How Brazil and the PT Can Weather U.S. Imperialism

Brazil’s left, headed by the ruling Workers’ Party (PT), has long been a leading voice in Latin America against U.S. interventionism. When the United States launched its military action to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2025, the Brazilian government and the PT joined a global chorus of shock and denunciation of this gross violation of national sovereignty.

Organs of the PT were quick to condemn the action, and Brazilian president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, was immediately in contact with the interim Venezuelan government to provide support and help protect the sovereignty of Latin America from U.S. interventionism. How the Latin American left navigates this crisis will play a crucial role in determining the next phase of global struggle in resistance to U.S. imperialism.

Reaction from the PT

As Brazil’s largest and most organized left-wing party, the PT was quick to condemn the actions of the United States. The party’s national executive committee issued an official party notice on January 3, titled “PT Condemns U.S. Attack and Kidnapping of Maduro.” The statement brought to attention the severe regional destabilization caused by the U.S. invasion, which it called “the most serious international aggression recorded in South America in the 21st century,” and urged a resolution mediated by the United Nations to resolve the crisis.[1]

On social media, PT members serving in the Brazilian national legislature also put out several statements of their own criticizing the United States. Congressional party leader José Guimarães stated, “This criminal aggression by the U.S. against Venezuela violates international law and the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.” Congressman Reimont Luiz Otoni Santa Barbara declared that Washington’s only intentions with this military action were to secure “Venezuelan oil” and to “amplify [U.S.] political power in Latin America.” He went on to repudiate the attack and declare the need for “peace and respect for International Law, not more imperialist war!”[2]

A January 9 PT article titled “The Return of the ‘Sheriff,’” by party member Rafael Tavares, synthesized a more pointed analysis. He argued the United States’s desire to be the “world’s policeman” was “an affront to the self-determination of peoples.” Tavares rightly identified the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro as an act of “international piracy” that showed contempt for the United Nations; and warned that the same logic utilized by the United States was used by the PT’s political enemies to rationalize reactionary coups against the party’s governance.[3]

The most vociferous condemnation came from the party’s youth wing, Juventude PT, which released a statement on Instagram declaring the pretext for the intervention to be false, and a “materialization of the historic U.S. intervention policies in the region that spread hunger, violence, authoritarianism and oppression of Latin American peoples.” JPT went on to characterize the “hybrid warfare strategy” of the United States as using “illegal sanctions, misinformation, fake news, and lawfare” to destabilize and violate the national sovereignty of Venezuela. In historical reference to the anticolonial struggles of Cuba, Korea, and Venezuela, their statement concluded with a demand for “Yankee interventionism out!”

The response from the PT has demonstrated a consistent ideological perspective toward U.S. imperialism and interventionism in Latin America. While the party has shifted politically since its founding in 1980, the PT has always advocated for non-interventionism from the United States in the affairs of Brazil and Latin America. The PT was founded in a spirit of revolutionary defiance by workers against the right-wing military dictatorship, which had taken power with U.S. support in 1961 by forcibly removing socialist President João Goulart.

Since first rising to power in 2002, the PT has sought the development of South–South relations, rather than following the trajectory of right-wing Brazilian leaders in aligning with U.S. foreign policy goals. Brazil under the PT opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the U.S.–backed coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, and consistently sought to resolve international and humanitarian crises through the United Nations rather than mediate them through the United States.

Under the PT, Brazil has also initiated and helped lead the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CECLAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), two organizations whose development have sought to reduce the influence and necessity of the U.S.-aligned Organization of American States (OAS). CECLAC and UNASUR have developed projects to reduce economic and financial dependency on the United States and Europe, and to create independent, collaborative Latin American institutions.

Diplomacy under Lula

Prior to Maduro’s kidnapping, Lula had been working to deescalate the increasingly bellicose actions of the United States against Venezuelan territory. A longtime critic of U.S. economic sanctions against Venezuela, Lula criticized the ramping-up of U.S. military actions in September 2025 at the BRICS Summit, and later that month voiced the necessity of respecting national sovereignty by the United States in Venezuela’s affairs at the United Nations General Assembly.[4]

On January 3, Lula immediately reacted to the kidnapping of President Maduro. Shortly after the incursion by U.S. forces into Venezuela, President Lula called interim Venezuelan president Delcy Rodríguez to understand the political situation on the ground. Following the call, Brazil’s foreign ministry quickly announced their recognition of the Venezuelan constitutional process and consequently of Rodriguez as interim president. Lula further published a note the same day rebuking the United States for “crossing an unacceptable line.” He described the action as a reminder of the “worst moments of intervention” in Latin American history, and strongly urged the international community and the United Nations to respond vigorously to this violation of sovereignty.[5] Lula was also one of the first major leaders to name the U.S. action as a “kidnapping,” counter to the U.S. narrative that President Maduro had been “captured” in a police action.

