The Trump administration is reportedly considering fresh Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison for plotting a coup – the latest move in a sustained campaign of US interference timed to Brazil’s electoral calendar.
In the following article, Carlos Martinez and Sara Vivacqua argue that October’s election has become a front line in Washington’s war on the multipolar world: a sovereign election treated as Washington’s own affair, alongside the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president, the energy siege of Cuba and a hard right installed across the continent. They also set out why Brazil – a BRICS charter member that now trades more with China than with the United States – is not an easy nut for Washington to crack.
This article was first published by the Morning Star.
The Financial Times reports that the Trump administration is considering fresh Magnitsky sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who presided over the case that sent Jair Bolsonaro to prison for plotting a coup. Brazil heads to the polls again in October. President Lula’s principal challenger is Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former president, whose campaign has become entangled in the Banco Master affair, one of the largest banking frauds in the country’s history.
The official justification for the proposed sanctions is human rights and press freedom. Yet one of the FT’s own US sources endorses Trump’s interference outright: De Moraes has “gone after the supporters of Trump. Not just Elon Musk, but Maga types in Brazil. Even if we want a good relationship with Brazil, obviously this guy is an enemy.”
The actual aim is an obvious one: to punish the justice for holding Bolsonaro to account over his attempted coup to overturn the 2022 election. After losing to Lula, Bolsonaro and figures around the military plotted to annul the result; on 8 January 2023, his supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Federal Court and the presidential palace in Brasília in a bid to trigger a coup.
It was the case arising from that assault – over which De Moraes presided – that sent the former president to prison, and it is for that conviction that Washington now proposes to sanction him. The contrast with the US is instructive: no comparable reckoning followed 6 January 2021, and the Brazilian courts have shown an institutional autonomy their US counterparts lacked.
If these proposed sanctions are implemented, it would not be the first such move. The Bolsonaro camp has repeatedly petitioned Washington for sanctions against Brazilian officials, handed US agencies national-security material that the Supreme Federal Court says was stolen while Jair Bolsonaro held office, and timed each move to the electoral calendar.
In July 2025 the US Treasury sanctioned De Moraes under the Global Magnitsky Act – the first time the instrument had been turned on a serving justice of any country’s highest court. The framework lets Washington freeze the assets of foreigners it accuses of corruption or rights abuses, an extraterritorial reach with absolutely no grounding in international law. Eduardo Bolsonaro, another of the ex-president’s sons and now a fugitive from Brazilian justice, boasted online that the penalty vindicated his campaigning: “I have the feeling of a mission accomplished”.
Also in 2025, Eduardo Bolsonaro and Paulo Figueiredo – grandson of Brazil’s last military dictator – met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump at the White House to solicit an investigation spanning digital trade, electronic payments, tariffs and intellectual property. Within weeks the US Trade Representative opened a Section 301 case, and Trump unveiled a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods in an open letter that tied its removal to Bolsonaro’s release, branding the conviction a “witch hunt”.
There is rich irony in Washington denouncing “politicised prosecutions” in Brazil. In 2018, Lula himself was jailed on charges the Supreme Court later annulled, having found the presiding judge biased – a prosecution the US Department of Justice actively cooperated with, and which removed the front-runner from the presidential race and delivered the presidency to Jair Bolsonaro.
Washington, in short, is treating a sovereign election as its own affair. For Lula the contest is no longer only about another presidential term; it is about proving that interference of this kind can be faced down and beaten – a precedent the whole global South is watching.
Nor is this only a Brazil strategy. Venezuela’s president has been kidnapped. Cuba is under an energy siege designed to break it. Colombia has just sworn in a hard-right president with Washington’s backing, and Trumpian quasi-fascists now govern in Chile, Argentina and Honduras. This is the Monroe Doctrine in twenty-first-century dress: Latin America as backyard, its courts, its elections, its natural resources and its trade policy all subject to supervision from the north.
Brazil, however, is not an easy nut for Washington to crack. It is one of the world’s ten largest economies and a charter member of BRICS; it now trades more with China than with the United States; and it is challenging the tariffs at the WTO, with Beijing joining the case. Lula has answered the pressure by leaning into the global South: coordinating with India’s Narendra Modi, invoking Brazil’s Economic Reciprocity Law, and steering commerce away from US markets.
Beijing’s support is concrete rather than merely rhetorical. China now buys more than a quarter of everything Brazil exports; the two economies increasingly settle accounts directly in reais and yuan, backed by a central-bank swap line of 190 billion yuan – around $28 billion – cleared outside New York; and Chinese investment committed to Brazil reached $6.1 billion in 2025, with the carmaker BYD now assembling electric vehicles at Camaçari, on the site of the plant Ford abandoned in 2021.
When the July duties took effect, Xi Jinping telephoned Lula to pledge Beijing’s backing for Brazil’s sovereignty against “external interference”, and over the year the two set a fresh bilateral trade record. The more of the relationship that sits beyond the dollar, the less a hostile US Treasury can squeeze.
The economic front now carries a military shadow. In May, Trump signed a National Counterterrorism Strategy that, for the first time, lists “violent left-wing extremists” alongside jihadists and cartels. In June, two Brazilian criminal networks were designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations – a label that exposes anyone connected to them to secondary US sanctions.
From Guantánamo Bay, War Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the United States was “taking back our hemisphere”, vowing to pursue targets in Latin America with the same tools once aimed at al-Qaeda and ISIS. Brazil’s Foreign Ministry has since warned Congress that the terrorism designation could be used to justify US military action on Brazilian territory.
On 16 August, Lula launched his re-election campaign in São Bernardo do Campo, the industrial suburb where he led the metalworkers’ strikes against a military dictatorship Washington had helped install in 1964, and for which he was imprisoned. “As long as I am alive,” he told the stadium, “I will not stop fighting and allow the right to prevail.”
The fight is on. A victory for Lula in October would be a victory for the Brazilian working class, for Latin America, and for progressive forces everywhere.