Monroe came back, and Lula answered at the UN
Washington put the doctrine of 1823 in writing, invaded Venezuela, sanctions Cuba, expands bases in Greenland and keeps a stalled war against Iran. Lula answered from the UN rostrum by naming the mechanisms of that offensive, and the vote of 4 October 2026 decides who administers the answer, with the Bolsonaro family on the other side.
On 22 September 2026, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened the general debate of the 81st United Nations (UN) General Assembly and spoke for about 22 minutes. Brazil has taken the first slot since 1955, and whoever speaks first tends to serve as the thermometer for the rest of the week. On that Tuesday, the thermometer measured the distance between two projects for the hemisphere.
Lula began with the room he was speaking in. “This is the tenth occasion on which I open the General Debate of this Assembly. Since I first took this rostrum, in 2003, this is the most critical moment for the United Nations,” he said, and then named what moved him: “The feeling that drives me today is indignation.” The UN was failing, he said, “in one of its most elevated missions: that of delivering humanity from the scourge of war”, and its credibility “has never been so low”. The full text is published in Portuguese.
Two scenes from that day were recorded. The first: the United States delegation did not applaud at any point. The second happened during the break between speeches: Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked over to Lula on the floor, and the footage shows the contact amounted to gestures with foreign minister Mauro Vieira, while the Brazilian president kept walking, surrounded by other delegates — the approach was recorded on video. There was no conversation, and neither side commented on the episode.
Hours later, Donald Trump spoke from the same rostrum. “The United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere — and if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States,” he said, according to the official compilation of his remarks released by the White House. In the same speech he called the cartels “the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere” and said: “Communism will never be coming to America — but freedom will be coming to Cuba and safety and security will be coming to Mexico.”
The opening speech was not the day’s only gesture, but it is where the offensive finds its name. On the other side, the Brazilian election of 4 October 2026 is where the offensive finds its target.
The doctrine is on paper
What Washington did in 2026 does not fit the improvisation of one speech. It is in a signed, published document. The National Security Strategy sent to Congress in November 2025 has a section titled “Western Hemisphere: The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” and states, literally, that “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”, in the official text. On 2 December 2025, in a message marking 250 years of the country, Trump wrote that his administration “proudly reaffirms this promise under a new ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”, in the presidential message.
A month later, after the military operation that captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, the US president summarised the renaming with the frankness he usually applies: “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe doctrine,” he said on 3 January 2026, in the interview in which he renamed the doctrine.
The instrument of that policy was named in March. The Shield of the Americas was created on 5 March 2026 and held its inaugural summit two days later, at Trump National Doral in Miami, headquartered at the US Southern Command in Florida — the State Department keeps the coalition’s page. On 22 September 2026, the same day as Lula’s speech, the Shield released in New York the Joint Statement on Defending Hemispheric Sovereignty, signed by 15 governments, which names 24 criminal organisations to be treated as “transnational narco-terrorist organisations” and announces a request for consultations at the Organization of American States (OAS) under the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, the Rio Treaty.
The list is the detail that matters to Brazil. Item 16 is Primeiro Comando da Capital and item 17 is Comando Vermelho, in the survey of the signatories. Brazil did not sign the statement and is not in the coalition, staying out alongside Mexico, in the count of coalition members. Both Brazilian factions had already been designated by the State Department as Specially Designated Global Terrorists on 28 May 2026 and as Foreign Terrorist Organizations on 5 June 2026, in a decision signed by Rubio and recorded in the department’s own release.
What the offensive has already done
Venezuela was the laboratory. On 3 January 2026, US forces captured Nicolás Maduro and Cília Flores in Caracas, in an operation launched from 20 bases and using 150 aircraft. Rubio presented the episode to the Senate as a law-enforcement action: “There is no war against Venezuela, and we did not occupy a country. There are no U.S. troops on the ground. This was an operation to aid law enforcement,” he said in testimony on 28 January 2026, as recorded in the official transcript of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Eight months later, the result shows up as a contract. The oil deal announced in late August 2026 gives the United States majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, across 17 fields granted for 100 years. On 22 September 2026, Trump received interim president Delcy Rodríguez in New York, their first face-to-face meeting since Maduro’s capture, and said that “to the victor belong the spoils”. The same day, demonstrators protested outside UN headquarters with signs reading “No vote, no oil”, and María Corina Machado’s team said she had been prevented from returning to the country.
At sea, the campaign has numbers of its own. The monitoring project Airwars counted 69 vessels destroyed and at least 227 people killed over 12 months of boat strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, with the campaign resumed on 24 August 2026, in the organisation’s report.
