Flávio Bolsonaro nominated as candidate at party convention
Brazil’s Foreign Ministry confirmed Saturday it had denied visas for Riley M. Barnes, an assistant secretary from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and Samuel Samson, a deputy assistant secretary of state, according to the ministry.
Brazil’s government believes the planned delegation is part of a concerted effort by the sons of former President Jair Bolsonaro — including his son Eduardo, who lives in the U.S. — to discredit the elections in case Flávio Bolsonaro loses in October, people close to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told the Wall Street Journal.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brazilian officials said alarm bells went off in the capital Brasília earlier this week when Flávio Bolsonaro told diplomats that the country’s electronic voting machines were produced by the Venezuelan company Smartmatic, insinuating they were vulnerable to fraud. Brazil’s election court has rejected those claims, saying that Smartmatic has never supplied voting machines used in Brazilian elections and that international observers have consistently found the country’s system to be secure.
Four years ago, Jair Bolsonaro summoned dozens of foreign ambassadors to the presidential residence to question the integrity of Brazil’s electronic voting system — which the Wall Street Journal described as a defining moment in his campaign to discredit the elections that would later see him banned from politics and then jailed.
Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup ahead of the last presidential election. Jailed in November last year and later released to house arrest because of health complications stemming from the 2018 stabbing that nearly killed him, Bolsonaro was barred from taking part in his son’s nominating ceremony, even remotely. His party, the Liberal Party, used artificial intelligence to project a video of the former president endorsing his son’s candidacy.
Flávio Bolsonaro was formally nominated as the Liberal Party candidate on Saturday at a party convention attended by Argentine President Javier Milei.
Speaking at his nomination ceremony, Flávio Bolsonaro vowed to carry on his father’s legacy, accusing Brazil’s Supreme Court of working with Lula’s government to restrict freedom of speech, with his father’s imprisonment held up as exhibit A.
“Brazil has been kidnapped, and we are going to free our country from this captivity,” he told cheering crowds.
Milei addressed the gathering, urging conservatives to unite to defeat socialism across the continent.
“Brazil can join the regional transformation that, in recent years, has allowed Latin America to shed its image as a land of romanticized poverty,” Milei said, “and become a synonym for progress.”