In the coming days, Brazil’s Supreme Court is expected to rule on the curious case of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s involvement in an alleged coup attempt after he lost the 2022 national election. The plot twists and turns of this dramatic ongoing saga seem plucked from one of Brazil’s own wildly popular televised novellas, or soap operas.

Bolsonaro is not attending the verdict and closing phase of the trial in Brasília, claiming to be suffering from a chronic and severe case of hiccups, a condition that he says started after a stabbing attempt on his life during his run for the presidency in 2018. In his most recent race for the presidency, Bolsonaro was narrowly defeated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade union leader and Brazil’s left-wing president from 2003-2011.

Bolsonaro, 70, and an inner-circle of seven political confidantes are charged with recruiting members of the military to overturn the 2022 election results, as well as coordinating efforts to poison da Silva and his running mate, Alexandre de Moraes, who is the Supreme Court Justice overseeing the very case against Bolsonaro. A panel of five justices, including Moraes, is expected to reach a verdict on or soon after 12 September. If convicted, Bolsonaro and his co-defendants face more than 40 years in prison.

The case is fascinating for a variety of reasons, particularly because Donald Trump has taken an oversized personal interest in it. The American president has insisted that Bolsonaro is the target of a ‘witch hunt’, and as a consequence, Trump imposed crippling 50 per cent tariffs on Brazilian imports to the US, as well as legal sanctions against the country’s Supreme Court justices. The US government has singled out Justice Moraes with human-rights abuse, arbitrary detention, flagrant denial of a fair trial, and violation of freedom of expression. In July, Trump officials took the extraordinary step of freezing any assets Moraes may have in the US.

In the meantime, Bolsonaro, under house arrest and outlawed from running for re-election next year, is banned from travel and his ankle has been outfitted with a tracking device. He is prohibited from using social media and contacting foreign nationals. The earliest he could run for office again would be in 2030. The Brazilian authorities claim that Bolsonaro is an international flight risk, and allege that he may seek asylum in a foreign embassy, presumably the American embassy in Brasília. In August, federal police said that Bolsonaro had planned to seek political asylum in Argentina.

In an event similar to the melee when pro-Trump supporters ransacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Bolsonaro enthusiasts on 8 January 2023 broke into and vandalised the Presidential Palace, Supreme Court, and Congress in Brasília. At the time of the rampage, two days short of the end of his presidential term, Bolsonaro was in Florida. Some 2,000 people were arrested in wake of the protest. The prosecution in the case maintains that Bolsonaro knew about the planned uprising and did nothing to stop it.

Part of the government’s case against Bolsonaro rests on testimony from a former Bolsonaro aide, Mauro Cid, one of those charged in the alleged coup conspiracy, who has agreed to a negotiated plea settlement. Among those also being tried are both Walter Braga Netto, a retired Brazilian army general and defence minister who was Bolsonaro’s former running mate, as well as Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, also an army general and former defence minister.

Meanwhile, one of Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo, an elected member of Brazil’s Congress, flew to Washington during the summer to successfully lobby the Trump administration to impose sanctions against Brazil, and specifically Justice Moraes, as well as effect the tariffs on Brazilian exports, which started on 1 August.

Those who follow Brazil-US diplomatic history will note the similarities between what is transpiring in Brasília now with what preceded the nation’s brutal 1964 coup, which deposed democratically elected President João Belchior Marques Goulart and replaced him with successive regimes of hardline right-wing generals. During the remainder of the 1960s, military technocrats consolidated control of the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential office in Brasília, suspending civil rights and imposing across-the-board press censorship. Thousands of Brazilians were imprisoned, tortured, and a still-undetermined number were killed. Goulart was granted political asylum in neighbouring Uruguay, and later moved to Argentina, where he died in 1976 amid allegations that he was poisoned by agents of the Brazilian federal police.

Both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations actively opposed left-wing Goulart through a variety of measures. Some operations to topple the Goulart regime were overt, but many were black-bag operations funded by the CIA and carried out by its operatives. In declassified State Department cables, former US Ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon acknowledged ‘covert support for pro-democracy street rallies… and encouragement [of] democratic and anti-communist sentiment in Congress, armed forces, friendly labour, and student groups, church, and business’.

The basis of both the 1964 coup and the 2023 alleged attempted coup was that US interests seemingly were threatened when a progressive president had been democratically elected. A similar fate befell socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende when he was overthrown in a US-based coup led by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte in 1993.

Those familiar with the inner political workings of Brazil have noted for years how American influence has been used to undermine the nation’s stability whenever there has been a spectre of left-leaning officials winning significant elections in either metropolitan or federal elections. Prior to the 1964 Brazilian coup, perplexed Brazilians became accustomed to Americans, who, seemingly through the strangest of circumstances, materialised in their country. Such was the case when, in the spring of 1962, a self-styled American evangelist from Crete, Indiana, and his family took up residence in the interior city of Belo Horizonte before moving to Rio de Janeiro, where the preacher lived until December 1963, five months before the coup took place. Thirty-two-year-old James Warren Jones was in search of a flock, and in his spare time worked for Brazilian investment firm, Invesco, as a mutual-funds salesman. Jim Jones, as he was known, was employed on a commission basis, but after three months of not reeling in a single account, he left Invesco and thereafter Brazil. Many have conjectured that Jones in fact was working for the CIA under the cover of an itinerant evangelist-turned-equities salesman who didn’t speak the language of the country in which he was supposed to sell locals first on Jesus, then on commodities.

