Donald Trump’s goal of regional dominance will be put to the ultimate test this weekend – not in the United States, but at the ballot box in Brazil.
On Sunday 25 October, incumbent centre-left president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will face off against right-wing opposition senator Flávio Bolsonaro, a key Trump ally and the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, now imprisoned for his role in an attempted coup after losing the 2022 election. Trump called Bolsonaro’s first-round lead “a great victory”. The final polls have him ahead by one to four points.
Brazil’s presidential election has become a proxy war for the ‘Donroe Doctrine’, as the media has dubbed the current White House’s reimagining and expansion of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine that sought to exert aggressive US dominance over the Western Hemisphere.
The younger Bolsonaro’s victory is key to Washington’s aims of securing a reliable supply of oil, minerals, electricity and territory for data centres – and in particular to preserving US supremacy over China in a conflict underpinned by two pillars.
The first is ‘energy dominance’, declared on the day of Trump’s inauguration. A council based in the White House has been tasked with extending the lifespan of fossil fuels, supplying factories with the cheap energy that the tariff policy aims to bring home, tying allied countries to US gas, and controlling a strategic point for oil imported by China.
The second is the computing infrastructure, ranging from chips to data centres and cutting-edge artificial intelligence models. In Beijing in May, Washington negotiated over soy, Boeing aircraft and rare earths, and refused to back down on export controls for chips.
Both pillars converge on the voracious energy consumption of AI. The method is the same in both cases: when Washington cannot secure a central position within a network, it seizes control of the chokepoint.
The American continent is where this method proves most cost-effective, as shown in Venezuela. In August, six months after arresting Venezuela’s president, Washington announced it has majority control of 65,000 million barrels of the country’s oil through a joint venture that gives it a 35% stake – and the right to purchase a further 20% of production at cost price – for 100 years. The White House credited the agreement with having re-established the Monroe Doctrine.
The following month, US secretary of state Marco Rubio undertook a tour of the Andean countries, returning with a framework agreement on minerals and a nuclear memorandum with Colombia, while Peru joined the ‘Shield of the Americas’, an informal coalition of governments aligned with the White House in the war against cartels.
But Brazil is the missing piece of the jigsaw. The country is Latin America’s largest oil producer, with 3.8 million barrels a day by 2025, mostly from fields in the Atlantic Ocean. It has the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earths. Its electricity grid is 89% clean, which is why it already hosts half of Latin America’s data centre capacity.
The Trump administration wants access to these resources, and has shown just how far it is prepared to go to get them.
Learning to coerce
In July last year, Trump imposed a new 50% tariff on imports from Brazil, blaming Jair Bolsonaro’s trial, which he described as “insidious attacks on free elections”. The US Treasury also sanctioned the Brazilian Supreme Court judge leading the case against the former president.
The court found Jair guilty anyway. The prices of Brazilian coffee and beef rose in US supermarkets, and the US withdrew the tariff in November without Brazil having made any concessions. In February, the US Supreme Court overturned the legal basis for the tariff.
Washington’s second attempt drew lessons from its first. In July this year, the US imposed a new 25% tariff on Brazil, this time with 1,000 exemptions on things the US needs to buy: coffee, beef, orange juice, aeroplanes, and more. A lower tariff may sound better but can amount to greater coercion; as the smaller of the two economies, Brazil cannot afford to lose access to the US market and is more likely to absorb the financial shocks than cease trading.
The new tariff followed what the US described as a “year long investigation” into whether Brazil’s “acts, policies, or practices are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden or restrict US commerce”.
Washington said the investigation looked at Brazilian court rulings against US social media companies; patents; the US’s access to Brazil’s ethanol market; illegal deforestation; and Pix, the free instant payment system managed by Brazil’s Central Bank. Pix has processed more Brazilian transactions than credit and debit cards combined since 2023, exposing the threat that a public system can pose to the global card networks dominated by US firms Visa and Mastercard.
