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Brazil has revoked the visa of an adviser to Donald Trump who planned to visit jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, after warning of potential “undue interference” in domestic matters ahead of elections this year.
Darren Beattie, who was appointed by Washington as an envoy to the South American nation last month, was barred from entering due to the “omission and falsification” of information in his visa application, Brazil’s foreign ministry said on Friday.
Officials claimed the political strategist had failed to declare his intention to see Bolsonaro, a hard-right populist and Trump ally who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup d’état.
Beattie was also due to meet Bolsonaro’s eldest son, Flávio, who will stand against Brazil’s leftwing leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a presidential race in October, according to a person aware of the matter. Recent opinion polls show the rivals are tied.
Lula suggested the visa decision was in retaliation for similar US action against a Brazilian cabinet member and his family last year.
“That American guy who said he was coming here to visit Jair Bolsonaro, he was prohibited from visiting, and I prohibited him from coming to Brazil until he releases the visa of my minister of health,” the leftist leader said on Friday.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court in Brasília reversed a decision granting Bolsonaro the right to receive Beattie. In a document submitted to the judge, Brazil’s foreign ministry said the visit “during an election year may constitute undue interference” in internal affairs.
The White House and US state department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A former Trump speechwriter in the Republican’s first administration, Beattie has previously criticised Brazil’s judicial crackdown on digital misinformation.
The development risks raising the diplomatic temperature again between the two most populous nations in the Americas, following a détente in recent months after tensions flared last year.
Trump imposed an additional 40 per cent tariff on many Brazilian exports — some of the highest levies in his global trade war — in a failed bid to get Bolsonaro off the hook, labelling his treatment a “witch-hunt”.
Several Brazilian officials also had visas revoked and the Supreme Court judge overseeing the coup trial was slapped with human rights sanctions.
Brasília stood its ground, however, and following Bolsonaro’s conviction alongside former government ministers and top military figures in September, the US lifted a number of the measures.
The visa cancellation comes as the Lula administration has been trying to arrange a visit for the president to meet his counterpart in Washington.
“We need to stop this paranoia that someone is coming here [to Brazil] to interfere,” Flávio Bolsonaro told reporters outside a hospital in Brasília, where his 70-year-old father was transferred to intensive care on Friday with pneumonia.
Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington
