Washington’s Bolsonaro Restoration Project Exposed
Washington did not merely prefer a candidate in Brazil’s presidential election. Senior officials inside Donald Trump’s State Department built a campaign to return the Bolsonaro family to power, wielding sanctions, tariffs and diplomatic pressure against the institutions that prosecuted Jair Bolsonaro’s coup plot.
A Reuters investigation published late Saturday, October 24, identifies Darren Beattie, senior adviser for Western Hemisphere affairs, and Ricardo Pita, a former Brazil-policy adviser later promoted to deputy assistant secretary, as the operation’s principal architects. Ten current and former U.S. officials described the effort; three said Beattie and Pita instructed American diplomats that restoring Jair Bolsonaro was U.S. policy even after Brazilian authorities barred him from office.
When Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced the former president to 27 years in prison in September 2025 for plotting to overturn his 2022 defeat, the strategy shifted to his son. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro now faces President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s runoff. Reuters reported that the two U.S. officials discouraged embassy personnel from engaging other conservative contenders who might weaken the younger Bolsonaro.
This was not ordinary diplomatic favoritism. Washington converted the machinery of sanctions and trade into election leverage.
Beattie pressed the Treasury Department to impose Global Magnitsky sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who led investigations into Jair Bolsonaro. The administration sanctioned Moraes in July 2025, while the State Department revoked visas for eight Supreme Court justices. Trump also imposed tariffs reaching 50 percent on Brazilian goods and explicitly linked the assault to what he called the “persecution” of Bolsonaro.
The administration presented those measures as defenses of free speech and American interests. But the political target was unmistakable: punish a sovereign judiciary for prosecuting Trump’s ally, injure the government overseeing that prosecution and create a path back to power for the same political family.
The State Department also classified the Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho criminal networks as foreign terrorist organizations after Bolsonaro allies pushed Washington to do so. AP reported Sunday that Brazilian experts viewed the move as an attempt to make Lula appear weak on crime. The designation turned a genuine public-security crisis into another instrument of electoral pressure.
Orna Blum, who headed the State Department’s Brazil and Southern Cone office before retiring in opposition to the administration, gave Reuters the plainest verdict: “the line between diplomacy and political intervention has been crossed.”
The campaign also exposed its own contradictions. Washington claimed to defend Brazilians’ right to choose while narrowing its diplomatic engagement to the Bolsonaro camp. It invoked human rights to protect a former president convicted of trying to nullify an election. It punished Brazilian workers and exporters with tariffs in order to advance an elite political restoration.
Brazil pushed back. The Supreme Court continued Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution. The United States later removed Moraes from its sanctions list. Brazilian authorities barred Beattie from entering the country in March when he sought to visit Bolsonaro in prison. Analysts told Reuters that the tariff assault strengthened Lula by turning sovereignty into an election issue.
That backlash helps explain Trump’s public restraint during the final campaign. He has praised Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round performance but stopped short of a formal endorsement. The machinery described by Reuters, however, operated well beyond campaign-stage applause.
Nearly 160 million Brazilians are eligible to choose between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro on October 25. Their votes belong to them alone. Yet the election now carries a second verdict: whether Latin America’s largest country will accept Washington’s claim that U.S. officials may sanction judges, squeeze exports and reorganize diplomacy to install a favored political dynasty.
Brazil’s institutions resisted once, when Jair Bolsonaro tried to stay in power after losing. The Reuters investigation shows that the restoration effort did not end with his conviction. It simply moved north, into the offices of the U.S. State Department.
Hero photo: Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro at the White House, March 19, 2019. Isac Nóbrega/Palácio do Planalto, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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