Trump wants control of South America. If Bolsonaro Jr wins in Brazil, that could become a reality | Steve Bloomfield

The US president has taken credit for far-right victories across Latin America, but those wins have had more to do with fears of gang crime than his meddling, says journalist Steve Bloomfield

Donald Trump has enjoyed very few foreign policy victories since returning to power. From failed wars to failed peace processes, his second term in office has been marked by one costly blunder on the world stage after another. In Latin America, though, the US president has a different story to tell.

His administration’s national security strategy outlined how the US wanted to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”. It was a brazen document, laying out how his government would interfere in the political life of countries it considered part of its sphere of influence, rewarding governments and movements that are “broadly aligned with our principles and strategy”.

To this end, Trump bailed out Argentina to the tune of $40bn and threatened to withdraw the funding if President Javier Milei’s party lost the midterm elections. In Colombia, he repeatedly bullied and threatened the leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, hitting him with personal sanctions and accusing him of being an “illegal drug leader”. And most dramatically, he invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. The day after Nicolás Maduro was brought to the US, the state department posted a picture of Trump above the slogan “This is OUR hemisphere”.

Over the past 18 months, seven rightwing or far-right candidates have won presidential elections across Latin America. In most of them, Trump openly backed the winning candidate. “We’re doing very well in South America,” Trump said last month. “Lots of people that I got elected.”

This weekend, he will be hoping to add the greatest prize of all: Brazil, South America’s biggest country and its largest economy. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, is neck and neck with the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. If he wins, Trump wins – and the hemisphere really will be his.

The White House has not simply been watching the election from afar. Since Trump returned to power in January 2025, administration officials and Maga-world allies have been doing what they can to damage Lula and boost the Bolsonaros. Initially, the aim of the support was to keep Jair Bolsonaro out of jail. Like Trump, he had not accepted defeat at the ballot box when he lost in the 2022 general election. Like Trump, his supporters stormed government buildings. But there were two crucial differences in Brazil – the seriousness of Bolsonaro’s attempt to hold on to power, and the determination of Brazilians that he should be held to account.

Investigators uncovered a sprawling conspiracy led by Bolsonaro and seven of his closest allies to keep him in power. It included an astonishing plot to kill Lula and his running mate, as well as a supreme court judge. A draft decree had been written that would overturn the result. The military would step in and ensure Bolosnaro returned to power. But the plot failed and Bolsonaro and allies, including his defence minister and the navy chief, were arrested and put on trial.

In response, Trump threatened in July 2025 to impose a 50% tariff on all imports from Brazil, arguing the case against Bolsonaro was a “witch hunt”. This blatant attempt at interfering in the judicial procedure of another country backfired. Lula made clear he wouldn’t bow to US pressure, the trial went ahead and Bolsonaro was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years in prison. Lula also received a bump in the polls after standing up to Trump.

In July, as the election campaign was kicking into gear, Trump tried his tariff trick again, imposing a new 25% rate on some Brazilian goods. The state department then tried to dispatch two officials to Brazil to investigate “electoral integrity” – Brazil denied them visas, accusing the officials of coming to “meddle in Brazil’s elections”.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Lula has leaned into those accusations. A recent advert accused Flávio Bolsonaro of being “Trump’s candidate” and said the US president wants “to colonise Brazil, take our riches, steal our future and leave us in the dust”. What remains unclear is whether the White House’s strategy in Brazil is working. “Some in Brazil joke that Lula’s most effective surrogate is Trump,” Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, told me.

Indeed, while Latin American countries have undoubtedly moved to the right in the past 18 months, US interference, despite Trump’s boasts, has arguably had little direct impact. In Peru and Chile, the Trump-aligned candidates were careful not to seek his endorsement for fear it would cause more trouble than it was worth. In Bolivia, the leftwing Mas government was responsible for its own downfall, winning just 3.16% in last year’s election after 20 years of increasingly chaotic rule.

The biggest reason countries have moved to the right has nothing to do with the US and everything to do with safety and security at home. Organised crime gangs, many of them linked to drug trafficking, are increasing in power. As Crisis Group put it in a report last year, while drug-related organised crime has been a problem across the continent for decades, “never has it spread so wide, and rarely has it penetrated so deeply into states and communities”. The failure of leftwing governments to deal with the problem has hurt them more than Trump’s attempts at interference.

If there is a foreign president whose policies are having an influence on Latin America, it’s El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. His authoritarian clampdown, which has involved arresting tens of thousands of people, mostly without legal process, has become a model for other rightwing leaders in countries beset by gang and drug cartel-related violence.

Democracy has been eroded and human rights trampled upon, but Bukele claims that his strategy – best described as “security populism” – has turned one of the most violent countries in the world into one of the safest. Other rightwing populists have found success in vowing to emulate him.

In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro has made a crackdown on drug cartels and organised crime gangs the centrepiece of his campaign. “We’re going to give the streets back to the Brazilian people,” he said at a recent campaign stop, vowing to chemically castrate rapists and reduce the age of criminal responsibility.

On this issue, Trump may have an influence. The US decision in May to designate two criminal organisations – the Red Command and First Capital Command (PCC) – as terrorist organisations has put Lula on the back foot. Bolsonaro has campaigned relentlessly on the issue, accusing Lula of weakness. Lula has talked about targeting the crime boss “who lives in a penthouse”, but has been more comfortable campaigning on improvements he wants to make in education and health. Bolsonaro Jr, should he win, will almost certainly sign Brazil up to Trump’s Shield of the Americas, a coalition of 18 rightwing Latin American and Caribbean heads of state that promises to use “lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks”.

Trump arguably paved the way for this new generation of Latin American political leader. His first victory in 2016 showed that posing as an outsider, using coarse language and embracing authoritarianism could be popular. Jair Bolsonaro was the first to emulate him, embracing the “Trump of the Tropics” tag. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins this month – either on Sunday or in the probable second round on 25 October – Trump’s ideology will dominate the continent.

It is likely to outlast the man himself. The rise of organised crime has spread fear across the continent and, at the moment, the security populists are the only ones who voters believe have the answer. As long as that remains, the right’s grip on Latin America will only get stronger, regardless of who is in the White House.

• Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer