{"id":143834,"date":"2025-08-14T01:27:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T01:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/143834\/"},"modified":"2025-08-14T01:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T01:27:11","slug":"lula-announces-5-5-billion-credit-lifeline-for-brazilian-exporters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/143834\/","title":{"rendered":"Lula announces $5.5 billion credit lifeline for Brazilian exporters"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAO PAULO (AP) \u2014 The Brazilian government on Wednesday unveiled a plan to support local companies affected by a 50% tariff imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump<\/a> on several of the country\u2019s exports. <\/p>\n

Dubbed \u201cSovereign Brazil,\u201d the plan provides for a credit lifeline of 30 billion reais ($5.5 billion), among other measures.<\/p>\n

Hours later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions against at least two Brazilian officials, in a move the South American nation\u2019s health minister rebuked. <\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva<\/a> described the plan, which includes a bill to be sent to Congress, as a first step to help local exporters. The leftist leader, whose poll numbers have gone up since the tariffs against his country were announced, once again said he and Trump have never spoken, and claimed the American president does not want to negotiate.<\/p>\n

Top congressional leaders attended Wednesday\u2019s ceremony at the presidential palace in Brasilia, a first in months, in a sign of growing political support for Lula in response to Trump.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s plan<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s measures include postponing tax charges for companies affected by U.S. tariffs, providing 5 billion reais ($930,000) in tax credits to small- and medium-sized companies until the end of 2026, and expanding access to insurance against cancelled orders. <\/p>\n

The plan also incentivizes public purchases of items that could not be exported to the U.S.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s government is also granting a one-year extension of tax credits for companies that import items so they can produce goods for exportation. That mechanism is called \u201cdrawback.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot be scared, nervous and anxious when there is a crisis. A crisis is for us to create new things,\u201d Lula said. \u201cIn this case, what is unpleasant is that the reasons given to impose sanctions against Brazil do not exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has tied the 50% tariff on many imported Brazilian goods<\/a> to the judicial situation of his embattled ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro<\/a>, who is currently under house arrest.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s president added that \u201cfor now\u201d he will not use the country\u2019s reciprocity law to impose higher tariffs on American imports coming to Brazil.<\/p>\n

Ricardo Alban, the chairman of the Brazilian industry confederation, said he hopes \u201cthis plan is behind us as quickly as possible.\u201d He described it as \u201cpalliative, but necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing justifies us being on the lowest of tariffs to going to the highest of tariffs,\u201d Alban said.<\/p>\n

Economy or politics?<\/p>\n

Trump has repeated a narrative pushed by Bolsonaro\u2019s allies, which claims the former Brazilian president\u2019s prosecution for attempting to overturn his 2022 election loss<\/a> is part of a \u201cdeliberate breakdown in the rule of law,\u201d with the government engaging in \u201cpolitically motivated intimidation\u201d and committing \u201chuman rights abuses.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cOur American friends, every time they decide to fight with someone, they try to create an image of a devil against the people they want to fight with,\u201d added Lula, who pledged to find markets to buy Brazilian goods that will not go to the U.S. <\/p>\n

Lula repeated on Wednesday that Brazil\u2019s judiciary is independent<\/a>. The executive branch, which manages foreign relations, has no control over Supreme Court justices, who in turn have stated they won\u2019t yield to political pressure. Bolsonaro\u2019s trial is expected to come to the sentencing phase sometime between September and October.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf what happened at the Capitol (the U.S. riots on Jan. 6, 2021) had happened in Brazil, he (Trump) would be on trial here too,\u201d Lula said.<\/p>\n

Earlier in August, Justice Alexandre de Moraes<\/a>, who oversees the case against Bolsonaro, was sanctioned under the U.S. Magnitsky Act<\/a>, which is supposed to target serious human rights offenders. De Moraes has argued that defendants were granted full due process.<\/p>\n

Rubio\u2019s response<\/p>\n

Only hours after Lula\u2019s plan was announced, Rubio said the U.S. would \u201crestrict visa issuance to Cuban and complicit third-country government officials and individuals responsible for Cuba\u2019s exploitative labor export program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rubio said on X that the Brazilian government program \u201cMore Doctors,\u201d which was started in 2013 with thousands of Cuban doctors spreading nationwide, was \u201can unconscionable diplomatic scam of foreign \u2018medical missions.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s Health Minister Alexandre Padilha, who was in the same job when the program was founded, later said the initiative \u201cwill survive to unjustifiable attacks from no matter who.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis program saves lives and it is approved by those who matter most: the Brazilian people,\u201d Padilha said. \u201cWe will not bow to those who are against vaccines, against research, against science and now against two key people in my first tenure as health minister, Mozart Sales and Alberto Kleiman (who had their U.S. visas revoked).\u201d<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s government says the initiative currently has almost 25,000 medical professionals operating, but did not provide figures on how many of those are Cuban.<\/p>\n

Lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, a son of the former president who is seeking amnesty for his father and others implicated in the alleged coup plot, praised the U.S government. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis measure is a clear message: neither ministers, nor lower-tier bureaucrats nor their family members are immune. Sooner or later, everyone who contributed to support those (autocratic) regimes will answer for what they did \u2014 and there will be no place to hide,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Earlier, Brazil\u2019s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said that his country \u201cis being sanctioned for being more democratic than its aggressor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will face, as we have, many difficult situations and we shall overcome,\u201d Haddad said. \u201cThis one comes from the outside, but unfortunately it has the support of radicalized sections of Brazil\u2019s society.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow AP\u2019s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/latin-america<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAO PAULO (AP) \u2014 The Brazilian government on Wednesday unveiled a plan to support local companies affected by…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":143835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[85352,68081,85351,85350,4214,19207,64,1613,57214,85353,69,12042,79,68082,66914,57,86,13790,39155,1612,4215,410,80,85354,4217,16618,618,67,132,68,93,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-143834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-alberto-kleiman","9":"tag-alexandre-de-moraes","10":"tag-alexandre-padilha","11":"tag-brasilia","12":"tag-brazil","13":"tag-brazil-government","14":"tag-business","15":"tag-central-america","16":"tag-cuba","17":"tag-cuba-government","18":"tag-donald-trump","19":"tag-economic-policy","20":"tag-economy","21":"tag-eduardo-bolsonaro","22":"tag-fernando-haddad","23":"tag-general-news","24":"tag-government-policy","25":"tag-international-trade","26":"tag-jair-bolsonaro","27":"tag-latin-america","28":"tag-luiz-incio-lula-da-silva","29":"tag-marco-rubio","30":"tag-politics","31":"tag-ricardo-alban","32":"tag-south-america","33":"tag-tariffs-and-global-trade","34":"tag-taxes","35":"tag-united-states","36":"tag-unitedstates","37":"tag-us","38":"tag-washington-news","39":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}