Another allegation of US meddling in Latin American affairs was the case of Dan Mitrione, who had quit his job as a police chief in Richmond, Indiana, and, under the auspices of the US Agency for International Development’s Office of Public Safety, moved to Brazil in 1962 to train local police officers, first in Belo Horizonte, then in Rio. After his initial tour, Mitrione returned to the States, but arrived back in South America in 1969, this time to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was alleged to have taught local police interrogation techniques, including use of a device labelled by left-wing guerrillas ‘the Mitrione vest’, described as an inflatable vest that can be used to increase pressure on the chest during interrogation. In 1970, Mitrione was kidnapped by Tupamaro extremists, who demanded the release of political prisoners in exchange for the former police chief. The demands were not met, and Mitrione, shot twice in the head, was found in the trunk of a car 11 days later. The events surrounding the kidnapping and murder were made into the 1972 film, State of Siege, directed by Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras.

What particularly upset US officials in 1964 was that former Brazilian President Goulart had signed a declaration expropriating land for compesinos along national highways and had advocated for rent-stabilisation measures. At the time, the Catholic Church was stoking opposition flames to Goulart, warning parishioners that the left-leaning president was driving the country toward Godless anarchy, as hundreds of thousands of mothers, largely middle and upper class, had organised themselves into protest units throughout the country.

Ever since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and the subsequent Roosevelt Corollary in 1904, the United States has maintained a pronounced we-know-better-than-you attitude directed towards all of its Latin American neighbours. The spectre of a geopolitical nation as significant as Brazil falling out of the US sphere of influence has always been anathema to American commercial interests.

It is also not difficult to see why Brazil has always been one of Washington’s major geopolitical concerns. Brazil, larger than the contiguous 48 US states and by far the largest nation in Latin America, is home to 213 million people, and is the world’s seventh most populated nation, fifth largest in area, and tenth in Gross Domestic Product. Still, the divide between the nation’s haves and have-nots is huge. Brazilian critics call this disparity the end game of capitalismo salvagem (savage capitalism). Brazil’s richest five per cent have the same income as the accumulation of the remaining 95 per cent, making for the second-highest lopsided income distribution in the world. At its current rate, it would take Brazil 75 years to reach Britain’s level of income equality and 60 years to meet Spanish standards. Compared to its South American neighbours, Brazil is 35 years behind Uruguay and 30 years behind Argentina in the same metrics.

Under President da Silva, Brazil has sought to distance itself from the orbit of American influence. This resistance from Brazil and other nations was further tweaked when Brazil hosted in July in Rio de Janeiro the 17th annual BRICS summit, consolidating independent political and economic clout. The association started with the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and now includes six additional nations.

Current President Da Silva, known throughout the nation by the mononymous nickname Lula (which translates to squid in Portuguese), was a young trade unionist who started out as an steelworker in what is known as the ABCD manufacturing sector of São Paulo during the repressive military regime. He dropped out of school at a young age, earning a living as a street vendor and shining shoes in São Paulo, Brazil’s large metropolis. He didn’t learn to read until he was ten. Despite this disadvantageous start, Lula was first elected a federal senator in 1986. He would be elected as president twice, in 2003-2010 and again in 2023 as the leader of the national Workers’ Party, which he founded. During his ascension in political life, the nation was struggling to move away from a cadre of strongmen towards democracy.

Seventy-nine-year-old Lula has been a transformative agent for social reform in Brazil over two generations. However, his career seemed to be derailed in 2017, when he was convicted of money-laundering charges and corruption, and spent a total of 580 days in prison. His convictions were nullified in 2022 by the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the following year he defeated incumbent Bolsonaro, often referred to as the ‘Trump of the Tropics’.

Lula has argued that Trump’s incursion into Brazil’s internal political and judicial affairs amounts to an extraordinary violation of a sovereign nation’s independence. One week before the tariffs were due to begin, Lula told the New York Times, ‘At no point will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country… If the United States doesn’t want to buy something of ours, we are going to look for someone who will… Trump is an issue for the American people to deal with. They voted for him. End of story. I’m not going to question the sovereign right of the American people, because I don’t want them questioning mine.’

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro continues to boycott the Supreme Court hearings that will determine his fate, claiming that his case of persistent hiccups is a serious medical matter. No matter how Brazil’s Supreme Court rules in the Bolsonaro conspiracy trial, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, outraged and dismayed by whatever the high court’s decision will be, have already shown up throughout the nation. Once the verdicts are announced, more than one million are expected in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia.