Democratic lawmakers accuse Trump administration of interference in Brazilian elections

Legislators sent letter to Marco Rubio saying US interference is weakening Brazil’s democratic institutions A group of 31 Democratic members of the US Congress has sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio , criticising the Trump administration over “an apparent effort to interfere with, and potentially undermine” Brazil ’s elections. Latin America’s largest country will hold the first round of its presidential election on 4 October, with polls showing a technical tie between the incumbent leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , and the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro . In the letter sent to Rubio on Thursday, 30 members of the House of Representatives and the senator Bernie Sanders listed a series of measures the US government took that they interpret as attempts to secure a victory for Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro . They wrote that those actions “reflect a broader and deeply troubling pattern of interference by the Trump administration in recent electoral processes across Latin America”, citing the recent midterm elections in Argentina and presidential elections in Honduras and Colombia .

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