Echoes of cold war as US accused of meddling in another Brazilian election

The year was 1962 and the Kennedy administration was desperate to swing Brazil’s congressional elections against its leftwing president, João Goulart, as a way of countering the supposed communist threat sweeping a region the US considered its back yard.Historians say that in the lead-up to the vote, the CIA and the Department of State secretly channelled millions of dollars to opposition candidates and a group tasked with spreading rightwing propaganda and stirring up unrest.Chico Rubens Paiva, 38, an activist whose grandfather investigated US meddling in Brazilian politics in the 1960s. Photograph: João Laet/The Guardian“There was a very heavy-handed intervention here by the US government,” said Chico Rubens Paiva, a political activist whose congressman grandfather Rubens Paiva investigated Washington’s meddling during a 1963 parliamentary inquiry into the conspiracy.More than six decades later, Paiva, whose grandfather was murdered by the US-backed dictatorship that seized power in 1964, is among those who fear history is repeating itself on the eve of Brazil’s 2026 presidential election.Rubens Paiva, a civil engineer and politician who was murdered by the military dictatorship in Brazil. Photograph: Family handoutOctober’s vote will pit the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, against the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Donald Trump ally who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a military coup.Polls suggest a tight race and Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have been accused of trying to tip the scales in Bolsonaro’s favour by launching an overt campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure against Lula.The US measures include imposing 25% tariffs on most Brazilian imports and designating Brazil’s biggest crime groups – Rio’s Red Command and São Paulo’s First Command of the Capital – as foreign terrorist organisations. Brazilian officials suspect this is partly designed to boost Bolsonaro by making Lula look soft on crime.In July, Lula said two Trump officials had been denied entry visas because they planned “to meddle in Brazil’s ​elections”. Brazilian officials believe the pair, who reportedly planned to meet Flávio Bolsonaro, intended to sow doubt about the reliability of Brazil’s internationally respected voting system – something the Bolsonaros have sought to do repeatedly. Soon after, the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to Washington was revoked.Celso Rocha de Barros, a political scientist and podcast pundit, voiced bewilderment that US interference – which he considered the election’s most urgent theme – was not getting more coverage in mainstream media.“The greatest superpower in human history is explicitly backing a candidate in our election and is strangling the Brazilian economy in order to help him [win],” Barros claimed. “We cannot pretend that this isn’t happening and treat this like a normal election … the Brazilian economy is under attack.”Trump’s tactics have echoes of Washington’s cold war-era attempt to manipulate Brazilian politics in the lead-up to the 1964 coup, which ushered in two decades of authoritarian rule in which hundreds of people were killed or disappeared.Back then, the CIA helped finance the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action, which, according to the historians Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, illegally poured money into the campaigns of hundreds of lawmakers and eight gubernatorial candidates. “The objective was strategic: to create a strong opposition in congress, block government initiatives and prepare the way for a coup d’état,” Schwarcz and Starling argued in their book Brazil: A Biography.Another US-funded group, the Research and Social Studies Institute, was used to disrupt Goulart’s government by bankrolling anti-communist propaganda and anti-government protests. James N Green, a Brown University historian who has written a book about the period, said: “The intention [was] getting rid of Goulart [and] opening the door to the military coming to power.”Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, at a campaign rally in Rio de Janeiro. The leftwinger faces a tight re-election battle in October. Photograph: Xinhua/ShutterstockGreen sees parallels between Trump’s use of tariffs to sabotage Lula’s campaign and how in the early 60s Washington sought to enfeeble Goulart’s government by funding his opponents and cutting off loans. Then, as now, the US government was “bent on doing everything possible to weaken the government” in Brazil.But Barros sees one key difference between the two US gambits. “[The 1962 campaign] was done covertly, precisely because the CIA knew there would be real public anger in Brazil if people knew the US was bankrolling candidates. So they did it secretly,” he said. “Today, this is being done openly – and on an incomparably larger scale.”The Department of State rejected claims the US was seeking to meddle in Brazil’s election. “Any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie,” an official said in a statement.“We respect the Brazilian people and whatever government that they choose freely through free and fair elections in Brazil. We’ve respected and dealt with governments from both sides of the spectrum in Brazil, and had very successful relationships with them.”Last year Trump was accused of meddling in the politics of neighbouring Argentina after he threw his weight behind its rightwing president, Javier Milei, on the eve of crucial midterm elections. Milei recently attended Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign launch in Brazil, using his speech to lambaste Lula as a “thief”.Donald Trump with Marco Rubio in Washington. The pair are accused of waging economic war against Brazil to influence its presidential election. Photograph: Elizabeth Frantz/ReutersGreen believes two strategic objectives lie behind the Brazilian pressure campaign being waged by Trump and by Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, who has made toppling Cuba’s communist government a personal project.Firstly, it is designed to weaken and delegitimise Lula’s government, making it harder for Brazil, Latin America’s largest democracy, to challenge the US economic asphyxiation campaign against Cuba.Secondly, it is about “neutralising” leftwing forces in Latin America more generally and boosting the right in the hope of helping to elect even more Trump-aligned leaders. Since 2023, a succession of radical rightwing populists have won power in Argentina and Chile, Costa Rica and Colombia. In reference to Trump’s tangerine complexion, this has been nicknamed Latin America’s “orange wave”.Paiva is running for a seat in Brazil’s congress in the 2026 elections. Photograph: João Laet/The GuardianPaiva, 38, believes US interference is intended to have a similar effect to the abduction of Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro – strengthening “American dominance” in a region it considers a US sphere of influence.Maduro’s removal in January allowed the US to impose a pliant successor, his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has started opening up the South American country to US oil and mining firms. Paiva believes Bolsonaro’s election will “serve the same purpose: putting people into power who will serve their interests”.He fears that as election day draws near, US social media companies could enter the fray, potentially giving Bolsonaro another lift. “Any kind of change to the algorithm has a brutal impact in the way information reaches people,” warned Paiva, who is running for a seat in congress in the election for the centre-left Brazilian Socialist party. He highlighted “the scary lurch the Silicon Valley bros” had taken into Trump’s camp during his second term.Barros is convinced the US aims to help elect Flávio Bolsonaro, “because Flávio will give them everything they want”, he said. “Flávio will make a rare earths deal no other president would. Flávio will let American big techs do whatever they like in Brazil. Flávio will reduce economic relations with China as much as he can.” He noted that Bolsonaro supporters attended rallies carrying US flags.Barros believes the campaign’s real driving force is not Trump but Rubio, who hopes to bolster a possible 2028 presidential run by showing voters he has “delivered the whole of Latin America to American interests”.“The fact is, this is an election between Lula and Marco Rubio,” Barros said.