On Sunday, June 21, tough-on-crime far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella claimed a narrow victory in Colombia’s election, winning 49.7 percent of the vote against the left-wing Iván Cepeda’s 48.7 percent. The nation appears ready to turn its back on the only leftist administration it has arguably ever elected. This marks the latest lurch rightward in a wave sweeping across Latin America, boosting Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, and, this month, the apparent victor in Peru, Keiko Fujimori — daughter of the dictator Alberto Fujimori.

For months it has looked as though the same wave would break over Brazil too, which chooses its leader in October. Running against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son and political heir of the imprisoned former president, Jair Bolsonaro, eighty-year-old Workers’ Party incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has watched a once-commanding lead drain away: from double digits late in 2025 to 7 points, then 5, then a dead heat by March. In April, a DataFolha survey put Flávio narrowly ahead for the first time.

But over the past month, Lula’s fortunes have turned, in no small part because of a cluster of clumsy interventions from Washington, which has sought to exercise greater influence in Latin America. On May 28, two days after the Bolsonaro brothers were received at the White House, the State Department moved to brand Brazil’s two largest criminal organizations, the Primeiro Comando da Capital and the Comando Vermelho, as “foreign terrorist organizations,” the same designation used to justify dozens of extrajudicial strikes on alleged Venezuelan and Colombian drug traffickers in the Caribbean. By overriding the Brazilian state on a matter of its own internal security, and doing so at the express request of the incumbent’s chief electoral rival, Washington handed Lula the grounds to reprise a powerful sovereignty-based campaign.