By Luciana Magalhaes
BRASILIA (Reuters) -With dark jeans pulled over an ankle monitor attached just hours earlier, Brazil’s right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro made clear on Friday that the humiliation of court-ordered restraints would not curb his role in global politics.
In a defiant interview with Reuters at his party’s offices, raided at dawn in the latest crackdown from the Supreme Court, Bolsonaro cast himself as the man to renegotiate U.S. tariffs, curb Chinese influence and beat back leftists in Brazil.
“They want to get me out of the political game next year,” he said, referring to an election in which President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is set to seek a fourth term. “Without me in the race, Lula could beat anyone.”
Even after Brazil’s Supreme Court barred him on Friday from contact with foreign officials, the ex-president insisted he wants to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, who slapped a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods last week and demanded an end to Bolsonaro’s trial for trying to overturn the last election.
While some allies worry Trump’s tactic is backfiring, tying Bolsonaro to the economic fallout and rallying support behind Lula, the ex-president remained supportive of his ally in the White House.
“I would never give advice to Trump. Who am I? I respect him,” said Bolsonaro, seated at a table with two volumes within reach: a copy of the Brazilian constitution and a magazine with Trump on the cover. “His country is an example for us. We’re not an example for them.”
In court orders on Friday, based on allegations that Bolsonaro had courted Trump’s intervention in legal matters, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes slapped the ex-president with a curfew and ankle monitor and banned him from using social media, approaching foreign embassies or dealing with foreign officials.
Bolsonaro called Moraes a “dictator” and described the latest court orders as acts of “cowardice.”
“I feel supreme humiliation,” he said, when asked how it felt to wear the ankle monitor. “I am 70 years old, I was president of the republic for four years.”
Bolsonaro denied any plans to leave the country, but said he would meet with Trump if he could get back his passport, which police seized last year. He also said he wanted to discuss Trump’s tariff threat with the top U.S. diplomat in Brazil.
Trump has praised Bolsonaro, but told journalists this week that he is “not like a friend.” When pressed for details of their relationship, the Brazilian former army captain began describing the advance of Chinese interests in Latin America.
“China is taking over Brazil. Many see that in Brazil I am the person who can stop China, as long as I have a warlike, nuclear nation behind me. Which one? Up north,” he said.
He said the BRICS bloc of developing nations, formed originally by Brazil, Russia, India and China, had become a “brotherhood of dictatorships and war criminals.”
While hosting the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro this month, Lula compared Trump to an unwanted “emperor,” drawing the ire of the U.S. president, who threatened to raise tariffs on the group for its “anti-American policies.”
(Reporting by Luciana Magalhaes; Additional reporting by Gabriel Araujo and Isabel Teles in Sao Paulo; Writing by Brad Haynes; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
