The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has directly pointed to the sons of former president Jair Bolsonaro as responsible for the renewed initiative by the United States Government to apply additional tariffs of 25% to Brazilian exports, accusing them of being "traitors to the homeland".
According to Lula, Washington's maneuver would be linked to the recent trip of Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro to the White House, where they met with Donald Trump. During that meeting, they also requested that Brazil's two largest criminal organizations be classified as terrorist groups, which was confirmed shortly thereafter.
"Those Bolsonaro sons manage to be worse than him, in truth, they have bartered the homeland," Lula denounced, reproaching them for interfering in the dealings that his administration maintains with the US Administration.
"They went to ask a foreign country to interfere in Brazil's decisions. They are traitors (...) What do traitors to the homeland who go to ask for a country's intervention in our people deserve?" the president posed during a public event in the municipality of Catalão, according to information from the portal G1.
The United States Department of Commerce proposed this Monday to increase tariffs on Brazilian products by 25% in response to alleged trade barriers imposed by Lula's government, in addition to alluding to issues such as illegal deforestation, piracy, and corruption.
Flávio Bolsonaro, for his part, assured this Tuesday that in his meeting with Trump and other high-ranking officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, he "explicitly" asked that these tariffs not be applied.
Despite this, Lula recalled that "Bolsonaro's children" already celebrated the first tariffs approved in mid-last year, even going so far as to request that Brazilian officials be included in lists of international sanctions.
The Brazilian president also took the opportunity to criticize Senator Rubio for his alleged animosity towards Brazil and other countries in the region. "He is anti-Latin America. I already told Trump that he doesn't like Brazil," Lula recounted.
That same Tuesday, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the United States, Rubio included Brazil in a group of countries that, in his opinion, cannot be considered allies of Washington in the region, along with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Colombia.