(DIR) Home
U.S. Pressure Campaign Kept Brazil's Generals at Bay
(HTM) Source
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Two weeks ago, Brazil's federal police launched a high-profile raid
against former President Jair Bolsonaro and more than 10 of his
allies, including Brazil's former navy chief, national security
advisor, and ministers of defense and justice. Authorities accused the
group of plotting a potential coup after Bolsonaro's failed 2022
reelection bid.
Court documents related to the raid suggest that Bolsonaro personally
edited a decree that would have overturned election results and
imprisoned a Supreme Court justice; a general loyal to the president
confirmed he would provide the troops needed to carry out the coup.
Bolsonaro also allegedly pressured his cabinet to more forcefully
share disinformation about supposed weaknesses in Brazil's electoral
system. The former president was asked to hand over his passport to
authorities and may face decades in jail.
The recent revelations suggest that Brazilian coup-mongers' plans were
more advanced than initially believed. In the end, however, they did
not get their way—in part due to divisions within Brazil's armed
forces that were the target of concerted pro-democracy efforts by U.S.
President Joe Biden.
Biden's stated commitment to defending democracy worldwide is often
brushed off as mere rhetoric. After all, during his tenure, the United
States has made uneasy compromises with autocrats to achieve its
geopolitical objectives. Amid continued U.S. support for Israel's
assault on Gaza, Washington has also been branded a hypocrite in much
of the global south.
This tide of criticism may explain why one of Biden's most significant
foreign-policy achievements to date remains curiously overlooked. Not
only was Brazil's democracy closer to the brink than initially
understood, but targeted U.S. pressure on key Brazilian officials was
likely decisive in guaranteeing the eventual outcome: a largely
peaceful transition of power in the country after its October 2022
presidential election.
The account presented in this article comes from interviews with
Brazilian policymakers and issue-area experts as well as Brazilian and
international media reports. In conversations with _Foreign Policy_ ,
several individuals, including a high-ranking Brazilian diplomat and a
military expert, confirmed that, in their views, external pressure was
critical to preventing members of Brazil's military from executing
Bolsonaro's plans for a coup.
* * *
Brazil returned relatively quickly to political normalcy after the
deeply polarizing 2022 presidential contest. That has led some
observers to forget how serious of a threat Bolsonaro posed to the
country's democracy.
During his final months in office, the former army captain so openly
flirted with subverting democracy that a Brazilian "Jan. 6
scenario"—an incumbent's refusal to concede followed by a violent yet
clumsy failed attempt to stop the transition of power—was seen by
analysts, myself included, as a comparatively benign prospect. We
feared much worse than what the United States experienced in 2021.
In the end, Bolsonaro supporters did launch such an attack on Brasília
on Jan. 8, 2023, about a week after new President Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva's inauguration. But Brazil's judiciary has swiftly prosecuted
cases related to the riots; last September, the first defendants to
stand trial were convicted and sentenced to at least 14 years in
prison. Seventy-three people remain in jail and more than 1,350 have
been released from prison as they await their trial.
In addition to the Jan. 6 and Jan. 8 parallels, Bolsonaro's pre-
electoral strategy was also similar to that of his ally, former U.S.
President Donald Trump. Without evidence, Bolsonaro sowed doubts about
the reliability of Brazil's electronic voting machines and spoke about
voter fraud, seemingly preparing to reject the presidential election
result if he lost. Of the approximately 50 million Brazilians who said
they would vote for Bolsonaro, about 25 percent told pollsters that
the president should not recognize the outcome if he came up short.
Last June, Brazil's electoral court banned Bolsonaro from holding
office for eight years for spreading false claims about Brazil's
voting system.
Yet comparisons between the chaotic presidential transitions in the
United States in early 2021 and in Brazil in early 2023 may end there.
That's because Latin America's largest nation was facing a far bigger
threat to its democracy.
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, several of Brazil's leading generals
not only refused to publicly commit to respecting the October 2022
election's results, but instead actively embraced Bolsonaro's
conspiracy theories. Some even accepted his argument that the armed
forces should play a role in certifying the contest's result, rather
than Brazil's electoral court. Such a change would have violated
Brazilian law and can be understood as a strategy to muddy the waters
and contest the electoral outcome.
The generals were aware that a Lula win would lead thousands of army
officers to lose positions of power—and associated economic perks.
During his presidency, Bolsonaro appointed more than 6,000 military
officers to roles in his administration and in state-owned companies,
blurring the lines between the armed forces and civilian government to
a degree unprecedented since the end of Brazil's dictatorship in 1985.
Adm. Almir Garnier Santos, then the head of the Brazilian Navy, and
Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, then the minister of defense, did little
to hide their willingness to question the reliability of Brazil's
voting system. In recently leaked recordings of meetings between
Bolsonaro's cabinet members, Nogueira described Brazil's electoral
court as the "enemy."
Yet support for subverting Brazil's democracy among generals was not
unanimous; importantly, it was a high-ranking former
general—Bolsonaro's vice president, Hamilton Mourão—who helped alert
the United States to the prospect of a coup. According to a 2023
investigation by the _Financial Times_ , Mourão privately expressed
concern about anti-democratic currents within the armed forces to
former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Tom Shannon during a private lunch in
New York in 2022. Shannon served in Brasília from 2010 to 2013 and has
remained a key interlocuter in U.S.-Brazilian affairs ever since.
