Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

We’ve been hearing for years from back-stabbing opportunists of the far right that Brazil’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores/PT) will transform Brazil into another Venezuela. For better or worse, 19 years of PT governments have proven the absurdity of those words. Now that the Trump administration, hailed by some self-proclaimed geopolitical analysts as a lesser evil alternative to Kamala Harris in 2024, has bombed our neighbor ,Venezuela, and kidnapped its President and 1st lady, it’s a good time to look at how events could play out that could transform Brazil into a similar target for US regime change.

For those who think I may be exaggerating, let’s take a look at recent history.

When Luis “Gege” Gonzaga da Silva, historic leader of the Central dos Movimentos Populares (People’s Movements Central/CMP), returned to Brazil after living for years in Venezuela, he spoke at a conference 9 days before the inauguration of Dilma Rousseff, correctly predicting there would be a coup in Brazil.

“When I said this, various petit bourgeois intellectuals who were among us laughed at me,” he said in a 2017 interview for Brasil Wire. “’You are in Brazil,’ they said, ‘you are not back in Venezuela. Over there they could have a coup any minute, but here in Brazil we don’t have these kinds of things. We don’t have a political climate for that here in Brazil.’ And now, where are all these intellectuals providing an analysis of their mistakes? Because the left made a mistake in not making this analysis. They thought that once they won the election it was over. The bourgeoisie does not joke around.”

It’s true that the Lula administration made significant advances in its relationship with the Trump administration in the second half of 2025. Make no mistake about it, however, the US wants ideological hegemony in the Western hemisphere. It wants our rare earth minerals and, especially, our petroleum, and the leading pre-candidate for the opposition, Flavio Bolsonaro, is already promising to privatize Petrobras.

Meanwhile, in the........

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