As economics professor Guilherme Klein noted in a column for openDemocracy, one of the US’s demands in the tariff relief negotiations was a guarantee that ‘political dissidents’ – a reference to Jair Bolsonaro – could participate in the election. While Brasília said it will not concede to this and the majority of the US’s demands, it indicated that it has not ruled out agreements on Brazil’s rare earths and hyperscale data centres. The latter is to this empire what the railway concession was to the previous empire: the physical clause of subordination, inscribed on foreign territory and sustained at the expense of others.
The US has also pursued another avenue of coercion. In May 2026, Washington added Brazil’s two largest criminal groups to its list of terrorist organisations, which exposes any Brazilian official or bank – including Pix – deemed to be providing them with “material support” to secondary sanctions. Flávio Bolsonaro has said he requested this move, which came three days after he met with Trump. The US’s National Counter-Terrorism Strategy, published the same month, also included “violent left-wing extremists” alongside cartels and jihadists.
Brazil, Mexico and Colombia were excluded from the Shield of the Americas when Trump launched it in March. Colombia, which has since elected a new right-wing president, joined last month. Brazil entered the hemispheric war on terrorism not as an ally, but as a theatre of operations.
How Brazil withstood sanctions
Coercion is a relationship, not an instrument.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil had a dollar-denominated debt, held just weeks’ worth of foreign exchange reserves, and followed the economic policies of the International Monetary Fund.
Today, Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy. It has long paid off its debt to the IMF, and its reserves exceed $350bn, having benefited from two decades of growing Chinese demand for its raw materials. In 2000, the US still accounted for 24% of Brazil’s exports, compared to less than 2% for China. By 2025, China accounted for 29% and the US for 11%.
What remains susceptible to coercion is the network layer: the international dollar payment system, the platforms, the chips. The path leading from a 50% tariff to a more targeted 25% one and to the designation of terrorist organisations leads towards these chokepoints.
Argentina illustrates the alternative. The country has negative net reserves and was forced to agree to a $20bn currency swap with the US Treasury in late 2025 – a bailout that Trump said depended on president Javier Milei’s party winning the midterms. Milei’s party won the elections; Argentina received the money and, months later, signed a trade deal and an agreement with Trump allowing the US access to Argentina’s critical minerals.
The structure determines the choice. A Milei in Brasília could not hand over what Brazil does not owe. He could concede what cannot be taken from him.
Dependence as a project
Washington did not invent coups d’état in Brazil; it just made them cheaper.
In 1964, the US ambassador coordinated with the plotters of a military coup that overthrew Brazil’s democratically elected progressive government and led to a 21-year dictatorship. Declassified documents show a US naval task force waited on the high seas during the coup, while Lyndon Johnson’s White House sent congratulations to the new government the day after the military seized control without waiting to see what the Brazilian Congress would do.
The US may have lent its support, but the military officers, newspapers, industrialists and middle classes who sought to overthrow the government in the name of ‘tradition, family and property’ were Brazilian. Similarly, in 2016, president Dilma Rousseff was impeached based on an anti-corruption operation whose Brazilian prosecutors secretly co-operated with the US Department of Justice. Each coup d’état was followed by a handover: oil, mining, state-owned banks, labour rights.
I have termed this pattern ‘dependence as a project’ – that is, subordination chosen by a ruling class because it costs less than sharing power and wealth at home. The elites, who imagine themselves to be white in a country that is not, call for intervention against governments whose voters are darker-skinned and poorer than they are. US Latinophobia finds its distorted mirror image in the ‘Americanism’ of the Latin American elite.
Former MP Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flávio’s younger brother, moved to the US in early 2025 to lobby for sanctions against judges in his own country, and was in June this year convicted in absentia of courting US interference in his father’s coup plot trial. Weeks after his conviction, Flávio asked the US Trade Representative to suspend the tariff for 180 days, until after the elections. A tariff now, he wrote, “would hand the current Brazilian government precisely the political victory it has been engineering”. His programme for the Amazon – involving illegal gold mining on Indigenous lands – is a Brazilian contribution to the extractivist agenda that Trump would gladly accept and which, in this case, he did not even have to ask for.
