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Latin America & Caribbean
Brazil’s ex-President Jair Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years for coup plot
Former president Jair Messias Bolsonaro is inaugurating Route 22 in eight cities in Rio Grande do Norte, starting with the cities of Extremoz, Natal, Parnamirim, and Mossoro, in Natal, Brazil, on August 16, 2024.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a coup to stay in power after losing the 2022 election — a historic first in a country that’s lived through 15 coups.
Four of the court’s five justices voted to find Bolsonaro and seven allies, including his running mate and top military officials, guilty of conspiring to overturn the result and hatching a plan to kill their opponent, current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro, who had already been banned from seeking public office again, has been sentenced to a 27-year prison sentence. He is expected to appeal.
How we got here. Bolsonaro, a former army captain far-right firebrand who was elected president in 2018, spent the 2022 re-election campaign spreading claims of election fraud that were disproven by official investigations. After losing to his leftwing nemesis Lula, his supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace on Jan. 8, 2023, demanding the military step in and overturn the results.
In recent weeks, the US has put pressure on Brazil over the trial. Bolsonaro is a close ally – and stylistic emulator – of US president Donald Trump, who has publicly pressured Lula to force the court to drop the charges, threatening high tariffs, sanctions on court justices, and other punitive measures on Latin America’s largest economy.
Those attacks have seemingly backfired – boosting the popularity of the aging and unpopular Lula, who has styled himself as a defender of Brazilian honor and sovereignty. The court justices, meanwhile, appear not to have been swayed by American pressure.
But Bolsonaro’s movement isn’t going away. Eurasia Group Brazil expert Silvio Cascione warns this is not the “turning of the page” many of Bolsonaro’s opponents may hope for. The ruling “crystallizes Brazil’s deep polarization rather than resolving it,” he said. Public opinion is split almost evenly: 43% say the trial was unfair, 51% back the conviction.
“The real concern isn't massive street protests,” Cascione says, “but rather the continued erosion of institutional trust that's been poisoning Brazilian politics for years. Courts, media, and political parties all suffer from a credibility deficit.”
Bolsonaro is still the kingmaker of the Brazilian right. Polls still show he’d be the strongest challenger to Lula in next year’s presidential election, so his endorsement could still shape the race. São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas has already emerged as a top heir to Bolsonaro’s movement, courting the former president’s base and floating an amnesty bill in Congress.
The conviction is set to roil relations with Washington. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the ruling a “witch hunt” and signaled possible retaliation, including sanctions on the justices who voted to convict.
If so, Brazil is unlikely to hit back directly, as an actual trade war with the world’s largest economy – and a major source of investment – could get ugly fast.
But tensions with Washington could still have a political upside for Lula. “In what promises to be a highly competitive race,” says Cascione, “playing the victim of American bullying could actually help Lula
Hard Numbers: Venezuela readies “battlegrounds”, US inflation creeps up, art market continues to collapse, Mexico to boost China tariffs
Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro stands next to members of the armed forces, on the day he says that his country would deploy military, police and civilian defenses at 284 "battlefront" locations across the country, amid heightened tensions with the U.S., in La Guaira, Venezuela, September 11, 2025.
2: The European Central bank held interest rates steady at 2% today, waiting to see the impact of the new US-EU trade agreement. Meanwhile, across the pond, US consumer prices rose 0.2 percentage points to 2.9% in August, highlighting the ongoing challenges for the Fed as President Trump’s tariff policies stoke inflation fears while he also pressures the regulator to lower rates. For more on why that matters, see this explainer by GZERO’s Alex Kliment.
248 million: Going once, going twice. The famed auction house Sotheby’s annual losses have doubled to $248 million, as the global art market continues to collapse due to uncertainty about the US economy and a tapering-off of interest from high-end Asian buyers.
50: Mexico will slap 50% tariffs on Chinese/Asian automobiles, up from the current 20%. The move is part of a broader tapestry of new trade barriers meant to protect the country’s own industries from Asian competition, but the moves will also be welcomed by the US – Washington has accused Mexico of being a “back door” for cheaper Asian goods to enter the US.
