The huge reaction to what André Janones accomplished in this year’s election, both in Brazil and abroad, is more than deserved. By organizing the Lula’s Army channel on WhatsApp, Janones gave the progressive camp an effective social media strategy against the far right. He taught millions of people to act on a hostile battlefield, one defined by the business model of Big Tech. Tied closely to the streets, this cohesive, militant mass movement made possible what had seemed unlikely just weeks earlier.

Congressman André Janones (REDE) with President Lula (photo: Ricardo Stuckert)

There is another lesson, though, and few people have commented on it. The New York Times captured it in a story on Janones: “He is not only a critic of the right, but also of what Brazilians call the ‘caviar left,’ whom he accuses of ‘elitism and intellectual arrogance’ and of alienating the working class.”

The problem is more complicated than it first appears. It calls for a discussion that gets beyond the usual, fragile terms of the culture wars.

First, one of the main strategies of the new right, especially in its origins in the United States, was to denounce what it saw as the moral hypocrisy of people associated with the progressive camp. These were people who claimed egalitarian principles in the abstract but, in practice, especially in cultural disputes, behaved in ways that contradicted them. Quite a few critics of the new right took the same road. Public debate never lacked people who enjoyed, and profited from, pointing a finger at the gap between ideas and practice.

On its own, this argument from the new right, including the far right, never settled the underlying moral conflict. Strictly speaking, saying that a progressive does not live up to what he or she declares does nothing to weaken the normative force of egalitarian principles. It is even worse when the criticism comes from a radical religious right, since that right itself only promises justice and equality after death.

The rhetoric of reaction was not limited to the hypocrisy thesis. Still, the thesis did its job with undeniable success. It carried reactionary rhetoric across classes, from the top of society to the bottom. In other words, it morally and culturally united both a minority that benefits from keeping inequality in place and a mass of people who would have better lives if inequality were reduced.

Why did the reactionary hypocrisy thesis work against the progressive camp? The answer calls for a sociological explanation. When educated middle class people embrace egalitarian causes, they cannot dissolve the force of distinction, no matter how faithful they try to be to their ideas. Every person has to “play” that game to stay in a privileged class position. So the hypocrisy thesis has a material basis: the objective position of middle class progressives in the social structure tends to clash with their political leanings. At the limit, it is the social world, not personal inconsistency, that produces the symptoms of the caviar left. Of course, some people never even think about doing something to reduce the problem.

What does Janones have to do with this? His army of millions is certainly diverse and spans several classes. But for the progressive middle class, gripped by panic over the looming disaster, Janones offered a powerful, if situational, solution. It addressed the contradictions between their objective position and their subjective leanings.

First, he showed them they were ignorant about political action on social media and, like a teacher, taught the uninitiated what to do. Second, using military rhetoric, he demanded that everyone give up what they hold most dear: the feeling of being unique, special individuals who, with their own ideas and autonomy, do not get swept up in mass action. Quite a few followed his orders. In private, though, they complained to their peers about the shallowness of “cultural Janonism.” Third, he set the agenda of the day that everyone was expected to follow. In short, he managed to impose unity within the diversity of the progressive camp. Fourth, he chose topics guided by problems that directly affect the majority of Brazil’s working class.

In the end, the educated progressive middle class was grateful to be made into rank and file activists. It celebrated Janones, who was subsequently treated to a special dinner with famous artists at Caetano Veloso’s home, a dream out of reach for 99.9% of his peers.

What remains to be seen is what lesson middle class progressives will take into the rest of the war, which continues into Lula’s new term. Will they keep up their activism, in the streets and online, for structural reforms to fight inequality? That means winning the “third round” against “Faria Lima,” São Paulo’s financial district. And will they find a way to take back moral hegemony in society from the far right, in favor of egalitarianism? Within the limits of what is socially possible, that means deep reflection on their own practices of cultural distinction from the vast majority of the people.

Sávio Cavalcante is a professor of sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).

This article first appeared in LeMonde Diplomatique Brasil, was translated with the express authorization of its editor-in-chief by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

By Henrique Rodrigues

In a deeply questionable approach to the journalistic scrutiny this story demanded, The Washington Post published an article on Saturday that gave wide space to known falsehoods spread by fugitive Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. The paper did not push back on them as sharply as the subject requires. It let a right wing extremist spread absurd lies about Brazilian institutions with no emphatic corrections. Owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the paper handed readers an unmistakable “softball” piece. It was built on a sympathetic, condescending narrative that ignores the gravity of the facts and Brazil’s laws.

Flávio Bolsonaro, who WAPO portrays wistfully gazing at a chocolate donut, is currently under Brazilian federal police investigation for allegedly laundering US $12 million. (photo: Beto Barata/Agência Senado)

While Brazilian democracy comes under attack from a coup narrative with no factual basis, The Post chose to open its story with a picturesque scene. It shows Bolsonaro in a Florida coworking space, gazing wistfully at an iced chocolate doughnut with sprinkles. By painting its subject as “sad,” “confused” and prone to typically American habits, the paper softens the image of a a man under investigation for serious crimes who recently snuck out of Brazil. It also exposes its own permissive editorial line toward the rise of the global far right.

The paper’s promotional post on social media, though, seems to strike a different editorial tone. “After losing Brazil’s election, sneaking to Miami and proclaiming himself rightful president, Flávio Bolsonaro tells The Post he doesn’t know what he’s going to do now, or next.” reads the post on the paper’s official X account.

Complicit Silence in the Face of Lies and the Denial of Democracy

The Post’s loudest failure is its deliberate refusal to rebut him with the force serious journalism demands. In the interview, unlike in the tough promotional post, Bolsonaro repeated the absurd claim that Brazil is no longer a democracy. He said, without offering a shred of evidence, that Donald Trump is “convinced” of this premise. Bolsonaro himself admitted to the reporter that he has no proof of the electoral fraud he alleged. Given such an explicit admission of disinformation, any outlet committed to the truth should have flatly contradicted him. It should have restored the facts in the final version that reached its readers.

Brazil is the world’s ninth largest economy and one of the most influential nations on the planet. It has been a consolidated, unbroken democracy since 1985, when the country ended its last military dictatorship. Its elections are auditable, fast and internationally recognized for their undisputed integrity. They even elected Bolsonaro and his father several times over the decades. Staying silent, or simply noting “what the other side says,” gives a stage to ideological lies. As a matter of fact, there is no “other side” when the question is the integrity of the electoral system. The election was clean, and there was no fraud of any kind.

The Post’s story also stumbles badly in how it describes the players in the justice system, not just in what it leaves out about Brazilian democracy. It calls Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Federal Court a “longtime adversary of the Bolsonaro family.” That phrasing is false and perverse. Moraes is not a political or personal rival. He is a Supreme Court justice carrying out his constitutional duties. He is the lead justice in the criminal cases and investigations that held hundreds of people accountable for attempting a coup.

Different Outlets, Different Journalistic Treatment

The Post’s stance looks even worse next to the work of other mainstream media outlets. The New York Times showed how journalism should respond to authoritarian figures. For every unsupported claim from Flávio Bolsonaro or his allies, correspondent Ana Ionova issued explicit corrections. She directly rebutted at least eight lies with data, facts and historical context. The Times dismantled the “political persecution” pose with rigor, and it subtly, discreetly mocked the role of victim the fugitive has taken on.

At Bezos’ paper, by contrast, readers find a gently toned human interest story about a man “uncertain about the future.” The story softens the real situation of the people involved. Jair Bolsonaro is not a wronged man. He is a convicted criminal who plotted a violent military coup against the republic, and he is serving his sentence under house arrest. Likewise, Flávio Bolsonaro is not a “humanitarian exile.” He is under investigation for several crimes, including money laundering and corruption. He also defied explicit court orders to flee the country and avoid answering to the courts.

Political Alignment and the Interests of Billionaire Capital

The Post’s condescension does not exist in an editorial vacuum. It reflects the ideological turn driven by its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos. In recent years, Bezos has openly moved closer to Donald Trump’s political circle and the Republican Party. He has made large financial donations to the group’s campaigns. He has also intervened directly in the paper’s decision making, including blocking its traditional editorial endorsements of Democratic candidates.

The Post’s story leans on Trump to back its criticism of Brazil. Yet Trump himself has repeatedly denied the results of U.S. elections and incited the 2021 storming of the Capitol. Using him as a yardstick for the quality of a foreign country’s democracy is an untenable logical contradiction. The Post’s alignment with this view serves its owner’s geopolitical and economic interests. It sacrifices factual truth for a narrative convenient to Trumpism.

By the end of the Post’s article, what stands out is not a search for the truth but a piece built on sympathy and passivity. The paper turned criminal accusations and antidemocratic theories into a mere “personal dilemma” for a man enjoying a doughnut in a Florida office. In doing so, it did a disservice to global public opinion. It also confirmed that a press kept by billionaires aligned with extremism would rather cover for lies than face the facts.

This article initially appeared in Revista Fórum, was translated with the express authorization of its editor-in-chief by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

I am not a political scientist, a field within the human sciences that I consider among the most complex, but I want to weigh in on the whirlwind we have been going through since October 4.1

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s epic comeback over the candidate of the corrupt and criminal far right will be the subject of study by these experts for a very long time to come, and will surely generate much debate.2 For me, however, one thing is indisputable: there was an uprising of civil society that made this David-versus-Goliath victory possible. A David who, incredibly, is President of the Republic and who, if everything were normal, should have been the Goliath in this story. But that is not the case.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory was a triumph over the mighty and omnipresent Big Tech companies, over the Big Brother of the North, the United States, and its dreadful president, Donald Trump, and over the neofascists who, unfortunately, keep gaining ground around the world and here too.3 It was a triumph over the most powerful material interests, which openly rooted for his defeat, and over the big corporate media, which gave the criminal, coup-plotting candidate a free pass, treating him as a “normal” candidate.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva raises a hand on stage during a “Women with Lula” campaign rally in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, on August 29, 2026. (Photo by Douglas MAGNO / AFP via Getty Images)

Lula’s victory was a triumph over the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE)4, who was an avowed partisan of the other candidate and shamelessly campaigned for him, usurping the power institutionally granted to him, and also over sections of the state apparatus5 that played dirty, trying to prevent his likely voters from voting.

In the flood of commentary now pouring out to make sense of this epic saga, the streets and social media have appeared as indispensable protagonists. But the massive street demonstrations across the country were not scheduled by the campaign. They were not instigated by the Workers’ Party (PT) or by the parties of the coalition supporting the president’s re-election.

No! It was civil society that took to the streets, that was shaken by the prospect of the country plunging over a precipice, and that decided to react. It all began with a demonstration by students at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói, the day after the first round, when the nightmare began. It was those young people who pulled the thread that began to weave the unlikely victory.

Congressman André Janones’s great idea of creating what he called “Lula’s army”6 to dominate social media, outmaneuver the biased algorithms, and achieve what the left had never managed before would have come to nothing had nearly 11 million Brazilian citizens not thrown themselves headlong into it.

But beyond the streets and social media, a myriad of entirely individual initiatives, coordinated by no one, began to spring up from all sides.

People who paid out of their own pockets to print thousands of pamphlets to hand out in various places, some of them showing the social achievements of the Lula government, in contrast to its horrible predecessor. Others exposed the countless crimes and shady dealings of the opposition candidate. Still others recalled the terrible years of the dictatorship and the loss of freedom that a far-right victory would represent.7

People who campaigned online tirelessly, working to win over undecided voters and those who had abstained in the first round8. People who, on election day itself, organized carpools to take elderly voters and others who would have trouble getting to the polling stations, voters who otherwise would not have voted for re-election.

Given all this, I believe Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory represents much more than the four additional years that Brazilians have given him to govern the country. And I say it means much more, not only because it spared Latin America a perilous near-unanimity of far-right governments9, which would have further increased Donald Trump’s power over our wealth and over democracy. Nor is it only because it symbolized a heavy defeat for the seemingly unstoppable rise of the far right around the world.

All of this is true. But the greatest value of this incredible victory, in my view, is that it runs resolutely counter to the deepest ideological currents of our time, in a world increasingly dominated by the values of the self-made individual, meritocracy, and rational individual action, a world in which each person looks out only for themselves, their own gain, their particular advantage, their private interests. This ideology, it should be said, is indispensable to the commodity form, and the endless torrent of technological novelties in the digital world only reinforces it.

This bleak world is the product of decades of neoliberalism and of the inequalities, injustices, and affronts to human dignity it has generated.

Against the “neoliberal subject,” in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s terms, Brazil showed the world the beauty of the collective, the common, and the group, of the sense of community and the building of solidarities. It showed the pleasure of a victory that belongs to everyone. It reminded everyone of the joy, almost absent today, of feeling part of something that transcends us.

May the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and of Brazil serve to change, however slightly, the grim panorama of this first quarter of the twenty-first century!

Leda Paulani is Professor Emerita of Economics at the University of São Paulo (USP). She is the author of, among other books, Modernidade e discurso econômico [Modernity and Economic Discourse] (Boitempo). This essay was originally published in the Brazilian online magazine A Terra é Redonda shortly after the second round of the 2026 presidential election in Brazil. This text was translated by Lygia Sabbag Fares and Pedro Henrique Evangelista Duarte. You can read the original article, in Portuguese, here.

Paraguay’s Ueno Bank was one of the primary sponsors of an international right-wing event in the United States that featured Eduardo Bolsonaro.

That bank is currently undergoing closure following a solvency crisis, which has unleashed a wave of protests and the resignation of President Santiago Peña.

Ueno Bank's connection to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago gala was brought to light by Brazilian lawmaker Alencar Santana, from the Workers’ Party. It appears in records from the ceremony, which was held at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Eduardo Bolsonaro speaks next to an image of his father, during the CPAC Argentina 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Photo by Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images)

In a post on Wednesday, November 4, Alencar said that he had presented the case to Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Foreign Relations. The lawmaker pointed out that the financial institution, now under intervention by the Central Bank of Paraguay, had allocated funds to sponsor the gathering of international conservative leaders.

