Terrorist designations strengthened justifications for intervention beyond US borders
Jordana Timerman’s argument in The Guardian is that the emerging right-wing alliance across Latin America is, in many ways, the mirror image of the region’s earlier pink tide. She wrote that the alliance has developed in close alignment with Donald Trump and his ambitions to reassert US dominance over the hemisphere. The relationship, she said, is mutually reinforcing: right-wing leaders who gained ground through domestic discontent look to Washington to consolidate their power, while the US relies on those governments and movements to advance its strategic interests.
Political and financial support forms one part of that alignment. Timerman said Trump, since returning to office, used endorsements, sanctions, tariffs and financial assistance to reward allies and put pressure on opponents. He backed right-wing candidates in Honduras and Colombia. Ahead of Argentina’s 2025 legislative elections, he offered Javier Milei a $20bn financial lifeline while warning that US generosity depended on the electoral outcome. Timerman also said Trump had turned a blind eye to Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s negotiations with criminal organisations, though Bukele denied making an informal pact with them.
In Brazil, the contest has reached domestic courts, trade and the Bolsonaro campaign. The Bolsonaro family sought Washington’s intervention against the Brazilian judiciary during Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution, and the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Brazil and sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Washington also pressed Lula for access to Brazil’s critical minerals as it sought to reduce dependence on China; Lula defended Brazil’s freedom to trade with other partners. Timerman said the stakes extended beyond the political fortunes of the Bolsonaro family.
Security supplied a more powerful instrument for the alignment. The Trump administration invoked the fight against narcoterrorism to expand its military role and pressure governments to accept Washington’s priorities, Timerman wrote. She said terrorist designations helped justify the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, threats of unilateral strikes against Mexican cartels and joint military operations in Ecuador. Washington has also discussed similar operations with Colombia. The designations do not themselves authorize military action, she said, but strengthen the administration’s justifications to intervene beyond US borders.
Brazil shows how the security strategy could reinforce a political campaign outside Washington’s government. Following lobbying from the Bolsonaros, the United States designated Brazil’s two largest criminal organisations as foreign terrorist organisations, strengthening Flávio Bolsonaro’s claim that Lula was failing to confront organised crime. Timerman said the decision made a Washington security designation part of a Brazilian campaign message.
Against this leverage, Lula built what Timerman described as a democratic and sovereignty counter-mobilization. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in Sunday’s runoff, overturning Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round lead in a historic comeback; no candidate had previously lost the first round and won the second. Having consolidated most of the left-wing vote after his first-round defeat, Lula had limited room to attract supporters of other candidates. His best route, Timerman said, was mobilizing abstainers and reconnecting with working-class voters.
The Workers’ Party intensified grassroots and digital campaigns, using social media influencers and messaging networks to reach supporters. Nearly 3 million more Brazilians voted in the runoff than in the first round, and Lula gained ground across the country, particularly in major cities and his north-eastern strongholds. Timerman said grassroots mobilization alongside social welfare policies helped turn the contest into a referendum on Brazilian democracy, rallying voters against Flávio Bolsonaro’s attempt to restore his father’s political legacy. Jair Bolsonaro was imprisoned for plotting a coup after his 2022 defeat, she said.
Lula also appealed to immediate economic concerns, drawing on his record of reducing poverty and inequality and increasing benefits under Bolsa Família, the landmark welfare programme he launched in 2003. He framed the election as a choice between protecting social gains and democratic institutions or returning to the Bolsonaro family’s attacks on both. He warned that Flávio would compromise Brazil’s sovereignty by aligning himself with Trump. Timerman said Lula’s victory suggested that defending democracy could remain a powerful electoral argument against the ascendant right.
That sovereignty position was explicit in Lula’s victory speech. Lula said the surge of street support in recent weeks “was a demonstration that this country refuses to be anyone’s back yard”. Timerman said the declaration directly challenged the so-called Donroe doctrine, which asserts an expanded US role in policing the region.
External pressure also cut both ways in Brazil, Timerman said. In 2025, Lula’s approval ratings rose after Washington threatened punitive tariffs over Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution. Lula turned the dispute into a defense of national sovereignty, making resistance to foreign interference a defining theme of his re-election campaign. She said the electoral effect of Trump’s involvement was difficult to isolate, but backlash helped Lula mobilize support. Combined with grassroots organizing, appeals to democracy and social welfare policies, that approach offered one possible response to the regional right’s advance.
Supporters gather to watch Lula speak in São Paulo on 25 October 2026. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters.
Yet the resistance remained national. Brazil’s size gave it a capacity to resist Washington that its neighbors lacked, Timerman said, and Lula had been pragmatic in keeping the resistance national rather than attempting to forge a regional coalition against Trump’s ambitions to reassert US dominance over the hemisphere. He also faced a strengthened right at home. Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede and sought to annul the election over a last-minute extension of voting hours that both campaigns had requested; electoral authorities maintained that the extension did not affect the outcome.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s vote nevertheless demonstrated the movement’s enduring strength. He won more than 48% of valid votes, Timerman wrote, and the right had substantial representation in an increasingly rightward Congress. His proposals on security and the economy appealed to voters frustrated by high living costs, including working-class Brazilians who had traditionally supported Lula. Timerman said frustration with crime, economic insecurity and established political parties had propelled a new right promising tougher security policies and attacking progressive social agendas.
She described this as mirroring the success of authoritarian-leaning right candidates across the continent, naming Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina and the recent election of Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. At regional scale, right-wing candidates had won seven presidential elections across Latin America in the past 18 months, she said. Two decades earlier, Lula had been among the leaders of the pink tide, a succession of left-wing governments that reshaped the region’s politics and sought greater autonomy from Washington. His fourth-term victory interrupted the opposite wave, but he was resisting it without a comparable coalition of allies.
The wider political landscape also obscured claims of a durable regional hegemony. Deeply divided electorates across Latin America had produced closely contested elections, Timerman said, complicating claims that either the left or the right had established durable political hegemony. In Brazil, nearly half of voters had backed a candidate who embraced much of Trump’s agenda. The rightward shift was neither inevitable nor irreversible, she wrote, but the movement retained substantial electoral support, influence over the political agenda and a powerful ally in Washington. Brazil might have stopped the blue tide at its borders, but it had not yet emerged as a regional bulwark against it.
Jordana Timerman is a journalist based in Buenos Aires, the managing editor of The Ideas Letter and compiles the Latin America Daily Briefing.