HARD NUMBERS: Trump pitches Europe on joint tariffs, Mexico nabs uniformed diesel smugglers, Hong Kong lawmakers veto same-sex bill, Apple holds prices steady
U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, after an announcement of a trade deal between the U.S. and EU, in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain, July 27, 2025.
14: Mexican authorities have detained 14 people, including several active duty Marines, for smuggling diesel fuel into the country from the United States. The scandal could put further pressure on an already-strained relationship between the US and Mexico, key allies in Washington’s “War on Drugs.”
71: Hong Kong’s legislature vetoed a government-backed bill that would have granted some additional marital rights to same-sex couples registered overseas. Seventy-one lawmakers voted against the bill, with 14 in favor.
5.6: Apple on Wednesday introduced a new, slimmer iPhone “Air” model which is just 5.6mm thick. But the fatter news from the event is that the company has decided not to increase prices for iPhones, despite the impact of new US tariffs, which are currently costing the tech giant more than $1 billion per quarter.
Graph showing the rise of the missing persons in Mexico from 2000-2024.
Last Saturday, thousands of Mexicans marked the International Day of the Disappeared by taking to the streets of the country’s major cities, imploring the government to do more to find an estimated 130,000 missing persons. The growing movement has put pressure on President Claudia Sheinbaum, who made addressing this issue a pillar of her campaign.
Much to Sheinbaum’s and the country’s dismay, the problem seems to be getting worse. The total number of missing people in Mexico increased 12% in 2025, after growing 6.3% in 2024 and 7.3% in 2023, according to the Mexican Institute of Human Rights and Democracy.
While missing people have been a serious issue in the North American country of over 130 million people since the 1950s, the problem became much more widespread beginning in 2007 after then-President Felipe Calderón declared a “war on drugs.”
Calderón’s proclamation – and subsequent military crackdown on the drug cartels – created power vacuums between these crime groups, as smaller ones battled one another to fill the void left by the largest groups that government forces took out.
“The violence erupted very quickly once the war on the cartels began,” said Eurasia Group’s Mexico analyst Andrea Villegas. “So that leads to more inter cartel violence as well, because when one group is dismantled, rival organizations fight to seize its territory and establish control.”
Violence has continued between the cartels, says Villegas, and the fighting has contributed to the dramatic rise in disappearances.
It isn’t just cartel-on-cartel violence, though. These criminal organizations also lure young recruits through false job ads, then use killing or disappearances as a means of punishment to keep order within the camp. They also want to maintain social control in areas where they already enjoy a great deal of power, like Guadalajara, a major city in western Mexico. And they use this violence as a preventative or retaliatory measure, once murdering a group of young police recruits training for a special unit whose purpose was to combat the cartels.
One of the most famous cases of cartel-on-civilian violence occurred in 2014, when one crime organization – with the help of corrupt police officials – seized 43 students from Iguala in southern Mexico. Eleven years on, only three of these students’ remains have been found.
Why can’t the authorities find these people? Those murdered are often buried by the cartels in mass graves, with their remains contaminated to make it extremely difficult to identify the bodies or determine the cause of death. The existence of these horrific sites has become so frequent that Mexicans are no longer as shocked by their discovery.
But in March, the country was shaken again. When volunteers searching for their missing relatives were given a tip about another mass grave site outside of Guadalajara, they instead found something resembling an extermination camp. It was replete with cremation ovens and burnt remains.
Mexico isn’t the only Latin American country to face this issue. Argentina’s military junta killed or disappeared an estimated 30,000 people during the late 1970s and early 1980s, often by dropping them from planes. Guatemala’s 36-year civil war included the disappearances of some 40,000 people. Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1965 to 1984 quashed dissent by seizing, killing and disappearing the dissidents of the regime – this was memorialized in last year’s Oscar-winning film “I’m Still Here.”
But Mexico’s issue is a current one, and the numbers are even greater.