The event in Mar-a-Lago took place on February 10, 2026. Photographs show Eduardo Bolsonaro standing in front of a backdrop featuring the Ueno Bank logo. The bank was listed as a “Diamond” level sponsor for the “Hispanic Prosperity Gala,” organized by the platform Latino Wall Street.

Ueno Bank Sponsored a Gathering with Eduardo Bolsonaro at Trump’s Club

The ceremony brought together business leaders, political figures, and representatives of the Latin American right at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s property in Palm Beach. Eduardo Bolsonaro attended in person. Argentine President Javier Milei, who had been announced as a guest, sent a recorded message.

Ueno Bank was one of six “Diamond” sponsors, a tier above the “Gold” and “Silver” categories. According to a schedule released by the organizers, the “Diamond” sponsorship package was priced at $100,000. The amount paid by the Paraguayan institution was not disclosed.

Eduardo Bolsonaro also took part in honoring Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, who is known for spreading baseless allegations of fraud over the 2022 Brazilian elections.

A huge scandal broke around Cerimedo in August, this year, after he was arrested in Bolivia on charges of attempting to kill his pregnant ex-girlfriend, Nadia Beller. She survived three gunshot wounds and spoke to press about Cerimedo’s role in underhanded political dealings across Latin America, and connections to far-right politicians and even the White House

At the Mar-a-Lago ceremony, in February, Eduardo presented Cerimedo with an award for “Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year.” The Brazilian news outlet Revista Fórum has previously documented Cerimedo’s international activities, his ties to the political movement surrounding the Bolsonaro family, and his coordination with political operatives linked to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Bank with Ties to Former Business Associates of the Paraguayan President Has Collapsed.

The crisis at Ueno Bank became public on November 3, when the Central Bank of Paraguay announced its intervention in the institution. The decision had been approved unanimously the previous day, following the discovery that the bank’s solvency ratio had fallen below 50% of the legally required minimum.

The bank resolution process resulted in the suspension of operations, transfers, and access to people’s accounts. Roughly 3 million customers have been affected, leading to long lines at bank branches and protests by depositors concerned about the recovery of their savings.

The institution managed between $800 million and $850 million in Paraguayan public funds. Of this total, roughly $380 million belonged to Paraguay’s Social Welfare Institute, IPS, which is responsible for pensions and healthcare services.

The bank’s primary shareholder is the Vázquez Group, a business conglomerate that maintained corporate ties with Paraguayan President Santiago Peña until March 2025. The growth in deposits from public institutions at Ueno had already been a subject of concern among the opposition and experts within the country.

The crisis has also impacted the institution’s leadership. Paraguayan authorities have ordered the arrest of eight individuals, including bank executives, as part of an investigation into suspected financial irregularities.

Millions of Clients Are Awaiting the Return Funds

The Central Bank of Paraguay has officially stated that deposits are guaranteed up to 228.3 million guaranis per account holder. That is approximately US$38,000, per individual. Preliminary estimates suggest that this coverage will fully protect about 97% of depositors.

On Wednesday, November 4, the country’s monetary authority announced a mechanism for advance payments of up to 40 Paraguayan minimum wages per client. That is the equivalent of 121.76 million guaranis, or roughly $20,000, minus any outstanding debts owed to the institution. The process was scheduled to begin this Thursday, November 5

The scandal has triggered a political crisis for the administration of Santiago Peña, leading to calls for an investigation, demands for the recovery of public funds, and demonstrations in favor of initiating impeachment proceedings.

Ueno Bank Sponsorship Raises Further Questions Over International Relations

The participation of Ueno Bank in the Mar-a-Lago gala has placed further attention on the spending of a financial institution that managed hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds.

This article was originally published by Revista Forum. It was translated by Panamerican Dispatch. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here.

Janine Jackson: Welcome to Counterspin, your weekly look behind the headlines. I’m Janine Jackson. This week on Counterspin, you can smell what U.S. corporate press are cooking with the New York Times headline that the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was a blow to Brazil’s right.

Lula on the campaign trail in Belo Horizonte in October, 2026 (Photo: Ricardo Stuckert)

Would you feel differently if the New York Times in their headline called Lula’s victory a win for Brazil’s poor and elderly and working people? Based on their record, the Times imagines and expects that you would. We’ll talk about Lula’s win and why your corporate news outlet might tell you to fear it with Brian Mier. He’s an editor at Pan American Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for Telesor English.

He didn’t parachute in, he’s lived in Brazil for decades. We’ll hear from him today on Counterspin. That’s what’s coming up.

“We don’t want dictatorship. We don’t want hatred. We don’t want guns.

We want a country of love.” So said Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the night before his electoral victory over Flavio Bolsonaro, who has subsequently fled the country and been granted asylum immediately in the U.S., because, of course. I found that quote in The New Republic and The Guardian, but most of U.S. corporate media ignored it in favor of hand-wringing like in CNBC’s article, “Lula’s election win leaves Brazil facing a fiscal tightrope.”

That article included the observations that his victory, “wiped out a rally in Brazilian assets that followed Flavio Bolsonaro, seen as the more market-friendly and fiscally disciplined of the candidates.”

And it added a familiar warning, “Lula has promised expensive measures that appeal to his grassroots base.” We can expect more of this going forward, but U.S. media certainly won’t be the only headwind that Lula will face.

Still, his victory has brought relief and maybe even a little hope to millions of people in Brazil and around the world. Brian Mier is an editor at Pan American Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for Telesor English. He joins us now by phone from Recife.

Welcome back to Counterspin.

Brian Mier: Thanks for having me.

Jackson: Well, listeners will know that the race was tight down to the wire and that Bolsonaro had won the first round and evidently the runner-up winning the second round hasn’t happened for decades.

And I just want to ask you first, where were you when the results were announced and what was that energy like?

Mier: Well, I was so stressed out about the election that I just sat in a restaurant that didn’t have a TV with a buddy of mine. We were just checking our phones sporadically and we started hearing screams from the streets. And then when the tally got up to about 80 percent, it was pretty much guaranteed that Lula had it and people were just running around screaming.

We got on the subway and headed up to Paulista Avenue. The subway itself was like a carnival ride, full of hundreds of people in red, singing and chanting for Lula. And we arrived on Paulista Avenue where an estimated crowd of one million came out for the victory celebration. And it was pretty intense. It was pretty big. It was a lot bigger than 2022.

Jackson: Well, I’m reading that the difference between the first round and the decisive round had to do with young voters in particular, but also in just increased turnout.

Mier: Yeah, well regarding the strategy... I wrote an article called Glimmers of Hope from Brazil’s 2026 election two days after the first round. It wasn’t as bad as people were portraying it.

Basically, there was a two point margin of error and polls had them pretty tying and Bolsonaro won by 1.8 percent. But basically, the PT party, the Workers’ Party analysis was that they would have a much better chance targeting people who didn’t vote in the first round than trying to change the minds of Bolsonaro fanatics. And so that’s what they focused on.

And they focused on it in two different ways. At the grassroots level, the way they always do - the old fashioned way, because it’s a party founded by labor union organizers - which is knocking on doors, talking to people at bus stops, handing out pamphlets on the street, talking to your relatives, getting older relatives to come out and vote because voting is optional for people over 70 in Brazil. A big untold story is just the massive amount of senior citizens who remember the dictatorship, who didn’t go out and vote in the first round because they thought Lula was going to win anyway who put on red, got in their wheelchairs, got wheeled to the polling stations. There were people in their 90s with their canes coming out to vote for Lula. So in the end, 14 million more people voted in the second round than the first round. Of those 14 million, 10.3 million voted for Lula and 3.7 voted for Bolsonaro.

Jackson: So it was a good strategy and it worked. I saw that AP said that the victory depended on younger, older and working class voters. And I thought, well, who else is there? I don’t want to underestimate the difficulties that Lula faces now, you know, besides these financial pressures and, you know, congressional hostility.

But what would you say are the biggest kind of obstacles within Brazil itself and the region? We’ll get to the U.S. in a second, but what is he confronting out of the gate?

Mier: Well, you see the way the Western media is portraying him as being fiscally irresponsible, as all leftists are, according to their 19th century, liberal doctrine of fiscal responsibility a la Margaret Thatcher. But the fact is, there’s massive climate change related weather disasters that have to be prepared for and the risks have to be mitigated. And this costs money in terms of fiscal responsibility.

When Lula took office the first time, Brazil only had $50 billion in foreign reserves. By the time Dilma Rousseff was impeached, the Workers’ Party had amassed $360 billion in foreign reserves. So they’re not a fiscally irresponsible party.

And the amount of debt that Brazil is in is much lower as percentage of GDP as the United States, for example. The economic issues are not the real problem. The problems facing Brazil, I think, are climate related.

They’re related to the wave of conservatism spreading across Latin America, animosity from neighboring Argentina that’s working very closely with Trump, future animosity from the Trump administration or the U.S. government. And, you know, just being able to govern with a very right-wing Congress, a lot of people are exaggerating how hard that’s going to be because they don’t know the history of how Congress works in Brazil. But even at the height of Lula’s popularity in the 2000s, the Workers’ Party never had more than 24 percent of the seats in Congress.

Currently, after the last election, it has about 18 percent But Lula has never governed in a situation in which Congress wasn’t dominated by right-wing political parties. And he’s been pretty good at stitching together workable coalitions that enabled him to push things through, like the constitutional amendment that he just spent four years working on that reduced Brazil’s work week from five and a half days a week to five days a week, which was a historic victory that people have been working towards for decades.

But that being said, there are challenges in that, for example, you see people like Glenn Greenwald, people who read Glenn Greenwald and listen to Glenn Greenwald and a series of New York Times articles trying to portray Brazil as this country that’s dangerously veering towards authoritarianism.

But the fact of the matter is Jair Bolsonaro’s wife was just elected to Senate. Jair Bolsonaro’s third son Carlos was just elected to Senate. The man who oversaw the kangaroo court procedure that culminated in Lula’s arbitrary imprisonment with no crime committed in 2018, Sergio Moro, was just elected governor of Paraná State.

So he is going to have some headaches from these people, you know, from Bolsonaro’s allies. Some of them are going to switch over to Lula’s coalition, but some of them are going to continue to give headaches to the government.

Jackson: Well, Trump, of course, was out in front crying corruption. That’s no surprise. And then inventing new asylum rules that would allow Flavio Bolsonaro to just slide right in. Now I’m reading in The New Republic about kind of behind the scenes, State Department meddling, asking diplomats in Brazil to do everything possible to undermine Lula.

What can we expect in terms of Brazil-U.S. relations, and how much does or should that matter?

Mier: It should definitely matter because the U.S. has a long history of intervening and propping up neo-fascist dictatorships and far right-wing authoritarian leaders in all of Latin America. And traditionally, as laid out by Philip Agee in The CIA Diaries, which is a great book from the 1970s, the State Department will first hope that their candidate can win an election in Latin America in a free and fair election. If that doesn’t look like it’s going to work, they start interfering in the election to prop up their candidate, which is what just happened in Brazil.

If that doesn’t work, historically the next step would be to try and foment some kind of coup d’etat. And we saw this happen in Brazil in 2014, when the Democratic Party was gunning for Aecio Neves, an extremely corrupt neoliberal who used tax money to build a private airport on his uncle’s ranch. He was involved in all kinds of corruption scandals, but they looked the other way.

When he lost the election against Dilma Rousseff, he immediately refused to recognize the results. He called for an audit of the votes, which happened and confirmed Dilma’s victory. And then they paralyzed Congress so that President Rousseff could get nothing done.

The fact of the matter is that Lula is a more savvy politician than Dilma Rousseff. I don’t think he’s going to have that problem. But that’s when they started the whole anti-corruption witch hunt called Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, which was a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, and this Curitiba public prosecutor’s office in a case overseen by this judge who was just elected to be governor of Paraná. And the New York Times gave an entire investigation, glowing coverage, and that process contributed to Dilma Rousseff’s illegitimate impeachment. So that’s the most recent time that the U.S. has stepped in to overthrow Brazil when it wasn’t happy with the election result. In this case, I think it’s going to be a little bit different. Because it looks like Trump is already backing off in his support for Flavio Bolsonaro. I think in Trump’s mind, he’s got this mental list in his head, that tiny brain of his, in which he categorizes people in binary fashion. They’re either winners or losers.

And he doesn’t want to be around losers. And I think in his mind, Flavio Bolsonaro is now a loser. Right? So even though Marco Rubio and other people in the Trump administration might be trying to help Flavio Bolsonaro, I don’t think Trump is on board with it.

And I think that if the Democrats win the majority in Congress, it’s going to create a bunch of headaches for Trump’s plans in Brazil as well, because the Bolsonaros made the very foolish move of completely siding with one political party in the United States. At first, the Biden administration seems happy to work with Jair Bolsonaro. But then when a very good group of Democratic lawmakers, about 30 of them, at the time led by Hank Johnson from Georgia, they managed to convince the rest of the party that really the closeness between Bolsonaro and Trump was bad for the Democratic Party.

And so when Bolsonaro started trying to set up the coup, apparently, from what I know from Brazilian media sources, he sent an emissary to ask for help holding an autocoup to the Biden administration. And the Biden administration said no. And so I think now, because of so much public association between Bolsonaro and Trump, if the Democrats take control of Congress, they’re going to look the other way at some of Lula’s effective social policies, which the corporate Democrats seem to hate, like increasing funding for the free universal public health system and free university tuition.

And they’re going to at least try to cause some problems for Trump’s imperialist Donroe doctrine ambitions for Brazil.

Jackson: I want to tell folks that you wrote about what you described as the long coup and US media’s involvement in that, meaning that time between the 2014 Dilma Rousseff impeachment, and 2019. And folks can look at FAIR.org for your 2023 piece on that.

