By Omar G. Encarnación* – Foreign Affairs
Bolsonaro’s Conviction Was the Fruit of U.S. Democracy Promotion.
It’s hard to imagine Washington taking a more heavy-handed response to the prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was recently sentenced to 27 years in prison for having led a coup to stay in office after his 2022 loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. U.S. President Donald Trump has characterized the conviction as a “witch hunt” and retaliated with a 50 percent tariff on many Brazilian goods. The U.S. Treasury Department has hit Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice overseeing Bolsonaro’s trial, with some of the harshest sanctions in the U.S. toolkit, including those intended for human rights abusers.
Even U.S. military action against Brazil, which Trump designated a major non-NATO ally in 2019, appears to be on the table. When asked about the possibility of a Bolsonaro conviction, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt warned: “This is a priority for the administration, and the president is unafraid to use the economic might, the military might of the United States of America, to protect free speech around the world.”
The harsh U.S. response to Bolsonaro’s prosecution represents a tremendous irony: the conviction resulted from the work of institutions that the United States fostered for decades by pushing for reforms to strengthen the independence of the Brazilian judiciary. Put simply, the Bolsonaro trial was a triumph of U.S. democracy promotion.
At the moment, democracy promotion is anathema in Washington. The Trump administration has made unprecedented cuts to democracy, human rights, and governance programs, including dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, slashing the State Department’s democracy bureau, and freezing nearly $5 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign assistance. Trump has said that “there’s no reason for USAID,” which he has called a “left-wing money-laundering scam.” These positions represent a wholesale retreat from the bipartisan post–Cold War liberal consensus positing that democracy promotion as a form of soft power could both benefit foreign countries and advance U.S. interests and principles.
U.S. democracy promotion can rightly be criticized for its misplaced idealism and its excesses. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration tried to carry out nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq on a scale not seen since the aftermath of World War II. Bush’s disastrous campaign to democratize the Middle East soured the American public on such policies, which in turn allowed Trump to position himself as an opponent of democracy promotion and foreign assistance more broadly. And even in Latin America, U.S. democracy promotion has a checkered history, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson’s moralistic crusade to impose democracy on Mexico in 1914.
After the Cold War, however, Washington embraced a softer and smarter approach in Latin America, nurturing fledgling democratic systems across the hemisphere by strengthening democratic governance, elections, human rights, and the rule of law, including reforming judicial institutions and criminal justice systems. Investing in that form of democracy promotion paid significant dividends in Brazil. But in the years to come, Trump’s abandonment of democracy promotion will make it harder for civil society and opposition parties to dislodge the autocratic forces that once again have begun to take root in Latin America.
Judicial Review
Historically, USAID was at the core of U.S. democracy promotion in Latin America, administering programs designed to strengthen democratic institutions, including by advising on elections, encouraging a free press, and promoting civic education. The agency also funded civil society groups working to expose and prevent corruption and increase government transparency. Less well known is the work of the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-autonomous agency whose government funding is currently in legal limbo. Created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, with an eye toward bringing change to the communist world, the NED has long enjoyed bipartisan support.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, as countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay began to independently transition away from military dictatorship and toward democracy, the work of USAID and NED complemented U.S. counternarcotics programs, economic development assistance, humanitarian aid, and environmental protection. Throughout the 1990s, Washington prioritized judicial reforms intended to bolster the rule of law by training judges, prosecutors, and public defenders; helping law enforcement agencies build modern criminal investigative units; and offering fellowships for Latin American public servants to study at universities in the United States and intern at U.S. government agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
The mission of strengthening the rule of law faced particular challenges in Brazil. The country has endured 14 military coups, from the 1889 coup that ended the monarchy and gave birth to the Republic of Brazil to Bolsonaro’s failed 2022 attempt to prevent Lula from taking power. Only half of these succeeded. But after almost every failed attempt, the coup plotters enjoyed amnesty, most famously in 1985, when Brazil underwent its last transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Other Latin American countries that had suffered under military dictatorships vigorously prosecuted the perpetrators of human rights abuses, but Brazil did not follow suit. It instead swept the regime’s offenses under the rug, enacting a broad amnesty law in 1979 that was upheld by the Federal Supreme Court in 2010 and remains in place to this day. It was only in 2011 that Brazil organized a truth commission to chronicle human rights abuses the military committed between 1964 and 1985.
