MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The United States has not received any official requests from the Brazilian government regarding the status of former President Jair Bolsonaro after his supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, the White House said on Monday.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan, with President Joe Biden for a U.S.-Mexico-Canada summit in Mexico City, told reporters it appeared that democratic institutions in Brazil were holding. He said U.S. officials are not in direct contact with Bolsonaro, who is believed to be in suburban Orlando, Florida.
Sullivan said he expected Biden would speak to new Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva about the events in Brasilia in recent days but did not know when that would be.
The United States believes Brazil’s democracy is “strong, resilient and will come through this,” he said.
“We have expressed confidence, because we believe it, that democratic institutions of Brazil will hold, that the will of the people of Brazil will be respected, that freely elected leaders of Brazil will govern Brazil and will not be deterred or knocked off course by the actions of these people who have assaulted the instruments of government in Brasilia,” he said.
Newspaper O Globo reported on Monday that Bolsonaro has been admitted to a hospital in Orlando, Florida, with abdominal pain.
Sullivan had no information about Bolsonaro himself and said Washington had received no official requests regarding the ex-leader’s status in the United States.
“Of course if we did receive such requests, we’d treat them the way we always do, we’d treat them seriously,’ he said.
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Steve Holland; Editing by Mark Porter and Chizu Nomiyama)
