Brazil’s Forthcoming Election Bears Watching

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John-Telegraph-Journal

Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, on July 25 formally launched his bid to challenge President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) in ‌October’s presidential election, gaining support from Argentina’s President Javier Milei, an AI-generated message from his jailed father, and ‌a video address from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bolsonaro, the candidate of the right-wing Liberal Party (PL), who is 45 years old, is the son of the disgraced former president, who is in jail after receiving a 27-year prison sentence for trying to overturn the result of the 2022 election. As for Lula, this will be the 80-year old’s seventh presidential campaign since he first sought Brazil’s top job in 1989, when he was 44. He is the standard-bearer of the Workers’ Party (PT), which founded in 1980.

Many on the right wanted Tarcisio de Freitas, the current governor of Sao Paulo, to run, but Jair Bolsonaro wanted his own son instead, and de Freitas respected Bolsonaro’s wish.

Flavio Bolsonaro began by pledging tax cuts and a tougher stance on crime and stressed his commitment to ​carrying forward his father’s political legacy. But his campaign has been filled with turmoil so far. He has been heavily involved in the Banco Master scandal, in which leaked audio messages revealed that he was receiving millions of reais, Brazil’s currency, from businessman Daniel Vorcaro, the bank’s major shareholder, to finance a movie about his father. The revelation shocked many allies.

The scandal, involving investigations into financial fraud, emerged in late 2025 with the launch of Operation Compliance Zero by the authorities and the liquidation of the financial institution, as well as Vorcaro’s arrest. It has been described as the country’s biggest ever banking fraud scandal.

The country’s recent past has been tumultuous. In 1961 Brazil’s voters elected left populist president Joao Goulart, but he was deposed by a military coup in 1964. A military dictatorship followed, marked by fierce anticommunism enforced with secret police, torture centres, and disappearances. I visited Brazil in the mid-1970s, when the army officer Ernesto Geisel was running the country. In 1985, the dictatorship finally gave way to civilian control and popular elections. But democracy remains a fragile shoot. Hence the important of this October’s presidential election.

Lula has many enemies, including the current leaders of the United States and Argentina. He and Trump don’t like each other, and that’s an understatement. Lula has argued that his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro’s 2022 bid to cling to power after his election defeat was reminiscent of Trump’s bid to remain in power in 2020. Tensions intensified after Flavio Bolsonaro took part in a pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference held in Texas on March 28.

The U.S. imposed a 25 per cent tariff on most imports from Brazil July 15, arguing that Brazil’s trade practices on a range of issues from digital trade to illegal deforestation were unfair. The tariffs affect about $6.6 billion in exports to the U.S.

Brazil has formally requested consultations at the World Trade Organization over the new U.S. tariffs on Brazilian exports, insisting the measures violate international trade rules under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Lula has called the tariffs interference in the election.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio maintained that the blame lay with Lula and his administration. He clamed that Lula’s economic policies are bad for Americans and bad for Brazilians. “For the past year, Lula has put his own ego ahead of making a deal for the welfare of the Brazilian people.”

Brazil on July 24 denied visa requests for two officials in Trump’s administration who planned to travel to the country to cast doubt on the integrity of its electoral system, according to Brazilian officials. A State Department spokesperson rejected any suggestion of a “ploy” to undermine Brazil’s elections.”

Now, the Trump administration has revoked the visa of Brazil’s top diplomat in the United States. The visa of the Brazilian ambassador, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, was canceled Aug. 4 in response to her country’s decision to stall the approval of President Trump’s newly appointed ambassador to Brazil and refuse entry to the other U.S. diplomats.

Another right-wing leader is also at loggerheads with Lula. Brazil’s foreign ministry summoned Argentina’s ambassador after inflammatory remarks delivered by Argentinian President Javier Milei about Lula, during the national convention of Brazil’s Liberal Party (PL), which nominated Bolsonaro in Sao Paulo July 25.

Milei denounced what he called the “tragedy of socialism” in Latin America, singling out Lula and Minister Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Federal Court for intense criticism.

The Argentinian leader hailed Flavio Bolsonaro as the “only candidate who can stop Lula.” Milei was also angry at not being allowed to visit Jair Bolsonaro in prison. “I was not allowed to visit my unjustly imprisoned friend,” remarked Milei, a declared ally of the Bolsonaro family.

It escalated further when Brasilia on Aug. 5 requested the recall of Argentina’s ambassador and reduced diplomatic representation to Charge d’Affaires level after Milei called President Lula a thief.

