As of: February 25, 2024, 11:59 a.m
From: Foreign Policy
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Mounting evidence suggests that it was Joe Biden who stopped pro-Bolsonaro generals from carrying out a coup in Brazil.
The coup plotters in Brazil's plans to overthrow the democracy of the largest country in South America failed by the narrowest of margins.
Former President Jair Bolsonaro was apparently at the center of the planned military coup in Brazil.
US President Joe Biden and the Pentagon are said to have exerted their influence on Brazil's army leadership.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on February 20, 2024 .
Two weeks ago, Brazilian federal police launched a high-profile raid against former President Jair Bolsonaro and more than 10 of his allies, including the former head of Brazil's navy, the national security adviser and the ministers of defense and justice.
Authorities accused the group of plotting a possible coup in Brazil following Bolsonaro's failed re-election in 2022.
Court documents related to the raid suggest that Bolsonaro personally authored a decree that would have annulled the election results and jailed a Supreme Court judge.
A general loyal to the president confirmed that he would provide the troops necessary to carry out the coup.
Bolsonaro is also said to have urged his cabinet to more forcefully spread disinformation about alleged vulnerabilities in Brazil's electoral system.
The former president was ordered to hand over his passport to authorities and faces decades in prison.
Joe Biden weighs in, betting on divisions in Brazil's military
Recent revelations suggest that the Brazilian coup plotters were more advanced than initially thought.
Ultimately, however, they failed to prevail - in part due to divisions within the Brazilian armed forces, which have been the target of US President Joe Biden's concerted pro-democracy efforts.
A supporter of the elected Jai Bolsonaro tries to break into the government buildings in Brasilia after his defeat.
(Archive image) © IMAGO/Eduardo FS Lima
Biden's stated commitment to defending democracy worldwide is often dismissed as mere rhetoric.
After all, during his time in office, the United States made uncomfortable compromises with autocrats to achieve its geopolitical goals.
Amid continued US support for Israel's military operation in Gaza, Washington has also been branded a hypocrite across much of the Global South.
Targeted pressure from Joe Biden saves democracy in Brazil
This barrage of criticism may explain why one of Biden's key foreign policy achievements has been strangely overlooked.
Not only was Brazilian democracy closer to the brink than originally thought, but targeted U.S. pressure on key Brazilian officials was likely crucial to the eventual outcome: a largely peaceful transition of power in the country following the October 2022 presidential election.
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The presentation in this article is based on interviews with Brazilian politicians and experts as well as on Brazilian and international media reports.
Speaking to
Foreign Policy,
several people, including a senior Brazilian diplomat and a military expert, confirmed that they believe external pressure is crucial to preventing members of the Brazilian military from carrying out Bolsonaro's coup plans.
Bolosonaro posed a serious threat to Brazil's democracy
After the highly polarizing 2022 presidential elections, Brazil returned to political normality relatively quickly.
That has made some observers forget how serious a threat Bolsonaro posed to the country's democracy.
In the final months of his term, the former army captain openly flirted with undermining democracy.
This went so far that a Brazilian “6.
“January Scenario” – the incumbent’s refusal to admit defeat, followed by a violent but clumsy attempt to stop the transfer 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.
Finally, Bolsonaro supporters launched such an attack on Brasília on January 8, 2023, about a week after the inauguration of new President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
However, the Brazilian judiciary quickly pursued cases related to the riots;
Last September, the first defendants were sentenced to at least 14 years in prison.
Seventy-three people remain in custody and more than 1,350 people have been released as they await trial.
Jair Bolsonaro's strategy is reminiscent of Donald Trump
Aside from the parallels between January 6 and 8, Bolsonaro's pre-election strategy is also similar to that of his ally, former US President Donald Trump.
Without evidence, Bolsonaro raised doubts about the reliability of Brazil's electronic voting machines and spoke of electoral fraud, apparently preparing to reject the results of the presidential election if he were defeated.
Of the roughly 50 million Brazilians who said they would vote for Bolsonaro, about 25 percent told pollsters that the president should not recognize the result if he was defeated.
Last June, Brazil's electoral court forced Bolsonaro out of office for eight years for spreading false claims about Brazil's electoral system.
Jair Bolsonaro is said to have based his coup plans on his role model Donald Trump.
© Alan Santos/dpa
But the comparison between the chaotic presidential transitions in the United States in early 2021 and in Brazil in early 2023 may end there.
Because Latin America's largest nation was faced with a far greater threat to its democracy.
Brazil's military was partly behind Jair Bolsonaro
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, several of Brazil's top generals not only refused to publicly commit to recognizing the October 2022 election results, but instead actively supported Bolsonaro's conspiracy theories.
Some even accepted his argument that the armed forces should play a role in certifying the results of the Brazilian election, rather than the Brazilian electoral court.
Such a change would have violated Brazilian electoral law and can be seen as a strategy to muddy the waters and challenge the election results.
The generals were aware that a Lula victory would result in thousands of army officers losing their positions of power and the economic benefits that came with them.
During his presidency, Bolsonaro has appointed more than 6,000 military officers to his administration and state-owned companies.
In doing so, he blurred the boundaries between the armed forces and the civilian government to a degree not seen since the end of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1985.
Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, then head of the Brazilian Navy, and General Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, then defense minister, did little to hide their willingness to question the reliability of Brazil's electoral system.
In recently leaked footage of meetings between Bolsonaro's cabinet members, Nogueira referred to Brazil's electoral court as an "enemy."
