Jair Bolsonaro threatened Joe Biden: “When it’s over …

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro assured that “diplomacy is not enough” over warnings from US President-elect Joe Biden who assured him that he would impose trade and economic sanctions on the South American country if he did not end the brutal fires in the Amazon. To leave no doubt about the tone of your message, Bolsonaro said at an event with local businessmen that “when the saliva ends, you need gunpowder”. The president of Brazil is one of the few heads of state in the world who has yet to congratulate Biden on his victory in the US presidential elections.

“We recently saw a great candidate for head of state say that if I don’t put out the fire in the Amazon, he will remove trade barriers against Brazil. How are we going to handle this?”Bolsonaro wondered as he watched his Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo at an official ceremony in Brasilia.

Not to mention Biden, Bolsonaro has sought in his own way to be adamant in preserving Brazil’s sovereignty over the Amazon. “Diplomacy is not enough. When the saliva is used up, there must be gunpowder. You don’t even need to use gunpowder, but you should know that there is“, warned the president, who has a friendly relationship with Donald Trump and He is one of the few leaders in the world who has yet to recognize the election victory of Joe Biden and his vice, Kamala Harris.

During the first presidential debate with Trump on September 30, Biden said Brazil must end the “destruction” of the Amazon, otherwise it could face “significant economic consequences”. The President-elect of the United States has thus collected one of the flags of the most progressive sector of the Democratic Party (represented in figures of the caliber of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), like the Green New Deal.

Biden announced that he would speak with other countries to offer the Bolsonaro government the sum of 20 billion dollars in order to put an end to the deforestation ravaging the Amazon. Already at the beginning of March, the elected president had declared in an interview with the magazine Americas Quarterly that Bolsonaro should be aware that “if Brazil is not a responsible guardian of the Amazon rainforest”, it would be his future government in the White House who would be responsible for “global support to ensure environmental protection”.

Brazilian president reacted immediately to these statements and he warned that he “does not accept” bribes, demarcations or unfounded threats “. He also claimed that “some do not understand that Brazil has changed”, that the country’s sovereignty “is not negotiable”, and called Biden’s statement “regrettable”.

Bolsonaro, a far-right leader ideologically aligned with Trump, has repeatedly said during the election campaign that he supports the re-election of the US president and until now has not commented on Biden’s clear election victory, which he continues to call a ‘candidate’ without even naming him.

In the same government act in which he threatened the President-elect of the United States, Bolsonaro called for homophobia to refer to the coronavirus pandemic. “Everything is now a pandemic, we have to end it. I’m sorry for the dead, I’m sorry. We’ll all die someday, here we’re all gonna die. There is no point in running away from it, running away from reality. They must stop being a country of queers», Declared the president at the Planalto Palace, seat of the federal government.

“You went to the ground in this pandemic, which was oversized,” Bolsonaro told businessmen in the tourism sector, referring to the severe blow the industry has suffered around the world due to health restrictions. Covid-19 has already left more than 162,000 deaths and 5.7 million positive cases in Brazil. The country ranks second in number of deaths and third in number of infections worldwide, although analysts and researchers insist a high number of cases have yet to be notified.