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by Bruno Huberman & Desirée Poets
Abstract: This article examines what Lula’s re-election in Brazil’s 2026 presidential runoff against Flávio Bolsonaro means for Brazil-Israel relations, U.S. imperialism, and the War on Drugs. Although diplomatic rhetoric toward Israel shifts sharply between governments, Brazil’s material ties with Israel, especially arms trade and security cooperation, have stayed steady across partisan lines. This continuity is anchored in the U.S.-led War on Drugs, which have shaped Brazilian policing and defense since the Cold War, with Israel supplying “battle-tested” systems and training. Flávio Bolsonaro’s pledges to join the Isaac Accords and the Shield of the Americas would have further embedded Brazil in interlinked U.S. and Israeli security architectures. Lula, by contrast, has rejected these initiatives and openly accused Israel of genocide, yet refused a military and energy embargo. The Army’s signing of an Elbit howitzer contract days before the runoff shows how military bureaucracies and national capital can override executive decisions. Breaking this pattern requires the left to abandon militarized public security and pursue genuinely popular development and security policies.
Bruno Huberman is a Professor of International Relations at PUC-SP and the author of The Palestinians and East Jerusalem: Under Neoliberal Settler Colonialism (Bloomsbury & IB Tauris, 2023). He holds a PhD and an MA in International Relations from the San Tiago Dantas Graduate Program (UNESP/UNICAMP/PUC-SP), including a period as a Visiting Researcher at SOAS, University of London. He serves as Vice-Leader of the Study Group on International Conflicts (GECI/PUC-SP) and is a member of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Studies on the United States (INCT/INEU).
Desirée Poets studies questions of peace, security, and development in Latin America comparatively, from community to global levels of analysis. She is the author of Unsettling Brazil: Urban Indigenous and Black Peoples’ Resistances to Dependent Settler Capitalism (University of Alabama Press, 2024) and holds a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. Her views are her own.
Introduction
On Sunday, October 25, 2026, Brazilians voted to re-elect incumbent Workers’ Party President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The 2026 presidential elections have far-reaching ramifications for Brazilians and the world. The choice Brazilians made between a right-wing government, under Flávio Bolsonaro (Liberal Party), the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and Workers’ Party candidate Lula, have implications for a broad array of domestic policy domains, including environmental and climate policy, Indigenous and Maroon rights, social and economic policy, and public as well as national security. The 2026 election is also poised to shape the region’s geopolitical dynamics, increasingly swinging toward right-wing governments and U.S.-alignment, and away from South-South and multilateral cooperation. The two candidates between which Brazilians decided in the runoff election embody the widening ideological divide over Brazil’s developmental path and role in the world.
In this article, we turn to Brazil-Israel relations as a proxy for what has been at stake in the security and defence policy dimensions of the 2026 elections. We foreground relations with Israel because Brazil, as a major (in 2010, the fifth-largest) importer of Israeli arms and Latin America’s largest power, plays a role in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Yet Brazil-Israel ties and Brazil’s complicity in the genocide did not take center stage in this election cycle. Concrete campaign proposals were eclipsed by the Master Bank corruption scandal, a fraud case that has evolved into an institutional crisis of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) and across the political sphere. Nonetheless, Israel/Palestine has featured in this scandal through the figure of Daniel Bialski, lawyer of former Master majority shareholder Daniel Vorcaro, and a prominent voice in the Brazilian Israelite Confederation (CONIB) and the Bolsonaro camp.
CONIB’s president, Claudio Lottenberg, is a staunch supporter of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has previously accused Lula of antisemitism for criticizing Israel’s actions. Had Flávio Bolsonaro won the election he was earmarked to be his Health Minister. This appointment would have strengthened CONIB’s campaign to incorporate the problematic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into Brazilian law, posing a threat to the freedom of expression of journalists and activists.
We argue that, in the case of Brazil-Israel relations, the differences between Lula and Bolsonaro both matter and show striking continuities. Diplomatic rhetoric has swung under different governments. Flávio Bolsonaro promised to transfer the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem and to join Argentina in the Isaac Accords, which “seek to embed Israel in Latin American countries’ economic, political and security architecture” (Gjevori 2026). Nevertheless, Brazil’s material ties with Israel in the form of arms trade and security cooperation have remained steady across partisan lines. This continuity is anchored in the U.S.-led War on Drugs framework that informs Brazilian public and defense policies. In what follows, we foreground this so-called war in the landscape of Brazil-Israel relations, and examine the potential shifts the 2026 elections could trigger. Crucially, Flávio Bolsonaro’s promise to join both the Isaac Accords and the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas regional security coalition would have only deepened Brazil’s integration into interrelated U.S. and Israeli architectures.
