Last Tuesday’s charges against Brazil’s fascist ex-president Jair Bolsonaro for the attempted coup of January 8, 2023, have prompted his allies to redouble efforts to rally support from Donald Trump’s administration in Washington. In addition avoiding an almost certain conviction, Bolsonaro also aims to overturn a ruling that bars him from running in the 2026 presidential election.

Fascist forces around the world responded to Trump’s election last November with glee. Since then, he and numerous figures in his administration, most notably Vice President JD Vance and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, billionaire Elon Musk, have promoted these forces to establish around the world as many governments as possible of, by and for the oligarchy.

Bolsonaro, who was elected president in 2018, during the second year of Trump’s first administration, counts on his well-established political ties with the fascist ruling circle in the US for similar favors. After Trump’s election, he wrote on X: “Against everything and everyone, Donald Trump will return to the US presidency... Congratulations, my friend, on this epic victory.” He also wrote: “May Trump’s victory inspire Brazil to follow the same path.”

The ex-president’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, has been working hard to implement this plan. A federal deputy in Brazil with deep contacts with the American, European, and Latin American fascistic right, he has traveled to the US alone three times this year.

Eduardo attended Trump’s inauguration representing his father after Supreme Court (STF) minister Alexandre de Moraes confiscated the passport of the ex-president. At the beginning of February, he met with Republican members of Congress and took part in talk shows of the American far-right. Last week, Eduardo took to the stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the US.

One of Eduardo’s closest allies is Steve Bannon, who entrusted him with the leadership of his fascist “The Movement” in Latin America. At a fascist political event in Washington before Trump’s inauguration, Bannon hailed Eduardo, saying: “This is one of the most important individuals in our sovereignty movement throughout the world. And I think one day in not too far a distant future, the president of Brazil.”

In response, Eduardo said, “If the United States did that with President Trump, we could do that with President Bolsonaro in the election of 2026. Usually, Brazil follows the same steps as the United States.” This phrase is a sinister reference to the fact that Bolsonaro’s 2023 coup plot was inspired by Trump’s coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Eduardo Bolsonaro himself was in Washington during the assault on the US Capitol, seeking to absorb strategic lessons.

On February 17, Folha de S. Paulo reported that Bannon spoke with the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the charges against Bolsonaro. According to the report, “Rubio agreed with” the concern expressed by Bannon about the denunciation of Bolsonaro and “added that [it] would be very much opposed by the Donald Trump administration.”

For Bolsonaro and his allies, CPAC hasn’t been just a place to gather the global far right and promote their fascist ideas. Since last July’s CPAC gathering in Brazil, its speakers have been working together to launch an internationally coordinated campaign against the supposed political persecution of Bolsonaro.

In his speech last Thursday at CPAC, Eduardo said that although his father had been targeted by the “Attorney General of the current ‘socialist government’” of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party - PT), “the persecution is not spearheaded by the Executive branch, but by the Judiciary.” In this sense, he continued, “my country has become a laboratory for censorship and judicial authoritarianism.”

The alleged “authoritarianism” is personified by STF minister Moraes, who is also the rapporteur of numerous investigations against Bolsonaro, including the one into his attempted coup. “Under his [Moraes] watch,” Eduardo continued, “Brazil has become a country where social media platforms are forced to silence opposition voices or face billions in fines.”

Last April, Musk became one those investigated under the infamous “digital militia inquiry” led by Moraes, which is based on the fraudulent political thesis that attributes the erosion of democracy in Brazil to the unchecked dissemination of “fake news.” Between August and September, Moraes banned X in Brazil for refusing to remove accounts of US-resident users involved in the January 8 coup attempt.

Justifying Musk’s shutdown of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Eduardo fraudulently claimed at CPAC that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) “helped to fund this experiment” in Brazil. Those institutions, he said, are “channeling resources into judicial censorship overreach and political persecution in my country.” 

