Brazilian president says he has ‘forbidden’ Trump adviser from visiting country

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has said he has “forbidden” one of Donald Trump’s advisers from visiting the South American country in retaliation for his health minister being denied a US visa.

Darren Beattie, a far-right political strategist who was recently tapped for a senior advisory role on Brazil, had reportedly hoped to use a trip to the country to visit the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup to stop Lula taking power after the 2022 election. Beattie is a longstanding critic of Brazil’s judiciary and president and once called the moderate leftwing leader a representative of “the most destructive and corrosive version” of communism.

On Friday, after a supreme court judge refused Beattie permission to visit the incarcerated politician, Lula announced he had given orders for the Trump aide’s visa to be revoked.

“That American guy who said he was coming here to visit Bolsonaro, he’s been barred from visiting and I have forbidden him from coming to Brazil so long as they don’t free up the visa of my health minister, which has been blocked,” Lula said during an event at a trauma centre in Rio de Janeiro.

Last year, as Donald Trump piled pressure on Brazil’s government and judiciary over Bolsonaro’s coup trial, the health minister, Alexandre Padilha, was refused a US visa and the minister’s wife and 10-year-old daughter were stripped of theirs. In an interview with the Guardian at the time, Padilha called that decision an “astonishing absurdity” and a “diplomatic abuse”.

“You can be sure you’re being protected,” Lula told Padilha on Friday as he announced that he was hitting back by preventing Trump’s aide from flying to Brazil.

The move exposed the many frictions that remain between Washington and Brasília, despite the relative rapprochement between Trump and Lula towards the end of last year. Relations plunged to their lowest point in years as a result of Trump’s pressure campaign of tariffs and sanctions targeting officials such as Padilha. But after the two presidents met at the UN last September, the atmosphere improved, with Trump hailing the “‘great chemistry” between them.

Lula is due to visit Washington to meet Trump in the coming weeks, although the trip was reportedly pushed back as a result of the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

A Brazilian diplomatic source told Agence France-Presse that Beattie’s visa had been revoked on Friday due to “lies about the purpose of the visit”.

Bolsonaro was reportedly taken to hospital from prison early on Friday after coming down with pneumonia.

Beattie was a White House speechwriter during Trump’s first administration but was reportedly fired after attending a gathering of white supremacists.

On the eve of Brazil’s 2022 election, which Bolsonaro lost to Lula and was convicted of trying to rig and overturn, Beattie cast the vote as a battle between “exactly the kind of nationalism that all of us want and support” and Lula’s supposedly “corrosive” brand of communism.

“The stakes are incredibly high in this election … it could be a turning point for global politics,” he told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.