Cuba entered the same script through another door, that of energy. On 18 September 2026, the Cuban power grid suffered its eighth total collapse of the year, leaving more than 9 million people without electricity. The day before, the State Department had sanctioned eight entities and three people tied to Cuba’s military-industrial complex and nickel sector, and Rubio described the country as “a failed and corrupt state and a persistent threat to US national security, located less than 100 miles off American shores”, in the official release. Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel answered on 16 April 2026 that Cuba is “a besieged state”, not a failed one, subject to “economic war, an intensified blockade and an energy blockade”, in the official speech marking 65 years since the proclamation of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. In March 2026, Trump had said in Miami that Cuba was “next”.
Greenland, which has no armed faction and no blackout, made the list on geography. On 22 September 2026, Trump, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenlandic prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen signed a security agreement that updates the 1951 defence pact and provides for two new bases, at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, the modernisation of Pituffik base and a ban on military installations from countries outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on the island. After the signing, Trump said the deal gives him “permanent control over the security and all other needs” of the island, “in perpetuity”. Denmark and Greenland rejected that reading and maintain that the text recognises the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark.
The rest of the region appears in the same week with mixed signals. In Colombia, the US Treasury sanctioned President Gustavo Petro, his wife and his son on 24 October 2025 over drug-trafficking allegations, per the Treasury release. On 7 August 2026, Abelardo de la Espriella took office promising to defeat “narco-terrorism relentlessly” and said that “the option of dialogue is completely exhausted”; five days later Colombia joined the anti-cartel coalition as its 19th member. In Ecuador, where voters rejected foreign bases in a referendum in November 2025, Daniel Noboa’s government signed a status-of-forces agreement and has authorised joint operations since March; Human Rights Watch documented in July 2026 the torture and arbitrary detention of four peasant workers in a joint operation at San Martín, as well as drone strikes on fishing boats near the Galápagos, in its A Dangerous Partnership report.
Chile joined the coalition on 22 September 2026, leaving its observer status, as President José Antonio Kast announced — eight days after he had said the country remained only an observer, and after his defence minister, Fernando Barros, declared that “from Chile’s point of view, we are not anybody’s backyard”. In Argentina, Trump celebrated what he called “a great victory” in the country, said he had gone “nine for nine” among the candidates he backed, and heard from Javier Milei a proposal for a “proactive role” in hemispheric security, with references to the South Atlantic and Antarctica; weeks earlier, the Argentine government had sanctioned oil companies operating in the Falklands.
Against Brazil, the offensive uses tariffs and lists. The Section 301 investigation concluded on 15 July 2026 imposed an additional 25% tariff on most Brazilian imports, with exemptions for beef, instant coffee, orange juice and civil aircraft, per the decision published in the Federal Register. On 15 September 2026, the presidential determination setting the list of drug-producing and transit countries for fiscal year 2027 said the Brazilian government had “failed to confront” Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho, even though Brazil does not appear on the 23-country list, in the presidential determination that set the list. In July, Itamaraty had told Congress that the unilateral designation of the two factions “could be invoked as justification for extraterritorial actions against Brazilian institutions”, with “risk of the use of US military force against national territory”.
The method is 203 years old
None of this was invented in 2026. James Monroe set out the doctrine on 2 December 1823, in his annual message to Congress, with the sentence that closed the continent to European colonisation: the American continents “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers”, in the original text. On 6 December 1904, Theodore Roosevelt added what was missing: the right to intervene. “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation,” he said, and the State Department records that the corollary served as justification for interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
What followed is in the archives. In 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organised from Honduras and El Salvador the force that toppled Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, in the operation code-named PBSUCCESS (a CIA cryptonym with no public expansion), documented in the declassified papers gathered by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s government authorised Operation Brother Sam, with weapons, fuel and the possibility of troops in support of the conspiracy against João Goulart, and tapes recorded by John Kennedy capture the decision to create a “coup climate”, in the same collection. In Chile, the Senate committee report that investigated intelligence operations concluded in 1975 that covert US involvement in the country was “extensive and continuous”, with US$ 3 million spent to influence the 1964 election and US$ 8 million between 1970 and 1973, in the Church Committee report.