Israel, the United States and the hemispheric War on Drugs
Neither U.S. nor Israeli security and defense infiltration into Latin America is new. Both date at least to the Cold War, when the United States intervened directly and indirectly into the region in the name of fighting communism, by toppling democratically elected governments, supporting anti-communist dictatorships, and funding counter-insurgency programs and forces—from Operation Condor to the Nicaraguan Contras, the Colombian military and paramilitaries, and the 1964 military coup and dictatorship in Brazil. During that time, Israel acted as a U.S. proxy, for example, by supplying the region’s dictatorships, in Argentina and in Chile, in their anti-communist crackdowns (Huberman 2025).
As the end of the Cold War approached, fighting crime and terror became the new mechanisms of U.S. security and defense infiltration in Latin America. The prohibitionist approach to drugs itself can be traced to twentieth-century U.S. drug policy, namely the sinophobic 1914 Harrison Act, before Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971 and Reagan codified “narcoterrorism” as a national security threat in 1986. Numerous studies have traced the institutional continuities between the Cold War and the War on Drugs, such as in the Office of Public Safety (OPS), whose remit shifted from counterinsurgency to counternarcotics (Schrader 2019; Huggins 1998).
Since then, the United States has engaged in bilateral and multilateral efforts, including the Organization of American States (OAS), to shape defense and security policies in Latin America according to its own priorities. One of its proposals has been the post-1990s “multidimensional security” framework. It encourages Latin American states to move away from traditional defense concerns–to be guaranteed by the United States in an expanded, hemispheric vision of its national security sphere–and toward nontraditional and transnational risks, including crime, poverty, terror, and corruption (Saint-Pierre 2011). This framework has been taken up by a selection of Latin American governments, especially in Central America, and most fiercely resisted by Venezuela (Magnani 2024). The Shield of the Americas, a 2026 initiative of the second Trump administration, both builds on and departs from this framework, as a more ideologically-driven and militarized coalition focused on fighting cartels, crime, irregular migration, and “extrahemispheric influence,” primarily China. As of today, it counts with nineteen members, mostly from the Caribbean as well as Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Lula has resisted joining the coalition.
Evidence of U.S. influence in Brazil’s internal security and drug policies abound, and have remained consistent across different administrations. Overall, the U.S. has influenced how threats are defined and justice enacted in Brazil, which surveillance equipment is purchased and employed, how the police is trained and how it operates, and the extent to which Brazilian elites think creatively and autonomously about the problem of security and defense. The template for the militarized, criminalizing, and punitive public security paradigm was imported and adapted from the United States.
U.S. drug enforcement has been globalized in the twentieth century, and has molded policing in Brazil since the Cold War. Brazil’s Federal Police, for example, has regular training, financing, and other interactions with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). According to Daniels et al. (2025, 2), over decades this has allowed the DEA “to exercise considerable influence over drug policy in Brazil.” The policialization of the military–increasingly deployed in domestic public security crises across Latin America, in Brazil under the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) mechanism–stems from the U.S.-led multidimensional security framework. Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” has merely expanded these efforts, such as through the Shield of the Americas under which two Brazilian armed drug organizations, the Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando da Capital, were designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs). The designation allows the implementation of asset freezes, visa restrictions, and other sanctions. Brazil’s most marginalized populations, especially young, Black, male favela residents, bear the brunt of this colonial-imperialist security and drug framework.
Cooperation with Israel is integrated into the U.S.-built system. To the War on Drugs, Israel has supplied “battle-tested” systems and counter-terror doctrine and training, including to Rio’s and São Paulo’s police forces in the lead-up to the 2014 and 2016 sports megaevents (Huberman 2025).
Trump's strategy and Israel’s arms diplomacy in Brazil
In Trump's foreign policy, there is an overlap among several imperialist strategies: the Shield of the Americas, the Board of Peace, the Abraham Accords, and the Isaac Accords. Each, in its own way, seeks to build political-security alliances among Washington’s ideological allies, and Israel plays a central role in this strategy.
The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states (the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco). This normalization paved the way for deeper economic and military cooperation. One result was the formation of an Afro-Asian military bloc of reactionary, pro-U.S. forces that Netanyahu recently called the Hexagon Alliance, led by Israel and the UAE (Mansour 2026). Andreas Krieg (2025) describes this bloc as an “axis of secessionists”: a constellation of actors that, since the Arab Spring, have advanced a counterrevolutionary strategy of secession across North Africa and West Asia: the Rapid Support Forces, accused of committing genocide in Sudan; the Government of National Stability, rival to Libya’s UN-recognized Government of National Unity; the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen, adversaries of Ansar Allah; and Somaliland, which seeks to secede from Somalia, a longstanding ally of the Palestinian cause. The Hexagon Alliance stands opposed to the Axis of Resistance, composed of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, and other groups.