Brazil has tremendous institutional problems, ranging from vote buying, organized crime, and systemic inequality to a very dysfunctional judicial system. Yet with Bolsonaro and Lula as the main candidates, regardless of who wins, this is unlikely to change.

 

Nicaraguan Revolution Betrays its Supporters

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

In April 1987, when I was working as a journalist in Washington, an idealistic young American engineer, Ben Linder, was killed in Nicaragua by the Contras. They were the Reagan-sponsored forces fighting the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSNL) rebels. The Sandinistas were trying to overthrow Anastasio Somoza, the brutal right-wing dictator whose family had controlled the country for four decades.

Linder was one of the so-called “sandalistas,” a sarcastic term for American leftists helping the revolutionaries, who indeed triumphed two years later. I wrote a piece about him, as did many other newspaper reporters.

Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the FSNL was founded in 1961. It attracted public support in the United States by presenting itself as a “coalition of the oppressed.” Left-wing magazines in the 1990s proclaimed Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a newly liberated country, and an example to others in central America. 

The Sandinistas under leader Daniel Ortega have ruled the country ever since, but not in the way Linder and others would have imagined. Reality has a way of upending dreams.

On July 19, the Nicaraguan president, who rules with his wife and “co-president,” Rosario Murillo, told the country that he will not hold any further elections, to prevent the opposition from coming to power.

Ortega made the announcement during the official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 victory. “We will work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on laws, because we need laws that build a wall, a barrier, against the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country,” he declared. He promised that the days of “parties backed by the Yankees” were over.

“With this decision, Ortega and Murillo have sealed the country’s transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship,” observed Tiziano Breda, Latin America senior analyst at the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. They had already pushed through a constitutional reform that extended by one year the presidential term due to end in 2026.

The elections were due to take place next year, but Ortega gave no details on whether they would be cancelled or whether the opposition would be barred from taking part. During the 2021 election campaign, the regime outlawed parties and jailed all opposition presidential hopefuls. International groups described it as a farce. Ortega claimed he won 76 per cent of the vote.

Ortega and Murillo are afraid that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest and threaten their grip on power. Therefore, instead of staging a rigged election, they have opted to eliminate electoral competition altogether.

In 2018, the regime carried out a violent crackdown on dissenters that killed more than 350 people, wounded hundreds, jailed thousands and forced nearly one million Nicaraguans into exile. The government in 2025 expanded its repression to include even some government supporters.  

Last August, lawyer Carlos Cardenas and opposition figure Mauricio Alonso died in custody, according to the media outlet Confidencial. At least six other political prisoners have died in custody since 2019.

The constitution now allows authorities to revoke the Nicaraguan nationality of people deemed responsible for “treason.” At least 452 Nicaraguans have been arbitrarily deprived of their nationality, leaving many stateless; authorities have also seized their assets. Over 200 members of the Catholic clergy have been forced into exile, deported, or denied re-entry since 2022.

On July 13, the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua denounced the government’s sudden revocation of credentials for numerous lawyers and notaries, warning the move effectively erased a vital part of the nation’s legal profession overnight and stripped citizens of their right to legal defence.

“Over the past week, corroborating evidence has mounted, providing reasonable grounds to believe that the Nicaraguan Government is systematically stripping numerous lawyers of their legal licenses,” stated Jan-Michael Simon, its chair.

The UN group also condemned the death of prominent indigenous Miskito leader Brooklyn Rivera while in custody. At the time of his arrest in September 2023, he was a deputy in the National Assembly for the Indigenous political party YATAMA.

The latest measures come on the heels of a sweeping purge of the judicial system that has been underway since October 2023, when police took control of the Supreme Court of Justice. Since then, eight magistrates have resigned or been forced out, and more than a thousand judicial employees have been dismissed.

The constitutional reforms in 2025 stripped the judiciary of its status as an independent power of the State; they redefined the judiciary as an “organ” that the presidency “coordinates” and reduced the Court from 16 to 10 justices, all appointed by co-presidents Ortega and Murillo.

After President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela was captured by U.S. forces in January, and as the Trump administration increases pressure on Cuba, two countries that have been allied with Nicaragua, Ortega’s government has become even more restrictive.

Felix Maradiaga, a presidential hopeful who was jailed in Nicaragua from 2021 to 2023 before being expelled to the U.S., saw Ortega’s comments as “a confession of fear. Ortega publicly acknowledged what has always been his true intention -- to prevent his tyrannical project from being subjected to any form of democratic competition,” Maradiaga told Reuters.

Like so many others betrayed by previous revolutions across the world, what would someone like Ben Linder think about Ortega now?