Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and U.S. President Trump stand on opposite sides on issues including multilateralism, international trade and the fight against climate change. File.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gestures during a press conference in New Delhi.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

  

Nearly two weeks after the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, uncertainty hangs over South America. The unease deepened on January 16 when the U.S. warned airlines to exercise caution over parts of South and Central America, citing risks linked to potential military activity. The panic followed a series of provocative remarks by U.S. President Donald Trump, who claimed drug cartels were “running Mexico” and suggested American strikes on land targets. Earlier, he had targeted Colombia, accusing President Gustavo Petro of exporting cocaine to the U.S.  

With a continent of more than 450 million people still reeling from the abduction of a sitting President, Mr. Petro responded rather bluntly to Mr. Trump. “If you detain a president whom much of my people want and respect, you will unleash the people’s jaguar,” Mr. Petro wrote on X. Later, as Mr. Trump moderated his tone a bit, Mr. Petro moved to de-escalate too, cancelling his planned trip to the World Economic Forum and, instead, focus on his planned meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House on February 3. 

As the region awaits anxiously for the Trump–Petro talks, Brazil — the largest democracy and economy in Latin America — is moving on two parallel tracks – diplomatic and humanitarian – to support Venezuela. While President Lula da Silva has publicly denounced the “violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and international law,” his government is focusing on relief efforts. Brasilia has dispatched 100 tonne of medical supplies to Caracas where a major dialysis centre was destroyed during the U.S. military operation. “We cannot forget that when there was a collapse of oxygen supply in Manaus during the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,35,000 cubic metres of oxygen came from Venezuela to save the Brazilian people,” Health Minister Alexandre Padilha said as Brazil sent a planeload of supplies to Caracas.  

Beyond humanitarian relief, Brazil has used the crisis to signal a diplomatic message: South America will not remain passive while a neighbouring country is reshaped by force. “Our priority right now is political and institutional stability in Venezuela and we are resisting pressure from some Western capitals to push immediately for elections or a rapid transition,” says a senior Brazilian diplomat. Meanwhile, Lula has activated multiple diplomatic channels, holding phone calls with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Russian President Vladimir Putin to coordinate opposition to the use of force and reaffirm respect for sovereignty of countries in the region.  

Brazil’s response to the crisis is also embedded in its rejection of unilateralism. This was underscored on January 17 as the European Union and the South American trading bloc Mercosur signed an agreement to create one of the world’s biggest free-trade zones. Speaking at the signing, President Lula argued that in an era of rising protectionism, the agreement demonstrated that “another form of global governance is possible — more active, representative, inclusive and fair.”  

Yet the region’s ability to present a unified front is being undermined by divisions within. Leaders, such as Argentina’s President Javier Milei, have openly aligned themselves with Mr. Trump. This alliance, analysts warn, risks normalising interventionist rhetoric. “Trump, being impulsive and believing in unilateral actions above all, would not be more contained even in the absence of aligned regional regimes,” says Rafael R. Ioris, professor of Latin American history at the University of Denver. “But it helps Trump to have most regional countries controlled by the Right. It provides a kind of legitimacy and puts pressure on those not yet aligned to reconsider more autonomous courses of action.” 

With Brazil and Colombia both heading into crucial elections this year, the geopolitical stakes are rising. “While Trump has openly suggested possible military action against Mexico and Colombia, pressure on Brazil is likely to be subtler. These could include support for right-wing candidates and efforts to tarnish Lula’s campaign, particularly through disinformation,” notes Mr. Ioris, adding that such tactics could also backfire, as happened in Mr. Trump’s failed tariff war against Brazil.  

With the Venezuelan crisis, South America is confronting a familiar challenge: the reassertion of a Monroe Doctrine–style logic in which the hemisphere is treated as a zone of U.S. influence. Regional leaders know that their response to this crisis will shape not only Venezuela’s future but South America’s place in the new world order. President Lula is leading the pushback against the framework. “In a multipolar world, no country should have its foreign relations questioned. We will not be subservient to hegemonic endeavors,” Lula wrote in an article for the New York Times on Sunday. Venezuela’s future, Lula asserted, “must remain in the hands of its people”. 

Brazil’s recent dealings with Washington show both the possibilities and limits of resistance. After months of confrontation, Brazil forced U.S. to roll back its tariff. Yet observers do not see this as something that will last long. “It is true that the Lula administration made significant advances in its relationship with Trump in 2025,” says Brian Mier, a Recife-based political commentator. “Make no mistake about it, however, the U.S. wants ideological hegemony in the Western hemisphere. It wants our rare earth minerals and, especially, our petroleum.” With Brazil heading to elections in October and some opposition figures openly courting Washington, the threat of renewed pressures remains high. 

The broader regional pattern only deepens these concerns. Peru has already experienced a right-wing coup, while Washington has actively sought to influence elections in favour of far-right candidates in Argentina, Ecuador, Honduras, and Chile. From Brasilia’s perspective, the logic is clear. “This is not about democracy or even oil,” says the senior Brazilian diplomat. “The real objective is to push China and Russia out, reassert the dominance of dollar and weaken the BRICS group. Venezuela is just one pressure point in an effort to drag the world back into a unipolar system where Washington sets the rules for us.”  

The challenge for South America, the veteran diplomat adds, is to resist the U.S. pressure without igniting fires across the continent. Any missteps could define the region’s autonomy for a generation. 

Published – January 21, 2026 05:00 am IST

Last Tuesday (October 28, 2025), before the sun had risen over Rio de Janeiro’s low hills, two favelas (shantytowns) on the city’s northern fringe were surrounded by heavily-armed troops as their armoured cars growled through narrow lanes and bursts of gunfire rattled the red-brick dwellings. The operation against the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) gang, which controls the city’s drug trade, lasted for hours.

By afternoon, the favelas had turned into a war zone — smoke billowed from cars burning in the streets, bodies lay in side alleys, and an acrid haze swept through the sprawl where residents hid in their tiny homes. By the time fingers were lifted from the triggers of automatic rifles, 64 people — including four police officers — lay dead. Within hours, Rio de Janeiro’s governor Cláudio Castro appeared before cameras, hailing the operation as a “great success,” even as Brazil erupted in debate over its purpose and cost.

The next morning, some favela residents went up the forested hills on the edge of their community. It was a scene of horror: dozens of bodies lay scattered in the bushes — many shirtless young men shot in the head, others with their throats slit, and one decapitated body with its head dangling from a tree. By day’s end, volunteers had carried the bodies to the favela’s main square, where desperate women searched for their sons, brothers, and husbands. “We brought down a total of 80 bodies with our own hands. We asked residents to bring sheets, towels or anything they had to help with the removals,” said Erivelton Correa, president of the community association, which represents the working-class and poor who live in these densely-packed areas.

Officially the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s history, which left 121 people dead, including 115 alleged gang members with another 113 arrested, has split Brazil on political — and class — lines. A survey on Friday found that 57% of Rio citizens approved of the operation, calling it a necessary response to drug violence, while 38% condemned it as brutal. While Rio governor hailed the operation as a victory against crime, hundreds of favela residents have marched through the alleys, carrying photos of the dead and chanting, “It wasn’t a war, it was a massacre.”

Such police raids are nothing new in Rio. The city’s history is replete with operations against drug gangs, which always leave behind a pile of corpses.

This time the operation has turned into a major political flashpoint as Brazil is about to enter an important election year. As the Rio governor defended his operation as a strike against what he called “narcoterrorism” — echoing rhetoric from Washington DC — critics dismissed his move as cynical politics from a leader facing sliding popularity and a court case that could bar him from public office. But Castro, who has seen a small boost in his ratings since Tuesday, has formed a “Peace Consortium” with five other right-wing governors to “take on narcoterrorism” in Brazil.

It’s hard to miss the timing of the operation and the words chosen by Rio’s governor and his fellow travellers on the Right. Coming just as President Lula da Silva announced his plan to run for president again in 2026, the language of “war on narcoterrorism” has sparked suspicion. With Lula leading in all polls and former president Jair Bolsonaro sidelined by convictions for attempting a coup, the president’s allies on the Left see the Rio operation as an attempt to shift the spotlight from the Lula government’s achievements to its alleged softness on crime. “The consortium that the governors have announced is not a peace consortium — it’s Trump’s consortium. They want to stir up foreign intervention,” said Guilherme Boulos, federal minister of the Presidential Secretariat in Brasilia.

There is a history to this criticism. In May, Brazil rebuffed pressure from the US to label the Red Command and PCC, another major criminal group, as terrorist organizations — rejecting a Trump administration’s push to link Latin American gangs to immigration and security threats. With the US navy ship now lurking in the Caribbean waters and Venezuelan boats being blown up almost daily, the specter of “narcoterrorism” has taken on a new meaning for Brazil –and the whole region. A day after the Rio operation, Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski made the Brazilian government’s stance clear: “Terrorism always involves an ideological element — it’s a political action, with social repercussions…Criminal factions, on the other hand, systematically commit crimes defined under the Penal Code. It’s very easy to identify what constitutes a criminal faction,” he said in Rio as Governor Castro looked on.

The Lula government might have put its foot down on the issue of narcoterrorism, but it certainly has come under pressure to act against organized crime. On Friday, President Lula signed the Anti-Faction Bill, designed to strengthen the state’s power to dismantle criminal organizations that control territories and economic activities. The proposal will go to the National Congress for an urgent review. Signing the bill, Lula said fighting criminal groups was a top priority of his government. “We will show how to confront these factions that survive by exploiting the poorest people in this country,” he declared.

From now till next year’s elections, Lula faces the delicate task of asserting his authority on organised crime without hurting the poor or upsetting the urban middle class, and without surrendering the narrative to the so-called “peace consortium.” Analysts believe the opposition might have played their hand too early. “If there’s a silver lining in the tragedy, it’s that the right-wing may have moved too fast. By revealing its strategy early, it has given Lula and the pro-democracy coalition time to craft a counteroffensive,” said Miguel de Rosário, a Rio-based political commentator.

With the new anti-crime bill, Lula is seeking to regain control of the security narrative — even as his government bets that low inflation and rising wages would appeal more than fear in next year’s election.

Published – November 04, 2025 05:02 am IST

The Rio de Janeiro public defender’s office on Wednesday (October 29, 2025) said a total of 132 people died in the bloodiest police raid against drug gangs in the Brazilian city’s history, as grieving residents laid out dozens of bodies in the street.

“The most recent update is 132 dead,” the Rio state public defender’s office, which provides legal assistance to the poor, told AFP.

There was no immediate corroboration of the figure from other sources.

Rio state Governor Claudio Castro put the death toll from Tuesday’s violence at around 60 but warned that the real figure was likely higher as more bodies were being to be taken to a morgue, where the dead were being counted.

Four police officers were slain during the military-style operation, which involved 2,500 officers taking on Rio’s most powerful criminal organization, the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command.

In Penha Complex — one of two densely populated, working-class neighborhoods targeted in northern Rio — residents wept over a line of at least 50 corpses early Wednesday.

A woman screamed as she hunched over the body of one of the victims, who were laid out in a line, covered in make-shift shrouds, some stained with blood.

Two girls, their faces streaked with tears, gently caressed the face of a dead man, wrapped in a sheet with a floral motif, and then hugged each other tightly.

“The state came to massacre, it wasn’t a [police] operation. They came directly to kill, to take lives,” one woman, who did not wish to give her name, told AFP, as she touched the face of another victim.

Authorities said that “60 criminals” had been killed in fighting that unfolded during the drug raids in the Penha Complex and the Alemao Complex, located near Rio’s international airport.

‘Executions’

But angry residents accused the police of summary killings.

“There are people who have been executed, many of them shot in the back of the head, shot in the back. This cannot be considered public safety,” said Raul Santiago, a 36-year-old resident and activist.

Lawyer Albino Pereira Neto, who represents three families that lost relatives, told AFP some of the bodies bore “burn marks” and that some of those killed had been tied up.

Some were “murdered in cold blood,” he said.

The huge number of police officers who took part in the operation were backed by armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, as the streets of the favelas saw war-like scenes.

The police and suspected gang members traded heavy gunfire. Fires erupted around the neighborhoods.