Operation Condor, created in Santiago between 25 and 28 November 1975 on the initiative of Chilean intelligence, with delegates from Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, turned information-sharing into a transnational system of disappearance: the investigation by journalist John Dinges documented 654 victims of kidnapping, torture and disappearance in the from 1976 to 1980 period, per the National Security Archive. In 2002, Venezuela lived the script in reverse: dissident military officers deposed Hugo Chávez for 47 hours in April, and a daily intelligence brief from the US government dated 6 April of that year already recorded the plotters’ planning — the document is declassified at the US National Archives. In 2019 it was Evo Morales’s turn, who resigned on 10 November after the armed forces recommended his departure, in a process where the OAS audit pointed to “intentional manipulation” in the count.
The training of the enforcers is documented too. The School of the Americas, created in 1946, trained more than 57,000 Latin American military personnel and civilians over five decades, and in September 1996 the Defense Department released excerpts from Spanish-language manuals used between 1982 and 1991 that discussed the execution and torture of insurgents, according to the Congressional Research Service report. The school was renamed in 2000 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
In 2013, there was a different official reading. “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” then secretary of state John Kerry declared at an OAS meeting, in a speech preserved in the State Department archive. 13 years later, preeminence was back in official vocabulary, under the name of a corollary.
The war that delivered nothing
The backdrop that gives the offensive its urgency lies outside the continent. On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched the operation they called Epic Fury against Iran, killing supreme leader Ali Khamenei and striking command, air-defence and nuclear facilities. A two-week ceasefire followed in April 2026, a naval blockade of Iranian ports from 13 April, and a memorandum of understanding signed on 17 June 2026 providing for an end to operations and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz within 60 days of negotiation — the period is summarised in the Congressional Research Service report and by an Arms Control Association chronology. The memorandum expired on 17 August without a final agreement.
The result has been measured. On 21 September 2026, only two commercial ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz, against a pre-war average of about 125 daily transits, according to data from consultancy Kpler. The International Maritime Organization counted 68 incidents in the Gulf and adjacent waters over six months of war, with at least 20 seafarers killed. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in February 2026 that it has no access to any of Iran’s four declared enrichment facilities and cannot state the size, composition or whereabouts of the enriched uranium stock, in its report to the Board of Governors; in September 2026, the joint statement by the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom recorded that Iran “has not provided access to any nuclear facility and has prevented all in-field verification activities”, in the British government statement. On 9 September 2026, the IAEA board voted 23 to 3 to refer the Iranian file to the UN Security Council for the first time in 20 years.
None of the sources consulted supports the thesis of an Iranian military victory. What the record shows is narrower and harder: the campaign delivered none of its declared objectives. Reuters described in an analysis on 27 August that “Iran has not surrendered, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted, and there is no clear path to ending the conflict Trump predicted would be over in four weeks”. The research group RAND (Research ANd Development) assessed the outcome as a dilemma: there was progress on three of the four declared objectives, and the government collapse Washington expected did not happen, in the commentary published by the institution. Pickaxe Mountain, the complex 100 metres deep under granite near Natanz that escaped the strikes, remains at the centre of the next threat.
What Lula said, and what he was answering
Lula’s speech can be read as the articulated answer to that sequence, and that is where this piece finds its axis. It was built as a diagnosis, not as a list of grievances: first the failure of the system that was supposed to contain the powers, then the mechanisms through which the offensive operates, and finally the country where it will be decided. The full text was released by the presidency’s social communication secretariat and is published in Portuguese.
The diagnosis starts with the room he was speaking in. “We are all hostages to the immobility of a Security Council that does not fulfil its role,” he said, linking that immobility to a legacy from 1946: “Brazil warned of the high price the international community would pay for the right of veto. That original defect in the UN Charter gave the great powers the privilege of foolishness. To that original sin is now added a profound crisis of leadership.” The picture he describes has a number: “2025 recorded the largest number of armed conflicts since the Second World War.” And the way out appears as an explicit choice, in three pairs: “multilateralism or unilateralism; democracy or extremism; sovereignty or subordination.” The sentence that sums up the method closes the passage, inverting Clausewitz: “war […] is the total failure of politics.”
Latin America comes next, and it is where the Monroe Doctrine has an address. “In Latin America and the Caribbean, geographic proximity to the world’s largest military power is inescapable. Especially in a context of resurgent hegemonic temptations. Brazil does not fit in anybody’s backyard.” The speech names the instrument: “the division of the world into zones of influence and neocolonial ventures for strategic resources are anachronistic gestures.” And it names the two countries the offensive has already reached: “the Venezuelan people deserve to define their own destiny” and, on Cuba, “the world watches in dismay the collective punishment imposed on 10 million people by an illegal economic embargo and energy siege.” That energy siege is the same one that blacked out the island eight times in 2026.