But what I want to lift up from that is your quote, “for over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story. The second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.” And I think that’s where news media come in, right?

Mier: Not just denying, but gaslighting journalists who try to talk about it.

There’s an industry of denying the coup, but they don’t just stop at denying the coup. They try and destroy the careers of journalists who talk about it. Look at what happened to Gary Webb.

Jackson: Well, we hear now from Paul Krugman, moving on to media, we hear from Paul Krugman that Meta, unsurprisingly, frankly, was doing some meddling, you know, hobbling Lula’s account and promoting Bolsonaro’s. That’s kind of par for the course.

But I understand that social media also played a positive role, such that people are asking, can they dress up for Halloween as cyber Lula?

Mier: This was really interesting because of something said by Nadia Geller, the ex-girlfriend of Fernando Cerimedo, who is kind of cyber bag man for the international far right in Latin America. He was involved in generating thousands of deep fake AI images in the Colombian election, from a bot farm based out of Argentina and is very close to Javier Milei. He was arrested for attempting to murder Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer who was pregnent at the time. She survived and went on the Mexican television network Channel 14 and gave an interview saying that Fernando had told her that he and Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flavio’s brother, had gone to Meta headquarters in California and negotiated a deal for supporting the Flavio Bolsonaro campaign by boosting its algorithm and damaging the Lula campaign. And that seemed to be what was actually happening, as the two candidates had pretty much equal reach until about 12 hours before the first round election.

And then suddenly Lula’s reach remained the same and Flavio suddenly had like five or six times more reach than Lula, even though he had less followers. And so then a bunch of Brazilian journalists did some really good work and people started testing its Meta AI and it was refusing to design campaign logos for Lula but designing them for Flavio.

The Supreme Court ordered Meta to provide equal reach for both candidates. Amnesty International and Eko both tested its system of monitoring and proved that it was very easy to take illegal campaign ads out from outside of Brazil—that’s a crime in Brazil—and also to use them to present disinformation that made it past Meta’s content moderation, right? So the Supreme Court ordered Meta to stop allowing that to happen and to provide equal reach, no pushing for either candidate’s reach. And Meta initially ignored the court order.

Then protests started happening. Then it started reaching the international media. Protests happened in London, Ireland in front of Meta’s headquarters in Sao Paulo.

And it looks like by the end, the final week before the election, Meta made some kind of decision that it was too damaging to their reputation to continue favoring Flavio Bolsonaro in reach. And the Lula campaign ended up surpassing Flavio’s reach by like 400 percent. And part of this is because of a really great congressman named Andres Janonez.

I say great. I mean, he’s just really smart and is from the working class.

He came up with this idea to bypass Meta’s algorithms by creating this WhatsApp group and asking everybody to get everyone they knew to sign up to it. And by a couple of days before the election, he had 10 million followers in a group that was only a few weeks old. And every day, he’s just coming on every hour, just yelling at the camera, sending his videos out, yelling, “nobody sleep, nobody eat, we can’t do anything until the danger of return to dictatorship is permanently vanquished from our country.”

And people starting sharing the stuff around. He would say, “go to this site, use this hashtag. If you have a friend who doesn’t know who to vote for, send them this article.” Every hour he would give out instructions like that. And it worked. It’s pretty incredible. And now leftist political parties around the world are asking him for help.

Jackson: I wish we had more time, but I just want to say I did notice some US press with an unsurprising emphasis, even within some ostensibly respectful coverage, but an emphasis that Lula has over promised, like leftists do, you know, but he won’t be able to deliver. And it sounds like a threat, frankly, but I just wonder what you would have listeners take away in terms of what you’re going to see in US news media about Lula and what antidote should you take with that?

Mier: Yeah, it’s funny. This criticism of Lula has seeped into a lot of leftist commentary as well, as if he didn’t really do anything for the last four years. He ended hunger. He took Brazil back off the UN’s world hunger map.

He pushed through annual above inflation minimum salary raises. He lowered the work week with no pay reduction for anyone, through a constitutional amendment. He ended a genocide that was underway against the Yanomami people in the Amazon, committed by illegal gold miners that had been encouraged by Bolsonaro to move into the area.

He reduced the Amazon rainforest destruction by 79 percent, trippled funding on renewable energy, rebuilt the public university system and built new universities. But they don’t report on any of this. So he’ll keep keeping his campaign promises, and the Northern media will just pretend he’s not doing anything, because a lot of the policies are too complicated to explain in soundbites anyway.

But it’s frustrating because I’ve seen people, even on the Facebook page of a frequent Fair contributor, arguing that Lula hadn’t done anything in the last four years. You could just do some research and find out what they’re actually doing.

And you’d be surprised. I mean, he promised to make online gambling illegal if he were re-elected, and then he just went ahead and did it anyway before the election. He’s done a very good job in three different presidential terms of working around a right-wing Congress and managing to make structural adjustments that have significantly increased the quality of life for Brazil’s large working class.

When he first took office in 2003, only 4% of the students in Brazil’s public university system - which is still tuition-free even though Bolsonaro tried to start charging for it - came from the primarily Afro-Brazilian working class. The PT, the Workers’ Party, set up an improvement over the US affirmative action system that’s locked into social class. So a requirement is that you have to have studied in public schools and come from a family that makes less than two times the minimum wage.

Today, 52% of the university population of the student body in the nationwide public university system is Afro-Brazilian and working class. And these were the young people who came out in massive numbers on the streets for Lula to protect the rights that they have earned, that they’ve won in the last 25 years, that the Bolsonaros, the US international imperialist class want to remove. Flavio Bolsonaro was promising to defund the public university system because he couldn’t end affirmative action because it would be electorally impossible. So he was promising a backdoor strategy, transferring the public university system out of the Ministry of Education into the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science and Technology. And that would have removed it from the constitutional requirement of funding earmarked from a certain percentage of income tax money every year.

It would have resulted in massive defunding for the entire system. So since it’s impossible for them to end the affirmative action, their plan was to destroy the system and then say they have to start charging for tuition so that it would transform back into an elite priveldge which is what it was like before Lula first took office in 2003. That’s just one example.

Jackson: I will just say the idea that folks will pay attention to Brazil and learn something from it, I understand why some people are afraid of that.

So just finally, we understand the hope and the fear that is coming out of this victory.

Mier: Yes. But I think that if you look at both the hope and the fear, the hope has definitely beaten the fear. And if anything, people are going to remain vigilant to protect their rights and their government more than ever right now from U.S. incursion.

I don’t know to what depths the United States government will go this time around to try and destroy Lula, which they’ve been working on for decades. But I feel like he’s in a stronger position now than he has been for the last four years. I mean, it was a massive victory.

If it weren’t for Meta, he would have won by 10 million votes.

Jackson: Exactly. And what I mean is I think that some people will be afraid that the involvement in Brazil means that, oh, maybe people will get an idea that people can fight for people.

And we don’t want that, you know. So I think we can expect from media a kind of dampening, dampening down, because heaven forbid, people take a lesson that you can have a bottom up victory the way that we had in Brazil.

Mier: It’s true. They would much rather have someone like Gabriel Boric in Chile, who just was like a lifestyle leftist, who didn’t do anything economically than have someone who might say inappropriate things now and again, and might not be very modern, but does a lot of transformative policies to improve the life of the working class at the expense of big business, redistribution and things like that.

Jackson: Alright, well, we will end it there. But we’re going to have future conversations.

We’ve been speaking with Brian Mier. He’s an editor at Pan American Dispatch and Brazil correspondent for Telesur English. Thank you so much for joining us this week on Counterspin.

President Donald Trump’s crushing defeat in the U.S. midterm elections and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s historic victory in Brazil mean much more than two election results. They send an enormous political message to the world. In the two largest and most important countries in the Americas, voters are saying they do not accept a unipolar world order. They reject the ideology of white supremacy. They say no to political projects that turn immigrants into enemies by persecuting them, criminalizing them and denying them fundamental rights.

Texans celebrate the gubernatorial victory of Gina Hinojosa (Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Images)

But the message is broader. People want peace. They want an end to wars, military threats and unilateral sanctions that undermine free trade and relations among nations. They want a world where dialogue and diplomacy prevail over force, intimidation and one power imposing its interests on all others.

The results are also excellent news for the United Nations, which Trump’s foreign policy has treated with contempt. The UN now has a chance to regain a leading role. It can advance the reforms needed to play a truly central part in building a new international order. That order would be more democratic, multipolar and committed to peace, the sovereignty of peoples and cooperation among nations.

Another phenomenon is even more significant. A wave of popular mobilization is growing in Brazil, the United States and several European countries. It brings together young people, workers and broad sectors of society. Street demonstrations have outpaced traditional parties and political leaders, and often their ability to respond. The rise of autocratic governments and projects, threats to democratic freedoms and attacks on social rights are putting crowds in the streets around the world.

This reaction crosses borders and party ideologies. It puts popular participation back at the center of the fight over the future of democracy.

In Latin America, the hope is that this wave of democratic resistance will also halt the advance of governments unconditionally aligned with Trump. A string of electoral victories for the far right in the region came with a political influence operation by Washington, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The United States gave financial, diplomatic and electoral support to conservative candidates. The strategy went as far as the direct use of military force in the Caribbean, culminating in the operation against Venezuela. It is a new version of the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America. That policy now faces signs of resistance. It may begin to lose strength as the shifts seen at the ballot box and in the streets take hold.

More than a reaction to the rise of the far right, what is taking shape at the ballot box and in the streets is a fight over the future of humanity. That future cannot belong to autocrats, warlords and those who own the money. It must belong to the people.

Florestan Fernandes Jr is editor of the nightly web TV program, Boa Noite 247, and has worked for many of the largest media outlets in Brazil, including Folha de São Paulo, Jornal da Tarde, TV Globo, TV Manchete, TV Cultura, TV Gazeta, and TV Brasil. He is also a member of Brasil 247’s board of directors.

This article, which does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Panamerican Dispatch, originally appeared in Brasil 247, was translated with express authorization of its editor-in-chief, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

In just 10 days, two events of enormous political significance may have marked a historic turning point. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. That ended the possibility of the far right returning to power. In the United States, President Donald Trump suffered a major defeat in the midterm elections, losing control of the House and Senate to the Democrats.

Both results suggest that the political wave represented by MAGA, Trumpism and Bolsonarism may have reached its limits. Hate speech, the exploitation of social divisions and aggressive nationalism no longer appear enough to secure electoral victories.

Trump’s defeat is especially significant. He promised prosperity and peace. He delivered inflation, higher fuel prices and a war against Iran. American voters have begun to hold him accountable for the gap between his promises and reality.

Texas democrats celebrate senate victory ofJames Talarico (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Lula’s victory has an international dimension. It represents a stronger Global South, multipolarity and the sovereignty of peoples in the face of Washington’s hegemonic ambitions. It is also a victory for humanist values over predatory capitalism, extreme concentration of wealth and the logic of endless wars.

Lula showed that it is possible to confront the far right with a project built on social inclusion, democracy and international cooperation. His reelection strengthens the BRICS and expands the possibilities of building a more balanced world order.

Trump’s weakening is likely to have consequences across Latin America. One of the leaders most exposed to the shift is Argentine President Javier Milei, who will run for reelection in 2027.

Milei built his political identity in close association with Trump. He shares Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and defends economic policies that favor big business. If MAGA loses strength internationally, Milei may face additional difficulties sustaining his project.

Of course, Argentina’s election will depend above all on the country’s own economic and social conditions. But the international environment also matters. The scenario that favored Milei’s rise may be starting to unravel.

Lula’s victory and Trump’s defeat do not mean the end of the far right. But they show that its expansion is not inevitable. They also show there is room for an alternative founded on sovereignty, social justice and peace.

In 2026, Brazil and the United States showed signs of change. In 2027, Argentina may complete that movement. And Milei may be the next to discover that history has changed direction.

This opinion peice, which does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Panamerican Dispatch, first appeared in Brasil 247, has been translated with express authorization from its editor-in-chief, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

The best thing that happened in October was Senator Flávio Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat. The second best was his flight to the United States. He may boast that he will lead the opposition from there, but that will not happen. It never has. Political leaders who were more important than him have returned to Brazil weaker, when they came back from exile at all. There is no sign of a return anyway, at least not for the next four years.

Bolsonaristas unhappy with the 2022 election results praying for Jesus to enact an authoritarian military coup. (photo: social media)

His absence will leave a gap. Had he stayed, he would have been the leader of the opposition. Without him, the opposition will fight over who its new leader should be, if anyone steps up at all. Most likely, the opposition will split. That will favor the government, which will be able to form the alliances it needs to carry out its agenda.

The Brazilian Army is breathing a sigh of relief. The purge promised in the event of a Bolsonaro victory will not happen. Nor will there be the “housecleaning” at Itamaraty, Brazil’s foreign ministry, that his brother threatened. The Supreme Federal Court (STF) will be able to settle its own matters in peace, without the sword of Damocles the new senators would have held over it. The people who made impeaching justices a campaign banner are the same ones now facing investigations overseen by the Supreme Court.

Even jailed former Banco Master chief Daniel Vorcaro is better off with Bolsonaro gone. Now he can finally reveal the truth about the “Dark Horse” Bolsonaro biopic fiasco. We are also spared that headache. It will be the film nobody ever sees, because it will never be released.

The governors elected by Bolsonarismo will hit the brakes. Cleitinho, Moro, Tarcísio and Ruas will depend on funding and cooperation from the presidential palace to govern. The retreat of Bolsonarismo (and of right wing extremism) will help the country grow, which is what the majority of Brazilians who have not fallen down the far right rabbit hole want most.

Alex Solnik is the author of 20 books and has worked as a professional journalist for over 50 years. He was arrested and tortured by Brazil’s US-backed Military dictatorship in 1973, an experience he later wrote about in the book, O dia em que conheci Brilhante Ustra. Solnik was born in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and immigrated to Brazil with his parents in 1958. He is currently a pundit and columnist for Brasil 247.

