Brazilian workers are the ones who will pay for this. Not the diplomats, not the senators, not the State Department spokesman. The woman packing export goods in Santos, the family watching prices climb in the São Paulo market, the factory floor in Minas Gerais where twenty-five percent on a tariff wall means a pink slip before Christmas. That is who Lula’s new campaign ad is really about. Not the argument between capitals. The people on the ground.
The ad runs a minute. The narrator does not mince words: Bolsonaro is Trump’s chosen man, and what Trump wants is to “colonise” Brazil, take its riches, and leave its people holding the bag. Lula sharpened it further on X, same day: “If it’s up to him, Brazil will become a colony again.” Now, I have sat through enough political ads in my life to know the difference between a sound bite and a line someone means. That line, Lula means.
The State Department says any suggestion of a US “ploy” to undermine Brazil’s election is “a baseless lie.” They have said it more than once. What they have not done is address what everybody can see. A twenty-five percent tariff wall sits on Brazilian imports right now. That is not a ploy on paper. That is a cost passed straight to workers on both sides of the water — Brazilian exporters who lose orders, American consumers who pay more at the register, and in both cases the people at the bottom who eat the difference while the people at the top divide the contracts.
Brazil’s own intelligence agency warned electoral authorities of a “critical level” of risk of US interference. The campaign ad also cites reporting on Big Tech meddling in the vote and links between Bolsonaro’s operation and Rockbridge, the conservative donor network co-founded by Vice President J.D. Vance. These are not abstractions. Big Tech is the same machinery that shapes what Brazilians see online, what prices they pay on marketplace platforms, and whose political voices get amplified and whose get buried. When that machinery serves one side of an election, it is not neutral infrastructure. It is a lever.
And this is not only Lula’s line. Renan Santos, a right-wing candidate who would sooner agree with Bolsonaro on almost anything, came out this week and said he does not want Brazil reduced to a US “vassal state.” He named the rare earths — the minerals under Brazilian soil that Washington wants locked up in American-friendly contracts. “I don’t want to see Latin America become an American protectorate,” Santos said. When a right-wing challenger and a left-wing president are making the same argument about sovereignty, that tells you the pressure is real and it lands on everyone, not just one party’s voters.
Dozens of Democrats in Congress wrote to Secretary of State Rubio this week calling it what they see: “a sustained, multifaceted campaign of interference and destabilisation.” They asked him to commit to respecting Brazil’s electoral process. They gave him until October 1 — three days before the first round. The State Department has not answered. And silence, when you have been asked a direct question about whether you are interfering in another country’s election, is its own answer.
At the UN General Assembly this week, Lula told the room what he thinks of it: “We will not allow the enemies of democracy — internal or external — attack the will of the people. Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians.” That is not diplomatic hedging. That is a man drawing a line.
Here is what I know. The United States has been running this playbook on Latin America my entire life and a good chunk of my father’s. Guatemala in ‘54, Chile in ‘73, Grenada, Panama, the slow squeeze on Venezuela — each time the same story dressed in different clothes. The playbook is simple: economic pressure, political interference, enough chaos that ordinary people have no good options left, and then you call the result democracy. I recognize it. I have seen how it works from the other end. When you create conditions where people have no choice, you have not given them freedom. You have taken it.
Every time the United States puts a thumb on Brazil’s scale, here is who pays. A Brazilian worker facing layoffs because export orders dried up under the tariff. A small farmer in the interior who sold to the American market and is now shut out. A family in a favela whose grocery bill just went up and whose wages did not. Those are the people on the receiving end of what Washington calls diplomacy. That is what it looks like in a kitchen, in a market, on a factory floor. Not a policy debate. A choice being made about someone else’s life by people who will never meet the people who live it.
Brazil’s working people will decide this one. Not Rubio, not Trump, not Rockbridge. The woman packing goods in Santos and the man laying block in São Paulo and the family in the interior watching the price of rice — they are the ones who get to say what Brazil is and who it belongs to. And the rest of us, including the people where I come from, had better be paying attention. Because the same playbook that squeezes Brazil gets used on us too, and the people who run it count on us not noticing the pattern until it is our turn.