The Future of BRICS, and Why It Should Become an Alliance

13 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

BRICS is not yet an alliance, because some of its nations are not yet ready to break away from dependence upon the U.S. Especially Brazil (the “B” in the original BRICS) might never be ready to do that, because it’s in the Western Hemisphere, which the U.S. regime is especially determined to keep in its orbit (allegedly because of the Monroe Doctrine, which was an 1823 American anti-imperialist doctrine that today’s imperialistic American Government falsely interprets as conveying and applying a U.S. right to control every nation in the Western Hemisphere).

BRAZIL’S PARTICIPATION IN BRICS IS COMPROMISED

Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, terminated in 2024 (by his veto) the possibility of Venezuela becoming a candidate (BRICS “Partner”) for membership allegedly because  of the questionable democratic authenticity of Venezuela’s 2024 elections. But another (and unstated) reason was widely suspected to be Brazil’s heavy dependency upon the U.S. Government, which (until 3 January 2026, when the U.S. conquered Venezuela and took control over its oil company so that Venezuelans are now serfs of U.S. billionaires) had long been intensely hostile toward Venezuela’s Government, which now is another U.S. colony. Lula knows that this could happen to him, too. There are even precedents for it.

In 1964, there was a now-acknowledged (but long denied by the U.S. regime) U.S. coup that replaced Brazil’s freely elected progressive President João Goulart, who was opposed by Brazil’s aristocracy (or “oligarchs”) and installed a succession of fascist regimes which lasted for 21 years — a typical operation by the ‘anti-communist’ but actually imperialistic U.S. regime. America’s dictatorship by its own billionaires, thus imposed its own fascism upon the Brazilian people. When the coup occurred, the liberal-imperialist (Democratic Party) N.Y. Times headlined on 2 April 1964 propagandistically, “Washington Sympathetic To Brazilian Rebel Cause” (notice that the fascists were called ‘Rebels’ against supposedly ‘communists’). It said that the U.S. Government “was most concerned about the moves of pro‐Communist labor leaders, but doubted their capacity to cripple the country with a pro‐Goulart general strike. … Washington’s sympathy was with the rebels. … Mr. Goulart, having led Brazil to the brink of economic collapse, had begun to move toward the destruction of her political institutions as well. He was believed to be planning, with Communist labor, peasant and student support, to disband Congress and to declare a syndicalist, Socialist regime, perhaps as soon as May 1. His opponents, on the other hand, are thought to include many supporters of moderate and constitutional government as well as some rightists. … Presumably, the revolt in Brazil was among the topics discussed this morning in a ‘far‐ranging’ review of world affairs by the President, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and the Director of Central Intelligence, John A. McCone.” Hitler and Goebbels couldn’t have produced a better cover-story than that. This is American ‘democracy’ since Truman. Then on 5 April 1964, the NYT headlined “BRAZIL COUP AFFECTS WHOLE CONTINENT; Overthrow of Goulart Is Expected to Bolster the Moderates and Set Back the Communists”. Notice that progressivism is called ‘extreme’ and ‘communist’ and fascism is called ‘moderate’.

In 1954, there had been another U.S. coup against Brazil, terminating the progressive Presidency of Getúlio Vargas, but the U.S. regime still hasn’t released its crucial documents on that one, so, it still denies it. What we do know is that Vargas, who had led progressivism in Brazil ever since in 1930 leading Brazil’s anti-dictatorship revolution (which is called a ‘coup’ by the U.S. aristocracy), then led rewriting Brazil’s Constitution so that women could vote and including the creation of the Electoral Court, after which fraud ceased to be routine in Brazilian elections. Vargas was called by his supporters “father of the poor,” for his social policies. He was the longest-serving of all Brazilian Presidents. In a 27 August 1950 speech he said:

My adversaries continue to simultaneously label me “Father of the Poor” and “Father of the Rich.” As a public figure, however, I have never been partisan or extremist. Above all, I have sought to act justly and achieve the common good. Rich and poor are equally Brazilian. If to the former, many of whom were on the verge of insolvency that would worsen the situation of the disadvantaged classes and wage earners, I opened opportunities for recovery and facilitated credit, consolidating the foundations of agriculture and industry, I also did not abandon the workers. I defended them against the greed of the exploiters, and breaking through resistance that arose against my actions, I firmly and securely initiated labor legislation in Brazil.

