I won't have 'humiliating' talks with Trump, says Lula
The Brazilian president says he plans to call the leaders of China and India to discuss a joint Brics response Donald Trump's tariffs. Photo: Reuters
As US tariffs on Brazilian goods jumped to 50 percent on Wednesday, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told Reuters in an interview that he saw no room for direct talks now with US President Donald Trump that would likely be a "humiliation."
Brazil is not about to announce reciprocal tariffs, he said. Nor will his government give up on cabinet-level talks. But Lula himself is in no rush to ring the White House.
"The day my intuition says Trump is ready to talk, I won't hesitate to call him," Lula said in an interview from his presidential residence in Brasilia. "But today my intuition says he doesn't want to talk. And I won't humiliate myself."
Despite Brazil's exports facing one of the highest tariffs imposed by Trump, the new US trade barriers look unlikely to derail Latin America's largest economy, giving Lula more room to stand his ground against Trump than most Western leaders.
Lula described US-Brazil relations at a 200-year nadir after Trump tied the new tariff to his demands for an end to the prosecution of right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is standing trial for plotting to overturn the 2022 election.
The president said Brazil's Supreme Court, which is hearing the case against Bolsonaro, "does not care what Trump says and it should not," adding that Bolsonaro should face another trial for provoking Trump's intervention, calling the right-wing former president a "traitor to the homeland."
He also said he was planning to call leaders from the Brics group of developing nations, starting with India and China, to discuss the possibility of a joint response to US tariffs.
"There is no coordination among the Brics yet, but there will be," Lula said. "What is the negotiating power of one little country with the United States? None."
Separately, he said Brazil was looking at lodging a collective complaint with other countries at the World Trade Organization.
"I was born negotiating," said Lula, who was raised in poverty and rose through union ranks to serve two terms as president from 2003 to 2010, then re-entered politics in the 2022 election to defeat the incumbent Bolsonaro.
But he said he was in no rush to strike a deal or retaliate against US tariffs: "We need to be very cautious," he said. (Reuters)
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