The Stars and Stripes, Israeli flags and Trump memorabilia are familiar sights at far-right rallies in Brazil, as they are around the world.
Last weekend, though, organisers asked Flavio Bolsonaro’s supporters to “put away” flags from “other countries”.
On Sao Paulo's Avenida Paulista, eight lanes of traffic became a sea of Selecao yellow. The 45-year-old son of Brazil's jailed former president, who has been endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, faces 80-year-old incumbent Lula da Silva in Sunday’s presidential runoff.
If Bolsonaro Jr knocks out the region's most prominent leftist president, pro-Israel right-wing leaders will be in place in every country across Latin America save Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba and Uruguay.
This dramatic shift, which has taken place over just 18 months, has featured the active involvement of the US government and American and Israeli-backed tech firms and social media platforms.
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This was on display in Sao Paulo last weekend, where two far-right media influencers turned legislators were given pride of place.
Nikolas Ferreira is barely 30. Lucas Pavanato is yet to reach that milestone. With their eye for controversy, self-described “right-wing Christian” politics and millions of followers, the clean-cut pair are rising stars in Bolsonarismo’s firmament.
Earlier this month, each won more than three million votes for seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the largest individual totals in Brazilian legislative history. Together they accounted for nearly 30 percent of their party's congressional votes, helping it make massive gains in Congress.
Ferreira led the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. Both have made support for Israel a plank of their viral politics.
In May 2025, Pavanato defended Israel’s destruction of Gaza as “justified, warranted and retaliatory violence.” The next month, he staged a confrontation at the University of Sao Paulo by waving an Israeli flag at students.
The encounter produced Instagram and YouTube content for the provocateur. In an interview last month, he explained that antagonism with the left generates far more engagement on digital platforms than policy discussions.
A Pew study published in June found that 52 percent of Brazilians have a negative view of Israel to just 33 percent positive. Yet Christian Zionism is a growing political constituency.
More and more Brazilians are turning to evangelicalism, and evangelicals skew heavily to the political right, with polling and the endorsement of major Pentecostal churches showing overwhelming support for Bolsonaro over Lula.
Flavio is narrowly ahead in the polls and favoured by the betting markets. A victory on Sunday would add Latin America's largest country to a remarkable string of regional advances for the US, Israel and the regional far-right.
Latin America's lurch to the right
Less than 18 months ago, the region looked very different.
In July 2025, 30 states were convened by the Hague Group, an international bloc formed to coordinate legal and diplomatic action in solidarity with Palestine, in the Colombian capital Bogota.
Thirteen states committed to six immediate measures targeting military exports to Israel and other forms of cooperation and support for Israeli occupation and the genocide in Gaza.
“We came to Bogota to make history - and we did,” declared Colombia’s then-president, Gustavo Petro. “Together, we have begun the work of ending the era of impunity.”
'We're doing very well in South America, Latin America; we're doing very well'
- US President Donald Trump
Colombian coal, he insisted, would not be transformed into bombs to kill children in Gaza. Without the protection of collective action, Petro warned, Washington would divide and rule: “By meeting with each of us separately, they are stronger.“
His hopes were not realised. In Bolivia, the conservative Rodrigo Paz won elections in October 2025, going on to restore his country’s diplomatic ties to Israel and withdraw from the Hague Group.
In Honduras, the Trump-backed construction industry magnate Nasry Asfura, a Christian Zionist, narrowly won a heavily contested election a month later. He accepted the Israeli ambassador’s credentials minutes after his inauguration and withdrew from the Hague Group.
Then it was Colombia’s turn. Elections this summer saw another candidate favoured by Trump and Israel, the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella, a US citizen and registered Republican, defeat Petro’s successor, Ivan Cepeda.
De la Espriella has withdrawn from the Hague Group, lifted Petro’s ban on coal exports to Israel, recognised Israel's annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and moved Colombia’s embassy to Jerusalem.
After Nicolas Maduro's abduction, Venezuela, under acting president Delcy Rodriguez and directives issued via WhatsApp from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has sent oil to Israel, restored consular services and welcomed an Israeli military mission after June’s earthquakes.
Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, had broken diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 over its assault on Gaza. Now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised an Israeli aid delegation for “rebuilding ruins” and “rebuilding relations” with Caracas.
Cuba remains. It faces a near total blockade, which has led, in Trump’s words, to “no oil…no money… no anything” on the island. Trump has publicly mused that he thinks he will have the “honour” of “taking Cuba”.
In Jerusalem in April, Argentina’s president and self-described “most Zionist president in the world”, Javier Milei, joined Netanyahu to launch the Isaac Accords.
The strategic partnership aims to unite “nations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in defence of freedom and democracy, and in the fight against terrorism, antisemitism, and drug trafficking”.
When Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Central America in May he celebrated – at the inauguration of another right-wing president, Costa Rica’s Laura Fernandez - “a positive trend of change, tightening of ties, and deepening of cooperation with Israel” across Latin America.
'The evangelicals are the key'
When Flavio Bolsonaro launched his campaign in July, Argentina’s Milei stood beside him and Israel’s Netanyahu offered his endorsement via video.
Israel has cultivated the political power of Latin America's evangelical churches for years. “The evangelicals are the key,” its former ambassador to Brazil, Yossi Shelley, recalled Netanyahu telling him.
In Colombia, pastor Raul Rubio, the country representative for the Jewish National Fund, promised at a rally for De la Espriella that the candidate would restore relations with Israel. He invoked God's promise to Abraham in Genesis: “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.”