Foreign Policy Logo © ForeignPolicy.com
Joe Biden and the USA start campaign in Brazil
Still, support for undermining Brazil's democracy was not unanimous among the generals;
Most notably, it was a high-ranking former general - Bolsonaro's vice president Hamilton Mourão - who helped alert the United States to the possibility of a coup.
According to a 2023
Financial Times
investigation, Mourão privately expressed concerns 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 worked in Brasília from 2010 to 2013 and has been an important interlocutor on American-Brazilian affairs since then.
In response, Joe Biden's administration has launched a sustained pressure campaign on the Brazilian military that began back in 2021.
The effort, first reported in Folha de São Paulo and also reported on by
Foreign Policy
, included explicit public warnings from U.S. senators about disregarding election results and ongoing backroom discussions.
It should be made clear that a democratic break would isolate Brazil on the international stage – and lead to a deterioration in US-Brazil security cooperation, which is highly valued by the Brazilian military apparatus.
The Pentagon is also said to have been committed to preserving democracy in Brazil
The campaign involved the White House, the State Department, the CIA, the Senate and - most importantly - the Pentagon.
In retrospect, the inclusion of the latter agency was perhaps the most decisive step of the Biden administration.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was tapped as Biden's top public envoy to Brazil's generals.
This was a natural choice given the strained relationship between Biden and Bolsonaro, who, following Trump's example, spread falsehoods about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 US election.
Austin was also a more credible interlocutor since the Brazilian military was the real target of the US 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 unmistakable message from the U.S. government that the Brazilian military must respect the electoral process.
Shortly before the Brazilian elections, the US Senate passed a resolution calling on Brazil to ensure that the election would be “free, fair, credible, transparent and peaceful.”
To minimize the risk of a coup, Biden, along with numerous Western allies, publicly congratulated Lula on his victory in the hours after the official election results were announced.
US authorities were already active in the election in Brazil
Mourão's reaction to Lula's victory suggests that the risk of a negative international reaction was among the factors that persuaded the Brazilian military's coup plotters to hold back.
In a post on
the then-vice president questioned the legitimacy of the election but argued that “a military coup would put the country in a difficult position internationally.”
As a Brazilian Report investigation found, the United States also played a crucial role in helping Brazilian electoral authorities overcome a global chip shortage to equip electronic voting machines and ensure the election ran smoothly.
After all, Bolsonaro would have cited any technical difficulty as supposed evidence of the machines' unreliability.
This largely behind-the-scenes operation involved Shannon, his colleague, former US Ambassador to Brazil Anthony Harrington, and Rubens Barbosa, Brazil's former ambassador to the United States.
Barbosa was appointed by Brazil's electoral court to lead the effort, which included negotiations with the Taiwanese government to ensure that chipmaker Nuvoton prioritized Brazilian demands.
Crucially, Bolsonaro's foreign minister, Carlos França, did not inform the then-president of the effort.
França knew about the chip operation in Taiwan but refused to be directly involved.
Dangerous strategy of the Biden administration in Brazil
The strategy of Joe Biden's administration was more daring than it appears in retrospect.
Memories of U.S. interference in Brazil's internal affairs - whether in support of a military coup in 1964 or more recently in the National Security Agency's spying on national oil company Petrobras and former President Dilma Rousseff - are still alive in Brazil.
For this reason, Washington's efforts to protect the country's democracy from a coup threatened to backfire - and could even have been criticized by those who oppose Bolsonaro.
Across Latin America, U.S. claims to imperatives such as “democracy promotion” and “democracy defense” have been tarnished because of the traumatic history of U.S. interventions in the region.
Brazil's democratic forces are defending themselves against attempted coups and fake news
This is not to say that international pressure alone could have prevented a coup in Brazil.
The country experienced an unprecedented mobilization of pro-democracy forces in the run-up to the elections.
Lula appealed to moderates by choosing his center-right rival Geraldo Alckmin as his candidate.
Brazilian 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, supported the left-wing candidate.
But the U.S. government's efforts to protect Brazil's democracy are particularly notable because it was clear from the start that they would benefit Lula, a candidate who has long been hostile to the United States.
Bolsonaro ran as a pro-American candidate in 2018 and frequently spoke out against China.
Relations between USA and Brazil under scrutiny
It was foreseeable that relations between the USA and Brazil would not improve significantly after Lula took office.
During a visit to the White House in February 2023, Lula thanked Biden for his commitment to democracy, but the meeting was marked by mutual disappointment.
The US Congress was unwilling to give Biden more funding to support Brazil's fight against Amazon deforestation, and Lula's non-aligned stance against Russia after the start of the Ukraine war frustrated Washington.
Lula's meeting with Biden paled in comparison to the Brazilian president's high-level visit to Beijing shortly afterward.
Regardless of how U.S.-Brazil relations have evolved since 2022, the United States' election-year strategy toward Brazil remains a notable U.S. foreign policy success.
A military coup in Brazil would have sent shockwaves around the world and increased the risk of a broader democratic recession in the Western Hemisphere.
Brazilian President Lula on a state visit to Washington DC with US President Joe Biden.
© IMAGO/Gripas Yuri/ABACA
While one can speculate about how Brazil's coup generals would have behaved in 2022 had Trump still been in the White House, it seems obvious that the United States will not have the same constructive role in helping Brazil counter the gravest threat to the country its democracy had been playing for decades.
This makes the upcoming US presidential election, which is expected to pit Biden against Trump again, all the more important for Brazil and other sometimes shaky democracies around the world.
The next time anti-democratic forces emerge from the shadows, the international environment - and the White House - may be less hostile to them.
To the authors
Oliver Stuenkel
is an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.
Twitter (X): @OliverStuenkel
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on February 20, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.