https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/world/what-usaids-dark-dollars-did-to-brazil/
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, is a far-left politician who served as the 35th president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. His government is notoriously responsible for the severe undermining of fundamental human rights in Brazil, especially free speech and property rights. Curiously, however, there was a decisive external element in the re-election of this far-left politician.
In July 2021, then-president Joe Biden sent CIA director William Burns to Brazil to meet with senior officials. During the meeting, Burns warned President, Jair Bolsonaro he should “stop casting doubt in his country’s [electronic] electoral process”.[1] A month later, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also visited Brazil to issue a similar warning: do not even dare even to question the reliability of the electronic voting system.[2] Then, in June 2022, at a Summit of the Americas meeting in Los Angeles, the Biden administration repeated the same warning: the US would not tolerate anyone casting doubt on the reliability of electronic voting machines.[3]
As these threatening messages came before the election they amounted to a warning of dire consequences should anyone in Brazil contest the transparency of electronic voting machines. On September 28, 2022, the US Senate approved a resolution threatening the suspension of US-Brazil relations in case of any questioning of the security of the electronic voting system, “otherwise the US must consider its relations with the Brazilian government and suspend cooperation programs, including in the military area”.[4] As reported by Revolver,
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 Foreign Policy, involved explicit public warnings by US 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 US-Brazil security cooperation, which is highly valued by Brazil’s military establishment.[5]
As also reported by Revolver,
The campaign involved the US 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 US presidential election. Austin was also a more credible interlocutor since Brazil’s military was the intended target of the U.S. campaign.[6]
This helps explain why, after just a few outlets called the Brazilian presidential election on October 30, 2022, the Biden Administration almost immediately orchestrated a formidable international embrace of the former president. In an official statement, Biden contended that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”.[7] Quickly afterwards, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released similar statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, claimed Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result.[8]
As can be seen, the controversial election of the notorious ex-convict and far-left politician was strongly encouraged by the oligarchical leadership of the world. However, millions of Brazilians have protested Lula’s alleged victory. The spontaneous mass-movement has no defined national leader.[9] These grass-roots protests are solely motivated by a strong — and reasonable — belief that the latest presidential election in Brazil suffered from massive electoral fraud. However, writing on his X account, President Macron, reacting to the protests in Brazil, stated that President Lula can count on France’s “unfailing support”.[10]