In the following days Brazil sought to support the proposal by the People’s Republic of China to convene the UN Security Council in an emergency meeting to address the severity of U.S. actions.[6] During the Security Council meeting, Brazilian ambassador to the UN Sergio Danese echoed Lula’s initial statement, categorically rejecting armed aggression against Venezuela by the United States as a “flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter” and “unacceptable.” Brazil then issued a joint statement with several Latin American countries to reaffirm their adherence to the Charter of the United Nations and issue a joint formal rebuke of the US’s actions.[7]

On January 18, Lula published an op-ed titled “This Hemisphere Belongs to All of Us” that prominently featured in the New York Times. There Lula further admonished the United States for its military action in Venezuela, and sought to communicate to the U.S. public the necessity for multipolarity and respect for national sovereignty of independent nations.[8] Lula spent the remainder of the month voicing his continued anger over the kidnapping of Maduro. In his speech during the closing ceremony of the national conference of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Lula declared, “South America is a land of peace. We don’t have nuclear weapons. We only have poor people who want to work, live, eat, and study. We don’t want war.”[9]

Lula has demonstrated the leadership in Latin America by criticizing U.S. foreign intervention and demanding accountability for U.S. actions on the world stage. The historic work of Lula and the PT to develop independent regional institutions and developmental goals, separate from U.S. interests, has been a major influence on the development of socialist and anti-imperialist sentiment in Latin America in the 21st century. In light of recent developments, it would have been economically beneficial for Lula to respond quietly to U.S. actions, so as to protect Brazil’s recently mended relationship with the Trump administration. Instead Lula has risked this recent diplomatic progress to vehemently condemn interference in Latin America and to unite disparate parts of South and Central America to protect their respective national sovereignties against U.S. imperialism.

Brazil and the Future of Anti-Imperialism

As the United States begins to act more aggressively to maintain hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, many in Brazil are asking what they can do to resist the fate that befell Venezuela. Unlike other socialist projects (in particular Marxist-Leninist states led by a Communist Party), no country in Latin America save Cuba is organized in any manner to aggressively defend itself from the twin dangers of capitalism and the imperialism.

Socialist movements in Latin America are frequently fighting multiple enemies, including the local comprador bourgeoisie, militaries with their own independent reactionary political base, evangelical right-wing Christian movements, and narcotrafficking cartels, amongst others. The United States has shown a willingness to materially and ideologically support any of these groups, solely on the basis of their opposition to socialism and communism. This newest aggression demonstrates that when these historical methods of intervention fail, the United States will turn to direct military action and force economic and foreign policy concessions at gunpoint. The kidnapping of Maduro was a warning to Venezuela and all of Latin America. A recently leaked recording revealed that immediately following the kidnapping of President Maduro, top officials of the Venezuelan government were given fifteen minutes to acquiesce to U.S. demands or they would all be killed by U.S. Special forces.[10]

As the second Pink Tide begins to ebb, we stand at a precipice. Several right-wing administrations have taken power across the South American continent, replacing ostensibly socialist presidents. Lula faces another election this year, where his opponent will be the son of the man who once imprisoned him. The ability to enact a socialist agenda within the confines of a capitalist state is already extremely limited; most socialist projects in Latin America have been limited at most to a decade of social democratic reforms before being deposed by reactionary politicians. These reactionary governments not only reverse the reforms, but wield the government as it was designed, as a tool of capitalist class. As V. I. Lenin wrote in State and Revolution, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” Latin American governments in bourgeois-democratic republics will always have an easier time privatizing the country and guaranteeing low-wage plantations for U.S. multinational corporations. The impossible task for these nations is to wield the autonomy to enact a socialist program, or even to operate with any level of sovereignty and independence from U.S. imperialism.

In Brazil we have fought tooth and nail for the small numbers of reforms and the poverty alleviation we have experienced, but we remain a country with much poverty, despite our wealth of natural resources. The test of the PT will not be if it can win elections, or if it can successfully advocate for diplomacy and cool-headedness on the international stage. As we see in Venezuela, the only weapon Latin America has against U.S. intervention is to unify, collaborate, and work together to resist the United States. And the only way we can unify Latin America is to defeat the forces of reaction that seek to preserve us in a permanent state of U.S. dependency.