Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is convinced of plotting a coup, Argentine President Javier Milei’s party suffers a key election lossand Mexican and Ecuadorian directors win acclaim at the Venice Film Festival.
At Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday, justices reached a majority to convict former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and seven associates of attempting a coup in the wake of the country’s 2022 election.
The case is being decided by a five-judge panel; by Thursday afternoon, four judges had voted to convict Bolsonaro on all five charges related to his efforts to stay in office. One voted to absolve him. After they announced their votes, the justices began discussing sentences for the defendants late Thursday.
The case has captivated observers in Brazil and abroad. It represented a landmark moment not only in the country’s democratic history, but also in its recently soured relationship with the United States.
Bolsonaro, running for a second term, lost the 2022 presidential election to leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s attorney general has argued that Bolsonaro’s repeated insinuations of fraud in that vote—and his meetings with top military commanders about how to hang on to power—amounted to a plot to undermine Brazilian democracy. Bolsonaro supporters alleging election fraud violently stormed Brazil’s government complex in January 2023.
The Supreme Court opened the case in April based on recommended charges from a federal police investigation. Seven of Bolsonaro’s close allies, many of them military officers, are co-defendants in the case; all eight deny the charges against them.
Brazil has experienced numerous coups during its history, and a military dictatorship ran the country between 1964 and 1985. But until now, a civilian court has never convicted any member of the Brazilian military on coup-related charges.
According to documents submitted by Brazilian federal police as part of the case, some of Bolsonaro’s allies planned to assassinate Lula, his running mate, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
A shooter went as far as assuming position to kill Moraes in December 2022 but aborted the mission in part because Moraes’s movements did not occur as expected that day, according to the documents. Moraes is overseeing Bolsonaro’s trial.
Although Brazilian politics are sharply polarized—Lula defeated Bolsonaro by only a slim margin—a majority of Brazilians believe that Bolsonaro participated in plotting a coup: 52 percent, compared to 36 percent who said he did not, pollster Quaest found last month.
U.S. President Donald Trump, a Bolsonaro ally, has called the trial against the former president a “witch hunt.” The Trump administration cited it when imposing tariffs on Brazilian goods as well as sanctions on some Brazilian Supreme Court justices. Though Lula has said he is willing to engage in dialogue over certain U.S. concerns, he has maintained that the Brazilian judiciary’s authority over the trial is nonnegotiable and a matter of national sovereignty.
Bolsonaro’s trial was also noteworthy because it was part of Brazilian authorities’ broad efforts to counter what they deem to be antidemocratic messaging on social media. Bolsonaro’s online dissemination of false information to discredit the country’s electronic voting machines was cited in the case.
Brazilian electoral authorities, at the time led by Moraes, were aggressive with content takedown orders related to the 2022 election. Critics say that the justice’s efforts were too heavy-handed and lacked transparency.
Some Brazilians who now oppose a conviction for Bolsonaro—including the judge who voted to absolve him on Wednesday, Luiz Fux—argued that the former president should have been tried by the whole 11-judge Supreme Court rather than the five-member panel. Such panels handle some criminal cases in order to move through the court’s caseload faster.
Brazil’s newspaper of record, Folha de S. Paulohas also advocated for an 11-judge trial. But on Wednesday, its editorial board wrote that “the evidence in this trial is robust and sufficient to characterize a criminal plot” and that Fux was erring on the “fundamental” decision of the trial. “Impunity would be disastrous for Brazilian democracy,” the board wrote.
Although Trump and Bolsonaro each rejected their election losses in 2020 and 2022, respectively, subsequent events led the two leaders to drastically different legal and political fates. Democracy scholars are taking note.
Harvard University professor Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Dietraveled to Brazil last month and appeared on one of the country’s biggest interview programs, Rod.
“Both presidents broke the cardinal rule of democracy,” Levitsky said of Trump and Bolsonaro. But U.S. institutions “failed one after another after another after Donald Trump’s coup attempt,” he added. “The Brazilian judiciary,” meanwhile, “stepped up. It did not step to the sideline. It did not retreat in the face of an authoritarian threat.”
Tuesday, Sept. 16: Mercosur foreign ministers meet in Brasília.
Friday, Sept. 19: The United Nations Human Rights Council discusses Nicaragua.
