Por Brian Mier
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| Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair |
We’ve been hearing for years from back-stabbing opportunists of the far right that Brazil’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores/PT) will transform Brazil into another Venezuela. For better or worse, 19 years of PT governments have proven the absurdity of those words. Now that the Trump administration, hailed by some self-proclaimed geopolitical analysts as a lesser evil alternative to Kamala Harris in 2024, has bombed our neighbor ,Venezuela, and kidnapped its President and 1st lady, it’s a good time to look at how events could play out that could transform Brazil into a similar target for US regime change.
For those who think I may be exaggerating, let’s take a look at recent history.
When Luis “Gege” Gonzaga da Silva, historic leader of the Central dos Movimentos Populares (People’s Movements Central/CMP), returned to Brazil after living for years in Venezuela, he spoke at a conference 9 days before the inauguration of Dilma Rousseff, correctly predicting there would be a coup in Brazil.
“When I said this, various petit bourgeois intellectuals who were among us laughed at me,” he said in a 2017 interview for Brasil Wire. “’You are in Brazil,’ they said, ‘you are not back in Venezuela. Over there they could have a coup any minute, but here in Brazil we don’t have these kinds of things. We don’t have a political climate for that here in Brazil.’ And now, where are all these intellectuals providing an analysis of their mistakes? Because the left made a mistake in not making this analysis. They thought that once they won the election it was over. The bourgeoisie does not joke around.”
It’s true that the Lula administration made significant advances in its relationship with the Trump administration in the second half of 2025. Make no mistake about it, however, the US wants ideological hegemony in the Western hemisphere. It wants our rare earth minerals and, especially, our petroleum, and the leading pre-candidate for the opposition, Flavio Bolsonaro, is already promising to privatize Petrobras.
Meanwhile, in the long tradition of acting as useful idiots for empire, there is an entire flock of petit bourgeois radical leftists waiting in the wings to attempt to destroy any possible successor to Lula, by doing things like blaming the fiscal framework, the best compromise with Brazil’s right wing congress that the Lula administration could broker, as a Machiavellian plan by Fernando Haddad to neoliberalize the workers party from within. This is the 2026 equivalent of the PSOL and PSTU intellectuals who embraced Globo’s mensalão scandal and Lava Jato for their own opportunistic purposes and it plays directly into the international bourgeoisie’s hand.
During the 1970s, Phillip Agee, a deep-cover CIA agent who had been stationed in Ecuador and Uruguay for over a decade, moved to Cuba and wrote a book explaining everything he knew about CIA operations in Latin America, called Inside the Company: The CIA Diaries.
In it, he described a graduated scale of CIA intervention tactics which they prioritized according to descending level of desirability. The most desirable outcome was that an entreguista president would be elected naturally, with no intervention from the US government. The second most desirable strategy was to covertly support an entreguista candidate for the presidency through measures such as clandestine financing and support for psychological operations that included fabricated scandals and media coverage in the important US newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, which would echo into the bourgeois media outlets in the target country. One example of a probable scenario where this took place was the 2014 elections. In 2013, expanded state actors like Facebook and Twitter helped expand the free public transport protests into a full blown color revolution, with ample support from international and national media outlets like Globo and Folha, which suddenly gave editorial space to figures associated with electorally insignificant “radical left” parties to criticize the PT. In 2014, a reporter from the LA Times told a Brasil Wire editor, “there is an unwritten rule in the international correspondent community that Aecio Neves has to win this election.”
According to Philip Agee, the next step down the CIA’s regime change priority list is to support a coup d’etat. This support is done both clandestinely and in the open through the work of the bourgeois media. One example of this is Lava Jato. As a handful of “radical left” national and international petit bourgeois intellectuals gloated with opportunistic delight, the US Department of Justice worked with a local public prosecution team and judge to wage a targeted anti-corruption war to politically annihilate the PT. The millions of job losses and judicially imposed bankruptcy of Brazil’s 5 largest civil engineering companies deeply exacerbated what had been a mild recession, setting the stage for Dilma Rousseff’s illegitimate impeachment in 2016.
According to Agee, the final regime change solution supported by the CIA, if the coup attempts fail, is assassination of a president, as it did to Patrice Lumumba, financing a proxy war, as it did with Nicaragua during the 1980s, or full blown military invasion, as the US has done dozens of times in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past century. In 1989, former CIA director and President George Bush added a new twist to this formula, when he ordered the kidnapping of his old friend and alleged drinking partner, Panamanian President Manuel Noriega.
We can see how this entire CIA regime change scale played out in the last 2 years in Venezuela. When the US estimated that Edmundo Gonzalez didn’t have the support needed to win a free and fair election, it began to meddle by deepening sanctions that hurt the Venezuelan people, and promising to lift them if he won the elections. The US routed millions of dollars into Venezuelan NGOs. They orchestrated disinformation campaigns across the political spectrum in mainstream media and in NED funded alternative “progressive” media outlets to damage the image of the Maduro administration. When all of that failed, on the day after the 2024 presidential elections, they supported a violent coup attempt in which dozens of police officers were killed and public schools, PSUV headquarters, community centers and mayors offices were firebombed across the country. After the Biden administration’s coup attempt failed, the Trump administration moved towards a final solution, copying Bush’s playbook from Panama.
‘But Venezuela is Venezuela and Brazil is Brazil,’ you might say. Let’s look around the continent. There was a right wing coup in Peru. The US has actively worked to influence recent elections in favor of far right candidates in Argentina, Ecuador, Honduras and Chile, and is threatening the governments of Mexico and Colombia. US elites like Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have been spreading anti-PT propaganda for 3 years. Even the New York Times ran 7 articles spreading the Bolsonaro/Musk/Greenwald false narrative of Brazil’s “authoritarian judiciary.”
How could possible US intervention in Brazil play out according to Agee’s formula? The US could support a far right candidate overtly, through praise and threats from Trump, and covertly, through support for an impeachment drive against Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, destabilization of Congress, amnesty for Jair Bolsonaro and his neofascist Generals, and financial support for so called “independent media” outlets financed by the US National Endowment for Democracy and its partners like Luminate, Open Society and the Ford Foundation through shell organizations like the International Fund for Public Interest Media to attack the Workers Party from the left.
If Lula is reelected, the US could build on the work it did in 2026 to damage Lula’s reputation and attempt to orchestrate a coup, like the one it supported in 2016. If all else fails, given the way the Trump administration has been acting, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s historic animosity towards the PT, the possibility exists that, yes, the US could attempt to assassinate or kidnap a democratically elected President of Brazil.
This first appeared on De-Linking Brazil.
Brian Mier is a native Chicagoan who has lived in Brazil for 25 years. He is co-editor of Brasil Wire and Brazil correspondent for TeleSur English’s TV news program, From the South.
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