What is the government doing about it? Elected last year, Sheinbaum has abandoned her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) policy of “Abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets), which prioritized economic development as a means to diminish cartel power. She has taken a more aggressive approach to confronting the issue.
“Sheinbaum is trying to do this coordination between states and police forces in order to be able to trace why a body started in Chiapas [in the South] and ended in Sinaloa [along the West Coast],” said Villegas.
Sheinbaum’s government has claimed that the approach is working, saying that homicides in the country have fallen 25%. However, the data for this stat isn’t publicly available. What’s more, the spiking number of disappearances tells a different story.
This could have political consequences for Mexico’s first female president. By identifying this issue a key part of her campaign, Sheinbaum has made the number of cartel disappearances a key metric for whether she can be deemed a successful leader. Right now, the data isn’t going in the right direction.
“Every single mass grave and data that comes out kind of points that this is going to be a much larger [issue],” said Villegas. “I think that it’s more a cause of the lack of security strategy that AMLO had, and she’s going to be reaping the consequences of this, but it is going to be her responsibility to respond.”
Hard Numbers: Train tragedy in Lisbon, Painting stolen by Nazis discovered on a listing, US judge rules in favor of Harvard, Armani passes at 91
A destroyed streetcar on Lisbon's iconic Gloria funicular railway line after it derailed and crashed, killing 16 passengers and injuring about 20 in one of the deadliest public transport accidents in Portugal, on Sept. 4, 2025.
16: A funicular railway crashed Wednesday evening in Lisbon, Portugal, killing at least 16 people. The renowned yellow cable cars help transport people up the capital city’s steep, cobblestoned streets, and are a favorite for tourists. Foreign nationals account for most of the dead. Officials haven’t confirmed the cause of the crash, though eyewitnesses say a brake failure sent the car hurtling down the street and into a building.
80: A painting looted by the Nazis 80 years ago has been found in Argentina after it was spotted in a listing on an estate agent’s website. Italian painter Giuseppe Ghislandi painted the piece, called Portrait of a Lady, some 300 years ago. The Nazis stole many paintings, often from Jewish people who they imprisoned or killed. The most famous example is Gustav Klimt’s Woman in Gold, which now lies in New York City’s Neue Galerie.
$2.6 billion: A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the Trump administration’s freeze on $2.6 billion in research funds was illegal. The judge found that the freezes, officially linked to Harvard’s handling of antisemitism, had little to do with its federally funded research and were instead a retaliation for the university refusing to comply with the administration’s demands to end its DEI efforts and screen international students for bias.
91: Legendary Italian designer Giorgio Armani has died at 91. Famous for redefining modern suits and global elegance, his empire spanned fashion, beauty, sport, and luxury hotels. Tributes poured in from leaders and celebrities, hailing him as a tireless pioneer who revolutionized style, elevated red carpets, and championed healthier runway standards.Seven warships, a nuclear submarine, over two thousand Marines, and several spy planes. Over the past week, the United States has stacked a serious military footprint off Venezuela’s coast. The White House claims this is a drug enforcement mission. And sure enough, yesterday the US Navy carried out its first – though surely not its last – lethal strike against a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, killing 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
But bringing amphibious assault ships and cruise missiles to a drug bust is like using a blowtorch to kill a mosquito: overkill. A deployment of this scale costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, risks miscalculation and accidents, diverts scarce resources from more strategic theaters, and – fundamentally – it’s far more muscle than the stated mission requires.
Either this is history’s most expensive counter-narcotics operation or it’s … something more.
A run of legal and political escalations points to a bigger play. Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration designated Venezuelan cartels as terrorist organizations and Nicolás Maduro as their leader. It doubled the bounty on Maduro’s head to $50 million. It authorized the Defense Department to use force against cartels in Venezuela and Mexico. And it made a point of reiterating that the US does not recognize Maduro as a legitimate head of state protected by US law – a crucial step in creating legal cover to target him directly, if Trump so ordered. These moves happened before the flotilla started steaming south.