Such an about-turn would not have been possible without US support.
The December 2025 National Security Strategy outlined the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the original assertion of US power over the Americas.
In practice, the Trump Corollary has seen the US take charge of Venezuela’s oil; intervene openly in elections in Argentina, Colombia and Honduras; murder hundreds of people in small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific; impose tariffs on Brazil, and intensify the blockade of Cuba.
In September, Trump boasted that in Colombia he “endorsed a gentleman, El Tigre [de la Espriella’s nickname]: I liked his name, I guess that means he's a tough guy,” before saying he helped “lots of people” win election in Argentina.
Latin America, the US president said, has “gone from being left to going right...We're doing very well in South America, Latin America; we're doing very well.”
Automated accounts and Israeli money
In February, Fernando Cerimedo stood on stage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
In his acceptance speech for Latino Wall Street’s Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year award, “MAGA’s man in Latin America” heaped praise and thanks on the US president’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale for “giving me your technology”.
Cerimedo, an Argentinian citizen now in pre-trial detention in Bolivia over an alleged connection to the shooting of his former partner, Nadia Beller, had an impressive run of election results under his belt.
In 2018, he worked on Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil election win, and in 2023 he did the same thing for Milei in Argentina. In Honduras and Bolivia last year, and Peru this year, the Argentine has successfully helped elect right-wingers.
Cerimedo claims to operate more than 50,000 automated social-media accounts and has amplified the false claims that Lula stole Brazil’s 2022 election.
Parscale and his company, Clock Tower X, are registered under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act for work on behalf of the State of Israel.
Clock Tower X has received at least $15m for its work to “coordinate and execute certain public communications and media activities” in the US for Israel, with a disclosed monthly budget for digital advertising of $4.5m.
Cerimedo worked on Asfura’s campaign in Honduras, reportedly using Parscale’s data strategy.
Voters received mass texts warning that voting for the left-wing candidate could threaten relations with the US and their remittances from friends and family.
Trump vowed to cut US aid if Asfura lost and pardoned his ally, former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, then serving 45 years in a US prison for drug trafficking.
A set of leaked recordings, known as Hondurasgate, purported to reveal a wider US-Israeli-Argentine operation to pardon Hernandez, return him to power and divert Honduran public funds into campaigns against left-wing governments in Colombia and Mexico.
Zuckerberg's Meta accused of acting against Lula
Days before Trump’s inauguration in 2025, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, announced the end of third-party fact-checking and relaxed content restrictions.
The Facebook founder pledged to work with the Trump administration to push back against countries seeking to regulate big tech.
Lula's campaign accuses Meta of repeatedly restricting its communications while favouring Flavio Bolsonaro. A 21-page campaign presentation seen by Middle East Eye documents a series of incidents.
On 23 September, Lula's advertising account was suspended 11 days before the election’s first round.
On 9 October, his campaign found itself unable to pay to promote new Instagram feed posts for almost 24 hours. It reported frozen reels, view counts and WhatsApp search results that promoted a Bolsonaro channel.
Requests to generate AI images featuring “Lula 13” were refused, while equivalent requests for “Flavio 22” succeeded.
Internal Meta messages acknowledged that restrictions had harmed Lula's accounts and that Flavio's Instagram profile and WhatsApp channel had been improperly recommended. Meta attributes the incidents to technical failures.
As well as influencing Brazil’s election, Meta has profited from it, receiving over $55m in electoral advertising payments, making it the leading campaign spending recipient.
Researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's NetLab uncovered 1,613 political advertisements promoted from abroad on Meta's platforms between July and September. They were bought predominantly from the US, through pages with little transparency about who controlled them, despite Brazil’s laws restricting foreign electoral advertising.
Brazil has had disputes with big tech before. In 2024, it blocked Elon Musk's X for six weeks until he complied with court orders and Brazilian law. But regulating Meta's algorithmically served content presents a greater challenge.
Brazilian electoral authorities cannot independently examine all the systems that decide which content reaches which voters. They can order Meta to treat the candidates equally, but the company holds the evidence needed to establish whether it has.
Brazil's last days
On Tuesday, Flavio Bolsonaro gathered around 300 social-media influencers for a final-week strategy briefing.
The influencer Pablo Marcal instructed the assembled posters to share Ferreira's videos, watch them repeatedly and coordinate their engagement to make them go viral.
He advised them to sell voters the fear of a Lula victory and warned them about the success of the WhatsApp channel “Exercito do Lula” (Lula’s Army). The right-wing Christian influencers were asked to pray. Marcal proclaimed that a spiritual war was under way.
Ferreira and Pavanato’s vast personal followings have already helped deliver additional seats for Bolsonaro’s party through Brazil’s proportional electoral system.
The left does have its own influencer-politicians. Erika Hilton, a black socialist trans woman with seven million Instagram followers, won nearly 1.6 million votes for the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), becoming the most-voted woman in the history of the Chamber of Deputies.
In Bogota last year, Petro had warned about the concentration of technological power in the hands of “crazy, mega-rich capitalists”.
Fifteen months later, Washington’s bombs, blockades and sanctions, the mobilisation of conservative churches and the power of US technology platforms are all shaping the choices of Latin American voters.
Lula calls Sunday’s choice “sovereignty or submission”. The meeting in Bogota had tried to give that sovereignty practical force.
Colombia has since lurched back to the pro-Israel right. But Petro's declaration in the Salon de Bolivar still stands as a yardstick: “Today's barbarism will be defeated if Palestine is free.”
Editor's note: The author was part of The Hague Group’s secretariat.
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