No-one I know who has visited Brazil has ever complained about the trip. The people, beaches, food, nature, or eternal loves encountered on the beaches of Rio or the concert halls of São Paulo … Brazil never disappoints.
President Cyril Ramaphosa was visibly radiant (but for reasons different to us tourists) during his two-day state visit to Brazil last month, one I was fortunate enough to witness as part of the South African delegation to Brasilia.
The first delegation I took part in was in 2000, when then-president Thabo Mbeki visited Brazil. It must also have been a welcome respite for the Brazilian government. The weekend before Ramaphosa arrived, Brazilian foreign affairs minister Mauro Vieira had his hands full after the Trump administration labelled two huge, organised crime and drug smuggling syndicates, the First Command of the Capital and the Red Command, as terrorist organisations.
These two syndicates have been giving successive Brazilian governments headaches for decades — and they are usually behind the poor drug mules who get carted off flights arriving on our shores from Brazil. While it’s doubtful they are terrorist organisations, they are definitely criminals, so fighting them should be welcomed. But that’s not the issue.
The Trump administration has a problem with Brazil’s current left-wing Lula government, and imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro’s two sons, Eduardo and now presidential candidate Flavio, have Trump’s ear.
Brazilian right-wing pundits and fearmongers have spread misinformation for decades that Lula’s Worker’s Party is in cahoots with these two syndicates. That is not the case, but truth matters little for either the Trump administration or the Brazilian far right, as Ramaphosa himself experienced at the Oval Office when he visited the White House.
The fear is thus that the Trump administration will use this terrorist classification, tied with some baseless accusation about Lula being at best soft on them and at worst a member of them, as an excuse to support Flavio Bolsonaro’s campaign for president. Trump has previously used the misinformation told to him by the Bolsonaro family to sanction the judge who sent Jair to prison for 27 years.
It beggars belief that the current right-wing frontrunner for the Brazilian presidential elections set for October is the son of a prisoner. Some current polls even put Flavio Bolsonaro comfortably ahead of Lula, who will be running for a record fourth presidential term. One can already see, though, how the Brazilian right wing is singing from the same hymn sheet as the Trump campaign did (and still does).
It is outright saying that the 2022 elections Lula won were fraudulent and playing on Lula’s age (he is 80), just like Trump did with Biden, though Lula is visibly in better shape — physically and mentally — than Biden was in 2024. Jailed Jair Bolsonaro is being portrayed as a victim and political prisoner of an evil left-wing cabal that stole the election to further their communist agenda.
Every right-wing candidate for the 2026 elections makes it clear that amnesty will be given to Jair and to everyone imprisoned for the riots and mayhem that followed Lula’s inauguration in January 2023. Some rioters fled to Argentina, where they are claiming — and in some cases getting — asylum, but not based on an unfair trial or for destroying public buildings and heritage.
They now claim they were protesting against Brazil’s abortion laws, despite the mountains of evidence that they were in fact destroying Brasilia in the hope of overturning Lula’s victory. Abortion is, except in some well-defined cases, illegal in Brazil.
Flavio Bolsonaro recently appeared at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas, at which he all but offered Brazil on a plate to the US if he wins the 2026 election. He claims Brazil could replace China as the main source of rare earths to the US. That message would have been music to the Trump administration’s ears, and one can be certain Bolsonaro Jnr would make good on this promise.
So where does that leave the bilateral relationship between South Africa and Brazil? The current relationship is largely based on Ramaphosa’s and Lula’s similar political views, which broadly mean support for the rule of law, redress for past colonial injustices, trade among developing countries and advancing the rights of women, minorities, indigenous people and LGBTQ+ communities.
Yet little meaningful trade has taken place between our two countries since Thabo Mbeki’s visit in 2000. If Bolsonaro Jnr wins the election, Brazil will almost immediately turn towards the US and away from the Brics bloc.
For Brazilian businesses, regardless of their political viewpoints, this makes sense. The US is a far more lucrative market than South Africa, and in the 26 years that I have been actively promoting trade between Brazil and South Africa, having lived and worked in São Paulo and learnt Portuguese, the number of Brazilian and South African businesses that set up shop in our countries is still fewer than 30 (according to the South African Embassy in Brasilia).
Some big Brazilian and South African businesses are taking advantage of unmissable opportunities, and more will undoubtedly do so in the future, but we will probably never see the same level of interest from Brazilian companies as we have seen from European and even American companies.
South African companies often cite Brazil’s overly complex tax laws as a deterrent, while Brazilians complain about the practical difficulties of complying with BEE, as reasons putting them off doing business with each other. Yet European and North American companies face the same realities, and those don’t seem to put them off.
If Lula wins, we can at least expect that he will keep on encouraging business to come to South Africa and Africa in general, and one can expect Ramaphosa to do the same. However, while not wanting to doubt Lula’s goodwill towards South Africa, Brazil has not really prioritised business with the country, as we were led to believe would be the case when South-South trade first became buzzwords in the 2000s. Just look at the lack of South African wines on Brazilian shelves, the result of punitive import taxes aimed to protect Argentine and Chilean vintages, as one example.
But a few things are clear and should influence South African policy decisions. Little progress has been made in the past quarter-century in promoting trade between South Africa and Brazil, with some notable exceptions, and this is unlikely to change. Things may even go into reverse if Bolsonaro Jnr wins the elections. The ideals of diminishing our dependence on trade with Europe and North America in favour of trade among developing countries have similarly not yielded the results we hoped for.
It may well be time that, while not giving up on fellow developing countries, we start bolstering intra-African trade and promoting trade with countries that uphold the rule of law, equality and social justice (read Europe) rather than countries led by right-wing ideologues for whom the biggest threat seems to be trans people and universal healthcare.
Another Bolsonaro administration will almost certainly result in a far colder reception for Ramaphosa in Brasilia, and we should start hedging our bets against such a possibility.
• Myburgh is an attorney practising in Johannesburg and São Paulo.
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