The following is an edited transcript of an interview of Brian Mier by Janine Jackson that aired on Counterspin on October 30. Listen to the full conversation 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.
Let’s not even get into what this m-fer black out during the last NO KINGS march.
Wait… no, let’s get into it!!!