The year was 1962 and the Kennedy administration was desperate to swing Brazil’s congressional elections against its leftwing president, João Goulart, as a way of countering the supposed communist threat sweeping a region the US considered its back yard. Historians say that in the lead-up to the vote, the CIA and the Department of State secretly channelled millions of dollars to opposition candidates and a group tasked with spreading rightwing propaganda and stirring up unrest. More than six decades later, Paiva, whose grandfather was murdered by the US-backed dictatorship that seized power in 1964, is among those who fear history is repeating itself on the eve of Brazil’s 2026 presidential election.
October’s vote will pit the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, against the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Donald Trump ally who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a military coup. Polls suggest a tight race and Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, have been accused of trying to tip the scales in Bolsonaro’s favour by launching an overt campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure against Lula. The US measures include imposing 25% tariffs on most Brazilian imports and designating Brazil’s biggest crime groups – Rio’s Red Command and São Paulo’s First Command of the Capital – as foreign terrorist organisations.
Brazilian officials suspect this is partly designed to boost Bolsonaro by making Lula look soft on crime. In July, Lula said two Trump officials had been denied entry visas because they planned “to meddle in Brazil’s elections”. Brazilian officials believe the pair, who reportedly planned to meet Flávio Bolsonaro, intended to sow doubt about the reliability of Brazil’s internationally respected voting system – something the Bolsonaros have sought to do repeatedly.
Soon after, the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to Washington was revoked. Celso Rocha de Barros, a political scientist and podcast pundit, voiced bewilderment that US interference – which he considered the election’s most urgent theme – was not getting more coverage in mainstream media. Back then, the CIA helped finance the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action, which, according to the historians Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, illegally poured money into the campaigns of hundreds of lawmakers and eight gubernatorial candidates.
Another US-funded group, the Research and Social Studies Institute, was used to disrupt Goulart’s government by bankrolling anti-communist propaganda and anti-government protests. James N Green, a Brown University historian who has written a book about the period, said: “The intention [was] getting rid of Goulart [and] opening the door to the military coming to power.” Green sees parallels between Trump’s use of tariffs to sabotage Lula’s campaign and how in the early 60s Washington sought to enfeeble Goulart’s government by funding his opponents and cutting off loans. Then, as now, the US government was “bent on doing everything possible to weaken the government” in Brazil.
But Barros sees one key difference between the two US gambits. So they did it secretly,” he said. We’ve respected and dealt with governments from both sides of the spectrum in Brazil, and had very successful relationships with them.” Last year Trump was accused of meddling in the politics of neighbouring Argentina after he threw his weight behind its rightwing president, Javier Milei, on the eve of crucial midterm elections.
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