On the use of force, the passage answers the Shield of the Americas without denying the problem it invokes. “People are tired of violence. But we will not outsource the responsibility of defending our borders and guaranteeing the population the right to live without fear. We do not need aircraft carriers watching our waters. We need cooperation to stem the flow of weapons and money that feeds crime. This is the spirit of the proposal I delivered personally to the President of the United States.” The final sentence is the key to the reading: the Brazilian government does not dispute the existence of organised crime, but the jurisdiction over it.
Trade and technology appear in the same movement. “The pillars of multilateralism are being eroded. The World Trade Organization is on life support. When governments capitulate before those who use tariffs as weapons of coercion and blackmail, the consequences are nefarious.” On what this piece treats as digital colonialism, the speech is specific: “a handful of techno-oligarchs want to revive a version of digital neoliberalism, without rules or transparency”, and the country “will not give in to pressure from multinationals that want to privatise our PIX, a public and free payments infrastructure”. The answer to the race for critical minerals and rare earths follows the same logic of reciprocity: “access to our minerals will have as a mandatory counterpart the generation of value in our territory, the transfer of technology and the supply of strategic national sectors.”
Gaza enters as a legal accusation, not a lament. “Generations of Palestinians will carry the pain and trauma left by the genocide carried out by the Netanyahu government against women and children in Gaza,” he said, adding that “pursuing the International Criminal Court and its members encourages these crimes to go unpunished”, and citing UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who “cannot be silenced for telling the truth”. The war against Iran appears in the same passage, through its economic effect: “the Strait of Hormuz has become a trench of the war, when it should remain a vital passage for international trade.”
The closing of the speech is what ties this piece to the Brazilian calendar, and for that reason it runs in full below. “On the fourth of October, millions of Brazilians will go to the polls to define their destiny. They will not merely elect the president of the Republic, state governors and representatives of the Legislative branch. They will decide between democracy and denialism. Whether Brazil will advance towards a future of more opportunities or return to a past of exclusion.” After saying that “we know that some abuse that freedom to associate themselves with foreign interests contrary to the country”, he closes: “under the attentive gaze of a plural citizenry and a free press, we will not allow the enemies of democracy, internal and external, to assault the popular will. Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians.”
The text denounces, through different formulations, mechanisms of tutelage, encroachment on strategic resources, electoral interference, tariff pressure and regulatory harassment against the country’s digital infrastructure. The passage “it is possible to put the poor in the budget and make the rich pay their share” presents that dynamic as the result of a political choice, rather than an inevitable consequence of economic circumstances. The statement “this is not recolonising the Global South” makes explicit that the speech itself acknowledges a dispute over the autonomy of Global South countries, even as it denies that its aim is recolonisation. The remaining formulations reinforce that reading by pointing to concrete forms of intervention — over resources, electoral processes, trade and infrastructure — that go beyond the field of simple cooperation between states.
We do not need aircraft carriers watching our waters.
The domestic link
The external offensive has domestic partners, and that is the link Lula attacks when he speaks of enemies “internal and external”. The Bolsonaro family is no extra in this story: it is the Brazilian side of an articulation that has already been partly judged, and which now presents itself as an alternative government.
The patriarch is in prison. The Supreme Federal Court (STF) convicted Jair Bolsonaro, in Criminal Action (AP) 2668, to 27 years and three months in a closed regime for armed criminal organisation, violent abolition of the rule of law, coup d’état, qualified damage and deterioration of listed heritage, with the sentence in execution since 25 November 2025. On 24 March 2026, Justice Alexandre de Moraes granted him humanitarian house arrest for 90 days, for treatment of aspiration bronchopneumonia, and on 3 July extended it indefinitely. On 17 July, after Bolsonaro wrote a letter of support for his son’s candidacy that circulated on social media, Moraes banned visits for political or electoral purposes until the end of the October election.
The eldest son has already been convicted over the external side of that articulation. The Chamber’s governing board revoked Eduardo Bolsonaro’s mandate on 18 December 2025, and the STF’s First Panel convicted him on 16 June 2026 to four years and two months in a semi-open regime for coercion in the course of proceedings, for having lobbied in the United States for pressure and sanctions against justices of the Court, which also made him ineligible. On 18 September, the First Panel unanimously rejected the defence’s appeal, and Moraes set out the rule in one sentence: “it is not the job of a Brazilian federal deputy to lobby abroad against his own country”.
