Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro hopes to visit Portugal at the beginning of 2020.
The controversial leader who only recently declared “the Amazon is ours” and dismissed his own country’s deforestation data as lies, is apparently “very keen” to come here, considering Portugal “a brother nation”.
Who affirms this is Bolsonaro’s minister for foreign relations, Ernesto Araújo who was speaking to Lusa at the XXIV meeting of CPLP (Portuguese-speaking) countries in Cape Verde.
“This year we have a very busy agenda, inclusively because Brazil is involved in the presidency of BRICS (the group of emerging economies formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and we hold the presidency of Mercosul (the south American trading bloc)”, he said. “But we hope at the start of next year it will be possible to achieve (Bolsonaro’s visit to Portugal)”.
The president himself – at a rather unusual breakfast meeting with international journalists last Friday – has also described Portugal as a “brother country”.
At the same meeting he claimed he was doing God’s work, that his appointment of his son to be Brazil’s ambassador to America was nothing to do with nepotism, and that indigenous people in the Amazon are longing to be freed from the situation of being made to live “like cavemen”.
Previously dubbed the Trump of the Tropics, Bolsonaro told reporters: “We understand the importance of the Amazon for the world – but the Amazon is ours. There will not be any more of that sort of policy that we saw in the past that was terrible for everyone. We preserve more [rainforest] than anyone. No country in the world has the moral right to talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your own ecosystems.”
Coincidentally, news of Bolsonaro’s impending visit followed hints that President Trump too could be making a stop-off in Portugal as soon as next month (click here). But this has yet to be confirmed.
