Bernie joined “with political and social leaders across the globes who are calling on Brazil’s judiciary to release Lula and annul his conviction.” The Intercept has many more documents at its disposal, their impact as yet unknown. But an important shift may be at hand in Brazilian politics, particularly if Lula’s sentence is overturned as a result of Moro’s now-exposed antics.

Bolsonaro has already shown himself ill-equipped to deal with the doubts now gathering over Lula’s conviction. When asked about the findings at a press conference on Tuesday, Bolsonaro abruptly stormed out of the room. During the election last year, polls clearly demonstrated that Lula, substantially ahead of Bolsonaro, would have won the election. If Lula’s hasty trial was driven by a partisan political agenda — something the Left has argued from the start but that now can be proven — Bolsonaro’s legitimacy as president will be called into question domestically.

But Bernie’s comments evoke another challenge Bolsonaro may face, this time from abroad: the loss of a powerful, if capricious, ally in Donald Trump. Indeed, as I previously noted in Jacobin, the Bolsonaro administration “has not demonstrated the chops to bring Brazil back from the fringe should the winds of international diplomacy start to shift” away from the reactionary worldview that unites Bolsonaro and Trump.

How would Bolsonaro contend with a democratic socialist in the White House? To understand the potential effects of a Sanders presidency within Brazil, it may be instructive to examine a different moment when a US president came to power calling out the authoritarian abuses of Latin American officials. Roughly four decades ago, Jimmy Carter’s presidency, moderate though it was, managed to erode the confidence of Brazil’s military dictatorship, supported by every US president since the 1964 coup. But Carter’s attempts to reign in the authoritarian abuses of Latin American strongmen were ultimately constrained by his unwillingness to challenge broader notions of American imperialism and economic orthodoxy. Given the nature of the political project he is advancing, Sanders has even more potential to inspire democratic forces in Brazil while frustrating the ambitions of its reactionary right.

If Sanders is elected President in 2020 poll, will be in direct conflict with Bolsonaro, whom he considers part of “a new authoritarian axis.” In the wake of Bolsonaro’s election, Sanders argued that “our job is to combat authoritarianism and build a movement of people who believe in democracy.” This is hardly the language of top-down regime change, reflecting instead a belief in populist grassroots mobilization connecting ordinary people in the United States, Brazil, and around the world.

In a New Yorker profile of Bernie’s foreign policy vision published last April, Sanders recalled an exchange program he implemented as mayor of Burlington that sent children from Vermont to the Soviet Union and welcomed Russian kids to his city. “It was just an incredible experience to see these kids getting along as well as they did … a lot of attitudes about foreign policy are based on lack of knowledge. He concluded on a note some no doubt will consider hopelessly naive but that, in the current climate, sounds downright groundbreaking: “To bring farmers from Turkey to farmers in Iowa. You know, just to get people to see each other as human beings. I think it could go a distance.”

The implication of Bernie’s statement is that those farmers, if brought face to face, might just realize the shared elements of their social, political, and economic struggles. From such soil, a lasting solidarity might sprout. “He’s bringing those views on the importance of tackling economic inequality into foreign policy,” declared Suzanne DiMaggio, one of Bernie’s foreign policy advisors. Indeed, last year, speaking at Johns Hopkins University, Bernie asserted that “we need an international movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security, and dignity for all people.”

The first element of that recipe — shared prosperity for everyone around the world — exemplifies a crucial difference between Carter’s frustrated human rights agenda and Bernie’s proposed approach. Unlike Carter, the self-styled peanut farmer from rural Georgia with a strikingly run-of-the-mill economic vision, the senator from Vermont sees foreign policy not as a discrete sort of alchemy that takes place beyond the borders of the United States, independent of economic and political arrangements at home, but rather as an outgrowth of the governing systems that leaders inherit. A real break with the foreign policy strictures of the past, in other words, would entail a forceful challenge to the political status quo, an effort very few American presidents have been willing to make given the heavy political cost for little perceived reward (to say nothing of deeply held ideological commitments). Bernie has repeatedly committed himself to such an effort.

For his part, Bolsonaro lacks the rhetorical and political skills that would be required of him to walk back the violent pronouncements he has made regarding the Left, of which Sanders is clearly a member. Given his proto-neoliberalism and the stakes of the global Cold War, Carter managed to work with Latin American generals despite his emphasis on human rights and their displeasure with being lectured by an American president. By 1979, Carter had largely abandoned human rights as a pillar of his foreign policy, presaging the return of a more assertive brand of US imperialism under Ronald Reagan (1981–1989).

If Bernie is committed to a truly revolutionary foreign policy, however, there is nothing to credibly justify a working relationship with Bolsonaro. It may seem counterintuitive given who they elected last year, but the route to a better country, a better hemisphere, and a better world, rests with Brazil’s people rather than its current leadership. The architects of a new US foreign policy must take that to heart.(IPA Service)