How U.S. Pressure Helped Save Brazil’s Democracy

Two weeks ago, Brazil’s federal police launched a high-profile raid against former President Jair Bolsonaro and more than 10 of his allies, including Brazil’s former navy chief, national security advisor, and ministers of defense and justice. Authorities accused the group of plotting a potential coup after Bolsonaro’s failed 2022 reelection bid.

Court documents related to the raid suggest that Bolsonaro personally edited a decree that would have overturned election results and imprisoned a Supreme Court justice; a general loyal to the president confirmed he would provide the troops needed to carry out the coup. Bolsonaro also allegedly pressured his cabinet to more forcefully share disinformation about supposed weaknesses in Brazil’s electoral system. The former president was asked to hand over his passport to authorities and may face decades in jail.

The recent revelations suggest that Brazilian coup-mongers’ plans were more advanced than initially believed. In the end, however, they did not get their way—in part due to divisions within Brazil’s armed forces that were the target of concerted pro-democracy efforts by U.S. President Joe Biden.

Biden’s stated commitment to defending democracy worldwide is often brushed off as mere rhetoric. After all, during his tenure, the United States has made uneasy compromises with autocrats to achieve its geopolitical objectives. Amid continued U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, Washington has also been branded a hypocrite in much of the global south.

This tide of criticism may explain why one of Biden’s most significant foreign-policy achievements to date remains curiously overlooked. Not only was Brazil’s democracy closer to the brink than initially understood, but targeted U.S. pressure on key Brazilian officials was likely decisive in guaranteeing the eventual outcome: a largely peaceful transition of power in the country after its October 2022 presidential election.

The account presented in this article comes from interviews with Brazilian policymakers and issue-area experts as well as Brazilian and international media reports. In conversations with Foreign Policy, several individuals, including a high-ranking Brazilian diplomat and a military expert, confirmed that, in their views, external pressure was critical to preventing members of Brazil’s military from executing Bolsonaro’s plans for a coup.

Brazil returned relatively quickly to political normalcy after the deeply polarizing 2022 presidential contest. That has led some observers to forget how serious of a threat Bolsonaro posed to the country’s democracy.

During his final months in office, the former army captain so openly flirted with subverting democracy that a Brazilian “Jan. 6 scenario”—an incumbent’s refusal to concede followed by a violent yet clumsy failed attempt to stop the transition of power—was seen by analysts, myself included, as a comparatively benign prospect. We feared much worse than what the United States experienced in 2021.

In the end, Bolsonaro supporters did launch such an attack on Brasília on Jan. 8, 2023, about a week after new President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s inauguration. But Brazil’s judiciary has swiftly prosecuted cases related to the riots; last September, the first defendants to stand trial were convicted and sentenced to at least 14 years in prison. Seventy-three people remain in jail and more than 1,350 have been released from prison as they await their trial.

In addition to the Jan. 6 and Jan. 8 parallels, Bolsonaro’s pre-electoral strategy was also similar to that of his ally, former U.S. President Donald Trump. Without evidence, Bolsonaro sowed doubts about the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting machines and spoke about voter fraud, seemingly preparing to reject the presidential election result if he lost. Of the approximately 50 million Brazilians who said they would vote for Bolsonaro, about 25 percent told pollsters that the president should not recognize the outcome if he came up short. Last June, Brazil’s electoral court banned Bolsonaro from holding office for eight years for spreading false claims about Brazil’s voting system.

Yet comparisons between the chaotic presidential transitions in the United States in early 2021 and in Brazil in early 2023 may end there. That’s because Latin America’s largest nation was facing a far bigger threat to its democracy.

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, several of Brazil’s leading generals not only refused to publicly commit to respecting the October 2022 election’s results, but instead actively embraced Bolsonaro’s conspiracy theories. Some even accepted his argument that the armed forces should play a role in certifying the contest’s result, rather than Brazil’s electoral court. Such a change would have violated Brazilian law and can be understood as a strategy to muddy the waters and contest the electoral outcome.

The generals were aware that a Lula win would lead thousands of army officers to lose positions of power—and associated economic perks. During his presidency, Bolsonaro appointed more than 6,000 military officers to roles in his administration and in state-owned companies, blurring the lines between the armed forces and civilian government to a degree unprecedented since the end of Brazil’s dictatorship in 1985.

Adm. Almir Garnier Santos, then the head of the Brazilian Navy, and Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, then the minister of defense, did little to hide their willingness to question the reliability of Brazil’s voting system. In recently leaked recordings of meetings between Bolsonaro’s cabinet members, Nogueira described Brazil’s electoral court as the “enemy.”

