Top US diplomat in Brazil summoned to foreign ministry over Bolsonaro trial comments
On Thursday, the embassy published a social media post in Portuguese criticising the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the cases against Bolsonaro, who is on trial over an alleged coup attempt.
The post read: '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.
'Moraes's allies in the judiciary and elsewhere are hereby warned not to support or facilitate his actions. We are monitoring the situation closely.'
The message was a translated repost of a statement by Darren Beattie, the US's senior official for public diplomacy.
The Brazilian government viewed the message as a direct threat to the other supreme court justices presiding over Bolsonaro's trials and – given that Trump has yet to appoint an ambassador to Brazil – summoned the acting head of mission, chargé d'affaires Gabriel Escobar.
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It was the third time Escobar had been summoned since Donald Trump began publicly defending Bolsonaro, even citing the former Brazilian president's prosecution over the 2022 coup attempt as one of the justifications for the steep tariffs imposed on Brazilian goods.
According to a source at the ministry, 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 did not comment on the meeting.
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 thus far unsuccessful efforts to reverse the tariffs.
Brazil says it has been seeking to open negotiations with the US since April, but has received no response.
This week, Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told Reuters: '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.'
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