For years, rallies hosted by far-right factions across Brazil have been defined by a familiar visual mosaic: the U.S. Stars and Stripes, Israeli blue-and-white flags, and a wide assortment of Donald Trump-themed memorabilia, matching patterns seen at similar far-right gatherings across every corner of the globe. But at a major late-October 2026 campaign rally for Flavio Bolsonaro — the 45-year-old son of Brazil’s imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro — organisers made a striking, uncharacteristic request of attendees: they asked all supporters to stow away flags representing foreign nations, leaving the iconic bright yellow of Brazil’s national Selecao football jersey to flood the eight lanes of Sao Paulo’s iconic Avenida Paulista, turning the entire thoroughfare into a sea of national pride.
This rally served as a high-profile showcase for two rising stars of the Bolsonaro-aligned far-right movement: 29-year-old Nikolas Ferreira and 20-something Lucas Pavanato, two self-described “right-wing Christian” legislators who each secured more than 3 million votes for seats in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies earlier that month, marking the highest individual vote totals for any legislative candidate in Brazilian history. The pair, who together accounted for nearly 30 percent of their party’s total congressional vote share and drove massive legislative gains for the Bolsonarista movement, have built massive, millions-strong social media followings by leaning into deliberate, provocative controversy, with unwavering pro-Israel advocacy as a core pillar of their viral political brand. In May 2025, Pavanato publicly framed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as fully “justified, warranted and retaliatory violence”, and the following month staged a high-profile confrontation at the University of Sao Paulo where he waved an Israeli flag directly at left-leaning students, generating tens of millions of views across Instagram and YouTube that he later admitted were far more engagement-driving than any detailed discussion of public policy.
Flavio Bolsonaro, who has received a public endorsement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to face 80-year-old incumbent leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the 2026 presidential runoff, and he currently holds a narrow lead in public polling and is the clear favourite in global political betting markets. A win for Bolsonaro would extend a dramatic, region-wide political realignment that has unfolded in just 18 short months: if he defeats Lula, pro-Israel, far-right governments will hold power in every Latin American nation except five: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba and Uruguay.
This sweeping shift represents a total reversal of the political landscape that existed as recently as July 2025, when 30 nations gathered in Bogota, Colombia, as part of the Hague Group — an international coalition formed to coordinate legal and diplomatic solidarity with Palestine. Thirteen of those states signed on to six immediate binding measures that targeted military exports to Israel and cut all forms of state support for Israeli occupation and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Then-Colombian president Gustavo Petro, a prominent leftist leader, declared at the time that the bloc would “end the era of impunity” for Israeli actions, vowing that Colombian coal would never be turned into weapons to kill Palestinian children in Gaza, and warning that without collective regional action, the U.S. would use a divide-and-conquer strategy to reassert total control over Latin American affairs.
Petro’s aspirations for a unified, sovereign Latin American bloc aligned with Palestinian rights never came to fruition. By October 2025, conservative candidate Rodrigo Paz won Bolivia’s national presidential election, immediately restoring full diplomatic ties with Israel and formally withdrawing his country from the Hague Group. A month later, Nasry Asfura — a Trump-backed construction magnate and outspoken Christian Zionist — won a hotly contested presidential race in Honduras, and accepted the Israeli ambassador’s official credentials mere minutes after his inauguration before pulling Honduras out of the Hague Group as well. The dominoes kept falling: in Colombia’s 2026 summer election, Abelardo de la Espriella — a far-right U.S. citizen and registered Republican explicitly favoured by both Trump and Netanyahu — defeated Petro’s chosen successor Ivan Cepeda. De la Espriella’s first actions in office included withdrawing Colombia from the Hague Group, lifting Petro’s ban on coal exports to Israel, formally recognising Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, and moving Colombia’s Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Even Venezuela, in the aftermath of Nicolas Maduro’s forced abduction, saw acting president Delcy Rodriguez implement directives relayed via WhatsApp from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to resume oil exports to Israel, restore full consular ties, and welcome an Israeli military mission to the country in the wake of devastating June 2026 earthquakes. The late Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, had fully severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 to protest its assault on Gaza, but Netanyahu publicly praised a visiting Israeli delegation to Caracas for “rebuilding ruins and rebuilding relations” with the nation.
