Brazil denied visas to two Trump administration officials this week. Riley Barnes, assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor, and Samuel Samson, a deputy assistant secretary of state, were planning to travel to São Paulo. Brazil stopped them. This is the column about what they were going to do there.
Let me say plainly what the diplomatic language dances around: the Trump administration is sending its democracy-and-human-rights officials to a Latin American ally to help the son of a jailed coup-planner discredit an election he may lose.
Flávio Bolsonaro was formally nominated Saturday as Brazil’s right-wing candidate at a party convention attended by Argentine President Javier Milei, an ideological ally. His father, Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup — a conviction Brazil’s Supreme Court entered after the former president summoned foreign ambassadors to question the country’s electronic voting system in a dress rehearsal for the January 6 playbook. Trump’s officials were coming to pick up the same script.
Flávio told diplomats this week that Brazil’s voting machines were produced by a Venezuelan company, insinuating fraud. Brazil’s election court responded with a fact: Smartmatic has never supplied a single machine used in a Brazilian election. International observers have repeatedly certified the system as secure. The claim is false. It is also beside the point. The point is to manufacture the doubt, not to prove it. The same technique, the same leading question, the same production of “suspicion” out of nothing — imported from the American playbook to a country that just convicted a president for using it.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jair’s other son, lives in the United States. Brazil convicted him of coercion last month. And in June, Lula accused the Bolsonaro sons of treason — a charge that sounded overheated until a $12 million shakedown of a jailed banker for a film project surfaced on voice messages. This is the family the Trump administration’s democracy-and-human-rights bureau was going to help.
The administration has spent months planning this trip — the State Department’s own bureau of democracy promotion dispatched to help a convicted insurrectionist’s son manufacture an excuse to reject an election he may lose. The irony is structural. You do not send the democracy bureau to run an interference operation for a coup family. You send people who have never heard of democracy, or you send no one. Sending the officials whose title carries the word democracy is a special kind of insult — the kind Jesus named when he said the Pharisees tithed mint and dill and cumin and neglected the weightier matters of the law.
I am a Catholic who claims the same tradition those officials claim. I will say what the tradition says. This is a sin, and it is a structural sin — pecado social, the kind Romero named when he said the obligation to denounce it is prophetic. You do not send officials to help discredit an election in a country that just jailed a president for the very tactic you are deploying. You do not export fraud-for-democracy to a hemisphere where the United States has already done catastrophic damage in the name of democracy.