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Recently, Brazil voted in an election that matters far beyond its borders. The leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is reported to be neck and neck with Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. A first round on Sunday is to be followed by a runoff on 25 October. Brazil is South America’s largest country and its biggest economy, and the result will show whether the rightward drift of Latin American politics has reached its biggest prize, and, just as important, what has been driving that drift.
The Trump administration has made the Western Hemisphere a stated priority. Its national security strategy speaks of restoring “American preeminence” in the region and of rewarding governments and movements “broadly aligned with our principles and strategy”. The practice has matched the language. Washington arranged a $40bn rescue package for Argentina, reportedly tied to the electoral fortunes of President Javier Milei’s party. It has imposed personal sanctions on Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, and publicly called him an “illegal drug leader”. It carried out an operation in Venezuela that brought President Nicolás Maduro to the United States, after which the State Department published an image of Trump under the slogan “This is OUR hemisphere”.
The political results look favourable to the White House. Over roughly the past 18 months, seven rightwing or far-right candidates have won presidential elections in the region, and in most cases Trump openly backed the winner. “Lots of people that I got elected”, he said last month. A Bolsonaro victory in Brazil would be the most visible addition to that list.
Brazil is the case where US involvement has been most direct and most controversial. Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, refused to accept defeat in 2022, and his supporters stormed government buildings. Investigators later described a wide conspiracy to keep him in power, including a draft decree to overturn the result with military backing and a plot to kill Lula, his running mate and a supreme court judge. Bolsonaro and several allies, among them a former defence minister and the navy chief, were put on trial. He was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Washington intervened on his behalf. In July 2025 Trump threatened a 50% tariff on all Brazilian imports and called the prosecution a “witch hunt”. This year, as the campaign began, a new 25% tariff on some Brazilian goods followed, and the State Department tried to send two officials to examine “electoral integrity”. Brazil refused them visas, saying they had come to “meddle in Brazil’s elections”.
The effect appears to have been the reverse of what Washington intended. Lula refused to bow, the trial went ahead and his poll ratings rose. His campaign now presents Flávio Bolsonaro as “Trump’s candidate” and says the US president wants “to colonise Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust”. One analyst, Brian Winter of Americas Quarterly, summed up the dynamic with the joke that Lula’s most effective surrogate is Trump. In a country with a long tradition of sensitivity about foreign interference, visible American backing can work as a liability.
The pattern elsewhere supports that caution. In Peru and Chile, the Trump-aligned candidates avoided seeking his endorsement, apparently judging that it would cost more votes than it won. In Bolivia, the long-governing MAS collapsed to 3.16% of the vote after two decades of increasingly chaotic rule, a failure that owed little to anyone abroad. Claiming credit for all of this is easy, but proving that US pressure decided any of these results is much harder.
A more convincing explanation is insecurity. Organised crime, much of it linked to drug trafficking, has expanded across the continent. The International Crisis Group has warned that although such crime has been a regional problem for decades, “never has it spread so wide, and rarely has it penetrated so deeply into states and communities”. Voters facing gang violence tend to reward whoever promises order, and incumbents on the left who could not deliver have paid for it.
The model that many candidates now cite is El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. His mass arrests, tens of thousands of them mostly without legal process, have cost the country democratic safeguards and drawn human-rights criticism. They have also been followed, by his account, by a transformation from one of the world’s most violent countries to one of its safest. That claim carries enormous political appeal, whatever its costs, and a style that might be called security populism has spread: tough-on-crime language, military solutions and a willingness to trade civil liberties for results.
Flávio Bolsonaro has built his campaign on it. “We’re going to give the streets back to the Brazilian people”, he has said, promising to lower the age of criminal responsibility and to chemically castrate rapists. The programme is unlikely to be tested in full, since many of these measures would face constitutional and legal obstacles, but as a message it is simple and strong.
Washington’s real leverage lies here. In May the United States designated two Brazilian criminal groups, the Red Command and the First Capital Command (PCC), as terrorist organisations. This put Lula in an awkward position. The designation lets his opponent accuse him of weakness on crime, and it frames security as a matter of international confrontation, not of domestic policing. Lula has spoken of pursuing the crime boss “who lives in a penthouse”, but he appears happier talking about health and education.
The stakes of the outcome go beyond rhetoric. A Bolsonaro government would almost certainly join the Shield of the Americas, a coalition of 18 rightwing Latin American and Caribbean heads of state that pledges to use “lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks”. With Brazil inside, the grouping would cover most of the continent’s population and economic weight, and could give legal and political cover to more military action against criminal groups in the region.
A Lula win. It would confirm that the right’s advance is not automatic and that incumbents can win by mobilising sovereigntist feeling against US pressure. It would complicate Trump’s claim to a hemispheric sweep, though it would not solve the security problem that helped the right elsewhere.
A Bolsonaro win. It would give Washington its largest regional ally and probably bring Brazil into the security coalition. It would also raise questions about the family’s record on democratic norms and about whether Brazil’s institutions, which convicted the former president, would remain as willing to hold power to account.
A narrow runoff. The most likely outcome, given the polling, is a close contest into late October, in which both campaigns try to hold their base while reaching undecided voters. Interference will be a central theme, and any new American move could prove decisive in either direction.
The deeper point is that the shift in Latin American politics may outlast the individuals involved. If voters continue to see gangs as the central threat, and believe that only hard-line candidates have an answer, then the right’s position will be fairly independent of who sits in the White House. Washington’s role looks more like an accelerant than a cause: it can raise the salience of crime and sharpen the choice, but it also risks handing the left its best argument. Whichever candidate prevails, the election will say less about American power than about whether Latin America’s governments, left or right, can show citizens that security is possible without surrendering the democratic institutions that the region fought hard to rebuild.
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