This opinion piece, which does not necessarily express the opinion of Panamerican Dispatch originally appeared in Brasil 247, was translated with express authorization from the editor-in-chief, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

On October 18, over half the population of the small town of Paudalho, Pernambuco came out to the streets to show support for Lula, in a scenario underway in hundreds of towns and cities across Brazil that day

The people built this victory with courage, hope and an extraordinary ability to mobilize. Between the first round and the runoff, we won more than 10 million votes. We grew in every state and in the Federal District. We flipped the result in more than 100 municipalities. Our opponent flipped it in just one. Brazil also recorded its lowest abstention rate since 2006. Millions of Brazilians decided they would not stand on the sidelines of history.

Popular mobilization was the main force behind this victory. Brazil saw a remarkable wave of political participation. Young people took to the streets, organized large demonstrations, drew crowds and mobilized schools and universities. They showed that a new generation is ready to take its place in building the country’s future. Students led the way with their irreverence, creativity and organizing skill. From mass rallies to dialogue brigades on the outskirts of cities to fan communities, young people showed that politics can again be a place for hope, belonging and change. When democracy is threatened, artists and intellectuals take a stand, because there is no full citizenship without culture and no democracy without freedom of expression.

Older Brazilians bravely went to the polls. Their experience, historical memory and long record in social and democratic struggles were essential to the mobilization. Women, LGBT people and Afro-Brazilians were also leaders of this victory. In the streets, online, in communities, in workplaces and in families, they mobilized to defend democracy, rights and a future with more equality. Indigenous peoples also played a major role in defending democracy, national sovereignty, their territories, their original rights and the environment. They are indispensable historic and political actors in building a Brazil that is more just, democratic and plural. Their voices were decisive in defending life, in fighting misogyny, racism and prejudice against LGBT people, and in affirming that there is no true democracy without participation, freedom and equality.

Our activists wrote one of the finest chapters in the Workers’ Party’s history. In every city and neighborhood, on the outskirts and in the interior, thousands of comrades did what they have always known how to do. They organized the people, talked, listened, persuaded and turned hope into collective action. They never gave up, even in the hardest moments of our history, and they showed their strength once again. The comeback began in the streets, in collective work, in generosity and in the conviction that Brazil is worth every effort.

The mobilization was also extraordinary on social media. “Lula’s Army,” led by Rep. André Janones, joined forces with party activists, grassroots communicators and millions of supporters. Together they helped change the digital debate and counter disinformation.

This victory went beyond party lines. Allied parties, popular movements, unions, artists, intellectuals and broad sectors of civil society took part. So did liberals, conservatives and people on the democratic right. They recognized the seriousness of the threat posed by a continuation of Bolsonarismo. Despite political differences, they understood that defending democracy must come before electoral disputes.

We won by defending national sovereignty, democracy and a development project committed to the lives of the Brazilian people. We defended the public Unified Health System (SUS), education for the whole school day, universal access to day care, a stronger response to violence and expanded social programs. We called for an end to the 6x1 work schedule (six days of work, one day off) and for free public transportation. We called for using national wealth to create development, jobs and opportunity in Brazil.

We stood up to lies, denialism, political violence and attempts at foreign interference in Brazil’s democratic process. We will tie national development to income distribution, higher wages, broader labor rights and shorter working hours. We will fight inequalities of class, race and ethnicity, gender and region. We will also build in environmental sustainability and respect for work in the countryside and in the city.

Voters elected Lula to bring change. His new term should open a cycle of structural change. The priorities are reform of the justice system, reform of the political and electoral system, and democratic regulation of the big digital platforms. Brazil must deepen its democracy, confront historic inequalities and make sure development brings better living conditions to its people.

We will build a national strategy for digital and technological sovereignty. It will include investment in science, artificial intelligence and Brazilian technologies, data protection and wider access to digital tools. We must confront technological dependence and the concentration of power in the big platforms. These changes must serve democracy, national development and the rights of the population, without imposing austerity on the poorest.

Brazilians have entrusted us with four more years to govern the country. Our responsibility is to make this a time of great achievements, expanding gains, strengthening rights and deepening dialogue with society. Lula said this will be a government of much dialogue.

The PT’s role is to be a permanent bridge between the government, political parties, social movements and different sectors of society. It must keep alive the democratic energy that showed up in the election. We will push for a government in which the people take part in political decisions, with participatory budgeting. We will keep the public mobilized to deliver the program that elected Lula president!

Celebrating this achievement does not lessen our responsibility to face the challenges that remain. Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil just two days after the runoff result, amid corruption allegations and investigations. His flight shows how serious the political moment is.

Flávio Bolsonaro, a fugitive in the United States, wrote a letter calling himself “the real president.” He did not recognize the election result and cited false claims about the vote. He contests the result of elections that were legitimate, auditable and transparent. Those elections expressed popular sovereignty in choosing state legislatures, the federal Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, governors and the presidency. The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and all political parties, including the Liberal Party (PL), recognized the results.

This is not the first time the Bolsonaro family has refused to accept an election result. In 2022, the family contested the results while planning a coup attempt and the assassination of the elected president and vice president. Democratic institutions defused that attempt. It ended with the imprisonment of Jair Bolsonaro and the military officers involved. Now Flávio Bolsonaro’s letter calls for outside interference. That marks a new step in the authoritarian reaction of those who lost at the polls.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s position on the election result and on Flávio Bolsonaro’s presence on American soil also demands attention. Brazil will not accept foreign interests interfering in its democracy. Nor will it accept political disputes serving as a pretext to disrespect the sovereign will of the Brazilian people in elections that were widely monitored and recognized as fair.

We are also deeply concerned about episodes of political violence in the last days of the campaign and after the vote. On Oct. 24, a rock thrown during a motorcade hit Iara Pimentel, a PT city councilwoman in Montes Claros, in Minas Gerais state, in the face.

There are allegations of killings, attempted killings, assaults, threats and intimidation. There are also serious accounts of electoral harassment in workplaces, with threats of firing, persecution and pressure against workers who voted for Lula. It is unacceptable for anyone to threaten the free exercise of the vote, one of democracy’s most basic rights, through any form of violence or coercion. The Labor Prosecutor’s Office should pay special attention to complaints of electoral harassment and act firmly to investigate and hold those responsible to account.

We also instruct municipal and state directorates to report all incidents of political violence and electoral harassment to the National Directorate through the form at pt.org.br. This will let the party track cases, send complaints to the proper authorities and take the appropriate steps.

The electoral victory does not end the task of defending democracy. We must turn it into permanent popular organization, strengthening the PT’s base committees and directorates in the countryside and in cities. That requires expanding political education, holding local assemblies, strengthening popular, social and union movements, and creating permanent spaces for listening and participation.

The party must adopt new forms of organization and mobilization, renew its communication and expand its presence in communities. It must turn electoral support into organized social force.

We must preserve social participation, strengthen popular organization and keep open the paths of dialogue and mobilization that made this victory possible. The PT will also strengthen its dialogue with different religious traditions, while respecting freedom of conscience and the secular nature of the state.

We will build common ground around democracy, social justice, solidarity and human dignity. We will confront religious intolerance and the use of faith as a weapon against rights and democracy.

We urge directorates, social movements and labor union confederations to stay organized. They should help defend democratic institutions and monitor the carrying out of the program voters approved at the polls.

Afro-Brazilians played a decisive role in Lula’s victory and in the popular mobilization to defend democracy, national sovereignty and a country with less inequality. In outlying neighborhoods, social movements, online and in the streets, Afro-Brazilian men and women were on the front lines of the campaign. They confronted racism, disinformation and the inequalities that have long limited their political participation. This leadership must lead to more policies for racial equality, more Afro-Brazilian representation in politics and a fight against structural and institutional racism.

The PT should call on its activists, sector groups, secretariats for fighting racism, elected lawmakers and the Afro-Brazilian movement to mount a broad mobilization during Black November. Nov. 20, the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness, should be a milestone for struggle, reflection and organization. The party must fill the streets and social media with rallies, assemblies, training and debates in communities. The message is that there is no full democracy without racial justice, historical reparations and equal opportunity.

The young people who took to the streets should have a central place in this new moment. The PT needs to open its doors, renew how people take part and build new paths of political organization with young people. We call for a broad campaign to recruit young members to the Workers’ Party. It should include spaces for listening, training, participation and welcome for a generation that showed such willingness to build Brazil’s future. The PT must take on its historic responsibility to continue and deepen the democratic and popular project. It must train new leaders, renew its practices and strengthen its organization for the challenges of the period after Lula.

On Jan. 5, 2027, Lula will be sworn in as president for the fourth time, in what will be his last term in office. It will be a historic day that marks a path of struggle and change for Brazil. To celebrate, we invite state directorates, lawmakers, unions and social movements to organize caravans so activists can attend and celebrate the inauguration in Brasília.

We have called a meeting of the PT National Directorate for Nov. 13, 2026, to review the elections and analyze the political situation. The meeting will produce a document with the party’s detailed political assessment of the historic victory and guidance for the next cycle.

We celebrate this achievement with joy, gratitude and a sense of history. Brazil has shown that democracy has deep roots, that hope can beat fear and that social struggle can change the course of a nation. From the hands of workers to the boldness of students, from the courage of women to the perseverance of our activists, millions of Brazilians made this victory a collective effort.

Brazil wrote an extraordinary page of its history. Now it is time to turn the force of this victory into a new cycle of democracy, rights, sovereignty and social justice.

This public statement from the Workers’ Party national directorate originally appeared as a press release and an article on the party’s website, which can be read in Portuguese here. It was translated by Panamerican Dispatch.

The administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is betting on a Democratic victory in the legislative elections to counterbalance Donald Trump’s influence in the region. Trump has been expanding his reach in Latin America under his second term, and interfering in Brazilian affairs.

The hope within Brazil’s Foreign Ministry is that, by securing a majority in the U.S. Congress, the Democrats could act as a “brake” on the Republican’s offensives and Trump’s destabilizing actions in the region, through a policy that has become known as the “Donroe Doctrine.”

U.S., Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian, and Panamanian ships conduct training exercises during PANAMAX 2026 on the Pacific Ocean near Panama, Aug. 7, 2026. (Petty Officer 3rd Class William / U.S. Southern Command)

Since 2025, Brazil has faced various U.S. measures against it, including sanctions, tariffs, and the U.S.-supported escape of Flávio Bolsonaro.

In recent months, however, both the Brazilian government and independent actors have cultivated close ties with Democratic senators and representatives, seeking to build an alliance to shine light on the violations committed under Trump.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that, from 2027 onward, Lula has more room to pursue an independent foreign policy, both in dealings with major global powers and in establishing pragmatic channels with other Latin American governments.

Democrats have issued at least ten statements and letters challenging the White House over its disruptive behavior in Brazil, including actions taken during the country’s electoral process.

Behind the scenes, progressive lawmakers and observers have traveled to Washington to brief U.S. members of Congress on the situation in Brazil.

Whenever Lula has visited the United States, he has also made a point of meeting with some of these representatives. In September, for instance, he dedicated part of his schedule to meetings with Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Just last week, nearly 30 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding an explanation regarding the Trump administration’s potential role in Flávio Bolsonaro’s flight to the United States.

Until now, however, Democrats have been in the minority in the U.S. Congress. This meant that, despite their pressure, they lacked the votes necessary to establish investigative committees or translate their grievances into concrete actions against Trump.

A different scenario could emerge moving forward, should they win the election. It is possible, for example, that the case of Flávio Bolsonaro’s departure could become the subject of an investigative committee. Democrats want to understand why Trump granted a humanitarian visa to Bolsonaro, while simultaneously suspending such access for over 500,000 people fleeing war-torn countries.

The Brazilian government also anticipates that a Democratic majority could serve as a check on Trump’s global trade policies. Under U.S. rules, trade policy is the prerogative of Congress. Trump had managed to circumvent this reality by declaring a “national emergency.” Once that mechanism was exhausted, he concocted spurious investigations into dozens of foreign governments to justify his tariffs.

International observers hope that, with a Democratic majority in Congress, the political cost to Trump for certain decisions would increase.

Within the Lula administration, there is an expectation that a Democratic victory could lead to a shift in the bilateral relationship. There is an alignment of agendas: Brazil seeks to curb U.S. encroachment in the region, while Democrats aim to use Trump’s diplomatic proposals as an example of the dangerous path his foreign policy has taken. With a new balance of power, Lula hopes to establish a pragmatic relationship with the White House. The prevailing view in Brasília is that the United States is an “unavoidable” partner and that the best course for national diplomacy is to seek common ground in areas of shared interest.

Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira are expected to meet in December to assess the bilateral agenda. Lula is also set to attend the G20 summit, and the possibility of a meeting between Trump and the Brazilian president cannot be ruled out.

This article was originally published by ICL Noticias. It was translated by Panamerican Dispatch. You can read it, in its original Portuguese, here.

Approximately 210 million voters in the United States head to the polls this Tuesday, October 3, to elect all 435 members of the House of Representatives, as well as 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate.

Americans will also elect governors in 36 of the country’s 50 states. The outcome of the election will determine President Donald Trump’s future in the White House, as the Democrats could secure a majority in Congress, a shift that would also have political repercussions for Brazil.

Traffic moves along rain-slicked Pennsylvania Avenue before the U.S. Capitol Building on October 11, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images)

That is because the U.S. opposition has questioned the White House over alleged interference by Trump in Brazil, such as U.S. funding for campaigns directed against the Supreme Federal Court.

Currently, both legislative chambers hold a narrow Republican majority, which has given Trump greater freedom to implement his policies.

Opinion polls have pointed toward a Democratic victory, driven in part by the rising cost of living. The conflict initiated by Trump against Iran is cited as one of the causes of inflation, as it led to an increase in fuel prices following restrictions on navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

Over the past few months, the U.S. president’s disapproval rating has risen to 61%, against an approval rating of 36%, according to an average of polls calculated by The New York Times.

