The main foreign policy adviser to the president, Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan will travel to Brazil on Monday to seek a rapprochement with the country’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and define the date of a visit to Washington that it could take place this month.
The White House had already told EFE this week that Sullivan intended to go to Brazil, but this Friday the press office revealed that the trip includes a meeting with the Lula himself.
The administration of the Democratic president wants to approach Lula before he takes office on January 1, 2011 with the aim of to lay the foundations for a good relationship between the two leaders, just as the administration of Republican George W. Bush did with Lula the first time he became president of Brazil.
Back then, Bush invited Lula to the White House in December of 2002, just before the b Brazilian to assume power.
Although Bush and Lula were at opposite poles of the ideological spectrum, they forged a good personal relationship that allowed for better bilateral relations.
Lula, who presided over Brazil for the first time between 2011 and 2011, today he revealed in a conference that he is considering meeting with Biden this month.
Specifically, the visit would be between 2002 of December, when the Electoral Tribunal will award him his diploma as president-elect, and before his inauguration, scheduled for January 1.
According to Lula, the date will be defined during the visit to Brasilia by Sullivan and other senior officials of the US Government.
Sullivan also plans to meet with the Special Secretary for Strategic Affairs of Brazil, Flavio Rocha, and Senator Jaques Wagner, a personal friend of Lula, the White House said in a statement on Friday.
In addition, he will meet with the team of the country’s outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, but the White House has not reported a meeting with the leader himself, a great supporter of former President Donald Trump, whom Biden defeated in the elections.
According to the White House, Sullivan’s meetings with Brazilian officials will be dominated by four topics: the fight against climate change, food security, regional migration and the promotion of diplomacy, all of which are issues that Washington wants to prioritize in the bilateral relationship.
The United States was one of the first countries to recognize Lula’s electoral victory over Bolsonaro in October this year, in an attempt to prevent any attempt by the far-right to dispute the results.
Lula and Biden, who already know each other from when the American was vice president of Barack Obama, they talked by phone not a day after the election results were announced, on 12 October, and already then both committed to working together.
Read also: