Brazil’s Lula rejects ‘humiliation’ of calling Trump over tariff row

As US tariffs on Brazilian goods jumped to 50 per cent on Wednesday, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in an interview that he saw no room for direct talks with US President Donald Trump which he believes would turn into a “humiliation” for him.

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’m not going to 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 demand 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”.