Amid this unfavorable landscape, Trump has promised a $5,000 payment to every adult in the country should the Republicans win the House and Senate elections. He has spent the last few days traveling across the nation to campaign for his allies.

Paulo Abrão, executive director of the Brazil Office Alliance, an organization that connects Brazilian researchers working in the U.S., says that the outcome of the election will determine the degree of control the legislative branch will have over President Trump.

“If the opposition wins one of the chambers, they could expand investigations, demand explanations from the administration, and hinder his legislative agenda. Control of the House is particularly significant for oversight,” Abrão told Agência Brasil.

Abrão added that control of the Senate grants the power to confirm or reject the appointments of officials and judges.

“If the Republicans retain both chambers, Trump will have a more favorable political environment to advance his agenda, though this does not eliminate internal disagreements within his own party,” said Abrão.

Trump has raised a series of questions concerning the security of the U.S. electoral system. In 2020, after losing to Joe Biden, Trump claimed the election had been rigged, though he provided no evidence. Last week, when asked by journalists, Trump stated that he would respect the outcome “if it’s an honest election.”

Foreign Policy

There is an expectation that a Democratic victory could lead to shifts in U.S. foreign policy, particularly over the situation involving Iran. Abrão notes that the U.S. presidency holds a wide margin of maneuver in foreign policy, even without a majority in Congress.

“A more independent Congress could increase political costs, scrutinize decisions, and contest the allocation of resources, even if it does not directly control diplomacy,” he said.

Implications for Brazil

Any political weakening of Donald Trump would likely also affect U.S.-Brazil relations, which have been marked by significant tariffs and friction with the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. That is particularly the case if Trump should lose his majority in one or both chambers of Congress.

Abrão says that Democrats could expand the investigation into the Bolsonaro family’s activities in the United States, exposing their connections to the Trump administration.

“Democratic lawmakers have already been demanding explanations [over alleged interference by Trump in Brazil],” said Abrão. “The core issue would be to clarify whether U.S. state instruments were used to favor a foreign political group, and, if so, for what reasons and on what grounds.”

He points out that a congressional investigation could examine allegations against Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, over the favoring of candidate Flávio Bolsonaro during the Brazilian elections.

The reduction in the social media reach of accounts linked to candidate Lula was attributed by the tech giant to “technical issues.”

“A shift in control of Congress could transform inquiries, currently expressed through letters from lawmakers, into investigations with a greater capacity to gather evidence and demand answers,” said Abrão, who is also a law professor. “This is not automatic. It depends on the priorities of the new majority and could face resistance and legal challenges.”

In recent weeks, Democratic members of Congress have questioned the White House in letters on a range of issues, from Meta’s actions during the Brazilian elections to the decision to revoke the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to the U.S., Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti.

Last Thursday, October 29, the Democrats demanded answers over potential White House involvement in the departure of Senator Flávio Bolsonaro from Brazil, which occurred despite a Brazilian court order prohibiting him from leaving the country.

Flávio is facing legal proceedings for money laundering, corruption, and currency evasion.

This article was originally published by Agência Brasil. It was translated by Panamerican Dispatch. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won reelection to an unprecedented fourth term. The victory capped one of the most dramatic electoral turnarounds in Brazil’s recent political history. In an extended interview with journalist Leonardo Attuch on TV 247, legal philosopher Alysson Mascaro said the reversal of a bad first round did not come from the traditional machinery of campaign offices. He said it came from workers and young people entering politics directly and on their own.

(Photo: Ricardo Stuckert)

Mascaro said the result at the polls exposed the limits of a purely institutional way of governing. When extremism on the right threatened to tear society apart, he said, grassroots networks took the lead.

The bureaucratic approach collapses in the first round

Mascaro said the campaign in the first round was trapped in a bureaucratic logic. It tried to please big business and social demands at the same time. He described a lukewarm stance built around balance sheets, strict fiscal responsibility and conciliation that failed to energize Lula’s base and failed to slow the resentment mobilized by the far right.

According to Mascaro, the first round was run as three bureaucracies at once: the government’s, the campaign’s and the party’s.

“It was backroom work, showing good numbers and trying to signal security in every direction,” he said. “But something that is safe in every direction usually does not truly please anyone. That model revealed enormous social fatigue with Bolsonarista violence and resentment.”

Mascaro, a professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), said the picture changed only when the risk of imminent defeat and of the dismantling of public institutions became real.

The spark in Niterói and the takeover of the streets

Mascaro said the decisive factor began outside government control and without its guidance. A civic jolt turned passive voters into active organizers. As a symbol of that shift, he pointed to an uprising by law students at Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Niterói. Their spontaneous protest set off demonstrations in several capitals and inland cities.

Mascaro named three features of the movement:

• Autonomous initiative: People did not wait for formal calls from party offices. They filled public squares, talked with neighbors and broke through apathy.

• The role of regional strongholds: The Northeast’s historic engagement, plus strong vote totals in strategic regions such as northern Minas Gerais, built the margin of victory.

• A change of program under pressure: Pushed by the grassroots, campaign leaders had to take up concrete demands of the working class. These included challenging the 6x1 work schedule (six days of work, one day off) and expanding social benefits. The campaign paired them with a guerrilla communication strategy on social media led by Rep. André Janones.

The limits of conciliation and the dilemma of a fourth term

Mascaro celebrated the popular victory but also issued a sharp warning about the new term. He said Lula’s biography casts him as the nation’s “great dealmaker,” a leader built for agreement and for settling conflicts, not for an open break with financial and rentier elites.

Mascaro said the classic strategy of Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) leaves economic power, interest rates and ownership of strategic sectors untouched. He said it now runs into severe material barriers in contemporary capitalism.

“Lula’s historic logic is to give people consumption, not to confront the exploiters of Faria Lima (São Paulo’s financial district) or renationalize strategic companies that were sold off for next to nothing,” Mascaro said. “That worked in the years of international boom. Today, without deep industrialization and with financial markets sabotaging the economy, the promise of consumption is limited. The government will have to decide whether to keep governing from the top as before or to anchor its term in the strength of an organized people.”

Shielding national assets and geopolitical weight

Mascaro said the election win saved Brazil from a program to speed up the liquidation of its remaining public assets. He cited plans that were in the works to open the way for private and foreign control of public institutions that are over 100 years old, such as the Bank of Brazil (Banco do Brasil) and the Federal Savings Bank (Caixa Econômica Federal).

On the international stage, Mascaro said the far right’s defeat in Brazil protects the country’s autonomy against imperialist pressure. He said it also preserves the strength of the BRICS bloc and gives popular movements across Latin America and the Global South room to resist.

Mascaro closed by stressing that the biggest challenge now is to keep people from leaving the streets after the euphoria of victory. He said a sovereign project will require the people to stay organized permanently. He said great social transformations come not from concessions in government offices but from the continuing ability of the masses to fight.

The full interview between Mascaro and Attuch is available on the TV 247 channel: “Alysson Mascaro: ‘Lula turned the race around because the people stepped in.’”

This article originally ran in Brasil 247, was translated to English by with express authorization of its editor-in-chief, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

A former Mossad agent helped with the escape. Ex-CIA agents are warning about the method used to get Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro out of Brazil. The plane used in the operation is suspected of links to businessmen who are far more than questionable. There was a disinformation ploy. And the flight landed at an airport that is notorious for its place in the history of White House interventions in Latin America.

This AI-generated fake image posted on Flávio Bolsonaro’s social media account after his meeting with Trump earlier this year added two people to the photo: Paulo Figueredo, the grandson of Brazil’s last military dictator, and Eduardo Bolsonaro, a fugitive of justice currently living in Texas.

The operation to get Brazil’s defeated presidential candidate out of the country tells us a great deal. Some Brazilians may still have wondered which flag the Bolsonaro family really serves. This event answers that question. Bolsonaro is, in the end, just a puppet of foreign interests.

TV Globo reported the details of the operation on Sunday. None of it should surprise anyone. Bolsonaro promised to give Brazil’s rare earths to the United States. He vowed to privatize public assets, give up national sovereignty over the defense of Brazilian territory, and align Brazilian foreign policy with American and Israeli interests. He is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a coup plotter.

Bolsonaro even offered to put the U.S. State Department in charge of his transition team. Nothing like that has ever happened in Brazil.

All the while, he posed as a patriot. He wore the flag and the Brazil national team jersey like a costume to fool millions of voters. He used the word “patriot” to hide what could have been the worst act of treason ever seen at the highest levels of Brazilian politics.

The Americans and the former Mossad agent did not come to Bolsonaro’s rescue out of generosity. They wanted to protect their asset in the region.

By fleeing with foreign help, Bolsonaro showed who he really is - a puppet who was willing to hand over the country in exchange for power.

His escape with the aid of foreign intelligence services shows what awaited us if he had won the presidency. It would have been a coup that simultaneously undermined our democracy and our sovereignty.

This is the bullet that we dodged on October 25th.

This opinion piece, which does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editors, originally appeared in ICL Notícias, has been translated to English with express authorization by the editor, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

By Marcelo Zero

What happened in Brazil in this second round of the election was historic.

It was not just an electoral victory.

It was the start of a national and international movement of popular resistance to fascism, the far right and the brutal, lawless imperialism imposed by the government of President Donald Trump.

(photo: Brian Mier)

All over the world, the “L” in Lula has taken on a new meaning.

It means that people, especially the most neglected, can hope to fight successfully against the growing erosion of the welfare state, the stripping away of social and economic rights, and the grim prospect that future generations will have worse lives than past ones.

Until this election, the dissatisfaction and hopelessness created by growing social malaise were being channeled heavily into neofascist movements, under the misnamed “populism of the right.” Those movements dominated social media. They pushed the view that the answer to this malaise lay in political authoritarianism and economic individualism.

As a result, in many countries, including Brazil, neofascist movements became “normalized” in democratic contests. This worsened economic and social problems and put democratic institutions at serious risk.

At the same time, this came with an attack on public international law, world trade rules and multilateralism (which is nothing more than democracy on a planetary scale). The result is a Hobbesian world founded on the interests of the US far right and based on the reckless use of force with no legal or moral limits.

Those who defend democracy, progressives and the left watched all of this, by and large, with a sense of powerlessness and growing fragility.

No more. I believe, without fear of exaggeration, that Lula’s victory was a “turning point” in this trend. It is inspiring progressive and democratic forces not only in Brazil and Latin America but across the planet.

Lula’s victory opened a path of hope, built on popular mobilization, to replace the sterile and counterproductive path of exploiting resentment and hatred for political gain.

It reclaimed politics and democracy, from the pavement of the streets to the digital rooftops.

But this fight has only begun. We planted the seed, but it must germinate.

What Gramsci called the struggle for counterhegemony begins again, renewed, at a higher historical level.

It is the struggle to prevail, in a peaceful contest of values, culture and intellect, over the hegemony of those who bet on inequality, resentment, antipolitics and authoritarianism.

We will only be able to govern if we deepen this fundamental struggle.

The fight of hope against hatred goes on. But the victory of Lula and the Brazilian people has opened a worldwide door that will not be closed again. The fugitives and criminals jumped out of a window that has now shut.

We won. We will win.

On Thursday, October 29, Brazilian lawyer Thiago Süssekind took to X to set the record straight on the accusations and evidence against Flávio Bolsonaro.

Reading posts by foreigners about Brazil, I get the impression that you’re not aware of the full extent of the accusations against Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, or of the available evidence of his corruption. So I'd like to kindly invite you to really get to know Flávio.

Senator Flavio Bolsonaro leaves the Federal Police headquarters after visiting his father, Jair Bolsonaro, in Brasilia, on December 09, 2025. (Photo by Ton MOLINA / AFP via Getty Images)

Flávio Bolsonaro's Relationship with Willer Tomaz

The seizure of Flávio Bolsonaro’s passport was ordered as part of the investigation into his relationship with Willer Tomaz, a lawyer accused of being a professional money launderer. In 2025 alone, Mr. Tomaz moved US$1 billion through a single betting platform. Let’s dive in:

Mr. Tomaz has been arrested before, is accused of money laundering in a scheme that siphoned money from pensioners, and has been the target of a search-and-seizure operation. He’s very close to Flávio: they traveled abroad together five times between January and May 2025.

Mr. Tomaz owns an offshore company, “Alcazar Holdings”, which held a one-third stake in a private jet used by disgraced banker Daniel Vorcaro — now in prison over the biggest financial scandal in Brazil's history — who owned another third. Police suspect Flávio is a partner.

Emails leaked to the press show that Flávio could control Alcazar’s bank account. The two are also caught up in a high-profile scandal: Richarlison, the Spurs striker, accuses them of stealing — through legal shenanigans — an island close to Rio that he bought six years ago.

Flávio Bolsonaro's Ties to Jailed Banker Daniel Vorcaro

Flávio Bolsonaro's ties to Mr. Tomaz aren't the only scandal he is allegedly involved in. Far more consequential for the election was his closeness to the jailed banker who owned the other third of that private jet. Flávio asked Mr. Vorcaro for US$24M to fund a biopic about his father.

The script of “Dark Horse” became a laughingstock. The trailer makes the budget — never made public — look implausible. The film also got public money, via congressional earmarks and São Paulo City Hall. The Federal Police are investigating possible misappropriation of funds.

In WhatsApp texts with Mr. Vorcaro, Flávio called him “big bro” and said the banker could “always count on him.” Vorcaro allegedly bribed several Bolsonaro close allies: the governor of the Federal District used public money to try to rescue his bank. And there’s much more:

The governor of Rio, Flávio’s ally in his home state, used state pension fund money to help the bank. Vorcaro paid for his trips and whisky. Bolsonaro’s ex-chief of staff tried to rescue the bank in the Senate. He got a monthly allowance, an apartment, a credit card and trips.