The lobbying, however, did not stop with the conviction. On 16 and 17 September 2026, Eduardo Bolsonaro and businessman Paulo Figueiredo met in Washington with members of the White House and the State Department to request the resumption of Global Magnitsky Act sanctions against Moraes and their extension to justices Flávio Dino and Gilmar Mendes. On 15 September he had written that “the nation will celebrate” any US sanctions against STF justices. And on 17 September he went beyond asking for sanctions: he said that if the justices “understand that Flávio’s election is an act of golpismo”, the United States could refuse to recognise the Brazilian result.
On 22 June 2026, at an event held by the National Confederation of Industry in Brasília, Flávio Bolsonaro said that “you cannot constantly provoke the world’s largest democracy” and that “Brazil cannot live in conflict with the United States”, the same interview in which he said “the Supreme Court today looks more like a police station than a constitutional court”. On 7 July he went to Washington to testify at a public hearing of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) on the investigation that produced the tariffs, positioning himself as an interlocutor of the US government. A day earlier he had accused Lula of using sovereignty as a “false narrative” to favour the higher tariff. On 15 September his electoral broadcast, recorded in the format of a presidential address, dealt with the crisis at the STF and said the government had “divided power” with part of the Court, creating “institutional imbalance”; the senator is formally under investigation by the Federal Police (PF) over his role in the case.
The declared target of that articulation is the Supreme Federal Court. As of 21 September 2026, Congress had accumulated at least 84 constitutional amendment proposals (PECs) changing the Court, 64 in the Chamber of Deputies and 20 in the Senate, dealing with appointment rules, minimum age, term length, composition and external oversight. Among those that have moved, PEC 8/2021 limits single-justice rulings and PEC 28/2024 would let Congress suspend a Supreme Court decision by two-thirds of each house. Law 15.402/2026, which reduces sentences for those convicted over the 8 January 2023 attacks, was promulgated on 8 May 2026 after the presidential veto was overridden, and its application was suspended by Moraes on 9 May pending a ruling on the merits. On 11 May 2026, the leader of the Liberal Party (PL) in the Chamber filed the amnesty PEC, which pardons “those who participated, directly or indirectly” in the attacks. A tally released by Moraes’s office on 29 April 2026 counted 1,402 people convicted over the 8 January 2023 attacks, including prison terms, alternative sentences and non-prosecution agreements.
On 15 September, a Supreme Court plenary session on messages attributed to Moraes lasted more than seven hours and ended without a decision, with a partial score of 4 to 3. The ruling that may define the reach of the amnesty and of the sentencing law is the same one Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign turned into a campaign theme.
What the election decides
The calendar pushes all of this into the ballot box. The first round is on 4 October 2026 and the runoff, where needed, on 25 October, under Resolution 23.751 of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). The Datafolha series shows the distance between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro falling from 10 points in June to 8 in July, 6 in August, 5 in early September and 3 on 17 September 2026, when the poll put them at 39% to 36%, a statistical tie within the two-point margin, with the runoff at 46% to 44% and rejection tied at 47% for both. Quaest recorded on 21 September the first statistical tie in the first round, 37% to 33%, and a Flávio lead in the runoff, 42% to 41%. BTG/Nexus, on the same day, had 40% to 37% and 46% to 45%. UOL’s aggregator had 38.8% to 34.4% and 44.3% to 44.1% in the runoff.
The Senate is the other number, and it is where the post-electoral picture is already drawn. Of 81 seats, 54 are up for election, and the turnover could reach 63 because nine senators mid-term are running for executive office and opening the way for alternates. In all, 314 candidates are running for the seats. In the Federal District, Michelle Bolsonaro leads the race for the two seats with 22.2%. In Santa Catarina, Carlos Bolsonaro stands at 16% and is tied for the lead within the margin of error.
This is where the two ends meet, and this is where the piece earns its title. The offensive Lula described from the rostrum does not end in the Caribbean or in Hormuz: it has a declared electoral address, said out loud in Washington by one of the former president’s sons, and an institutional instrument moving through Congress, namely the 84 proposals that reshape the Supreme Court, the law that cut sentences and the amnesty awaiting a vote. If the Senate renews two-thirds of its seats and the Court is reconfigured, Brazil’s answer to the offensive stops depending on the speech of whoever holds the rostrum and starts depending on whoever controls the committees. The question the week in New York leaves open is this one: who administers, after 4 October 2026, the answer Lula formulated on behalf of the country. The speech set the position, and the ballot box decides whether it will have a government. Fragility is part of the datum: the same text that drew the front line was delivered by a candidate locked in a statistical tie, in a country where most of Congress votes against his government.