Who will be the next president of the largest Latin American economy? We’ll know for sure with the run-off on October 25, but after the first-round results in Brazil’s general election, it seems it won’t be Lula da Silva. The 80-year-old socialist who was close friends with Hugo Chávez and failed to pressure Nicolás Maduro after he stole the 2024 election would need a miracle to stop Flávio Bolsonaro. The ultra-conservative populism of the candidate’s father, former president Jair Bolsonaro —currently in jail for the coup attempt of 2023—, surpassed Lula in the presidential vote and grabbed the majority of states and seats in Congress.
Unless the Workers Party has a secret weapon against Bolsonaro and recruits enough voters in extremis, Lula will end his career defeated by a family closely associated with attacks to democracy, misinformation, open dismissal of environmental concerns, militarism, and sexism.
We’ll see what millions of Brazilian voters, who are fed up with inflation and crime, will decide. But from a Venezuelan point of view, the idea of having Flávio Bolsonaro ruling over our big neighbor to the south sounds like bad news for chavismo, especially if the rest of Venezuela’s land borders touch Guyana, a rising oil producer closely protected by the US, and Colombia, where Abelardo de la Espriella, a leader who resembles Bolsonaro, is already president.
Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan. He’s not fighting socialism and trying to spread capitalist democracy.
If we add that Panama, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, Chile, and Argentina have conservative presidents who declared a new war on drugs and are even joining the Trump administration’s Shield of the Americas initiative, we’ll see a map turning dark-blue hostile to the heirs of 21st-century socialism. No more silence about chavismo’s abuse. No more anti-imperialist performance in global arenas. Finally, the pendulum swung away from chavismo’s old circle. This right-wing storm on the continent is bad for Delcy Rodríguez and good for María Corina Machado. Right?
Not necessarily.
Before and after Trump
Before Trump, things were simpler. Conservative governments in Latin America were like Álvaro Uribe’s in Colombia or Felipe Calderón’s in Mexico: they tried to get along with Chávez but ended up as enemies, cutting commercial and diplomatic ties, fighting chavista diplomats in the UN and accusing their local adversaries of trying to export chavismo. Predicting a vote involving Venezuela in the OAS was easy: you just had to count how many representatives were on the right and how many on the left or the Chávez payroll, like Petrocaribe’s members.
After Trump, on the contrary, those old categories no longer matter. Ideology is not important. Not even cultural wars, which are so good for social media and for recruiting powerful allies like evangelical churches; a government can allow abortion and same sex marriage and be considered a friend by Trump, as long as this government connects with the priorities of the president’s political and corporate circles.
Hugo Chávez would be worried about the Bolsonaros’ apparent return to Brasília. Delcy Rodríguez, not so much.
Trump’s foreign relations favor those governments who are in sync with the specific matters his administration is about, like pushing China out of the region, securing markets for American companies, and, more particularly, supporting Trump’s narratives. If you lose an election, as he did with Biden, you blame socialism and try to reverse the results; if Trump says fentanyl and cocaine are coming from your country, you help the Americans to attack boats and produce viral clips on social media; if Trump says your migrants are poisoning his country, you help him to stop them before they approach the US, and even accept that your own citizens are sent to prisons in third, remote countries.
Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan. He’s not fighting socialism and spreading capitalist democracy. He’s not even treating China as a geopolitical adversary, but a corporate competitor with a CEO you can visit and have at home, as Trump just did with Xi Jinping. Trump is in worse terms with a fully democratic, pro-market government like Mark Carney’s in Canada, which did not bend to his demands, than with President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, a hardcore leftist, who is more cooperative with the White House. And, in fact, Trump is allowing the existence of three socialist autocracies on the continent: Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Trump can coexist with socialists, as long as they do what he wants. In practice, this means that our old premises about the impact of having left- or right-leaning governments around are not as valid as they were when Chávez was alive.
New friendz n the hood
We Venezuelans can easily see how things changed in the region’s geopolitical play, and how ideology lost relevance, in the evidently comfortable relationship between Donald Trump and Delcy Rodríguez, or in the aftermath of the earthquakes in June. Many governments sent help to La Guaira, but one of the first and most spectacular rescue missions came from El Salvador, where the government is a very public enemy of chavismo. The Salvadorans’ equipment and efforts in the rubble were highlighted on President Nayib Bukele’s social media. El Salvador’s fast response helped the dictatorship to manage the disaster, not the Venezuelan opposition, which is currently led by a pro-market politician, Machado, who courted the Republican Party for years.
We have also seen how Paraguay, Argentina and Chile, all of them with right-wing leaders very close to Trump, started to restore relationships with Miraflores Palace, even if it is still in the hands of the people who perpetrated the 2024 fraud and besieged the Argentine embassy in Caracas.
Hugo Chávez would be worried about the Bolsonaros’ apparent return to Brasília. Delcy Rodríguez, not so much. She can invite big Brazilian companies in energy, retail and agribusiness, which would get deregulation and diplomatic support in a Bolsonaro government, to join the investment frenzy in the Caracas Marriott. Yes, Machado and Bolsonaro met in Chile, during Kast’s inauguration in March, and she congratulated him on social media last Sunday, but Venezuela’s democratic renewal is not an urgent priority for Flávio Bolsonaro.
A critical difference between Abelardo and Flávio is that the new Colombian government needs to put pressure on Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela.
A good proxy to estimate how Bolsonaro Jr. would behave with chavismo and Machado is Abelardo de la Espriella. The Colombian president, who used a similar mix of conspiracy theories and a macho persona to defeat the Pacto Histórico leftist coalition, has so far been as passive about Venezuela’s suspension of democratic rights as Gustavo Petro. De la Espriella has been pushing Venezuelan migrants to go home, like Trump. As experts see it from Colombia, he is just following Trump’s lead regarding his neighbor. One critical difference between De la Espriella and Bolsonaro is that the new Colombian government needs to put pressure on Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela (with American support and, probably, even Delcy’s help), a variable absent in the Brazilian case.
I’m not saying that the Bolsonaros and the rest of the Trumpian Right will support Delcy forever. My point is that we can’t see their spread over South America as a force meant to crush socialists. We must observe what Trump and their allies do, instead of just believing what they say. Trump said a lot of things about Maduro and chavismo, but at the time of writing, Venezuelan citizens remain deprived of influence, just like when Maduro stole their votes, and Maduro’s former vice president is having the time of her life.