The arrival of Flávio Bolsonaro in the United States is reminiscent of the Gran Sasso raid, and it shows us exactly how the Trump administration sees the world in the days leading up to the US midterm elections — and hints at their plans for Canada.
This year started with a military invasion of Venezuela by the United States to arrest the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, on an assortment of drug-related charges, to which they added torture earlier this month. He and his wife, Celia Flores, who is also facing US charges, have been in a Brooklyn, New York jail since January.
It is unlikely that any of that happened because of Maduro’s behaviour on human rights as president. Immediately after the attack, the United States took control of Venezuela’s oil industry. It was a resource play, not a moral one.
16 days after Trump won the 2024 election, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for being:
Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.
Since then, he has voluntarily visited the United States at least eight times, most recently speaking at the United Nations just 12 kilometres away from Maduro’s jail cell — without ever being arrested.
This week, Flávio Bolsonaro lost his bid for the presidency of Brazil and was immediately ordered to surrender his passport pending charges relating to corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion. Those investigations had been put on hold pending the election. His father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, has been in prison since he attempted a January 6th copycat coup after losing his own bid for re-election, settling in for a 27 year sentence.
After losing, Bolsonaro claimed to be the president-elect with the standard far right talking points about any election they cannot win being stolen. Rather than turning his passport in, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio granted him a US visa amid a US government-organised escape via Argentina, with Bolsonaro now enjoying asylum in Miami.
There is no reason for the United States to have extracted Bolsonaro without a plan to restore him to power as their own puppet should the opportunity arise.
On September 12th, 1943, Adolf Hitler sent a commando unit to extract recently deposed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from his own detention at Gran Sasso d’Italia. He was restored to power as a puppet of the Nazi government two weeks later until he was deposed and executed in the final days of the war in Europe a year and a half later.
The contrast between the three leaders is sharp. The United States attacked Venezuela to capture and arrest its leader on domestic American charges. They ignored an international arrest warrant for their ally Benjamin Netanyahu. Then they exfiltrated their defeated ally from Brazil for future use in spite of facing domestic justice, which is likely to offer Netanyahu some comfort if he is unable to hold power after this week’s ambiguous Israeli election results.
While the Americans have been warning Canadians not to interfere in the mid-terms, they have also been planting the seeds for a narrative that, if the Republicans widely lose the mid-terms, it will have been Canada’s fault.
To what end?
The Republicans are set to lose this week’s midterms. If polls and the anecdotal evidence of Trump and his allies being no longer able to fill even small rooms, it will be an absolute rout. Even the millions of dollars oligarchs are putting into their campaigns may not be enough to save them at the ballot box, nor again the massive nationwide efforts at gerrymandering and voter suppression. Whatever the results, they will likely understate the scale of Americans’ anger.
In anticipation, they are preemptively setting up a narrative that Canada is responsible for election interference so spectacular that it directly affected the outcome. There is a reason for this. We have seen the examples from Venezuela, Israel, and Brazil, not to mention Iran, and are meant to take them as warnings.
Trump has already shown that he will protect his allies at all costs and invade foreign countries on false pretence if they have something he wants. He has made no secret of his desire to annex Canada, having made that one of his leading causes since reclaiming the White House nearly two years ago.
He wants our resources and our land, does not respect our sovereignty, and does not believe anyone else will come to our defence. When he loses Tuesday’s elections, he will need someone to blame and he has been setting up Canada as the enemy. His violent attempts to hold onto power could well be directed north.
Why else tell the world — in advance — that his defeat is our fault?
The good news, though, is, in spite of the existential danger he poses, his approach is so transparent and ham-fisted as to become the parody of itself predicted by Michael Moore’s 1995 satire, Canadian Bacon. It was not meant to be a documentary!