Report: Democrats Block Arms Sales to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Greenlight Sales to Saudi Arabia

President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro speaks during a farewell ceremony for outgoing minister
Andressa Anholete/Getty Images

Reuters reported Monday that Democrat lawmakers have stalled a $100-million sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Brazil over worries about Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s “Trump-like questioning of voting integrity ahead of Brazil’s Oct. 2 election.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration last week cleared a $3 billion Patriot missile sale to Saudi Arabia — the nation President Joe Biden vowed to make into an outlawed and shunned international “pariah” during his 2020 campaign.

According to Reuters, the sale of about 220 Javelin missiles was negotiated in the last year of the Trump administration and approved by the Biden State Department late last year. The deal, which has not been revealed to the public, was then “slow-walked” by congressional Democrats to “send a message to Bolsonaro and his military.”

The Javelin missile is a very hot defense product at the moment, after performing extremely well against Russian armor on the battlefields of Ukraine. One of the slow-walking tactics deployed against the sale involves questioning why Brazil would need such weapons, although the State Department seems comfortable with allowing the purchase to go forward.

Ukrainian servicemen load a truck with the FGM-148 Javelin, an American man-portable anti-tank missile provided by the U.S. to Ukraine as part of military support, upon its delivery at Kyiv’s airport Boryspil on February 11, 2022, amid the crisis linked with the threat of Russia’s invasion. (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

“There are those within State working levels who have expressed reservations about this sale given Bolsonaro’s actions and rhetoric and certain past actions of Brazil’s military and security services. Such concerns are not shared among Defense Department officials nor State leadership,” a U.S. government source told Reuters.

The holdup appears to be coming mainly from Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), two powerful committee chairs who seem intent on delaying the Javelin sale until after the Brazilian presidential election, which Bolsonaro seems likely to lose, although his left-wing opponent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s lead narrowed slightly in the latest polls.

Bolsonaro has suggested giving the Brazilian military a role in supervising the October election or counting the ballots, and some military officials have indicated support for the idea.  

Last Tuesday, the Biden State Department cleared Saudi Arabia to purchase 300 Patriot missiles and their support hardware from Raytheon Technologies, a deal valued at over $3 billion.

The missiles are expressly intended to defend Saudi Arabia from attacks by the Houthis, the Iran-backed insurgency that overthrew the legitimate government of Yemen in 2014. The Houthis have attacked Saudi civilian targets with drones and missiles because Saudi Arabia led a regional coalition to intervene in the Yemeni civil war and restore the deposed government.  

Biden broke from the Trump administration by refusing to back the Saudis against the Houthis. One of Biden’s first acts in office was removing the Houthis from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations, a decision Biden has refused to review even after years of unrelenting Houthi violence against civilians. 

“The arms sale to Saudi Arabia comes after years of rocky relations between Washington and Riyadh over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, with then-candidate Joe Biden pledging in 2019 to make the country a ‘pariah’ on the international stage. In February of last year, Biden banned U.S. offensive weapons sales to Riyadh,” DefenseNews recalled last week.

The Biden State Department also approved a $2.2 billion sale of defensive missiles to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s partner in the Yemen intervention.

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