Add it all up and this reads like the opening act of a pressure campaign to unseat Maduro.
President Trump is usually – though not always (see Brazil, for example) – skeptical of regime change, but Secretary of State and national security adviser (and acting USAID Administrator, and acting Archivist) Marco Rubio has been pushing for a more active US intervention in Venezuela since his Senate days. For Rubio, whose worldview was shaped by Miami Cuban exile politics, hitting Caracas is about more than drugs, crime, and illegal migrants – it's about taking down what he sees as Cuba's oil-subsidized proxy and the first step in cleaning house across Latin America.
Trump himself has competing impulses. On one hand, he promised voters no new foreign wars and still mistrusts the Venezuelan opposition after getting burned by the Juan Guaidó fiasco in his first term. Unlike Rubio, he also has no principled commitments to the cause of Venezuelan democracy. Even as his administration tightened the screws on Maduro and his circle, it quietly reinstated Chevron’s license to pump Venezuelan oil earlier this year. The license is structured to keep oil moving but on terms that favor American interests rather than PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil monopoly.
On the other hand, Trump is not ideologically averse to all military action – only to politically costly quagmires – and he has plenty of reasons to want to see Maduro gone. Judging by the administration’s recent moves, Rubio may have succeeded in convincing the president that Venezuela offers the perfect opportunity for him to project strength on the global stage and take an easy victory lap at a time when the regime is brittle and some of his other big-ticket foreign policy gambits, such as Ukraine diplomacy, are flopping.
None of this implies boots on the ground. Trump has zero appetite for another Iraq that would be politically toxic and unpopular even with his MAGA base (not to mention that a ground invasion would require a much larger troop deployment).
But military actions against cartel infrastructure, key facilitators, or military assets propping up the regime? That would align with Rubio’s agenda, explain the scale of the buildup, and give Trump easier-to-sell wins that don’t risk messy entanglements. Most likely, the goal isn’t to seize territory or topple the regime in one go (though targeted decapitation strikes can’t be ruled out); it’s to ramp up the pressure on the people keeping Maduro in power, shifting their calculations and eventually threatening his standing.
That’s how most autocracies crack – from within. Venezuela's military has stuck with Maduro (and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez) through the country’s economic collapse and international isolation, but its loyalty is transactional. Fifty million-dollar bounties, a naval blockade, and the prospect of death by Tomahawk create powerful incentives to reconsider.
This isn’t to say the regime is about to collapse. Even if Maduro falls – still a big if – the military and palace power brokers would try to manage the transition and install his successor. Think Vice President Delcy Rodríguez or her brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez, both pragmatic insiders who've negotiated with Washington and the opposition before. The ruling PSUV has far-reaching institutional control; any deal that persuades regime elites to stand down will require extensive power‑sharing and amnesty guarantees. The path to real elections and opposition government would be long, messy, and probably violent.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves. The immediate question is simpler: are we looking at theater or prelude? My bet is it’s a little bit of both, but we will know soon enough. Those around Maduro must be wondering whether he’s still worth the risk of sticking around to find out.
Is the US trying to topple Venezuela's leader?
In this episode of ask ian, Ian Bremmer breaks down the recent US military strike on a vessel leaving Venezuela and what it signals for the Trump administration’s broader strategy.
“The United States has now engaged in an initial strike claiming a drug enforcement mission,” Ian explains. But the scale of the operation tells another story: “Seven US warships, a nuclear submarine, over 2,000 Marines, and several spy planes…this is clearly not just a drug interdiction.”
Ian suggests the move could be the start of a blockade or even strikes on gangs and terrorist groups inside Venezuela. While some US officials have long pushed for Nicolás Maduro’s removal, he cautions against assuming regime change. Ian notes, “I’d be very surprised to see boots on the ground.”
The Venezuela policy, Ian remarks, stands in stark contrast to Trump’s approach in Israel, where the US government continues to provide funding and political support, an exception to his ‘America First’ stance.