Across the region, the U.S. and Israel have leveraged the fast-growing political power of evangelical Christian communities, a demographic that is rapidly expanding across Brazil and skews overwhelmingly to the political right, with major Pentecostal churches issuing public endorsements of Flavio Bolsonaro and polling showing massive evangelical support for his campaign, even as a June 2025 Pew Research study found that 52 percent of the general Brazilian public holds a negative view of Israel, compared to just 33 percent with a positive view. Netanyahu’s former ambassador to Brazil Yossi Shelley later recalled that the Israeli prime minister had long told him “the evangelicals are the key” to expanding Israeli influence across Latin America. In Colombia, Raul Rubio — the national representative for the Jewish National Fund — even invoked the biblical Genesis promise that “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” at a campaign rally for de la Espriella, pledging he would fully restore Colombia’s ties to Israel if elected.
This sweeping regional shift has been explicitly enabled by the U.S. government, which formalised the “Trump Corollary” to the historic Monroe Doctrine in its December 2025 National Security Strategy, a policy that has seen Washington seize operational control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, openly intervene in national elections across Argentina, Colombia and Honduras, conduct deadly operations targeting civilians in small boats across the Caribbean and Pacific, impose punitive tariffs on Brazil, and drastically escalate its decades-long economic blockade of Cuba. Trump has openly boasted of these efforts, declaring publicly that “We’re doing very well in South America, Latin America; we’re doing very well” after his administration helped install a string of allied far-right leaders across the region. The U.S. has also deployed a sprawling network of political consultants and tech operations to drive these electoral wins: Argentine strategist Fernando Cerimedo, known as “MAGA’s man in Latin America”, was honoured at a 2026 award ceremony at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he thanked former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale for providing him access to sophisticated voter targeting technology. Cerimedo, who is currently in pre-trial detention in Bolivia over alleged ties to a shooting that injured his former partner Nadia Beller, has an unbroken track record of securing far-right election wins across the region dating back to Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 Brazilian victory, including Javier Milei’s 2023 Argentine win, and he claims to operate a network of more than 50,000 automated social media accounts that have amplified false, widely debunked claims that Lula stole the 2022 Brazilian presidential election. Parscale’s firm Clock Tower X is formally registered under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act for work on behalf of the State of Israel, and has received at least $15 million in public funding to run public communications and digital media operations for Israel, with a disclosed monthly digital advertising budget of $4.5 million.
The U.S.-Israeli influence operation has also been aided by major social media platforms, most notably Meta, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. Days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the platform’s third-party fact-checking program and rolled back a wide range of content moderation restrictions, while publicly pledging to collaborate with the Trump administration to push back against global efforts to regulate big tech. Lula’s 2026 campaign has accused Meta of repeatedly restricting its official communications while granting preferential treatment to Flavio Bolsonaro’s campaign, with a 21-page internal campaign document documenting dozens of incidents: in September 2026, Lula’s main advertising account was suspended 11 days before the first round of voting, and in early October, the campaign was locked out of paying for new Instagram promoted posts for nearly 24 hours, while internal Meta records show that the platform’s algorithms repeatedly recommended Flavio Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp channel to users, and refused to generate AI images featuring the Lula campaign’s official “Lula 13” branding while readily generating equivalent content for Flavio’s “Flavio 22” branding. Meta has attributed all of these incidents to unconnected technical failures, but the platform has earned more than $55 million in Brazilian electoral advertising revenue during the 2026 cycle, making it the single largest recipient of campaign spending. Researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s NetLab also uncovered more than 1,600 political advertisements run on Meta’s platforms from July to September 2026 that were purchased from the U.S. by opaque, unaccountable pages, in direct violation of Brazilian electoral laws that ban foreign spending on domestic political campaigns.
As voters head to the polls for the 2026 runoff, Lula has framed the election as a fundamental choice between “sovereignty or submission” for Brazil. While the region’s rapid shift toward pro-U.S., pro-Israel far-right rule has erased most of the 2025 Hague Group’s collective power, Petro’s 2025 declaration in Bogota remains a defining marker of the political stakes: “Today’s barbarism will be defeated if Palestine is free.”
How Trump, Israel and big tech are driving Latin America to the right
