Anticorruption and Imperialist Blind Spots: The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup

Abstract

A comprehensive examination of the evidence available, contained in U.S. government statements, English-language media accounts, and hacked Telegram chats among Brazilian prosecutors, indicates that the United States was closely involved in the "long coup" that removed the left from power in Brazil in 2016 and secured the election of the far-right in 2018. Just as after Brazil’s U.S.-backed 1964 coup, this evidence has largely been ignored by U.S. scholars. Latin Americanists would do well to return to the anti-imperialist tradition that established our field as a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy. Um exame abrangente das evidências disponíveis, contidas em declarações do governo dos EUA, relatos da mídia em inglês e bate-papos hackeados no Telegram entre promotores da justiça no Brasil, indica que os Estados Unidos estiveram intimamente envolvidos no "longo golpe" que removeu a esquerda do poder no Brasil em 2016 e garantiu a eleição da extrema-direita em 2018. Tal como depois do golpe de Estado de 1964 apoiado pelos EUA, esta evidência tem sido amplamente ignorada pelos académicos norte-americanos. Os latino-americanistas fariam bem em regressar à tradição anti-imperialista que estabeleceu o nosso campo como um dos principais críticos da política externa dos EUA.

Media Reform as Transformation Tool: A Hegemonic Gap in Environmental Research and Policy

“…Bolsonaro's rise was only possible because of a "soft" coup using "law fare"-that is, (mis)use of law as a substitute for military means to achieve the objective-with the support of virtually all of Brazil's powerful mass media outlets, albeit a few less than others (Rodrigues, 2018). Planned by elite opponents of the Workers Party, including a coalition of members of Brazil's Congress and military (Leirner, 2020;Van Dijk, 2017), the goal was to remove the Workers Party, which had won every popular election since the turn of the century, and to replace it with a center-right government more inclined to serve a neoliberal agenda and, thereby, finance and US interests (Mier et al, 2023). The plot resulted in the 2016 impeachment of the democratically elected Dilma Rousseff on illegitimate grounds (ibid.).…”