Nonetheless, with help from the United States, Brazil made significant strides, mostly by enhancing the independence of its judiciary. Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court has taken dramatic steps to expand the rights of historically marginalized communities including Afro-Brazilians, indigenous people, and LGBTQ people. For example, when Brazil legalized gay marriage in 2013 (before the United States), the court noted that its intervention was needed given the lack of action from the Brazilian Congress.
The strength of the judiciary has also enabled federal prosecutors to confront large scale corruption. In 2014, prosecutors launched Lava Jato, or Operation Carwash, a money-laundering investigation that exposed a host of criminal activities, including bribery, tied to Petrobras, the state-run oil company. The investigation became the biggest anticorruption dragnet in Brazilian history, leading to nearly 280 convictions and implicating top business people and politicians. It led to the imprisonment of the best-known of all Lava Jato defendants, President Lula, who served 580 days in jail. The investigation also provided the backdrop for the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, who previously chaired Petrobras’s board of directors but was impeached on separate charges that she manipulated the budget.
Nowhere has the strength of Brazil’s judiciary been more evident than in the courts’ bold confrontation of Bolsonaro and his illiberal agenda. Just months after Bolsonaro left office, in 2023, the Superior Electoral Court, which oversees federal elections, prosecuted the former president for abuses of power linked to spreading misinformation about Brazil’s electoral system. That conviction banned him from running for public office until 2030. In September, a panel of five judges on the Federal Supreme Court ruled four to one to convict Bolsonaro on five separate charges, including seeking to stage a coup, leading an armed criminal group, and attempting a violent abolition of the democratic rule of law—the first time the country has held coup plotters accountable.
A Helping Hand
It’s important not to overstate the role of U.S. influence, of course: the lion’s share of the credit for this remarkable turnaround goes to the Brazilian people, who have erected strong democratic institutions in a remarkably short time. In 1988, following a participatory amendments process through the National Constituent Assembly, Brazil enacted a new constitution that guarantees a broad menu of civil, political, and human rights. It abolished the Electoral College (a holdover from the old regime used by the military to ensure that its candidates won the presidency) and afforded the Federal Supreme Court considerable powers to protect vulnerable communities and to prosecute corruption. In 2004, a constitutional amendment created the National Council of Justice to manage the judiciary, which has vastly improved the functioning and autonomy of the courts.
But until Trump’s return to power, U.S. support for democracy in post-transition Brazil had been steadfast, and never more so than when democracy itself came under attack. After Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brasilia on January 8, 2023, an act that eerily mirrored the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, U.S. President Joe Biden telephoned Lula to affirm Washington’s “unwavering support for Brazil’s democracy.” At Biden’s request, Lula visited the White House in February 2023 to discuss strengthening democratic institutions and values. Following that meeting, the United States and Brazil initiated a series of collaborative projects intended to deepen the quality of Brazilian democracy, including a USAID-sponsored program to combat racial discrimination against Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous communities.
Of course, Brazil’s justice system is hardly beyond reproach. According to the Brazilian NGO Rio de Paz, only about eight percent of murders in Brazil lead to a criminal conviction. Many of the corruption-related convictions and sentences that resulted from Operation Carwash have been overturned—including Lula’s. Washington has not made much of either issue. Moreover, some Brazilians have raised legitimate concerns about whether the Federal Supreme Court has grown too powerful for the good of democracy. And for a policy that purports to support the rule of law, U.S. democracy promotion has done little to advance transitional justice policies that seek accountability for the human rights abuses committed by the military.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the cruel irony that at the precise moment when democracy promotion is bearing fruit in such a dramatic fashion in Brazil, the United States is turning its back on the policy. This will result in fewer resources dedicated to upholding the rule of law. Indeed, many Latin American NGOs are bracing for a “civil society recession,” as groups that depend on U.S. assistance close shop. Among the consequences will be a shrinking of the civic arena, which could create an opening for nondemocratic actors such as China and Russia to expand their regional influence.
For its part, Trump’s intimidation campaign over Brazil’s conviction of Bolsonaro will also likely discourage other Latin American countries from prosecuting their own antidemocratic leaders. Because of Trump’s actions, leaders who should be held accountable for undermining democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—including Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador—are resting more comfortably today. Brazil’s successful prosecution of Bolsonaro still offers Latin American countries a model to emulate. But it will be harder to do so without help from the United States.
*Omar G. Encarnación is Charles Flint Kellog Professor of Political Studies at Bard College and the author of Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting.