remains one of the few right-wing leaders on the continent, along with Iván Duque in Colombia, whose mandate will soon run out; Guillermo Lasso, from Ecuador, and Luis Lacalle Pou, from Uruguay.