The Isaac Accords extend this strategy to Latin America. Signed in early 2026 with Javier Milei’s Argentina as the sole partner so far, the accords have found in Flávio Bolsonaro an ally for bringing Brazil into the alliance. Alberto de la Espriella’s Colombia is also negotiating its accession. The convergence of the Shield of the Americas with the Isaac Accords could produce a transnational far-right military alliance that poses a serious threat to political minorities, the environment, and dissident nations in Latin America, such as Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico.
Lula was not invited to join the Shield of the Americas, and he declined the invitation to join the Board of Peace, the organization initiated by Trump to oversee the ceasefire and reconstruction in Gaza. The Brazilian president has made an effort to avoid becoming an adversary of Trump, while also making clear that Brazil will not submit to his dictates. His relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, however, deteriorated to the point that Lula was declared persona non grata in Israel. Although the Palestine/Israel question has become entangled with Brazil’s domestic political struggle—with the left identifying with the Palestinian cause, even waving Palestinian flags at rallies, and the right venerating Israel—it would be misleading to assume that the Lula’s governments represent radical solidarity with Palestine.
Brazilian criticism of Israeli aggression against Palestinians, as during the 2014 assault on Gaza, fostered the false perception that the Lula and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016) administrations were radically supportive of Palestinian rights (Huberman et al 2026). However, it was during Lula’s first two terms (2003–2010) that Brazil and Israel began military cooperation, including billion-dollar deals with the armed forces and police. Mercosur and Israel concluded a Free Trade Agreement in 2007.
When Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019, he merely deepened an already solid relationship with Israel; his presidency did not mark an abrupt reversal in foreign policy. Israeli officials were nonetheless disappointed with the Bolsonaro government, which failed to deliver on promises such as relocating the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem, closing the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Brazil, and substantially increasing arms purchases. The most significant development was the onset of Brazilian oil exports to Israel following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022.
Upon returning to power in 2023, Lula was emphatic in accusing Israel of genocide in the first weeks after October 7. He also took significant steps, such as withdrawing Brazil from the IHRA despite pressure from the Israel lobby for legislation that would define criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Lula reduced oil exports and, in 2024, blocked the Army’s acquisition of 36 Elbit howitzers. Nevertheless, he refused to impose an energy and military embargo on Israel, as his social base demanded—and as Brazil had done against apartheid South Africa in 1985 (Huberman et al 2026).
However, just days before the second round of the 2026 presidential election, the Army announced it had signed a contract to manufacture the Israeli vehicles with Elbit’s Brazilian subsidiary, AEL Sistemas, and Avibras, Brazil’s largest defense company, recently acquired by Joesley and Wesley Batista, owners of the J&F holding company, one of the country’s largest conglomerates (Godoy and Vassallo 2026). Several factors contributed to this reversal: the close ties between the Brazilian military and Israeli businessmen, as well as the country’s need to strengthen its military capabilities in the face of growing regional insecurity, particularly since the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026. In other words, the interests of the state bureaucracy and the national bourgeoisies prevailed over the political decisions of the Executive.
This demonstrates the strength of Israel’s arms diplomacy, which has built deep relationships with representatives of the Brazilian state and managed to close a deal worth $200 million amid a severe political crisis. It also helps explain why, despite the rhetoric of progressive leaders and strong popular support, Latin American nations such as Brazil have been unable to adopt a genuinely pro-Palestinian stance (Huberman 2025).
Conclusion
Settler-capitalist nations such as Brazil and Israel are founded on the continuous expansion of the frontier against Indigenous peoples and other racialized minorities to expand capitalist accumulation. The Brazilian case demonstrates that, even under progressive governments aligned with anticolonial forces, the interests of state bureaucracy, the comprador bourgeoisies, and developmentalist ideology keep the state on a course of settler colonial expansion, at the cost of dispossessing Indigenous and Maroon peoples, and aligning with genocidal countries such as Israel. Beyond leaving the country vulnerable to imperialist expropriation, this model prevents the redistribution of wealth and furthers the destruction of the environment.
As a result, the technocratic management of peripheral capitalism has made it difficult for the Latin American left to remain in power, opening the way for the current wave of the far right in the region, to the benefit of U.S. imperialism. It is essential that left-wing parties such as the Workers’ Party advance a left populism that breaks with economic technocracy and abandons militarized models of public security. We must pursue a genuinely popular public security policy, and a defense policy that promotes and protects a truly sovereign developmental path. Only then will the insecurity of the working classes cease to be exploited by the far right and their foreign allies. This is what is at stake in Lula’s fourth term, 2027-2031.
Works Cited
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