Following Trump’s example, Bolsonaro prepared the ground for his fascist coup attempt by advancing the claim that the 2022 presidential election in Brazil was rigged. With Trump’s return to power, this myth has gained a new momentum, along with the claim that the USAID funneled resources into bodies such as the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court (TSE) to change the election’s results.

In one of the most significant passages of his speech at CPAC, Eduardo claimed that the election of his father in 2026 is the only way to prevent Brazil from “falling completely under Chinese influence.”

Besides China being Brazil’s leading trading partner, it is also a member of the BRICS—comprised of Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa, plus half a dozen countries recently incorporated into the group—which Trump threatened in December with 100 percent tariffs if it adopts an alternative to the dollar.

In recent weeks, Bolsonaro has made several anti-China statements to strengthen his ties to the Trump administration. On February 14, he said in an interview with Folha: “If I’m president again, I’ll leave BRICS.” Brazil is the president of the BRICS this year, and the Lula government has defined the development of a platform allowing member countries to use their currencies for trade between themselves as a priority.

Indicating that Latin America will not be spared in a future world conflict, Folha reported on February 6 that Bolsonaro “will make a ‘tough military agreement’ with the US to end the presence of terrorists on the triple border” between Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, a region with a sizable Lebanese presence that the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Bolsonaro unfoundedly claim to be a base for Hezbollah. “I will allow a US military base to be installed there,” Bolsonaro declared.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s speech at CPAC was preceded by a series of meetings he had with Republican members of Congress, the White House, and the US State Department to discuss the alleged political persecution of his father. 

In a video recorded during Eduardo’s visit to the US, Brazilian fascist journalist Paulo Figueredo, grandson of Gen. João Figueiredo, the last president of Brazil’s military dictatorship, said that these meetings were designed to “expose the size of this electoral interference in Brazil”; to demand “free, transparent, auditable elections with the opposition being able to run” and that the US not recognize it otherwise; and that “the US uses its foreign policy tools, as it does all over the world, to hold accountable all public agents who have committed violations of human rights and democracy in Brazil.”

To this end, they met with Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who “reintroduced a bill called the ‘No Censorship On Our Shores Act,’ which is the law that cancels visas and prevents the entry of any foreign authority [a direct reference to Moraes and other STF ministers] that violates freedom of expression.” 

More significantly, they also met with Congressman Chris Smith, who, according to Figueiredo, “provoked the OAS [Organization of American States] special rapporteur to come to Brazil” in early February to investigate Bolsonaro’s complaint of political persecution by the STF. 

According to Metrópoles: the OAS move “could lead to an unprecedented offensive by the United States against the Lula government.” This could include “new measures that harm the Brazilian economy, in addition to the already announced steel tax,” with the country being the second largest exporter of steel to the US.

In a foretaste of things to come, Trump Media & Technology Group and the fascist social network Rumble filed last week a joint lawsuit in a US federal court against Justice Moraes for violating US sovereignty and free speech protections by demanding the suspension of accounts of Bolsonaro supporters residing in the US.

On Tuesday, Musk responded to a speech given by Moraes denouncing the “Big Techs” for “not [being] sent from God” and for “brainwashing” voters with a post on X questioning whether Moraes could be sanctioned in the US. 

The g1 website reported that “the harassment by Elon Musk and part of Donald Trump’s base against Minister Alexandre de Moraes” made the STF “demand a formal diplomatic reaction” from the Lula government’s foreign ministry. According to the report, the government must react to “various fronts of institutional embarrassment.”

However, any reaction will make Lula turn even further to the right amid falling approval ratings for his government, rising inflation, and an inability to resolve the Brazilian working population’s growing social and economic grievances. 

As a loyal representative of Brazil’s capitalist ruling elite, Lula’s two years in office have seen attacks on education, health, and other social rights that continue what the Bolsonaro government was implementing in Brazil. In what should be a serious warning to the Brazilian working class, this process is strengthening the fascist political opposition that has benefited from the betrayals of the PT and the unions it leads.