Bolsonaro on Her Majesty’s service

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro will travel to London this weekend to attend the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, scheduled for Monday. He will then fly to New York for the United Nations General Assembly — at which Brazil traditionally gives the opening speech.

Far behind in the polls and at risk of losing to former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a landslide, Mr. Bolsonaro was never one for protocol. So why would he waste precious days of potential campaigning for a trip abroad? 

The answer could lie in how, under the Bolsonaro administration, Brazil and the United Kingdom developed a closer relationship.

In his last trip to the UN General Assembly in September 2021, Mr. Bolsonaro — already an international pariah — held bilateral meetings with only two foreign leaders: Andrzej Duda, the far-right president of Poland; and then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The two leaders spoke again in March this year, by phone. The British Embassy in Brasília said the conversation concerned the need for a ceasefire in Ukraine — an odd subject, given that both countries had already voted twice at the UN deploring Russia’s invasion. 

One day after the phone call, President Bolsonaro’s House whip, Congressman Ricardo Barros, announced he would introduce a motion to fast-track a bill that allows mining on indigenous lands. The move was successful, but the bill stalled after large protests in Brasília.

The Man with the Golden Gun

As The Brazilian Report has shown, President Bolsonaro is a long-standing defender of lifting controls on mining ventures in Brazil, especially in the Amazon. Mr. Bolsonaro has repeatedly said the country’s rainforest contains “the entire periodic table” of elements. 

Electric vehicles are one of the drivers of this increased appetite for metals such as nickel. In May, Brazilian mining giant Vale confirmed a long-term contract with Elon Musk’s Tesla to supply Class 1 nickel in the U.S. from its operations in Canada. 

At the time, Vale did not specifically reply to The Brazilian Report about whether it intends to one day supply Tesla with nickel mined in Brazil. This week,...