A tariff hits Brazilian exporters and the jobs behind them. Flávio’s submission did not ask for it to be lifted, only delayed, with automatic reinstatement if talks failed, and it offered Washington a new negotiator immediately after an opposition victory. For the Bolsonaros, the tariff was never about Brazilian jobs. It was about who would govern.
Elections as a stage for the doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine does not suppress elections. It orchestrates them.
In June, Colombia elected a Trump-backed president by a single point, after Washington sanctioned the incumbent. In Venezuela, oil started flowing to US companies – with a Washington-approved Chavista running the government and the state oil company – months after US forces detained president Nicolás Maduro. Democracy was the wrapping paper; the concessions were the gift.
In Brazil, we have not returned to 1964, because 1964 failed when it was tried again. The attempted coup of 2022/23 collapsed, and the Supreme Court tried its perpetrators despite US sanctions. The far right was unable to seize power by force, so it is trying to take it through the ballot box, and Flávio has already promised his father amnesty if he wins.
Washington, which cannot influence Brazil’s financial stability, is instead exerting pressure on its voters. Since Trump resumed power, Washington has put pressure on elections held in Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, but none has faced tariffs linked to a court case, sanctions against a judge, inclusion on terrorist lists affecting the financial system, and a candidate who has called for all of this.
The pressure is cruder than during the Cold War because the US is weaker: no loans, no promises of modernisation, just tariffs and a candidate. What is coming to an end is an empire – the institutional form that US power bestowed upon itself when it could afford to seek consent. What persists is the imperial relationship, without the emperor’s new clothes.
What each outcome will bring
For Latin America, a victory for Flávio Bolsonaro would signal that the last counterweight has fallen into line and the right-wing wave is firmly underway. For Washington, it would signal that a client government can deliver what coercion failed to.
Brazil’s oil reserves and electricity grid would become part of a hemispheric energy bloc, while its rare earths would be refined for US supply chains, and Pix and other platforms would be opened up to US card networks and tech companies. Data centres would be powered at Brazil’s expense. The designation of criminal groups as terrorist organisations would remain a permanent lever over Brazilian finances.
And Bolsonaro would tell anyone attempting a coup on the continent that, if they lose, they can expect an amnesty. The Senate elected on 4 October will, from February onwards, have 49 right-wing senators – exactly the number needed to amend the Constitution and enshrine an amnesty that the Federal Supreme Court could overturn if it were passed as ordinary legislation.
The central two pillars of Trump’s strategy have been called into question by a war waged to secure the Strait of Hormuz, which has turned that maritime passage into an Iranian toll road, and Chinese open-weight AI models circumventing controls on chips.
A victory for Lula would confirm that the doctrine has failed to make coercion work in the face of Brazil’s size and diversified trade, nor has it succeeded in getting its client governments to abandon Chinese demand; nor has it managed to win the elections that mattered most to it. Brazil would remain where it has been: trading with everyone, without aligning itself with anyone – a democracy that condemned its coup plotters despite foreign sanctions and voted against those who called for them.
There is a lesson here for the left. Bolsonaro failed to secure an outright majority at the election’s first round, but still led over Lula by almost two percentage points; Brazilians did not vote with sovereignty in mind – they voted with their debts in mind. Half of all adults are behind on their bills due to the world’s highest real interest rate. The fiscal rule upheld by Lula froze the main state benefit for poor families (Bolsa Família) at 600 reais a month from March 2023 until September, when the government decreed a 15% rise, paid from 19 October. That very rule is the reason why Brazil’s ties with China have not led to any development strategy.
In concrete terms, sovereignty is also the ability to navigate between poles of power. It wins elections when it delivers results. Last week, the Senate passed an amendment to end the six-day working week by 75 votes to one – something seven out of 10 people in Brazil want, and which Bolsonaro’s party had blocked for months until, with the polls tied, Flávio announced he would vote for it.
A fourth term for Lula that breaks with his own austerity measures would make independence from Washington something even a shop assistant could feel. That is how dependence ceases to be a project.
Pedro Paulo Zahluth Bastos is a professor of political economy at the University of Campinas, Brazil.