Yet support for subverting Brazil’s democracy among generals was not unanimous; importantly, it was a high-ranking former general—Bolsonaro’s vice president, Hamilton Mourão—who helped alert the United States to the prospect of a coup. According to a 2023 investigation by the Financial Times, Mourão privately expressed concern about anti-democratic currents within the armed forces to former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Tom Shannon during a private lunch in New York in 2022. Shannon served in Brasília from 2010 to 2013 and has remained a key interlocuter in U.S.-Brazilian affairs ever since.

In response, 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-Brazil security cooperation, which is highly valued by Brazil’s military establishment.

The campaign involved the U.S. 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 U.S. presidential election. Austin was also a more credible interlocutor since Brazil’s military was the intended target of the U.S. campaign.

The sheer number of U.S. actors involved in the campaign meant that, for much of 2022, many Brazilian government officials visiting Washington received an unambiguous message from the U.S. government about the need for Brazil’s military officers to respect the electoral process. Shortly before Brazil’s election, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling on Brazil to ensure the vote is “conducted in a free, fair, credible, transparent, and peaceful manner.” In order to minimize the risk of a coup, Biden, along with numerous Western allies, publicly congratulated Lula for his victory in the hours after the official results were made public.

Mourão’s reaction to Lula’s win suggests that the threat of a negative international response was among the factors that convinced the Brazilian military’s coup-mongers to stand down. In a post on X (then still known as Twitter) three days after the Oct. 30, 2022, runoff election, Mourão acknowledged Bolsonaro supporters’ “frustration,” writing that Lula should not have been allowed in run in the first place because of his annulled criminal conviction; the then-vice president questioned the legitimacy of the election but argued that “a military coup would put the country in a difficult situation internationally.”

As an investigation by the Brazilian Report revealed, the United States also played a crucial role in helping Brazil’s electoral authorities overcome a global chip shortage to outfit electronic voting machines and ensure a smooth contest. After all, Bolsonaro would have latched onto any technical difficulties as supposed evidence of machines’ unreliability.

This largely behind-the-scenes operation involved Shannon, fellow former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Anthony Harrington, and Rubens Barbosa, Brazil’s former ambassador to the United States. Barbosa was tapped by Brazil’s electoral court to lead the effort, which involved negotiations with the Taiwanese government to ensure that chip manufacturer Nuvoton prioritized Brazil’s demands. Crucially, Bolsonaro’s foreign minister, Carlos França, did not inform the then-president of the effort. França was aware of—but refused to be directly involved in—the Taiwan chip operation.

The Biden administration’s strategy was more daring than it appears in retrospect. Memories of U.S. meddling in Brazil’s internal affairs—whether in 1964 to support a military coup, or more recently, in the National Security Agency’s spying on national oil company Petrobras and former President Dilma Rousseff—remain vivid in Brazil.

For this reason, Washington’s efforts to coup-proof the country’s democracy risked backfiring—and could have been criticized even by those who opposed Bolsonaro. Across Latin America, U.S. claims to imperatives such as “democracy promotion” and “democracy defense” are tarnished due to the traumatic history of U.S. intervention in the region.

None of this is to suggest that international pressure alone could have prevented a coup in Brazil. The country saw an unprecedented mobilization of pro-democracy forces ahead of the elections. Lula reached out to moderates by selecting his center-right former rival Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate. Brazil’s electoral authorities took historic steps to combat fake news. Many of Lula’s former opponents, such as environmentalist Marina Silva and former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, came out in support of the leftist candidate.

Yet the U.S. government’s efforts to protect Brazil’s democracy are especially remarkable because it was clear from the start that they would benefit Lula, a candidate with a long history of antagonizing the United States. Bolsonaro ran as a pro-American candidate in 2018 and frequently spoke out against China.

Predictably, the U.S.-Brazil relationship did not improve significantly after Lula came to office. During a visit to the White House in February 2023, Lula thanked Biden for his defense of democracy, yet the meeting was marked by mutual disappointment. The U.S. Congress was unwilling to provide Biden with more funds to support Brazil’s fight against deforestation in the Amazon, and Lula’s nonaligned stance toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine frustrated Washington. Lula’s meeting with Biden paled in comparison to the Brazilian president’s high-level visit to Beijing soon after.

Irrespective of how U.S.-Brazil ties have evolved since 2022, the United States’ election year strategy toward Brazil remains a remarkable U.S. foreign-policy success. A military coup in Brazil would have sent shock waves around the world and increased the risk of a broader democratic recession in the Western hemisphere.

While one may speculate about how Brazil’s coup-mongering generals would have behaved in 2022 if Trump had still been in the White House, it seems obvious that the United States would not have played the same constructive role in helping Brazil fend off the most serious threat to its democracy in decades.

This makes the upcoming U.S. presidential election—expected to be a rematch between Biden and Trump—all the more relevant for Brazil and other sometimes-shaky democracies around the world. The next time that anti-democratic forces emerge from the shadows, the international environment—and White House—may be less hostile to them.