US President Donald Trump has said that he is seriously looking at NATO membership or some other formal alliance with Brazil as he welcomed Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to the White House on Tuesday.
Bolsonaro made an unusual trip to the CIA headquarters yesterday, the first day of his trip to the US during which he hopes to articulate a pro-US stance and to expand trade ties and diplomatic cooperation.
Brazil’s president was one of the first to throw his support behind Venezuela’s pro-US opposition leader Juan Guaido after Trump declared support for him in January.
Ahead of Bolsonaro’s trip, a senior Trump administraion official touted the “historic remaking” of the US-Brazil relationship to McClatchy.
Bolsonaro endorsed Trump’s southern border wall and immigration policy in an interview with Fox News on Monday night and echoed Trump’s own rhetoric, saying that the “vast majority” of potential immigrants “do not have good intentions.”
“They do not intend to do the best or do good to the US people,” he said.
The right-wing leader, who rose to the presidency after an anti-establishment campaign modelled on Trump’s own 2016 candidacy, has been branded the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ by some media.
“I’m willing to open my heart up to [Trump] and do whatever is good, to the benefit of both the Brazilian and the American people,” he told Fox.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been an outspoken critic of Bolsonaro and who lives in Brazil, tweeted on Monday that during his time reporting on the infamous Edward Snowden files, he was repeatedly “warned” that the CIA’s largest permanent presence is in Brazil due to the intelligence agency’s Cold War activities, including its role in helping to overthrow Brazil’s democratically elected government in 1964.