Allies of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) heard by Young Pan reported that the Brazilian spoke with North American leader Donald Trump at a G7 summit event this Tuesday (16). Official video of the traditional photo that brings together the leaders shows that the Brazilian and North American did not interact or even greet Lula. The images were widely publicized by opposition politicians as a sign of deterioration in the relationship between the two.
Those around the PT member, however, minimized the situation, saying that Trump and Lula greeted each other and spoke briefly at the summit’s social event held a few hours after the official photo. They deny that there is tension between the two leaders.
The government expects Lula to be able to talk to the Republican about recommending new tariffs on Brazilian products. After the “tariff”, when the US government taxed products from all over the world, the president, as well as parliamentarians and part of the business community, had a negotiation considered successful with Trump, overturning a large part of the taxes. Despite ideological differences, Trump has praised Lula and says he has a good relationship with the Brazilian.
The USTR report is the result of an investigation launched a year ago by the Trump administration against alleged “unfair practices” by Brazil in trade with the USA. Among other topics, to justify the measure, the institution accuses Pix of “unfairly” harming American companies that provide electronic payment services, such as credit card operators, such as MasterCard and Visa, and WhatsApp Pay.
So far, there has been no confirmation about a possible bilateral meeting between Lula and Trump. If any meeting between the two leaders takes place in France, it will be just over a month after their last meeting, at the White House in Washington, in early May.
At the time, according to Lula, teams from both governments were instructed to present a proposal to resolve the impasse over export tariffs and the USTR trade investigation, which has not effectively happened yet.
“That [encontro entre Lula e Trump] is not defined. Contacts continue with the United States, that’s what I can say for now, and that they have been ongoing in an intense way, since always, and this continues to happen”, said Ambassador Philip Fox-Drummond Gough, Secretary of Economic and Financial Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MRE), in an interview with journalists this Wednesday (10).
This is also the first contact between Lula and Trump after the US government began to formally designate the Brazilian criminal factions Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).
The Brazilian government had been trying, in recent months, to avoid this designation as it assessed that it could pave the way for US military action in Brazil or the application of severe sanctions in economic and financial sectors.
