After the Pink Tide: Introduction

On November 1, 2018, Trump's bellicose National Security Advisor John Bolton gave a speech in Miami where he identified Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua as a "Troika of Tyranny" and the "genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere." At the same time, he singled out Iván Duque of Colombia and Brazil's president-elect, the neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, as "like-minded leaders." Bolsonaro, elected with 55 percent of the vote on October 28, has promised to rid the country of "reds" and has argued that the problem with Brazil's military dictatorship was that it only tortured, rather than killed, its political opponents. An anonymous official in Duque's government told a Brazilian newspaper that if Bolsonaro or Trump were to invade Venezuela, then Colombia would back them up, raising the possibility of a "nationalist international."