Flávio Bolsonaro's Connection to Organized Crime

Back in 2007, as a state lawmaker, Flávio publicly defended the “milícias” — a form of organized crime that emerged in Rio to control territory and charge residents protection fees. His ties to these criminals, especially Adriano da Nóbrega, are still cause for concern.

Adriano da Nóbrega, killed in a 2020 shootout with police, ran a murder-for-hire business. A former cop, like many “milícia” members, he was expelled from the force in 2014 over his ties to organized crime. Flávio awarded him a state medal and even took shooting lessons with him.

Adriano's wife worked in Flávio's office at the state assembly from 2007 to 2018; his mother, from 2016 to 2018. Both are suspected of taking part in a scheme that diverted public funds from the office. Flávio was charged, though the case was later annulled on procedural grounds.

The office scheme was allegedly run by Fabrício Queiroz, an ex-cop who had served with Adriano. He collected money from other staffers and paid bills such as school fees for Flávio's daughters. In 2020, he was found hiding — and arrested — at a house owned by Flávio's lawyer.

Flávio's allies in his home state are cause for concern. The politician he had picked to run for Senate is in jail on suspicion of money laundering, and has known ties to the “milícias.” The first gubernatorial candidate he wanted is also in jail, over ties to drug trafficking.

Flávio Bolsonaro's Wealth: Where did it Come from?

Flávio's wealth raises eyebrows. In 2021, he bought a US$1M mansion, worth 3x his 2018 declared assets, with a loan from BRB, a Federal District public bank that later tried to buy Vorcaro's bank. From the 1990s to 2018, his family bought 51 properties at least partly in cash.

Given all this, many in Brazil expected that, if defeated, Flávio would leave the country. With his immunity ending, the Federal Police were set to ramp up their investigations — hence the request to seize his passport.

Before calling it persecution, please consider our context.

Thiago Süssekind has a Law Degree from Rio de Janeiro State University and a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Oxford. You can follow him on X, here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Panamerican Dispatch.

President Lula, you won by 4,430,191 votes that were wept over and sweated for. They were won with great difficulty among undecided voters and among those who chose your opponent in the first round. It is the largest number of votes any president has received since our democracy was restored in 1988. That is a lot, President Lula.

Scene from Lula rally in Paudalho, Pernambuco, Oct 18, 2026 (Photo: Brian Mier)

In the heat of Avenida Paulista, you sang along with the crowd to the National Anthem: “Either the homeland stays free, or we die for Brazil.” Your gratitude went to the Brazilian people. It went to those who put you back in charge of this country. It went to the women. It went to the older voters who dragged themselves to the polls almost on stretchers. It went to the students who quickly dried their tears after the first round defeat and took to the streets, calling on the frightened who did not believe it was possible.

It was possible. We can thank this combination of factors and, even more, Congressman Janones’ “Lula’s Army” WhatsApp group. It made us believe in its theories about algorithms and the spread of slogans (if the two even go together). Those theories brought us here. It was not the traditional media, President Lula. It was not the market.

Do not fall for the story of a “divided country,” as former President Dilma Rousseff did. She was forced to bow to the demands of the people who pulled that absurd thesis out of their pockets and drove her to impeachment.

Believe in the strength of the people who carried you back to Planalto Palace. Believe that those who sang with enthusiasm on Avenida Paulista, promising to defend this country, will fight to keep you there, as long as you have faith and strength. Do not lose heart at the first speculative attack, designed to scare you and create panic. Nobody voted for the market. You are the one who knows the strength of the people and the power of transformation that has taken hold in this country. If your decisions match the agenda our people voted for, your power to carry them out will find echo and resonance.

Do not let yourself be bent by those who follow you only in exchange for personal power. Choose for your inner circle only those who share your ideal of a fourth term that is better and more favorable to social causes. Where was the market when you were thrown into a room at the Federal Police? Who was Senate President Davi Alcolumbre when you faced, with courage and a clear conscience, the humiliations inflicted by then Judge Sérgio Moro and the U.S.-backed Car Wash prosecutors?

Why hand these men your options now, your privilege of choice? It is the agenda the people elected, and you understood, that should guide the nomination of the finance minister.

Look at last week, when you surely went to bed not knowing who would be at the helm of this powerful ship that is Brazil. Remember the crude cardboard signs you saw raised in the crowd, which read things like: “Thank you, President Lula. My son is a doctor thanks to you!”

Your path in political contests ends with this term. Your name is already in this history books as that of someone who transformed our country. We did not vote for backsliding. Do not give in!

Make your choices keeping in mind the cry of the young people who marched for you: “Worker, come here. I am on the street so your child can study.”

That is it, President Lula. Listen to the echo of the streets and do what needs to be done.

The country is not divided. Those who wanted to sell out the homeland were left behind by more than four million votes. Brazil won. Make this victory count, President Lula.

Denise Assis is a journalist at Brasil 247 who worked in Brazil’s biggest mainstream media outlets, including O Globo, Journal do Brasil and Veja for decades. She’s a former advisor to the President of Brazil’s National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES), and a researcher from the Truth Commission, which investigated executions and torture during the military dictatorship. She is the author of several books, including Propaganda e cinema a serviço do golpe – 1962/1964 (Propaganda and cinema at the service of the coup - 1962-1964).

This op ed piece first appeared in Brasil 247. It has been translated to English by Panamerican Dispatch with express authorization of the editor-in-chief, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Brazilian swing. The stakes couldn’t be higher: a matter of do or die. So Brazilians hit the streets and the polling stations and managed to pull it off.

Partial view of the largest political rally in São Paulo history, on October 24, 2026 (photo:Ricardo Stuckert)

They did nothing less than tame the Mother of All Hybrid Wars and defeat, even momentarily, a powerful, toxic coalition including the full force of the “Donroe Doctrine” administration; Silicon Valley techno-feudalism, especially deployed by Meta; Wall Street and the Goddess of the Market; the multiple tentacles of Zionism Inc.; the old reactionary elites – and their media; the new bling-bling elites; the evangelical dementia; and last but not least, a mediocre neo-fascist dynasty bent on converting Brazil into an extractivist neo-colony to the benefit of His Master’s Voice.

The soothing effect is similar to an Antônio Carlos Jobim bossa nova anthem sung by Frank Sinatra. Yes, Brazil is too big and too wild to be anyone’s backyard. And what a turnaround, when it comes to Lula personally: geopolitics hasn’t seen a comeback like this since the Battle of Stalingrad.

We Lost: So the Election Was “Rigged”

Election Day dawned in nail-biting territory, but with Flávio Bolsonaro still given an 82% chance of winning according to DARPA darlings Polymarket. It’s as if the Deep State knew the result in advance, just like in the first round of voting.

Yet in the end, Lula won by 4.4 million votes. Not without plenty of drama. Just before the polls closed, a Supreme Court justice, who was formerly Lula’s defense lawyer during the Car Wash corruption case, extended voting nationwide by two hours. The electoral court should have ruled on this. It didn’t because another Supreme Court justice, who was appointed by Bolsonaro, was dragging his feet.

The extension was vital because by then it had already been proven that bolsonarista mayors were deliberately hobbling public transport, especially buses, in Lula strongholds like Salvador in Bahia: a tactic straight from the oligarchic sabotage playbook, used to suppress the popular vote.

The key fact is that both campaigns had asked for a voting extension. And that completely undercuts claims by bolsonarista and MAGA-linked twats that the election was “rigged.”

Predictably, Flávio Bolsonaro is refusing to concede and wants the election annulled. That won’t happen, according to the same Bolsonaro-appointed justice who was dragging his feet in the first place.

In the second round, Lula increased his vote total by over 10.4 million votes, while Bolsonaro got only 3.6 million more. Add to that a near improbability: there were over 1.8 million fewer (italics mine) null and void ballots compared to the first round, and the overwhelming majority went to Lula.

Several reasons explain the performance by the Comeback Kid (or Grandpa). Starting with massive popular mobilization: abstention fell from 21.08% to 19.21%. Nearly 3 million more people showed up at the polls.

Lula expanded his margin in the Northeast, where he was strong, and reduced his losses in the wealthy Southeast.

Lula’s campaign deployed serious self-correction: instead of focusing on the past he started talking about the dire, present reality: family economics; huge levels of indebtedness; the cost of living; salaries; and even advanced concrete proposals for the next four years.

The digital mobilization campaign was something to see, complete with a lethal weapon unleashed on WhatsApp: the “Lula’s Army” channel, which went from about 50,000 followers to a whopping 10 million in less than three weeks: a de facto digital infantry.

Spearheaded by newly elected Congressman André Janones, the campaign showed how Lula beat techno-feudalist hegemon Meta at its own game: the strategy will be studied in the annals of political science for generations.

And then there’s Flávio Bolsonaro’s stunning incompetence – a deadly mix of arrogance and ignorance which simply could not be sold as a moderate alternative.

Only two days before the runoff, during the last, crucial debate, Bolsonaro, live, in front of the whole nation and millions of undecided voters, mocked Lula’s disability, calling him “the 9 fingers”.

Lula crafted the blowback in real time like a cobra. He recalled how he lost his pinkie at 17 in a metalworking press, a victim of the precarity and lack of safety that millions of workers in Brazil endure: “Something very different from you, Bolsonaro, who have never worked a real job in your life.”

That sealed it: the lost pinkie as the definitive symbol of dignity in the face of privilege.

This is gonna get very ugly

Governing Brazil will be a Sisyphean task for Lula’s fourth term. The Senate (81 seats) is controlled by the extreme right (48 seats): an absolute majority. In Congress, the extreme right has 303 seats (way above the majority at 257), the center has 86 seats, and the left only 124 seats. Any reform, budget, or law will face an Iron Wall.

Arguably the best definition of Lula was once offered by the late great El Comandante, Fidel Castro:

“He was never a leftist extremist, nor did he rise to the status of revolutionary from philosophical positions, but from those of a worker of very humble origin and Christian faith, who worked hard creating surplus value for others.”

In sum, Lula may be characterized as personifying a Catholic, traditional, Lusophone-mestizo and progressive Brazil.

Lula, now in his eighties, seems to have recovered that spark. There’s no question he knows very well how this massive defeat for Trump, MAGA and the Donroe Doctrine will force him to summon all of his powers – to organize Brazil while containing the out-of-control fury of the Empire.

Whatever the results in the US midterms next week, Trump will inevitably ramp up sanctions and/or tariffs against Brazil and will continue to pull out all the stops and launch dirty operations to destabilize the country. The CIA and the Deep State are deeply enmeshed in the Brazilian reality and able to unleash an unlimited bag of dirty tricks.

Lula knows: this will get very ugly.

This article originally appeared in Pepe Escobar’s blog, Geopolitics Prime, was copy edited slightly for readability, and can be read in its original form here.

By Brian Mier

In a normal presidential race, a candidate who defended a corrupt police officer on trial for murdering a 5-year-old girl wouldn’t even be in the running. The only member of Rio de Janeiro’s state legislature to vote against extending maternity leave, who had hired the girlfriend and mother of one of the state’s most notorious death squad leaders, Adriano da Nóbrega, as ghost employees in his state congressional cabinet for more than a decade, and who was under investigation for laundering millions of dollars, would have a hard time reaching double digits in the polls. A man who chose a vice presidential running-mate who was under investigation for raping a 13 year-old girl would never emerge as a front runner in a Brazilian presidential race. This was not a normal election.

Lula on Paulista Avenue shortly after winning his 4th presidential election (Photo:Ricardo Stuckert)

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It was an election that saw flagrant interference from the U.S. government in the form of tariffs and sanctions, with President Donald Trump personally meeting with a candidate in the White House. It saw massive intervention from Meta, whose owner was one of Trump’s largest campaign donors, and a secret deal for rare earth minerals struck between Vice President J.D. Vance’s Rockbridge Network and the Bolsonaro campaign. It was the first election in Brazilian history in which a candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, offered to turn supervision of his transition team over to the U.S. government if elected.

The U.S. intervention was so obvious that a group of 31 U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to the State Department officially complaining about it, an act further supported by a public declaration denouncing U.S. intervention signed by 39 British members of Parliament.

Meta manipulation was so flagrant that on two different occasions it was denounced by its own employees. Its failure to obey Brazil’s electoral laws and bar foreign campaign advertising was exposed by Amnesty International, Eko and the Brazilian Supreme Court. Nadia Beller, former girlfriend of international far right bagman Fernando Cerimedo, who is rotting in a Bolivian prison after attempting to murder her, told Mexico’s Channel 14 that Eduardo Bolsonaro had visited Meta headquarters in California with Cerimedo to strike a deal to favor Flávio in the elections. And Meta corporation is now the subject of a Federal Police investigation for election interference in Brazil.

None of this was enough to guarantee a Bolsonaro victory and the dystopian hellscape that would have followed.

Massive grassroots organizing leads to biggest rallies in Brazilian history

Across Brazil, in thousands of towns and cities, millions of people took to the streets to rally for Lula. I witnessed a Lula rally in the small town of Paudalho, Pernambuco (population 55,000), in which over half of the entire population took to the streets to show their support for Lula. I saw 200,000 show up for a Lula rally in Recife, center of a metro area of 3.4 million, and was present at the largest rally in São Paulo’s history, which saw a crowd of 2 million people show up on Paulista Avenue the afternoon before election day.

Drone shot of the crowd that came out to Paulista Avenue in S. Paulo to celebrate Lula’s victory

The one thing these crowds had in common was that, in addition to the legions of first generation PT supporters in their 60s and 70s who fought against the military dictatorship and have never given up on the party, the streets were full of working class youth, including huge numbers of Afro-Brazilians who now make up 52% of Brazil’s public university student body.

João do Boi, a man in his 70s who leads a local Carnival group in Paudalho, told me, “I worked as a street vendor to pay my way through high school. Today these young people, some of whom are still voting for the other side, don’t know anything about our suffering and struggle for these rights that they take for granted. They think they’ve always existed. People gave their sweat and blood and their lives - a lot of people died fighting for these rights.”

