Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the United States is designating Brazil’s two largest criminal organisations — the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Red Command (Comando Vermelho) — as foreign terrorist organisations. The announcement came after Rubio met far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking to return to power in October’s presidential election. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responded with evident fury, declaring that Brazil would not be treated as a “tinpot country” by Washington. The designations carry significant legal consequences: American banks must freeze affiliated assets, US citizens are prohibited from providing material support, and the State Department can impose visa restrictions on individuals deemed to have aided the designated groups. Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy and the hemisphere’s most populous democracy.
The received wisdom
The progressive critique will be sharp: this is naked electoral interference dressed in the language of counter-terrorism. The PCC and Red Command are unambiguously violent criminal organisations responsible for massacres, prison riots, and a narcotics trade that destabilises communities across Brazil and into Paraguay, Bolivia, and beyond. But the timing — a high-profile announcement coordinated with a Bolsonaro family meeting months before a presidential election — gives the game away. The US has not previously designated these groups despite decades of documented violence. The sudden urgency, this reading argues, has nothing to do with American national security and everything to do with tilting Brazil’s domestic politics toward Washington’s preferred candidate. Lula’s Workers’ Party has long maintained an independent foreign policy and warm relations with China; that, not gang violence, is what Rubio’s State Department is actually targeting.
This critique has real force. It should be taken seriously.
A different read
But taking it seriously does not mean accepting it wholesale. The PCC in particular has expanded far beyond domestic Brazilian criminality in the past decade. It has established networks across Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina, corrupted port officials to move cocaine through the Atlantic, and its leadership has reportedly established contact with European criminal syndicates. The Red Command similarly operates internationally. The question of whether these organisations meet the legal threshold for “foreign terrorist organisation” — which requires a foreign entity, terrorist activity, and a threat to American nationals or security — is genuinely contestable, but not obviously frivolous.
The more interesting analytical question is what this move reveals about the Trump administration’s Latin America strategy. The pattern is now fairly clear: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and now the implicit leveraging of Brazil are all part of a systematic effort to tighten economic and diplomatic pressure on left-of-centre Latin American governments. This is not new — American interference in Latin American politics has a history stretching back through the Cold War — but the current iteration is unusually brazen in its timing and explicitly tied to electoral outcomes.
Lula’s “tinpot country” retort is worth parsing carefully. It is partly theatrical — Lula is a skilled political communicator and understands that domestic indignation at American overreach is good politics. But it also reflects a genuine strategic reality: Brazil under Lula has been pursuing a foreign policy of equidistance between Washington and Beijing, deepening BRICS ties, refusing to take sides on Ukraine, and positioning itself as a leader of the Global South. Washington views this as strategic drift at best, alignment with adversaries at worst. The terror designation is a shot across the bow.
The historical parallel worth considering is Colombia in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration threatened to “decertify” Colombia as a counter-narcotics partner unless it met American demands. That episode humiliated a moderate Colombian government, strengthened anti-American sentiment, and produced years of diplomatic friction — before eventually being abandoned as counterproductive. Heavy-handed conditionality has a poor track record in Latin America. It tends to rally domestic nationalism behind the targeted government rather than undermining it.
The more durable American interest in Brazil is a stable democracy capable of governing its territory, managing Amazonian deforestation (which affects global climate), and remaining an open economy integrated with the West. Bolsonaro’s record on all three counts — democratic institutions, environment, rule of law — was notably worse than Lula’s. If Washington’s goal is a reliable partner in South America, the terror designation strategy looks self-defeating.
What to watch
- Whether Brazilian courts or the legislature respond with countermeasures — reciprocal visa restrictions or asset-freeze legislation targeting US-linked entities would escalate the dispute significantly.
- Lula’s October election standing: if this designation stiffens Brazilian nationalist sentiment, it may paradoxically boost rather than hurt him.
- Whether the PCC designation affects US-Brazil extradition and law enforcement cooperation — Brazilian authorities have relied on US DEA intelligence in major trafficking operations.
- China’s response: Beijing will likely offer Lula conspicuous diplomatic support, turning a bilateral US-Brazil spat into another data point in the global alignment contest.
— J