Trouble in Brazil

Donald Trump recently deported a planeload of 88 Brazilians, who arrived with cuts and bruises after being handcuffed, beaten and denied food and water during the flight from Louisiana. The plane had trouble with its engines and air-conditioning, and was forced to make unscheduled stops in Panama and Manaus, where the deportees were transferred to a Brazilian air force plane for the last leg to Belo Horizonte. Whole families experienced these conditions together. Some of the victims opened the emergency exits and walked out onto the wings when the plane landed at Manaus to show their injuries and plead their case to the Brazilian press. The viewing public was shocked and upset.

Itamaraty’s response to Trump’s affront has been limited to complaining about the use of handcuffs and demanding an explanation of the ‘degrading’ treatment. This is distinctly muted compared to Mexico, whose leaders explained to its citizens that they were prepared for the consequences if Trump was unwilling to negotiate the tariffs he had threatened. He duly agreed to postpone them when Claudia Sheinbaum promised to post more troops on the US-Mexico border. As the successor to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President Sheinbaum enjoys high levels of domestic support.

Mexican government rhetoric is largely pro forma, however, given the lack of effective sovereignty in its border states. Sheinbaum’s most serious domestic problem – the rule of organised crime – is tied to US markets. As she indicated in an address on 3 February, US efforts to fight the war on drugs deepen existing problems rather than solving them.

The Brazilian president, meanwhile, like the PT (Workers’ Party) that he helped found among the now vanished industrial working-class, is unrecognisable as the Lula who, as the leader of the great ABC strikes in the late 1970s, saluted the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions. Today, anti-imperialist nationalism in Brazil is notable chiefly for its absence. With Chinese and German demand for imports plummeting, Brazil will depend heavily on exports to the US in the coming years.

Several weeks ago, Steve Bannon declared that Eduardo Bolsonaro will be Brazil’s next president. His father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, was crushed that he could not attend Trump’s inauguration in Washington; under investigation for a range of crimes, he isn’t allowed to travel abroad. In Brasília on 8 January 2023, Bolsonaro restaged Trump’s storming of the US Capitol a year earlier. Bolsonaro’s running mate, General Braga Neto, is under arrest for plotting Lula’s assassination in the run-up to his inauguration, but so far the other military architects of 8 January remain free.

Whether or not Eduardo or another member of the Bolsonaro clan (organically connected to Trumpworld) carries on the torch is immaterial. The PT was trounced in recent local and regional elections, and the forward march of bolsonarismo, a far-right movement led by businessmen, evangelical pastors, soldiers and police officers, along with some sectors of organised crime, has yet to be halted. It is supported by close to half the electorate.

Given the power of the centrão in Congress, the limits of presidential authority and the government’s lack of direction independent from banking and agribusiness, Lula’s administration is internally weak as well as isolated internationally, even from such natural allies as Colombia and Mexico.

The latest opinion polls show Lula with a negative approval rating. Among those who earn less than twice the minimum wage – the majority of the PT’s base – 39 per cent disapprove of his approach to raising household income. Half those polled think the country is heading in the wrong direction, 65 per cent say Lula has not kept his campaign promises and 83 per cent report a rise in food prices. The government has lost support even in its north-eastern stronghold, as well as among women and young people. Budget cuts and austerity – in areas that disproportionately affect the PT’s base, such as education and healthcare – remain the order of the day.

Like the Democratic Party under Biden and during the Harris campaign, the PT and its supporters are convinced the Brazilian government’s main problem is one of communication. (The more obvious candidates, tactics and strategy, are excluded from consideration.) The economy is performing well, but people have been fooled by anti-government disinformation and conspiracy theories into failing to appreciate that the leading macro-economic indicators are improving. According to the government, Brazil’s majority is once again middle-class and unemployment is at an all-time low.

To longtime PT supporters who work on and around the beach in Porto da Barra, Salvador, these supposed triumphs are a bad joke. No one is fooled by the smoke and mirrors of statistics or imagines that good times will return. Hope springs eternal in Brazil, but it’s currently in short supply, even though Carnaval is coming.

Bahia, which the PT has run for twenty years, was the most violent state in the country for the fifth consecutive year in 2024, and Salvador (with a right-wing mayor) its most violent city. The PT has effectively handed the issue of public security to organised crime factions and the far right, which has more control over the police than state governors do. Each year, the police kill more people in Bahia than they do in the entire US (as a proportion of the population, the rate is thirty times higher).

Unless the PT can offer concrete solutions to some of the most pressing problems, it is hard to see how they can win in 2026, even if Lula is healthy enough to run again. Trump, Bannon et al. will be working overtime to make sure they don’t.