João do Boi (Photo: Brian Mier)

In Recife, Mayllane da Silva, a national director of UNE, the National University Students’ Union, said, “We are out on the streets today because we believe President Lula’s reelection is essential to defending education in our country. We can’t leave education in Flávio Bolsonaro’s hands, given that he wants to take our universities out from the jurisdiction of Education Ministry. He wants to tear down education in our country. That’s why UNE isn’t just out on the streets here in Pernambuco, but all across Brazil, to say: We need Lula reelected president so we can defend our right to education.”

Mayllane da Silva (photo: Brian Mier)

In a rally organized by São Paulo’s city workers and state theater workers unions, actress Flora Sandya said, “I think it’s important that we young people who work in the cultural industry take a side, because we are in a very delicate political moment in Brazil. We have to defend our rare earth minerals, and we have to keep Brazil out of the hands of the United States.”

Flora Sandya (Photo: Brian Mier)

In the historic rally on Paulista Avenue, which brought more people to the streets than the entire population of Philadelphia, a young subway system worker named Ricardo Senese told me, “Considering the entire history of the Bolsonaros, they can be viewed as a family that fights against democratic rights. They attempted to stage a coup on Jan. 8, 2023. They nominated top ranking military commanders to head their ministries. We support Lula because we want to strengthen democracy in our country. We are defending democratic freedom.”

Ricardo Senese (Photo: Brian Mier)

Many people were worried about dirty electoral tricks, and it didn’t take long for news of them to come to the surface. In São Paulo, Bolsonaro aligned Mayor Ricardo Nunes ignored a court order requiring the buses to run at full capacity and had 40% of his fleet parked in city garages, primarily for lines going through the poor neighborhoods on the city periphery where Lula had gotten the most votes in the first round. Similar complaints began to come in from cities like Salvador, Brazil’s sixth largest metro area, and Petrolina, Pernambuco, population 440,000.

After both the Bolsonaro and Lula campaigns issued complaints requesting voting hours to be extended, Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin issued an order for the polling stations to stay open for another two hours. At this exact moment, I was in a São Paulo polling station at FAM, the College of the Americas, and this is what I saw.

The entrance gates to the college were closed at 5 p.m., leaving a middle aged woman in tears because she had just spent one hour and 40 minutes on public transportation after leaving her job as a supermarket cashier on the other side of the city so that she could exercise her democratic right to vote. Fifty minutes later, a guard came out and reopened the gate. Unfortunately, by this time the woman was long gone.

“This isn’t just happening in São Paulo,” the guard said. “It’s happening in several other states. There have been problems with public transportation. There were several locations where people did not have good access to mobility, so both candidates agreed to extend the voting deadline. And they are telling us it has been extended to 7 p.m.”

Heading back into the building, I saw election observers arguing with officials.

“The Workers Party and its coalition partners filed a court request to extend the voting deadline by two hours across the entire country due to problems with public transportation,” a university professor and election observer named Maria Carlotta told me. “The electoral court took a long time to respond, so the Federal Supreme Court intervened and issued the extension, but many voting centers in São Paulo are ignoring the order due to instructions from the [conservative] São Paulo regional electoral court.”

Maria Carlotta (photo: Brian Mier)

A few minutes later, the front gate was closed again. An election official told me that the problem was that the order from the Supreme Court came too late and that all the electronic voting machines had been turned off. Once that happens, he said, they cannot be turned on again.

Another election observer came up to me and contradicted the official. “My name is Marilda Taffarel, and I am an observer from the Workers Party for section 197 on the fifth floor of this voting center. The ballot machines were not all turned off there. Several ballot boxes were still open. On the other floors they were closed very quickly. It was only after a lot of insisting that the gate for voters to enter was reopened at 5:50 p.m. And the issue of one voter who arrived at 5:10 p.m. is still being resolved. They still haven’t let him vote, and he’s here complaining, and they are trying to send him to the notary public’s office.”

Marilda Taffarel (photo: Brian Mier)

As I was getting ready to leave, the front gate was reopened, and I saw three voters enter the building being told that they would only be able to vote if they were registered for the voting section on the fifth floor.

In the end, it didn’t make any difference. Lula won by 4.4 million votes, and the total number of votes tallied nationwide between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. was only 35,000.

I waited for the results with a friend in a restaurant during the tallying. When the count hit 80% with Lula still in the lead, the streets broke out with cheers, singing and shouting for Lula. We got onto subway train at República station that was already jam packed with people in red singing and shouting. Our short trip up to Paulista Avenue was like a carnival ride, and when we came up to street level, we were greeted by a crowd of red that stretched as far as the eye could see.

How did Lula stage his comeback?

If it weren’t for Meta and other social media company manipulation, plus the U.S. government using tariffs and sanctions to try to scare and extort voters into supporting their candidate as they did in countries like Honduras, Peru and Colombia, I believe that Lula would have won by at least 10 million votes.

The fact that he managed to double his lead over Jair Bolsonaro from the 2022 election is a testimony to the support he has from Brazil’s working class, which voted for him by a nearly 2 to 1 ratio over Bolsonaro.

Formed by a coalition of working class labor unions and social movements with middle class intellectuals like Paulo Freire, the PT has always relied on grassroots organizing. This has been put to the test in the age of heavily manipulated algorithmic reach pushed by the social media corporations.

It’s also led to bad analysis about the left not knowing how to use social media, as if these Zionist corporations were a democratic commons where everyone had equal freedom to express their ideas, not a field where wealthy elites can pay for reach and build bot armies to advance dystopian fantasies about things like “scientific racism,” “the joys of being a trad wife” and “the climate change hoax.”

After losing the first round, party activists doubled down on the PT’s traditional mobilization techniques of knocking on doors, talking to people on the street and in the workplace, and organizing street rallies. The instructions were to focus on the 33 million people who abstained during the first round election. The party’s logic was that it would be easier to convince people to come out to vote than it would be to convince Bolsonaro supporters to change their votes. The analysis turned out to be correct. Fourteen million people who abstained or cast blank ballots in the first round election voted in the runoff. Of those 14 million, 10.3 million voted for Lula and 3.7 million voted for Flávio Bolsonaro.

Although social media is not an even playing field, successful strategies were employed that made a difference in the election. First of all, from the moment Amnesty International and Eko first published their reports, pressure began to build against Meta. After more reporting by Brazilian journalists exposed Meta’s fraud, protests in front of corporate headquarters kicked off in three countries, and Meta announced that its global policy director and main point man with the Trump administration, Joel Kaplan, was leaving the company.

This pressure on Meta seems to have made a difference in reach for both candidates on the final election day, after the debacle of the first round, where, 12 hours before the voting started, Flávio suddenly had multiple times more engagement than Lula.

Another clear factor that contributed to Lula’s victory was concocted by Minas Gerais congressman André Janones, from the center left REDE party. He successfully built a WhatsApp group called “Lula’s Troops,” which amassed over 10 million followers in less than two weeks. Janones has a lot of charisma, and his hourly pep talks with instructions for online behavior for Lula supporters certainly built momentum for the election.

Right wing journalist and politician Joice Hasselmann, who has a huge social media following, was the bolsonarista liberal party’s first leader in Congress during the Jair Bolsonaro administration. She generated a lot of waves when she announced that even though she dislikes the Workers Party’s policies and will continue arguing with them, she was voting for Lula because of the importance of democracy and sovereignty.

Another factor in Lula’s victory was the Catholic vote. Despite misunderstandings about this in the Global North, there are twice as many Catholics as evangelicals in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was ushered in in part through a Reaganesque coalition of right wing Catholics, like Jair himself, and conservative evangelical Christians. But when it came out that the pastor who converted Flávio from Catholicism to prosperity gospel evangelism wrote an entire book chapter comparing Brazil’s patron saint, Our Lady of Aparecida, to Satan, and that a large number of Bolsonaro supporters were working to try to have her removed as the patron saint of Brazil, there was a backlash among a significant number of conservative Catholics that certainly made a difference on election day.

What happens now?

Historically, when a U.S.-backed candidate loses an election in Latin America, the next step is to begin working on a coup. This happened most recently in Brazil after the DNC’s beloved and corrupt candidate Aécio Neves lost to Dilma Rousseff.

Flávio Bolsonaro has already fled to Miami. His parliamentary immunity ends in February with the formation of the new Senate, and he is currently under investigation for a series of crimes. There are mountains of material evidence including audio recordings showing tax evasion and money laundering of a $12 million gift from jailed banking fraudster Daniel Vorcaro - a crime that has been admitted by Flávio himself. In other words it was a reasonable assumption that sooner or later, he would be arrested in Brazil. This probably explains why, with Javier Milei and Trump’s help, he snuck out of the country after the Federal Police requested his passport, correctly assessing him as a flight risk.

After Bolsonaro released a statement yesterday declaring himself the “legitimate president of Brazil,” however, his family’s closest allies have begun to distance themselves from him. São Paulo Gov. Tarcísio Freitas said that he knows it must be tough but that Flávio has to accept the election results and move forward. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) leadership has issued a statement officially recognizing the election results. Pastor Silas Malafaia, one of the most powerful right wing evangelical leaders in Brazil, has not only recognized the election results but also labeled the Bolsonaro children as a group of “jackasses.”

Actors on the international far right continue to push an “authoritarian Brazil” narrative. This might work in the parallel universe of QAnon, flat earthers and the great replacement theory, but does not hold up to any rational analysis. If Brazil is so authoritarian, how did Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party just elect the highest number of congressmen and senators? How did Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, just get elected to the Senate? How did the fraudulent U.S.-trained judge who oversaw kangaroo court proceedings that led to Lula’s arbitrary imprisonment just get elected governor of Paraná? How did Flávio’s own brother Carlos just get elected to the Senate?

There is no doubt in my mind that the Silicon Valley tech giants want to destroy Brazil’s democracy. There is also no doubt in my mind that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump want to transform Brazil into a neocolonial protectorate, as they are trying to do with Venezuela.

The questions at this point are: 1) How high is this on their priority list? 2) How will a possible Democratic victory in the U.S. midterms change their power dynamic?

At this point in the conjuncture, it seems that any future regime change plans coming from the U.S. will be made without the Bolsonaros, who are now, like Maria Corina Machado, firmly placed in the “loser” column on Trump’s mental list of winners and losers.

A few months ago, one case caused a stir among Latin American immigrants in the United States. The Donald Trump administration refused to grant a humanitarian visa to the mother of a U.S. child who was recovering from a rare brain tumor.

The mother, an immigrant, had been deported to Mexico and was hoping for a sign from Washington that would allow her daughter to continue receiving specialized medical treatment.

She waited for ten months, only to receive a negative response. The child was 10 years old when immigration authorities deported her parents, who lacked legal documentation, to Mexico more than a year ago.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Senator Flavio Bolsonaro smile in the Oval Office after their meeting in Washington in May 2026.

The girl and four of her siblings, three of whom are also U.S. citizens, left along with their parents. Their deportation interrupted months of vital treatment the girl had been receiving in the United States following emergency surgery in 2024 to remove the brain tumor.

Cases like this are part of an endless list of denials issued by the White House.

Beginning in 2025, hundreds of thousands of people who had been protected from deportation lost that protection when a humanitarian relief mechanism known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was terminated. 500,000 foreign nationals were affected.

On June 12, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had begun sending notifications to people advising them of the termination of their humanitarian status and work authorization in the United States. Those most impacted were Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

Among Haitians alone, the measure affected 350,000 people living in the U.S. In 2026, new countries were added to the list. In total, protections for citizens of 13 countries were suspended, affecting 1 million out of the 1.3 million beneficiaries who held this status.

Yet, this week, Washington broke with precedent and decided that one family deserved this privilege: the family of Flávio Bolsonaro.

The humanitarian pass granted to the senator sparked outrage among lawyers and activists working on U.S. immigration issues, including those representing hundreds of Brazilians currently awaiting deportation.

In 2026, only 16,000 people were granted exile status in the United States. Almost all of them were white South Africans who, according to Trump, were being targeted for “persecution” by the country’s Black population.

By comparison, during the last two fiscal years of the Joe Biden administration, 2023 and 2024, 60,000 and 100,000 people, respectively, entered the country as refugees.

In the 2024 fiscal year, the largest groups of people arrived from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, and Venezuela.

This article initially ran in ICL Notícias. It has been translated by Panamerican Dispatch. You can read it in its original Portuguese here.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won a record fourth term in office, defeating far-right challenger Flávio Bolsonaro by 4 million votes in a runoff election on Sunday. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who remains under house arrest for plotting a coup against Lula four years ago. The younger Bolsonaro, who narrowly defeated Lula in the first round of voting earlier this month, is now refusing to concede.

Lula’s surprise comeback comes after weeks of student-led organizing and campaigning on his behalf, and amid accusations that U.S.-based tech companies were suppressing Lula’s reach online in favor of his Trump-aligned opponent. “The amount of organizing, the amount of marches and rallies, campaigning, pamphlets that we’ve seen the last three weeks has been something that I have never seen in my entire life, ever, covering elections for decades in so many different countries. It is absolutely unprecedented,” says Brazil-based journalist Michael Fox. “It is an absolute game-changer for the region.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I’m in Denver to speak after the screening of the film about Democracy Now!, Steal This Story, Please!, at CU Boulder this afternoon at 3:30. But right now we go to today’s top headline.

We begin in Brazil, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pulled off a stunning comeback to defeat far-right challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, but Bolsonaro is refusing to concede. Just three weeks ago, Bolsonaro won the first round of voting, but on Sunday, Lula defeated him by more than 4 million votes.

Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of Brazil’s former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who remains under house arrest after being sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup following his defeat to Lula four years ago.

Lula supporters celebrated in the streets of Brasília last night.

STELA SAÍGUI: [translated] This turnaround was historic. I think we sent a message to the world that the fight against fascism is real, and it takes popular mobilization. Nothing surpasses the power and strength of the people.

