US President Donald Trump wants to “colonize” Brazil and gain control of its natural resources by interfering in the country’s upcoming presidential election, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s campaign has said.
Meta blocked the advertising account used by Lula’s campaign on Facebook just days before the first round of the presidential election on October 4 in which left-wing incumbent Lula is seeking a fourth term against his main rival, right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro. Recent polls have put the two candidates in a tight race, with a runoff scheduled for October 25 if neither wins more than half the vote.
In a minute-long television advertisement broadcast on Thursday, Lula’s campaign accused Trump of meddling in Brazil’s election in a bid to turn the country back into a colony and seize its natural resources. The video points to US-funded political advertising targeting Brazilian voters, alleged involvement by American tech companies, and an intelligence warning that the risk of US interference had reached a “critical level.”
“Flavio Bolsonaro is Trump’s candidate,” the narrator says. “And what Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, to take our wealth, steal our future and leave us behind.”
Trump fiercely backed Flavio’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, during his trial over an alleged plot to overturn his 2022 election defeat and remain in power.
Risk of US interference in Brazil at ‘critical level’
The ad cited a confidential assessment by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), which was sent to the presidency, the country’s electoral court, and the Justice Ministry. The document warned of escalating US pressure on Brazil and raised the risk of external influence or interference in the election to a “critical level.”
“According to ABIN, the pressure from the United States must increase and Trump’s goal is to defeat Lula to control our natural resources,” the campaign ad says.
Lula echoed the accusation on X, stating that Bolsonaro wants to “hand our natural resources over to the United States.” “If it’s up to him, Brazil will become a colony again,” the president wrote.
The campaign video also suggested direct links between Bolsonaro’s campaign and US political interests. “And now we know that there’s American money in Flavio’s campaign,” the narrator says, pointing to Rockbridge Network, a secretive US donor network co-founded in 2019 by Vice President JD Vance and investor Chris Buskirk. Reuters has described the Silicon Valley-backed organization as financing right-wing media, polling and voter-turnout operations to spread Trump’s brand of nationalism, with wealthy investors including Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer among its reported backers.
Brazilian media reported that Pedro Sang, described as a Rockbridge organizer in Brazil, helped set up Bolsonaro’s campaign headquarters in Sao Paulo and took on a leadership role there. Lula’s Workers’ Party asked the Brazil’s Supreme Court to investigate possible foreign financing, which is prohibited under Brazilian election law. Sang denied that Rockbridge provided funding to political campaigns in Brazil.
Meta has meanwhile disabled the advertising account used by Lula’s campaign on Facebook, preventing it from running new ads just days before the election. The campaign said the US tech giant gave no explanation for the move and demanded that access be restored, threatening legal action and describing the restriction as another example of alleged Big Tech interference in the vote.
“The evidence of interference is all there, it keeps happening and we have already denounced it publicly,” Workers’ Party communications chief Eden Valadares said. Meta has not publicly explained why the account was disabled.
The move follows a study published last week that found Meta approved 13 of 15 test political ads paid for through a US-based account and targeting Brazilian voters, including an AI-generated video depicting Trump urging Brazilians to vote for Bolsonaro. The researchers did not actually publish the ads, while Meta said the experiment did not reflect the scale of its efforts to protect the Brazilian election.
US hits Brazil with tariffs over Big Tech
Washington has ramped up economic and diplomatic pressure on Brazil ahead of the vote, imposing 25% tariffs on Brazilian imports in a dispute that observers say centers on Big Tech regulation rather than trade imbalances. The US Trade Representative cited Brazil’s treatment of American tech companies and court orders forcing platforms to remove political content, among other policies, to justify the tariffs.
Washington also revoked the Brazilian ambassador’s visa in August as tensions escalated during the election campaign. Lula’s government called the move politically motivated interference.
Lula has cast the pressure as a threat to Brazilian sovereignty. “We will not allow the enemies of democracy – internal or external – to attack the will of the people,” he told the UN General Assembly this week. “Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians.”
Venezuela raid fuels fears of US intervention
The alarm has spread beyond Lula’s camp. Right-wing presidential candidate Renan Santos has also accused Trump of wanting Brazil as a “vassal state,” to secure favorable rare-earth contracts and said Brazil should not become a vassal of the US or China.
Santos pointed to the US military operation in Venezuela in January, when American forces captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and brought them to the US to face drug and weapons charges. Lula condemned the raid as the first direct US military attack on South America in more than 200 years of independence, while Santos warned: “I don’t want to see Latin America become an American protectorate.”
The State Department last month shrugged off claims that the White House was meddling in Brazil’s election, declaring that “any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie.”
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