Michael Paarlberg

Lula is certainly the defining political figure of his era, but it isn’t very sustainable for Brazil’s left to have its electoral fortunes, and access to power, be entirely dependent on a singularly charismatic politician who is 80 years old.

Lula sees himself an active player in Latin American integration. But due to the continent’s right wing turn, and their leaders’ suspicion of “globalism,” there will be less opportunity for regionwide coordination, I told @aljazeera.com as the votes came in.

In his fourth term, I expect Lula to keep a distance from Washington and to maintain closer relations with China, the EU and Africa, and continue to position Brazil as a leader of the global South, I told @politico.com

“Lula has shown that he still is the dominant political figure of his era, but he is weaker,” I tell @reuters.com, given a lack of ideological allies in Congress and the rest of the hemisphere, plus inflation and growing debt.

“Lula faces a very different political environment from the one that existed when he first took office, during the pink tide. Back then, he had several regional allies and could play both sides to Brazil’s advantage,” I tell @cnn.com

Democrats should realize that what Meta did in Brazil, they and other social media companies will do in the US in 2028 unless they are made to understand they will face criminal penalties for it

I hope we in the US notice that Brazil, a country of 213 million with a landmass larger than the continental US that also has a federal presidential system, managed to count its votes efficiently in just a couple of hours.

It's not the economy, stupid: some comments on the Brazil election from my interview with @perrybaconjr.bsky.social for @newrepublic.com

73% of your campaign donations go to consultants and vendors; only 13% goes toward ads. This is 4x the cut consultants made 20 years ago. Important work by @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social and @adambonica.bsky.social on the capture of the Democratic Party by consultants.

Blatantly illegal

We were told this was all about drug traffickers in boats

Veja o Flávio se envolvendo com a ideologia de gênero

He walked into that one

In Brazil, there is evidence that Meta suppressed pro-Lula accounts in favor of Flavio Bolsonaro ahead of next week's election (Brazil is the world's top user of Whatsapp). Underscoring why regulating social media over electoral interference is in the mutual interest of the US and other countries.

What’s happening in Venezuela is basically Odebrecht 2, except instead of one big construction company doing bribery and procurement fraud, it’s a hundred little MAGA grifters who hung out at Mar-a-Lago and the Kennedy Center www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/u...

Read @mpaarlberg.bsky.social's Q&A with the International Policy Journal on Brazil's election internationalpolicy.org/publications...

Oops looks like half of all the people I arrested for being gangster terrorists and threw in torture dungeons without trial were wrongfully accused. My bad.

Why did Lula do so poorly in Brazil’s election — and what does it mean for the global contest between right and left? New episode of @orderfromashes.bsky.social with @mpaarlberg.bsky.social Nara Roberta Silva

I discuss Brazil’s vibes-based election and lessons for the US with @perrybaconjr.bsky.social for @newrepublic.com newrepublic.substack.com/p/what-lulas...

Latin America right now has two Palestinian presidents who are right wing and pro-Israel, Asfura 🇭🇳 and Bukele 🇸🇻

It’s kind of funny that political scientists need to be reminded that actually describing how politics works is a useful endeavor, but here we are www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

One of the downsides of being a crime scholar is that this is the kind of image you get when you google your name

Ecuador had a president named Lenin Moreno. He was a conservative.

Nearly all of those arrested by Bukele’s government have not been convicted of anything, but instead held in indefinite pretrial detention. Now their only day in court will be mass trials. The State of Exception is not an anti-gang measure, it is an anti-due process measure.

After a strong showing in the first round, Brazil seems likely to elect Flávio Bolsonaro, son of Jair, over incumbent Lula, despite Lula's success in delivering material results to Brazilians. @mpaarlberg.bsky.social explains why to @atherton.bsky.social internationalpolicy.org/publications...

If Arab diaspora churches are like Korean diaspora churches, I bet they have so much beef with the second Arabic-speaking Lutheran parish on Staten Island

"We're not as corrupt as our opponents" is not a winning message for center-left parties, even if it's technically true!

The US is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture. It was signed by Reagan and ratified and enacted into the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act, which prohibits refoulement, meaning this is illegal under US law.

Half of the new assistant professor job postings in the social sciences are looking for someone who researches AI. Sending the message that, to even have a shot at landing a TT job, you have to have correctly predicted what will be hot 5-7 years from when you started grad school.

This is an point for students or anyone using AI tools to apply for jobs or fellowships: The purpose of an application is to stand out from other applicants. The purpose of AI is to be generic. You’re not being unique or memorable. You’re being the opposite. blekhman.substack.com/p/why-i-am-n...

China is already the top trade partner for most of S. America. But polls show, despite our imperialist legacy, most people throughout Latin America feel closer to the US than to China, and don't like how China does business. It's a tremendous own goal by Trump to get to this point.

As Brazil votes in the first round election today, it's striking how no amount of scandal or controversy - not the sports betting ban, Moraes probe, or Santini sex parties - is changing voters' minds, if the polls are accurate. The October surprise is that no one is surprised.

Good analysis by Lili Arrieta, a onetime elections official for the Salvadoran government, on the Bukele model of purging and weaponizing government institutions www.populismstudies.org/the-bukele-m...

This isn’t even imperialism, it’s mercantilism.

These are called extraordinary renditions

I recently read Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which details the intel failures leading to 9/11, and Steve Coll’s Directorate S, which details the failures of the war in Afghanistan, and it’s striking how many US government officials who appear in the first book keep their jobs in the second.

The ending of TPS is a stark reminder that the goal of this administration is not simply deporting “illegals,” but rather turning legal immigrants into “illegals,” thus forcing them from stable productive lives and into the shadows.

In 2016, an evangelical conservative friend said about Trump, "He's not one of us but he'll get things done for us." One can interpret this as proof that right wing voters are hypocrites, or that they are better at thinking of politicians instrumentally as means to an end.

Ever heard of “compulsory union membership” or think you can sue for unjust dismissal? If you’re in Richmond, VA, come by Gallery 5 on Tuesday. I’m giving a public talk on common myths about unions and labor law in the US.

Wise words on the Economic Policy Institute from my former colleague there, Jared Bernstein econjared.substack.com/p/happy-labo...

For the Trump administration, it is preferable to be partnered with a nominally left wing government that’s a dictatorship than a likely right wing government that’s a democracy, because the latter would be accountable to its citizens and the former is accountable only to Trump.

I was on NPR’s Morning Edition today, talking about Rubio’s trip to Latin America, the boat strikes, and how some of the US’s main partners in the war on drugs in the region are tied to the drug trade themselves.

Say hi if you’re in Boston for APSA!

We think of state capture as bad because it allows corrupt actors to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. But it can also be used to settle petty personal scores, which is bad even if you have no stake in this particular beef.

I seem to remember being told this was all about Tren de Aragua, Cartel de los Soles, and narco dictators. Looks like over 200 fishermen had to be killed so Trump’s cronies could get an oil deal.