Milei’s midterm warning. Argentina’s midterm elections next month will be a major test for libertarian President Javier Milei. He faced a preview on Sunday in an election for the local legislature of Buenos Aires province. Milei’s Liberty Advances party fared badlylosing by a bigger margin than most polls predicted.
The opposition Peronists won 47 percent of the vote compared to Liberty Advances’s 34 percent. Buenos Aires province is a Peronist stronghold, so it is not an ideal barometer for the country, but the results still suggested voter discontent with Milei. The election boosted the standing of Buenos Aires Gov. Axel Kicillof, a leftist, within the Peronists’ leadership battle.
The share of national legislators that Liberty Advances and its allies earn in October will determine Milei’s power to carry out some of his remaining policy goals, such as pension reform. His term ends in 2027.
Chinese FDI in Brazil. Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Brazil more than doubled between 2023 and 2024, a new report from the China-Brazil Business Council showed last week. The increase made Brazil the emerging economy where Chinese firms invested the most money last year. (Saudi Arabia and Indonesia previously outranked it.)
If the first half of 2025 is any indication, then Chinese FDI in Brazil is set to rise again.
The boost in Chinese investments comes after the Lula administration doubled down on relations with Beijing and sought to channel Chinese economic engagement toward certain local policy goals, especially green energy. Electricity projects received the most investment. Oil came next, followed by the car sector.
Director Ana Cristina Barragán poses with the Orizzonti Best Screenplay Award for Ivy (The Ivy) at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Sept. 6.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Venice film feats. New films by two Latin American directors won prizes at the Venice Film Festival last week. Both were in the festival’s Horizons section, which focuses on emerging directors and international film.
For best screenplay in that section, Ecuador’s Ana Cristina Barragán won for the drama The Ivy, which slowly unfurls the reason why a woman in her 30s seeks to connect with a young boy at a group foster home. Like Barragán’s previous two films, which also won acclaim, The Ivy features young actors who have not yet been professionally trained.
The prize for best film in the Horizons section went to On The Road by Mexican director David Pablos, which explores queer relationships in the world of long-haul truck drivers. The truckers are a backbone of the economy in northern Mexico’s industrial zone, but they are rarely the focus of big-budget cinema; nor are the subtle ways that gender and sexuality play out there.
Mexican actor Diego Luna, one of the film’s producers, said it brought to life “places that we’re not even aware of.”
Who is Diego Luna’s partner in his production company?
Alfonso Cuarón
Gael Garcia Bernal
Jorge Funds
Luis Estrada
They were co-stars in 2001’s And your mom too.
A woman shows a cellphone to a Guatemalan migrant deported from the United States, seen inside a bus after his arrival at the Guatemalan Air Force Base in Guatemala City on Aug. 31.Johan Ordóñez/afp via Geetty IMAGES
Last week, El Salvador became the latest Latin American nation to announce new measures aimed at reintegrating returning migrants.
Countries throughout the region have expanded such plans after the near-total shutdown of the asylum process at the U.S.-Mexico border and increased U.S. deportations under Trump; officials in Brazil, Guatemalaand Mexico have all announced new efforts in recent months.
Since Trump took office in January, many migrants who were traveling toward the United States but did not cross the southern border have returned to their countries of origin, according to a Mixed Migration Center survey published in May. The study also found that some of the migrants were lingering in third countries or described themselves as stranded.
Countries launching policies for returnees have generally voiced at least two objectives: to meet people’s humanitarian needs and to integrate them back into the workforce. Those are pillars of El Salvador’s new plan, crafted in partnership with the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration and the Inter-American Development Bank as well as private sector representatives.
In Brazil, social workers have been assigned to migrant returnees to get their documents in order. Guatemala is tracking the occupations of returnees and created a platform to connect them with jobs in the country. In Honduras, civil society groups asked that presidential candidates announce their policies regarding migrant returnees ahead of Nov. 30 elections.
If migrants who previously lived in the United States gained new job skills there, then countries should try to take advantage of those, migration scholar Anita Isaacs wrote last week in the New York Times. She argued that returnees to Guatemala should help build up the country’s ecotourism industry, and that “America’s loss could be Central America’s gain.”
