Foreign navy visited Varginha 47 times between 1996 and 2003

The compiled record draws on travel vouchers, per-diem reimbursement filings, and rental car invoices that were released as part of an unrelated audit response. Forty-seven distinct trips were taken by uniformed personnel from the same foreign naval office to the Minas Gerais region across the seven year window covered by the audit.

All forty-seven trips depart and return through the same regional airfield, which has no routine military traffic. Thirty-one of the trips are scheduled to begin or end on a date within seven days of January 20.

Three cover programs are cited across the forty-seven trips: an agricultural exchange, a meteorological cooperation initiative, and a cultural liaison program. None of the three programs has any corresponding record at the named Brazilian host institution. Two of the three programs have no record of existing in any foreign agency database.

The third program — the meteorological one — is real, but its published travel calendar for the same period does not include any of the trips listed in the audit response.

The audit covers only the seven years 1996 through 2003 because the requesting auditor did not extend the window. We do not know whether the visits stopped in 2003 or whether the recordkeeping changed. The personnel named in the vouchers have either retired or transferred out of the office; only one is reachable. He does not return correspondence.