Alan Santos/Palácio do Planalto (CC BY 2.0)
Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro holds up a Brazilian soccer jersey with former U.S. President Donald Trump's name. The two leaders met in Washington, D.C. in March 2019.
Donning the yellow and green jersey of Brazil’s national soccer team, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro joined tens of thousands of his supporters in “Make Brazil Great Again” hats in a demonstration in São Paulo, Brazil, on February 25. The defiant rally comes as the far-right leader, who has been called the “Tropical Trump,” faces a criminal investigation into his attempts to carry out a coup d’etat in 2023.
Bolsonaro, however, has rejected claims that he tried to overturn the country’s 2022 elections.
“What is a coup? Tanks in the streets, weapons, conspiracy. None of that happened in Brazil,” Bolsonaro declared to his supporters during the demonstration, echoing Donald Trump’s denials of the January 6 insurrection. “We cannot accept that an authority can eliminate whoever it may be from the political scene, unless it is for a fair reason.”
The attempted coup has been compared to the January 6, 2021, insurrection by Trump supporters in Washington, D.C. Bolsonaro remains defiant about what happened that day.
The demonstration was a show of force by the far right in Brazil. Both local and international media have suggested that Bolsonaro and his movement have been weakened by criminal investigations into the former president, his allies, and several high ranking generals for their part in sparking a violent insurrection on January 8, 2023.
“The extreme right no longer has access to money from the political structure that it had at its disposal before January 8,” Ana Tereza Duarte, a Brazilian political analyst, tells The Progressive. “Many Bolsonaro supporters are also a little afraid of demonstrating like this after what happened with the January 8 protesters, many of whom ended up in jail.”
On January 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazilian government buildings. The riot was in protest of the results of the 2022 elections, in which the progressive candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva—commonly known by his supporters as Lula—won a third term in office. More than 2,000 people who participated in the riots were arrested, including seven senior police officers.
Just weeks ahead of the far-right rally, police raided and searched the homes and offices of former president Bolsonaro and those of several of his top aides on February 8. That day, Bolsonaro surrendered his passport to investigators.
Other allies in Bolsonaro’s inner circle were arrested in conjunction with the investigation, including the president of Bolsonaro’s rightwing political party, Valdemar Costa Neto, who was arrested for having an unregistered firearm. Brazilian army colonel Bernardo Correa Neto was also arrested upon arrival in Brazil as part of the investigation into the 2023 coup attempt.
Bolsonaro and his inner circle face charges of plotting to pressure military officials to join the attempted coup and to jail a member of the country’s Supreme Court. The former president was also the target of other investigations for crimes committed during his time in office. These cases include investigations into undeclared gifts of jewelry and watches from Saudi Arabia, investigations into falsified data about the pandemic, and charges for harassing an endangered humpback whale.
“I think it is possible that Bolsonaro and many people who are linked to him—soldiers and advisors—could go to prison,” Duarte says. “The possible prison sentences for Bolsonaro could exceed fifty-five years.”
The support for Bolsonaro reflects an authoritarian shift that is occurring across the region. This has included support from ex-members and aides in the Trump Administration.
As Bolosonaro faces charges for attempting a coup, across the region the far right has increasingly looked to El Salvador as an ideal example. El Salvador has seen the rise of president Nayib Bukele, who has become the new face of authoritarianism in Latin America.
In February, Bukele easily won re-election in an electoral process that was criticized for being fraudulent. While Bukele has maintained widespread support, his re-election was a violation of the country’s constitution, which prohibits a second presidential term.
Bukele has become a rockstar on the far right. He has been interviewed by Tucker Carlson and gave a speech at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Bukele called on U.S. conservatives “to fight” and echoed antisemitic conspiracies about “global elites” influencing the media.
Bukele’s heavy handed tactics against gang violence in El Salvador have become an example for far-right governments around the hemisphere. Images of half-naked prisoners in the country’s new mega-prison have been circulated in other countries, inspiring similar actions by far-right proto-authoritarians.
In Argentina, far-right libertarian president Javier Milei has used such images as a deterrent against crime in the South American nation. Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa, too, has repeated the use of these images in his campaign against organized crime in the country. The state of emergency that Noboa declared in January 2024 in Ecuador was extended on March 8 for another thirty days.
Other countries in the region have chosen to seek closer relations with the far-right in the United States in order to strengthen their own influence.
The far right in Guatemala sought to gain support from Trump’s circles in the United States as they sought to make accusations of fraud in the country’s 2023 elections, in which progressive anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo won a historic victory. Most of the voices who supported the far right's attack on internationally backed anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala, such as Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, largely stayed silent or, in the case of Senator Rubio, expressed support for the results of the elections during the turbulent months following the June 25 general elections and the August 20 presidential run-off.
But Richard Grenell, Trump’s controversial ambassador to Germany, and Frank Polo, a failed MAGA candidate in Florida’s 27th Congressional district, were the only ones who endorsed the fraud narrative, joining other controversial voices such as disgraced ex-Guatemalan president Jorge Serrano Elías, who himself attempted a coup d’etat in 1993. Grenell, in fact, traveled to Guatemala and met with members of the country’s far-right and the outgoing president Alejandro Giammattei ahead of the change in government.
In spite of these efforts to undermine the election, Arévalo took office on January 15.
Back in Brazil, Bolsonaro is barred from running for office again until 2030, but his far-right political movement continues to wield influence, which could swell again ahead of the 2026 elections.
“Currently we are in a period where the polarization is more stable,” Duarte says. “I would say that before the elections it may be that polarization is going to intensify again. The political leaders at the national level are going to try to influence polarization.”
She adds, “Bolsonaro will continue to be the leader of the far right, even though he cannot run for office.”