He won that election. He was elected as Brazil’s President three times: on 3 October 1930, 17 July 1934, and finally 3 October 1950. But he was then trapped by agents of Brazil’s aristocracy (“oligarchs”), and committed suicide on 24 August 1954. In his last will and testament letter right before his suicide he wrote:

If simply resigning from the post to which I was elected by the people would allow me to live forgotten and peacefully on my homeland, I would gladly resign. But such a resignation would only give them [his enemies] more reason to persecute and humiliate me with even greater fury. They want to destroy me at any cost. I have become dangerous to the powerful of the day and to the privileged classes.

Old and weary, I chose to go and give an account to the Lord, not of crimes I did not commit, but of powerful interests I opposed, either because they were contrary to national interests, or because they ruthlessly exploited the poor and humble. 

To imagine that the CIA had no role in this, would beggar the belief even of idiots, but this is what ‘historians’ in the U.S. empire maintain, and I do not. Why doesn’t the U.S. regime open ALL of its relevant documents on this matter to the public? But even what it has released indicates the likelihood of CIA involvement. For example the CIA noted in its 24 August 1954 “Declassified in Part – Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/07/05” “TO: Deputy Director (Intelligence)” “SUBJECT: The Vargas Suicide and the New Brazilian President”: “The ‘resignation’ and suicide on 24 August of President Getúlio Vargas brings Vice President Joao Café Filho to the presidency. … Because of his background, it can be expected that the armed forces will keep a close watch on Café Filho and he will go along with the demands of the armed forces. The government in Brazil will continue to be conservative, anti-Communist and pro-United States.” He was approvingly alleging that the representatives of Brazil’s and America’s oligarchs would be in control no matter what. So: what did the CIA “sanitize” out?

The second non-acknowledged U.S. coup in Brazil was, as Brian Mier, Bryan Pitts, Kathy Swart, Rafael R. Ioris, and Sean T. Mitchell, titled their September 2013 Latin American Perspectives journal article “The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup” stated in their summary or “Abstract”:

A comprehensive examination of the evidence available, contained in U.S. government statements, English-language media accounts, and hacked Telegram chats among Brazilian prosecutors, indicates that the United States was closely involved in the “long coup” that removed the left from power in Brazil in 2016 and secured the election of the far-right in 2018. Just as after Brazil’s U.S.-backed 1964 coup, this evidence has largely been ignored by U.S. scholars.

The article pointed out that “It should come as no surprise that U.S. media and many scholars have ignored (or applauded) U.S. involvement in the long coup. For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story; the second half involves justifying, minimizing, or denying U.S. involvement.” It noted: “Brazilian democracy was undermined by a politicized anticorruption campaign, that we call the ‘long coup’ … [and this] ‘anticorruption’ crusade and the long coup … enjoyed active U.S. support.” “Two unsigned articles, for instance, mislead readers into believing that Dilma Rousseff [Lula’s supporter and immediate successor] was impeached for corruption.” There was extensive “U.S. collaboration with national elites between 2009 and 2018 to damage the left under the aegis of anticorruption. Particularly considering the cloak of classification under which U.S. agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Justice operate and the short time that has passed since Rousseff was impeached, the evidence for U.S. involvement is overwhelming. And scholars in the United States have had virtually nothing to say about it.”

A July 19, 2017, speech by Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco at the Atlantic Council (Department of Justice, 2017a) … praised the cooperation between the Department of Justice and Brazil, citing the “extraordinary results” of collaborative investigations on FCPA cases involving Embraer, Rolls Royce, Braskem, and Odebrecht. Blanco also cited Lula’s conviction as a success of Brazil’s anticorruption campaign. Brasil Wire was among the first media outlets to break this bombshell revelation (Mier, 2017), and it led Lula’s defense team to file a motion to dismiss all Lava Jato charges because of illegal collaboration with a foreign government (Conjur, 2018). … On March 8, 2021, … the court reversed all convictions of Lula in response to an earlier motion filed by Lula’s defense team in November 2020 accusing the prosecution of illegal forum shopping (Falcão and Vivas, 2021). …

The role of the United States … has been widely acknowledged by Brazilian scholars (though not equally across social science disciplines), many of whom have not hesitated to call out the United States for its role in fostering the country’s economic and institutional crisis that started in the mid-2010s. …

Paradoxically, the U.S. scholars who have admitted U.S. involvement have been those who approve, mainly legal scholars. These scholars, most of whom do not speak Portuguese, assume that Brazil suffers from an “innate culture of corruption” (Tobolowsky, 2016: 385) whose remedy lies in emulating the Global North, above all, the United States, which one of them calls … “ethically minded.” …

The lawfare tactics used against Dilma and Lula resembled in many ways the destabilization of the early 1960s that culminated in the military coup of 1964.

