President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left Brazil on Thursday for a trip to the U.S., where he will meet with President Joe Biden and American lawmakers on Friday. With former President Jair Bolsonaro in Florida since December 30, this will be the first time both men are in the same country since the change in government.
After narrowly losing the presidential election in October, Mr. Bolsonaro made few public appearances. In a farewell speech broadcast on his social media accounts, he criticized Lula and admitted that he “did all he could” to revert the electoral results “within the four lines of the Constitution”.
Mr. Bolsonaro left Brazil on the second-to-last day of his term to avoid attending Lula’s swearing-in ceremony on January 1, where protocol dictates he would hand his successor the presidential sash. Instead, a diverse group of eight Brazilians handed the sash to Lula.
More evidence of what Mr. Bolsonaro attempted to do surfaced in the last few weeks. The Federal Police found a draft putschist decree at the home of his former justice minister, Anderson Torres. This week, The Brazilian Report revealed a plan to hack Brazil’s chief electoral justice.
While remaining publicly silent, Mr. Bolsonaro and several of his allies were hard at work devising putschist plans to overturn the election and keeping Lula from taking office, or even being certified as president-elect. Pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers explicitly called for a Brazilian ‘January 6’ during a Senate hearing.
Mr. Bolsonaro has been staying in a home owned by a former MMA champion in a gated community in Kissimmee, Florida. He recently applied for a six-month tourist visa to stay in the U.S.
Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to President Biden requesting him to “reassess” Mr. Bolsonaro’s status in the country, “to ascertain whether there is a legal basis for his stay.” They added that the U.S. should cooperate with Brazilian authorities in investigating the role he may have played in the January 8 attacks in Brasília.
President Lula is to meet with Senator Bernie Sanders and other Democratic lawmakers at Blair House on Friday, before heading to the White House to meet with President Biden.
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