In response, the Biden administration mounted a sustained pressure
campaign aimed at Brazil's military, which began as early as 2021. The
effort, as first reported in _Folha de São Paulo_ and also covered by
, involved explicit public warnings by U.S. senators about not
respecting election results as well as continuous back-channel
conversations to make clear that a democratic rupture would leave
Brazil isolated on the international stage—and lead to a downgrade of
U.S.-Brazil security cooperation, which is highly valued by Brazil's
military establishment.
The campaign involved the U.S. White House, State Department, CIA,
Senate, and—notably—the Pentagon. In retrospect, including that last
agency may have been the Biden administration's most decisive move.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was employed as Biden's chief
public emissary to Brazil's generals. It was a natural choice given
the tense relationship between Biden and Bolsonaro, the latter of whom
followed Trump's lead in parroting falsehoods about supposed fraud
during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Austin was also a more
credible interlocutor since Brazil's military was the intended target
of the U.S. campaign.
The sheer number of U.S. actors involved in the campaign meant that,
for much of 2022, many Brazilian government officials visiting
Washington received an unambiguous message from the U.S. government
about the need for Brazil's military officers to respect the electoral
process. Shortly before Brazil's election, the U.S. Senate passed a
resolution calling on Brazil to ensure the vote is "conducted in a
free, fair, credible, transparent, and peaceful manner." In order to
minimize the risk of a coup, Biden, along with numerous Western
allies, publicly congratulated Lula for his victory in the hours after
the official results were made public.
Mourão's reaction to Lula's win suggests that the threat of a negative
international response was among the factors that convinced the
Brazilian military's coup-mongers to stand down. In a post on X (then
still known as Twitter) three days after the Oct. 30, 2022, runoff
election, Mourão acknowledged Bolsonaro supporters' "frustration,"
writing that Lula should not have been allowed in run in the first
place because of his annulled criminal conviction; the then-vice
president questioned the legitimacy of the election but argued that "a
military coup would put the country in a difficult situation
internationally."
As an investigation by the _Brazilian Report_ revealed, the United
States also played a crucial role in helping Brazil's electoral
authorities overcome a global chip shortage to outfit electronic
voting machines and ensure a smooth contest. After all, Bolsonaro
would have latched onto any technical difficulties as supposed
evidence of machines' unreliability.
This largely behind-the-scenes operation involved Shannon, fellow
former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Anthony Harrington, and Rubens
Barbosa, Brazil's former ambassador to the United States. Barbosa was
tapped by Brazil's electoral court to lead the effort, which involved
negotiations with the Taiwanese government to ensure that chip
manufacturer Nuvoton prioritized Brazil's demands. Crucially,
Bolsonaro's foreign minister, Carlos França, did not inform the then-
president of the effort. França was aware of—but refused to be
directly involved in—the Taiwan chip operation.
* * *
The Biden administration's strategy was more daring than it appears in
retrospect. Memories of U.S. meddling in Brazil's internal
affairs—whether in 1964 to support a military coup, or more recently,
in the National Security Agency's spying on national oil company
Petrobras and former President Dilma Rousseff—remain vivid in Brazil.
For this reason, Washington's efforts to coup-proof the country's
democracy risked backfiring—and could have been criticized even by
those who opposed Bolsonaro. Across Latin America, U.S. claims to
imperatives such as "democracy promotion" and "democracy defense" are
tarnished due to the traumatic history of U.S. intervention in the
region.
None of this is to suggest that international pressure alone could
have prevented a coup in Brazil. The country saw an unprecedented
mobilization of pro-democracy forces ahead of the elections. Lula
reached out to moderates by selecting his center-right former rival
Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate. Brazil's electoral authorities
took historic steps to combat fake news. Many of Lula's former
opponents, such as environmentalist Marina Silva and former President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, came out in support of the leftist
candidate.
Yet the U.S. government's efforts to protect Brazil's democracy are
especially remarkable because it was clear from the start that they
would benefit Lula, a candidate with a long history of antagonizing
the United States. Bolsonaro ran as a pro-American candidate in 2018
and frequently spoke out against China.
Predictably, the U.S.-Brazil relationship did not improve
significantly after Lula came to office. During a visit to the White
House in February 2023, Lula thanked Biden for his defense of
democracy, yet the meeting was marked by mutual disappointment. The
U.S. Congress was unwilling to provide Biden with more funds to
support Brazil's fight against deforestation in the Amazon, and Lula's
nonaligned stance toward Russia's invasion of Ukraine frustrated
Washington. Lula's meeting with Biden paled in comparison to the
Brazilian president's high-level visit to Beijing soon after.
Irrespective of how U.S.-Brazil ties have evolved since 2022, the
United States' election year strategy toward Brazil remains a
remarkable U.S. foreign-policy success. A military coup in Brazil
would have sent shock waves around the world and increased the risk of
a broader democratic recession in the Western hemisphere.
While one may speculate about how Brazil's coup-mongering generals
would have behaved in 2022 if Trump had still been in the White House,
it seems obvious that the United States would not have played the same
constructive role in helping Brazil fend off the most serious threat
to its democracy in decades.
This makes the upcoming U.S. presidential election—expected to be a
rematch between Biden and Trump—all the more relevant for Brazil and
other sometimes-shaky democracies around the world. The next time that
anti-democratic forces emerge from the shadows, the international
environment—and White House—may be less hostile to them.
______________________________________________________________________
Served by Flask-Gopher/2.2.1