- Brazilian and US trade negotiators plan an in-person meeting on the sidelines of the G20 industry and trade ministers' gathering in Milwaukee on September 30 and October 1.
- Two separate US tariffs — 25% and 12.5% — are currently on the table, but they followed an earlier, larger 50% tariff that a US court has already blocked, though the White House quietly kept its legal groundwork alive.
- The talks land just four days before Brazilians vote in a presidential first round pitting Lula against Flávio Bolsonaro, with a regional oil boom adding a new layer of leverage to the dispute.
A negotiating channel reopens in Wisconsin
Brazil's Minister of Development, Industry, Trade and Services, Márcio Elias Rosa, has confirmed he plans to travel to the United States to hold an in-person session with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer during the G20's industry and trade ministers' meeting, scheduled for September 30 and October 1 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That gathering is a sub-ministerial session, distinct from the full G20 leaders' summit the US is hosting at a Trump-owned resort in Doral, Florida, in December. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira is expected to join Elias Rosa for the trip. "The expectation, on our side and the USTR's, is that we'll hold an in-person meeting there," Elias Rosa told reporters this week, describing it as the centerpiece of an otherwise packed G20 schedule.
The renewed contact traces back to an August 21 phone call between Presidents Lula and Trump that ran roughly 80 minutes, followed on August 31 by a working session between Elias Rosa and Greer that Brazilian officials described as lasting about 40 minutes.
What's actually being negotiated — and what the headline tariff figures leave out
The two surcharges up for discussion in Milwaukee are narrower than they might sound, and newer than a lot of coverage of the "trade war" implies. In July 2026, the Office of the US Trade Representative rolled out a 25% surcharge tied to a Section 301 investigation into Brazilian practices Washington calls unfair — including the operation of the PIX instant-payments system, anti-corruption enforcement, intellectual-property rules and Amazon deforestation — effective July 22. A second, separate Section 301 measure tied to a forced-labor review added a 12.5% surcharge three days later; Brazil drew that top rate while 19 other economies were assessed a lower 10% charge, since Washington judged Brazil had not adequately banned forced-labor imports.
What that reporting often skips is where the fight started. In July 2025, Trump moved to impose a much larger, across-the-board 50% tariff on Brazilian goods, invoking emergency powers and explicitly linking the move to what he called unfair treatment of former President Jair Bolsonaro, then on trial for plotting a coup. That 50% tariff took effect that August — but the US Supreme Court ruled in February 2026 that the law Trump used, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, doesn't authorize sweeping tariffs like that, suspending the charge. Even so, the White House renewed the underlying national-emergency declaration for another year in late July, and Brazilian fact-checkers have had to repeatedly knock down claims that the tariff was scrapped outright — it remains legally frozen, not repealed, and Bolsonaro allies in Washington continue pressing for it, or something like it, to be revived. The 25% and 12.5% charges now being negotiated rest on the separate, still-valid Section 301 authority, which is why they survived where the bigger tariff didn't.
Washington has carved out roughly 2,100 Brazilian products from the 25% surcharge — coffee, beef, orange juice, crude oil, pig iron, pharmaceuticals and aerospace parts among them — after industry groups on both sides of the border argued Washington had little alternative domestic supply for many of the goods involved.
Brasília holds the line on digital sovereignty
Lula's government has repeatedly ruled out putting PIX — the free, wildly popular instant-payment network run by the central bank — on the table, treating it as a matter of national sovereignty rather than trade policy. Rather than shutting down talks altogether, Brazil is running two tracks at once: continuing the Milwaukee diplomacy while activating the countermeasure process under its Economic Reciprocity Law, sanctioned in 2025, which lets the trade board Camex restrict imports or suspend patent and royalty protections against countries that impose unilateral sanctions on Brazil. That process opened in mid-August and, separately, Brazil has said it will take the tariff dispute to the World Trade Organization's dispute-settlement system.
An election four days later
The Milwaukee meeting lands just ahead of Brazil's October 4 first-round vote, in which Lula is seeking an unprecedented fourth, non-consecutive term at age 80. His main challenger is Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who is running with the direct blessing of his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro — now behind bars on a 27-year sentence for his role in the plot to overturn Brazil's 2022 election, and barred from running himself. The overlap between the trade fight and the Bolsonaro family's push to unseat Lula gives the Milwaukee talks a political charge that goes beyond tariff schedules.
The tariff fight isn't unfolding in isolation from a broader shift in hemispheric energy. Brazil's crude oil output hit a record annual average of 3.77 million barrels a day in 2025, a 12.3% jump from 2024, according to Brazil's national petroleum agency data reported by Rio Times Online — an important distinction, since the widely repeated claim that Brazil "topped five million barrels a day" in 2025 actually refers to combined oil-and-natural-gas output, not crude oil alone. This growth cements Brazil's position alongside Guyana and Argentina as the main engines of South America's production increase.
That regional buildout coincides with Washington's own push to fold Venezuela's oil sector back into the hemisphere's supply picture, months after US forces captured President Nicolás Maduro in a January raid and his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was installed as acting head of state. A senior US energy official told S&P Global Commodity Insights that the Western Hemisphere now supplies roughly a third of the world's crude and called reviving Venezuelan output one of the administration's signature energy projects. Brazil's crude has so far stayed off the US tariff list entirely — one of the few pieces of the relationship Washington hasn't touched.
What comes next
Technical teams on both sides are still trading documents to firm up the Milwaukee agenda, and officials on both sides caution that no draft agreement exists yet. Brazil wants to widen the exemption list further and shrink the impact on exporters; the US has signaled the tariffs could be revisited if Brazil changes the practices cited in the original investigations. With the first-round vote just days away, neither government has much room to let the dispute drift past October without some kind of signal — even if it falls short of a full resolution.
