By Mark Weisbrot
One of the most important elections in recent Latin American history will take place Sunday in Brazil. Incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has recently been emphasizing the issue of national sovereignty. One reason: The challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, has the strong backing of the Trump administration — and the U.S. has been intervening heavily on his behalf.
In the last few months of Brazil’s election campaign, Trump has met with Bolsonaro at the White House, imposed new tariffs on Brazilian goods and tried to send State Department officials to Brazil. (Both Brazilian and American officials said the presence of Trump administration operatives would cast doubt on the integrity of the voting there.)
A letter last week to Secretary of State Marco Rubio from 31 members of Congress documented additional hostile actions and concluded that “the United States is acting as an agent of interference and destabilization.”
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The election is forecast to be very close, and the sovereignty issue could be persuasive for swing voters.
Trump’s intervention undermines a basic and generally cherished right to self-determination, as well as the right to democracy itself. It is even clearly illegal under the Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the United States is a signatory.
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