ANABEL FERREIRA: [translated] Oh my god! I can’t even believe it. It was a real struggle. We fought against some very powerful forces — economic power, betting companies, Meta, the media, the mainstream media, militia members and everything else — and we made it.

AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday night, Brazilian President Lula addressed supporters in São Paulo after he was declared the winner in the runoff.

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] But I wanted to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time, and in the second round, to thank the generosity of the Brazilian youth who took to the streets, took to the streets to defend democracy. …

I saw many scenes today of people being carried by their grandchildren to go vote, people unable to move around, people with cancer and other types of illness. And people went to vote because we were able to convince them that the vote was very important to safeguard democracy in the country. …

I want to thank society as a whole, what really won. This election was an election in which we had to overcome outside interference through digital platforms, which we will have to regulate … in a demonstration that this country does not accept being anyone’s backyard.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Brazilian President Lula speaking last night.

His opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, has called for the election results to be annulled, citing a decision by a Brazilian Supreme Court judge to keep polling stations open for an additional two hours because of bad weather in some regions — both candidates had reportedly requested the extension. Flávio Bolsonaro’s refusal to concede comes four years after his father, Jair Bolsonaro, staged a coup after Lula defeated him in the 2022 election. This is part of what Flávio Bolsonaro said last night.

SEN. FLÁVIO BOLSONARO: [translated] What happened today was not normal. It was downright unacceptable. A Supreme Court justice, for the first time in history, a former lawyer for Lula, with a simple stroke of the pen at the request of a former partner, changed the rules of the game in the middle of the match. At 5:01 p.m., Justice Zanin, who is not a member of the electoral court and has trampled on the specialized judicial system, decided to postpone the elections by two hours. This has never happened before in Brazil’s history. It has completely undermined equality among Brazilians from different cities and states. … It is impossible to understand the election results in context, given when these events took place. We will take legal action. I will request that these elections be annulled.

AMY GOODMAN: Brazilian President Lula’s victory bucks a rightward shift in Latin America. Over the past 18 months, Honduras, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Peru and Colombia all elected right-wing leaders aligned with the Trump administration. In addition, Trump ordered the U.S. military to abduct the leftist president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.

We go now to Porto Alegre, Brazil, where we’re joined by Michael Fox, freelance journalist, former editor of NACLA. He’s the host of Under the Shadow podcast, a joint project of NACLA and the Real News Network. He’s also the co-founder of the independent news site Panamerican Dispatch.

You’re there on the streets of Porto Alegre, Michael. Can you talk about the response? This is unprecedented for a candidate to win after losing in the [first round], which just took place three [weeks] ago. Talk about the significance of Lula’s victory by 4 million votes and Flávio Bolsonaro refusing to concede.

MICHAEL FOX: Yeah, it’s just unprecedented, absolutely, Amy. I mean, it was just incredible to be on the streets last night, to be there seeing people voting. My wife votes near here in a town called São Leopoldo, and she said that there were people coming in from the hospital, that they — like, they literally left the hospital. They were in their hospital rooms, but they had to get there. They had to vote. This is something that we’ve just never seen before. The amount of organizing, the amount of marches and rallies, campaigning, pamphlets that we’ve seen the last three weeks has been something that I have never seen in my entire life, ever, covering elections for decades in so many different countries. It is — it is absolutely unprecedented.

And that’s why people, when they went out to vote, and last night when they started to see the results coming in, they weren’t quite sure what they were going to see. This poll, the latest, the latest numbers, it said it was neck and neck. Like, they could not tell who was ahead. And the only thing that they said was going to make or break the difference was abstention. If Lulu was going to be able to get enough people out there to win the vote, then he would win; otherwise, it’d be Flávio. And he got way more than enough, double, right? Like, I think it was 10 million more votes. And also, just one other detail here, Amy, he won by double the percentage that he beat Jair Bolsonaro four years ago. It’s just shocking. And it is really important for Brazil and really important for the region.

Now, the fact that Flávio Bolsonaro came out and said he’s not going to recognize the results, it’s almost as if you can’t expect anything else. We know that four years ago, his father didn’t respect the results. And in a lot of ways, this is really just a justification for him then to whip up a storm amidst his supporters.

Already, the Supreme Electoral Court, the two — so, the Supreme Electoral Court in Brazil is made up of two, three judges from the country’s electoral court — from the country’s Supreme Court and other court bodies within Brazil. The two main judges that are on the Supreme Electoral Court were both appointed by his father, Jair Bolsonaro. So, these people, who many people saw them kind of trying to help the Flávio Bolsonaro campaign, and the president, Kássio Nunes, the president of the Supreme Electoral Court, has already said that he thinks that everything that went down in the elections was legitimate and fine. And like you mentioned already, many of the — the extension of the voting extension, Flávio Bolsonaro himself had requested it in five different states because of adverse rain, in fact, here in Porto Alegre, Santa Catarina, São Paulo and a bunch of other places. So, this is not something that is likely going to impact the results of this election, but he’s going to use this as justification to whip his people up and to attempt to create denialism and to undermine the vote, without a doubt.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Michael, I wanted to ask you specifically about this whole issue of the turnout, because Flávio Bolsonaro actually got more votes in this election than his father did four years ago, but it was just the enormous increase in Lula’s vote, where he had gotten about 60 million votes when he defeated Jair Bolsonaro, this time he got 64 million votes. And so it was just the enormous increase in the turnout. How was that accomplished? And also, what was the impact of the debates, from what you could tell, that Lula had with Flávio Bolsonaro during this runoff period?

MICHAEL FOX: So, this is so important, because I think this is one of those lessons that, everywhere, people need to learn from what Brazil has just done. It was organizing on the ground, grassroots, and it was every day. Like, one of the biggest things was, literally, the day after that first vote, people were just — you know, Lula supporters were just — they couldn’t believe what had just happened, right? He had just lost two points. He was supposed to be ahead in the polls. Now it looked like Flávio Bolsonaro was six points up. What are we going to do? And the very next night, you saw students hit the streets in Niterói. And it was these images of students saying, “Uh-uh, not going to happen.”

And why students? It was because what happened with Jair Bolsonaro four years ago — or, six years ago, right? Under his term, 2019 through 2022, one of the major things he went out at the very beginning of his term is he tried to cut budgets across the board for federal universities. He slashed budgets, froze budgets. And students rose up, and they saw — some of the very first, the biggest marches against Jair Bolsonaro were the student marches. And so, the students were the ones who were really in the streets, front and center, helping to lead, helping to guide these marches.

But it wasn’t just that. You saw people, like — and they were talking, “Look, you have to talk to your neighbors. You have to talk to your relatives. You have to go — you know, you have to travel, you know, to go back to your place of voting.” It was this massive vote-getting campaign, people asking, “Hey, do you need rides to get to the polls?” big marches, big rallies to show their support, and so much hope.

This was another thing I think that was really important, that Lula, literally the night that he lost, he said, “Don’t worry. It’s all good. I like — I like sudden death. I like the second round. You know, Bolsonaristas, get ready, because, you know, I’m going to defeat you.” And he did. And people felt that kind of excitement. So, I think that was really important.

The other thing was online. So, this is huge. First off, Bolsonaro, just like the far right in general around the world and in the United States, they know how to use the memes. They know how to use AI, Meta, Instagram. And, of course, Meta, in this case, was clearly also biased and doing favoritism for Jair Bolsonaro. But what we saw was Lula supporters, they had an organized campaign of trying to use memes, using AI to get around — they call it fora da bolha — you know, break through the bubble that they had, to try and get into other areas, to try and get to those independents, to the 33 million people in Brazil who didn’t vote. And they were just able to do this incredible campaign online. And they really, really — and, of course, online, here’s the problem, is the fact that Big Tech, we know, it is under the control of Big Tech. They control the algorithm. We don’t know what it is. And they’re playing favorites. That was clearly the case in this moment, except for the fact that Meta says that they didn’t interfere in the elections. But that’s what happened. But, definitely, Lula and his supporters organized and organized and organized, and it is a lesson for people elsewhere.

In terms of the debates, the very first debate was just — it was just insane, right? Because it was an attack show. There were no rules. But I think that what people got out of it was just how aggressive Flávio Bolsonaro was, how many lies he was doing. But it was just this back-and-forth. Now, the second debate had all these specific rules. You couldn’t stand behind each other. You couldn’t just directly attack each other. You actually had to kind of respond. But then, when they did fact-checking afterwards, it showed that, you know, most of Lula’s answers were true, and most of Flávio Bolsonaro’s answers were false, and he was actually throwing out false information. So, it’s hard to tell exactly, like, the impact the debates had, but I think that, overall, Lula came out looking just a little bit better, because people said, you know, he is — he’s a statesman, right? He is a diplomat, and that’s what he represents. And this is, of course, the difference between the attacking of the far right and what we see kind of all elsewhere, their use of language and hate and discourse in order to undermine kind of the democratic debate.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, I wanted to go to the debate Friday night, the final debate. This is Lula speaking after Bolsonaro called him “nine fingers.”

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] I am going to use my time, because he said something extremely stupid, and I am not going to let that go. He called me “nine fingers.” I want him to understand something. There is someone here in this audience who knows what the world of work is like. That person is me. There is someone here who lost a finger while working. I lost my finger while working. I had to work at night. I had no choice but to work. I will not allow him to call me that again. I will not allow it.

CÉSAR TRALLI: [translated] Silence in the audience, please.

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] He has never worked a day in his life. He doesn’t know what a work permit is. The first job he ever had was given to him by his father. He worked with his father and stayed in Brasília, and now he comes here and calls me names. He will have to apologize. He will have to apologize, because Brazilian workers are watching. Millions of workers have suffered because of employers who force people to work long hours. I was underage, and I worked at night, because I either worked or I didn’t eat. I will not accept some rich guy with a highly questionable political practice coming here and calling me “nine fingers.”

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Lula responding to Bolsonaro calling him “nine fingers.” Michael Fox, if you can talk about the difference in the class base between Bolsonaro and Lula, and, actually, if you see comparisons to what’s happening in the United States now with President Trump?

MICHAEL FOX: Well, there are obviously comparisons with the United States, and that’s something that I dug into a lot in Brazil on Fire, my podcast, back from 2022. And part of this is the fact that it is class-based, but it’s also race-based. Like, you know that in northeastern Brazil, it’s kind of the poorest region of the Brazil, and it’s the largest Afro-Brazilian region. This is the area that Lula came from, right? This is where he’s from. He understands this place. This is the region that’s always voted en masse for Lula — right? — and in high, high percentages. Why? Because his social programs, his poverty alleviation programs, his development projects have completely changed the map of northeastern Brazil. It’s been extremely important.

The southern Brazil, in general, is white. It’s middle-class, descended from Europe, Italy, Germany and whatnot. And these people vote more in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro or the Bolsonaro family, right? This is an area that was actually back — and I did some reporting on this a while back. Like, Santa Catarina, the state where I actually live, they had the largest Nazi party outside of Germany during the 1930s. This is an area where there are still neo-Nazis. And so, this is extremely important to understand the role these connections that it plays within the support for Flávio Bolsonaro.

And it absolutely is a response, kind of a pushback from the white lower class, middle class — the same thing we see within Trump’s — to kind of the poverty alleviation programs, to the social programs that Lula has been able to roll out over the last 20 years, just kind of in a similar way that we saw with Obama. And so, the reaction that we’ve seen for, first, the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, and then the attempt for also Flávio Bolsonaro of the far right, this rise of the far right, is very, very similar in this sense.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Michael, I wanted to ask you about the impact of this result in the rest of Latin America. Of course, we’ve heard much about the rightward turn in many Latin American governments. But the two largest countries in Latin America, Mexico and now Brazil, remain under the leadership of left-wing leaders. In fact, Claudia Sheinbaum was among the first to congratulate Lula on his victory last night. And Mexico and Brazil still represent half of the total population of Latin America.

MICHAEL FOX: I saw an article yesterday or the day before that said this is the most important election, if not in Latin America, in the world, after the U.S. election. And it’s exactly for that. Lula and Brazil set a mark, in that they said, “No, we’re not going to go down that route.” And it is — it is an absolute game-changer for the region. In my podcast, Under the Shadow, I focus on U.S. intervention in Latin America, and I’ve spent this entire year looking at what Trump has been doing in the region, from, you know, his invasion of Venezuela, the turning the screws around Cuba and everyplace else, meddling in elections up and down. This is the one country that’s been able to stand up and say no. And this is one of the most important countries in the region, because it’s the largest GDP. Literally, the population, the size is the same as all the rest of the countries of South America combined.

And Trump knows that. This is why this was a huge priority for him, getting this to flip and getting a good friend of his, like Flávio Bolsonaro, in here. Remember, Flávio Bolsonaro literally traveled to the United States six times this year. He met with Trump in May and convinced Trump to put two Brazilian gangs on the foreign terrorist organization list of the United States. That’s the same kind of the excuse that the United States uses to meddle in other countries, right? So, clearly, Flávio Bolsonaro was clearly aligned with Trump. He had already told Marco Rubio that he was more than willing to hand over his transition team to the State Department, which is just mind-boggling.

But so, this, that’s why this is so important, because, literally, we now have someone like Lula, who is going to continue to stand up. Brazil is going to continue to stand up, demand sovereignty. Don’t forget that just last year we saw Trump levy 50% tariffs on Brazil, and then, you know, Brazilians rose up and said, “Uh-uh, that’s not going to happen,” and until, finally, like, you know, he had to — they negotiated, and then he removed them, because that’s not — you know, so this is an extremely important moment for the region. Brazil is a shining beacon for the region at this moment. And Brazilians know it, and so do so many people elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Fox, we want to thank you so much for being with us, freelance journalist, former editor of NACLA, the host of Under the Shadow podcast, which is a joint project of NACLA and The Real News Network, co-founder of the independent news site Panamerican Dispatch, speaking to us from Porto Alegre, Brazil. To hear this interview in Spanish, you can go to democracynow.org.