The authorities accused the suspects of using buses as barricades and of using drones to attack the police with explosives.

“This is not ordinary crime, but narcoterrorism,” Rio state governor Claudio Castro wrote Tuesday on X, where he shared a video from the fighting.

Police raids in Rio’s favelas, where drugs gangs have a powerful presence, are a common occurrence. However, Tuesday’s operation stood out for the scale and lethality.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said it was “horrified” and called for “swift investigations.”

A delegation from left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government will travel to Rio on Wednesday for an emergency meeting with Castro.

Last year, approximately 700 people died during police operations in Rio, almost two a day.

The Human Rights Commission of the Rio state legislature will demand “explanations” of how the favela was turned into a “theater of war and barbarism,” commission head Dani Monteiro told AFP on Tuesday.

Published – October 29, 2025 09:43 pm IST

The ruling from Moraes cited X’s noncompliance with the order to provide the user’s data.

Sao Paulo, Brazil:

Brazilian authorities said Wednesday they were searching for a British journalist who has been missing for 11 days in the South American country. Sao Paulo’s public security secretariat said in a statement sent to AFP that police were “carrying out investigations to locate the missing person and clarify the facts.”

The Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in Brazil (ACIE) on Tuesday raised the alarm over the disappearance of Charlotte Alice Peet, 32.

Peet, a freelance reporter who describes herself as fluent in Portuguese on her LinkedIn profile, was last heard from on February 8 when she contacted a friend in Rio de Janeiro via WhatsApp saying she planned to travel to the city from Sao Paulo and needed a place to stay.

A few days later, Peet’s family in the UK contacted the same friend to say they had lost contact with her.

The foreign correspondents’ association said that Peet had worked as a freelance correspondent from Rio de Janeiro over two years ago before returning to London.

She returned to Brazil in November of last year, said the statement.

While in Brazil, Peet reported for various publications, such as Al Jazeera, The Times of London, and The Evening Standard, she wrote on LinkedIn.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Brasilia:

Brazil’s attorney general on Tuesday formally charged far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro and 33 others over an alleged coup attempt after his 2022 election loss.

Bolsonaro, 69, and his co-accused were hit with five charges over the alleged bid to prevent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after a bitter election race.

Attorney General Paulo Gonet Branco filed the charges at the Supreme Court “based on manuscripts, digital files, spreadsheets and exchanges of messages that reveal the scheme to disrupt the democratic order,” his office said in a statement.

“They describe, in detail, the conspiratorial plot set up and executed against democratic institutions.”

One of the charges is for the crime of “armed criminal organization,” allegedly led by Bolsonaro and his vice-presidential candidate Walter Braga Netto.

“Allied with other individuals, including civilians and military personnel, they attempted to prevent, in a coordinated manner, the result of the 2022 presidential elections from being fulfilled,” read the statement.

The prosecutor’s office based its decision on a federal police report of over 800 pages, released last year after a two-year investigation which found Bolsonaro was “fully aware and actively participated” in the plot to cling to power.

Bolsonaro has denied the accusations and said he was the victim of “persecution.”

According to the statement from Branco’s office, the plot began in 2021, with “systematic attacks on the electronic voting system, through public statements and on the internet.”

During the second round of the presidential election in October 2022, security agencies were mobilized to “prevent voters from voting for the opposition candidate,” said the statement.

Those involved at this stage worked to facilitate “the acts of violence and vandalism on January 8, 2023,” when Bolsonaro supporters stormed the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court.

The attorney general’s office said the criminal organization headed by Bolsonaro had pressured army chiefs “in favor of forceful actions in the political scene to prevent the elected president from taking office.”

Investigations also showed a plot to assassinate Lula, vice-president Geraldo Alckmin and a high-profile judge with “the approval of” Bolsonaro.

According to the statement, the January 8 riots by Bolsonaro supporters urging the military to intervene were “the final attempt.”

The Supreme Court will now weigh the charges and decide whether to initiate proceedings against Bolsonaro.

Hours before the charges were filed, Bolsonaro told journalists in the capital Brasilia that he had “no concern” about the possibility of being indicted.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Neymar in action for Santos© AFP