Two US State Department officials led a campaign to restore the right-wing Bolsonaro clan to power in Brazil and successfully pushed for sanctions aimed at tilting the election in their favour, according to 10 current and former US officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
Their plan faces a reckoning on Sunday, when Senator Flavio Bolsonaro faces left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a tight run-off. Lula has warned Washington against encroaching on Brazil's sovereignty and accused his opponent of plotting with the Trump administration.
The two officials were Darren Beattie, a Senior Adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs who oversees Brazil policy, and Ricardo Pita, another senior adviser promoted this year to Deputy Assistant Secretary for North America. The details of their campaign to return the Bolsonaros to power have not been previously reported.
Beattie and Pita, both political appointees, operated with wide latitude to manage Washington's relationship with the second most populous country in the Americas, the people said.
In the months before election campaigning began, they instructed US diplomats in Brazil that it was US policy to restore former President Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil's leader – even though he had been disqualified from office for plotting a coup in 2022, when he lost the presidential election to Lula, three of the people said.
After Bolsonaro received a 27-year sentence in September 2025, the two men pivoted to supporting the candidacy of his son, right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, the three sources said. Beattie and Pita told embassy staff not to interact with other conservative presidential contenders who could challenge the younger Bolsonaro, they said.
Since last year, the two men have successfully advocated punitive US government measures against Brazil designed to weaken Lula and boost the Bolsonaros, the 10 people told Reuters. The policies included designating Brazilian gangs as terrorist groups and imposing US sanctions against the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who was spearheading the investigation into Jair Bolsonaro.
Reuters could not determine the extent to which the two men were acting on orders from the White House or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump, a vocal defender of Bolsonaro since his election defeat in 2022, has not publicly endorsed any candidate.
The White House declined to comment and referred questions to the State Department.
State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott did not answer questions about specific measures and directives involving Beattie and Pita but said in a statement: "All actions taken by the United States against narco-traffickers and to protect free speech are to defend the rights and lives of the American people. The Brazilian people have the right to choose their leaders through free and fair elections."
Lula's office did not respond to requests for comment.
Orna Blum, one of the officials who spoke to Reuters about Beattie and Pita's efforts, led the State Department's Brazil and Southern Cone office until retiring last year over her opposition to the Trump administration.
Washington "has every right to pursue its economic and strategic interests," she said. "But when American foreign policy instruments are used to pressure another democracy over the legal fate of a political ally, the line between diplomacy and political intervention has been crossed."
Sanctions on a Supreme Court justice
Beattie is a former White House speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after addressing an event frequented by white nationalists. He is also the architect of "free speech diplomacy", a policy advocated by Trump allies that seeks to punish nations they accuse of censoring right-wing speech by US citizens, companies and global right-wing allies.
The United States has accused Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes of violating free speech rights by jailing Brazilians for political social media posts and censoring content from US social media companies. Moraes has argued that he was ridding social media of fake news that undermined public faith in Brazil's democratic institutions.
Moraes did not respond to a request for comment.
Pita, a conservative Venezuelan-American, is among many in Rubio's orbit who view Lula as a threat to US interests in Latin America. Rubio has been a key leader in the administration's aggressive policy in the region, which has included an invasion of Venezuela to oust its president, an oil blockade of Cuba and military attacks on suspected drug boats from Latin America.
Beattie and Pita were drawn to the Bolsonaro family's right-wing politics, their antipathy towards Lula and the idea that Jair Bolsonaro was a victim of abuses by Brazil's Supreme Court.
Like Trump in the 2020 US election, Bolsonaro refused to concede that he had lost Brazil's 2022 presidential vote, triggering riots by supporters who stormed government buildings. The Supreme Court convicted him in September 2025 of plotting a coup to remain in power.
Before the conviction, in early 2025, the Bolsonaros were aggressively lobbying Washington for sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act against Moraes, who had led criminal investigations into Jair Bolsonaro. The act is a 2016 federal law allowing US sanctions against foreign individuals responsible for human rights abuses or severe corruption.
Around April 2025, Jair Bolsonaro's younger son, Eduardo, visited Beattie in his State Department office in Washington, DC, according to two former US officials. Eduardo Bolsonaro had been making the public case for Magnitsky sanctions against Moraes since at least 2024, and in March 2025 he said in a livestream that it was "practically certain" the Trump administration would do so.
Eduardo Bolsonaro did not respond to requests for comment.
Beattie made calls to the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control to appeal for Magnitsky sanctions against Moraes, said a former US official with direct knowledge of the matter.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose department administers Magnitsky sanctions through OFAC, offered no opposition, the former official said.
The US announced Magnitsky sanctions against Moraes in July 2025, citing his alleged violations of free speech rights by censoring anti-government social media posts.
A Treasury official said Bessent and Rubio are "fully aligned on the administration's foreign policy."
Terrorist designations
The Bolsonaro family was also pushing for Washington to designate Brazil's top gangs – the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) – as terrorist organisations. They believed such a designation would hurt Lula, whom some opponents have criticised for failing to control crime.
Eduardo Bolsonaro had become friends with Pita through US conservative circles, and both supported the effort to designate the gangs as terrorist groups.
In May 2025, Pita joined a US delegation that visited Jair Bolsonaro at his residence in Brasilia as he awaited his trial, according to public announcements at the time. Also in the group was David Gamble, the State Department's top sanctions official at the time.
Back in Washington, Pita asked State Department sanctions officials to explore how terrorist designations like those announced against Mexican cartels in February 2025 could be used in Brazil, one former official said.
Nearly a year later, in May 2026 – after Pita was promoted to a new job that took him out of Brazil affairs – presidential contender Flavio Bolsonaro met with Beattie and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in Washington to discuss "the urgency of designating the PCC and the Comando Vermelho as foreign terrorist organisations", according to an X post by right-wing influencer Paulo Figueiredo that included photos of the attendees.
The State Department announced the designation the following day.
Reuters could not determine the extent of Pita or Beattie's influence in securing the final decision.
Backfires and setbacks
In July 2025, Washington also announced a series of other measures against Brazil, including the revocation of eight Supreme Court justices' visas and 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods, citing the "persecution" of Jair Bolsonaro.
Reuters could not determine what, if any, role Beattie or Pita played in the additional measures. But if they were intended to undermine Lula, many of them backfired, according to political analysts in Brazil.
Measures targeting the court did nothing to stop it from proceeding with Bolsonaro's trial, while the tariffs boosted the Lula government's poll numbers, the analysts said.
Major US and Brazilian firms reliant on bilateral trade – including meatpacking giant JBS (JBSS.O), controlled by Brazilian billionaires Wesley and Joesley Batista – also pushed back against the tariffs, which Washington eventually watered down.
Beattie and Pita's campaign also hit setbacks. Without an official explanation from the Treasury Department, the US removed Justice Moraes from the Magnitsky sanctions list in December, and in March Brazil barred Beattie from entering the country to visit Bolsonaro in prison.
Mario Braga, a Latin America analyst at risk intelligence firm RANE, said Trump may have decided to withhold a public endorsement of Bolsonaro to avoid being seen as meddling in Brazil's election – a perception that could boost Lula's popularity.
Still, after Flavio Bolsonaro narrowly outperformed Lula in the first-round election earlier this month, Trump called it a big victory.
"Close, but a very, very big victory," he told reporters. "Amazing, actually."