The president of the United States, Joe Biden, intends to speak this Thursday with his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, about “free” elections and climate change, including the Brazilian Amazon, the national security adviser of the White House, Jake Sullivan.
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“There is no issue that is off the table in any of the bilateral meetings that the president (Biden) hasincluding with President Bolsonaro,” Sullivan told reporters on the presidential plane en route to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.
Sullivan thus reacted to questions from journalists about the conditions that Bolsonaro supposedly set to attend the Summit of the Americas. According to local media, he asked to meet with Biden alone and not to talk about the deforestation of the Amazon or his criticism of the electoral system in Brazil.
The Brazilian ruler, who is running for re-election in October, has questioned the legitimacy of the voting system in Brazil and just yesterday said that he still harbors suspicions about Biden’s electoral victory over former President Donald Trump (2017-2021) in the 2020 elections.
There is no issue that is off the table in any of the bilateral meetings that the president (Biden) has
Sullivan declined to comment on the latest statements from
Bolsonaro, but insisted that the elections and the Amazon will be part of the meeting.
“I can anticipate that the president (Biden) will talk about fair, transparent and democratic elections. The climate will be an important topic of the talks and we believe that it can be an area of progress in the relationship between the United States and Brazil.in particular concrete and tangible actions to protect the Amazon,” he asserted.
The meeting between Biden and Bolsonaro will be the first since the US president took office in January 2021.
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It will take place within the framework of the Summit of the Americas, which has been attended by more than 20 heads of state and government of the continent but which is marked by the absence of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which the United States did not invite to consider their leaders to be “dictators”.
a strained relationship
Biden is one of the leaders who has increased the most pressure on the Brazilian government to actively combat deforestation in the Amazon, which under Bolsonaro’s mandate has registered the worst indicators in a decade.
During his campaign, the Democrat promised to join other countries and provide a millionaire fund for Brazil to stop deforestation or else it would suffer “significant economic consequences.”
At a climate summit hosted by Biden in April 2021, Bolsonaro promised to seek carbon neutrality by 2050, ten years before the previous goalwithout convincing his critics about his sudden conversion to an environmentalist agenda.
For Bolsonaro, the Biden government has an “obsession with the environmental issue” that “slightly hinders” the relationship, as he said in August 2021.
“It is important to balance the vision: we have duties and so do they. It is not about one asking the other for things, but about both saying what they are going to do to fulfill the commitments made,” Pedro da Costa e Silva told AFP. Secretary for the Americas of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry.
Despite diplomatic disagreements, the trade relationship remains close. The United States is Brazil’s second largest trading partner, just behind China.
The exchange between both countries exceeded 26,000 million dollars between January and April of this yearan increase of 41 percent compared to the same period in 2021.
The largest nation in Latin America buys from the United States -among the main products- petroleum or mineral fuel oils and motors and non-electric machines. While it exports semi-finished products of iron or steel and aircraft, as main items.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from AFP and Efe
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