The legal case against Lula that he was corrupt (and there wasn’t even that against Roussef) was called “Car Wash” but was totally hogwash.

And here is from the news two days ago:

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https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/09/11/2026/semafor-flagship-levers-of-hard-power

https://web.archive.org/web/20260912213826/https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/09/11/2026/semafor-flagship-levers-of-hard-power

https://archive.ph/FHKGh

11 September 2026

BRAZILIAN ELECTION TOO CLOSE TO CALL

Rightist candidate Flávio Bolsonaro surged in opinion polls weeks ahead of Brazil’s presidential election as incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faces corruption allegations against family members and perceived allies. The two had been locked into a virtual tie for much of the election cycle until earlier graft accusations against Bolsonaro tanked his odds. However similar allegations against Lula’s son as well as against a Supreme Court justice seen as close to Lula have erased the deficit. Should Bolsonaro emerge victorious, it would cement the rise of the right across Latin America and leave Mexico as the only major economy in the region still governed by a leftist leader.

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But what is right-wing politics — the aristocracy’s (the oligarchs’) politics — except corruption? Whereas the left can be corrupt, the right always is corrupt, because it is FOUNDED on “pay for play”: political participation depends upon how wealthy one is; the poor can’t play. In the conservative view, they shouldn’t even be allowed to vote. That CAN’T be an authentic democracy. And NO aristocracy ever is.

When Lula vetoed Venezuela’s becoming a candidate for BRICS membership, he was not thinking of BRICS as being inexorably a target of the U.S. and its colonies to be defeated and ultimately absorbed into the empire. He had been a co-fonder of BRICS but still doesn’t know that either the empire will continue to grow, or else BRICS (or perhaps a replacement of it) will continue to grow, until one or the other of them will win. This will inevitably be a defeat of one by the other. Co-existence between these two sides is ultimately impossible. Lula thus weakened Venezuela, which soon thereafter joined the U.S. empire. Venezuela capitulated — despite having done everything it could on its own, to avoid that. Now Lula will have to try to find a permanent way for Brazil to avoid the fate that he had helped consign Venezuela to. The ONLY permanent way would be for BRICS to become a real alliance, against the empire —against  the enemy of all of them.

INDIA’S PARTICIPATION IN BRICS MIGHT ALSO BECOME COMPROMISED

On this September 11th, Bloomberg News posted an excellent 10-minute video, titled “Why India Won’t Break Up with Russia”, which makes clear how and why India — the “I” in the original BRICS — is ALSO compromised by heavy reliance upon the U.S. Government.

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MY COMMENTS:

Whereas I suspect that Brazil will be forced by the U.S. regime to quit BRICS (and that it will happen very soon if on October 4th the fascist Bolsonaro family again wins the Presidency), I think that India won’t. It seems to me that the world is becoming bifurcated by the U.S. empire, between its own Western-Hemisphere-based realm, versus the rest of the world, which will be led by Russia and China. The positions of both Japan and South Korea will be especially difficult for the same reason that the position of Brazil now is — isolation far from the leadership of its short-term most advantageous side, Brazil being far from Asia, and India being far from the Western Hemisphere.

The U.S. Government is forcing this bifurcation; all other national Governments are trying to adapt to it as well as they can. The BRICS organization should accept no new member that’s unwilling to ultimately cease trading with the U.S., because the U.S. is already demanding tribute from them all. It is addicted to “It’ll be either us or them — Choose!” That has become the American Way. All BRICS members or applicants should be realistic about this. The U.S. Government is determined for BRICS to fail. BRICS will fail if it remains unrealistic. And if BRICS will fail, then the U.S. Government will succeed.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.