> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://beirutwire.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # No USAID No Party: Brazil Joins Latin America’s Conservative Wave as Bolsonaro Beats Lula - URL: https://beirutwire.com/no-usaid-no-party-brazil-joins-latin-americas-conservative-wave-as-bolsonaro-beats-lula/ - Published: 2026-10-05T05:13:42.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T05:13:42.000Z - Description: Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead of President Lula da Silva in Brazil’s first presidential round, extending a powerful conservative electoral shift that has already transformed governments across Latin America. - Author: Beirut Wire - Tags: Politics **Brazil Joins Latin America’s Conservative Wave as Bolsonaro Beats Lula** Latin America’s political shift to the right has reached its biggest country. Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on October 4, taking roughly 47% of the vote against Lula’s 45%. Neither secured the majority needed to win outright, sending Brazil to a runoff on October 25. With almost all ballots counted, Bolsonaro received more than 56 million votes against roughly 53.7 million for Lula. The result was more than a Brazilian upset. It extended one of the clearest political trends in the Western Hemisphere: voters across Latin America have repeatedly turned away from left-wing governments and toward conservative candidates promising tougher approaches to crime, immigration, corruption and economic stagnation. Over the past two years, José Antonio Kast has won in Chile. Keiko Fujimori took Peru. Abelardo de la Espriella won Colombia. Laura Fernández won Costa Rica. Nasry Asfura returned Honduras’s National Party to power. Daniel Noboa secured another term in Ecuador. Associated Press described the pattern this year as a broad conservative advance across Latin America, with seven countries electing right-wing leaders and security emerging as one of the defining issues of the shift. Brazil may now follow them. The country matters on an entirely different scale. With more than 200 million people, Latin America’s largest economy and enormous diplomatic weight across the Global South, Brazil has been one of the principal anchors of the region’s left under Lula. Bolsonaro’s first-round victory therefore represents the strongest indication yet that the political cycle that brought a series of left-wing governments to power earlier this decade is running out of momentum. Brazilian voters went into the election particularly concerned about crime, corruption and inflation, according to Reuters. Bolsonaro campaigned as the candidate of political change and closer relations with the United States, while Lula defended his economic and social record. There is another striking piece of timing behind Latin America’s political reversal. In January 2025, President Donald Trump froze U.S. foreign-development assistance as his administration moved to dismantle USAID. By July 1, USAID had formally stopped administering foreign assistance. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, approximately 6,780 of its 7,510 awards had been terminated by March 2026, representing tens of billions of dollars in cancelled commitments. Among the programs disrupted were initiatives specifically intended to influence governance, civil society and democratic institutions overseas. The GAO says the United States had been spending more than $2 billion annually on democracy assistance in the years before USAID was dismantled, including programs implemented through nongovernmental organizations and institutions in recipient countries. Since USAID stopped administering foreign assistance in July 2025, Latin America’s presidential elections have produced an extraordinary succession of defeats for the left. That does not prove that USAID funding determined previous elections, nor that ending it caused conservative victories. Election results across several countries have far more immediate explanations: violent crime, weak economies, corruption scandals, dissatisfaction with incumbents and growing frustration with migration. But the sequence is politically significant nonetheless. For years, conservative movements across Latin America argued that foreign-funded NGOs, civil-society organizations, media initiatives and democracy programs created an institutional environment disproportionately aligned with progressive politics. USAID unquestionably financed left wing initiatives abroad. What cannot be established from the election results alone is how much electoral advantage those programs produced for the Latin American left. What can be established is what followed their abrupt contraction. The regional political map changed remarkably quickly. Chile elected Kast after campaigns dominated by crime and illegal immigration. Peru elected Fujimori on a platform that included mega-prisons and tougher immigration enforcement. Colombia elected de la Espriella after years of left-wing government under Gustavo Petro. Costa Rica elected Fernández on a security-heavy platform. Honduras returned the National Party to government. The common theme has not been one particular economic ideology. It has been a rejection of the political direction of the preceding years. Security has played an especially important role. Organized crime has expanded across parts of the continent. Countries that once regarded cartel violence as a problem concentrated elsewhere have seen extortion, assassinations and increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations emerge domestically. Immigration has also become a more prominent political issue, particularly as Venezuelan displacement and irregular migration have transformed communities across South and Central America. The result has been a political environment considerably less receptive to the progressive politics that dominated much of the region after 2020. Brazil now sits at the center of that transformation. Flávio Bolsonaro is not yet president. His first-round victory gives him the lead going into a runoff, but Lula remains within a few percentage points and pre-election surveys showed the two effectively tied in a second-round contest. That distinction matters. But so does what has already happened. Four years after Lula narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro and restored the Brazilian left to power, his son has now received more votes than the incumbent president in the first round. And Brazil is no longer moving against the political current of its neighbors. It is moving with it. Latin America’s latest electoral cycle has increasingly been defined by voters demanding stronger borders, tougher security policies, fiscal restraint and a break with incumbent left-wing governments. Whether Bolsonaro completes that shift on October 25 remains for Brazilian voters to decide. But the continental trend is already difficult to miss.