The controversy over Brazil’s election results veered into chaos last weekend, as large crowds of supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro surged into government buildings in Brasilia in an apparent attempt to bring about the overthrow of Marxist Lula da Silva. Da Silva himself happened to be in São Paulo, but the demonstrators broke windows and committed various acts of vandalism before decamping to nearby military headquarters, in the apparent hope that the military would intervene on their behalf. Instead, the military began rounding them up, signaling a clear intent to side with the Marxist Lula and his radical new administration.
As for Jair Bolsonaro himself, he prudently departed Brazil the day Lula was sworn into office, and has been keeping a low profile in a rented home in Florida. Now, of course, vengeful leftists in Brazil and the United States are urging his expulsion from the U.S., in the expectation that he will be returned to Brazil and made to face so-called “justice” — even though Bolsonaro apparently played no role in the anti-Lula demonstrations leading up to and including the weekend’s events. Bolsonaro has been hospitalized in Florida for treatment of persistent issues relating to a recent assassination attempt, in which he suffered serious stab wounds. According to the latest reports, he is now considering returning to Brazil rather than waiting for the radical left-wing Biden administration to deport him.
With Brazil’s new Marxist government rounding up thousands of demonstrators and vowing to utterly stamp out all resistance to the official narrative of election legitimacy, the country now looks to spiral downward into a much larger version of Venezuela and Cuba. The only thing still standing in Lula’s way is the large number of pro-Bolsonaro congressmen — and they may end up getting purged as the Marxist takeover gains momentum.
This might seem to be exaggerated and alarmist; after all, Lula has been the Brazilian president before, and the country avoided a complete Marxist takeover. This time, however, Lula is an ex-con out for revenge on those he views responsible for his fall from grace and brief incarceration — and now, following the unrest in Brasilia, he has the political pretext to crack down on all opposition.
Lula da Silva is an unreconstructed radical leftist revolutionary, one of whose most consequential affiliates, the São Paulo Forum, a hugely influential international Marxist organization in Latin America, seeks nothing less than complete integration of all Latin American countries under a Marxist regime. This project is an attempt to forge in Latin America a bloc similar to the old Communist Eastern Bloc in Europe, a counterweight to Canada and the United States. Nor is the forum an inconsequential debating society. It was founded in the summer of 1992 in São Paulo (one month after the creation of the modern UN-backed global environmental movement at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro), and has since grown into the premier vessel for advancing the cause of international leftism in Latin America.
Essentially an international coalition of leftist parties and political organizations, it is funded by Venezuela’s oil wealth and by drug money flowing from Colombia and elsewhere. Currently, only five Latin American countries — Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Guatemala — are not governed by parties belonging to the São Paulo Forum. The forum includes workers’ parties, communist parties, socialist parties, green parties, environmentalist organizations, social democratic parties, worker’s unions, and even armed insurgents (Colombia’s FARC leftist guerrillas).
Lula’s electoral takeover in Brazil may have very serious consequences not only for Brazil, but for all of Latin America. Brazil may end up providing Communist China with an enormous new platform of influence in Latin America of a size that the old Soviet Union, with its inroads into Cuba and Nicaragua, could only have dreamed of. Lula’s Brazil may end up catalyzing a decisive tilt into Marxism across the entirety of Latin America, where regimes like Venezuela’s Maduro may become the rule rather than the exception.
