When Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lands in Washington and walks into the White House on Thursday, he will carry with him a briefcase of valuables that no other Latin American leader meeting Trump this year has possessed.
The South American country holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth elements — after China. The EU-Mercosur trade deal took effect on May 1, giving Brazil a functioning alternative to the U.S. trade relationship for the first time in decades. The PCC and Comando Vermelho — Brazil’s two most powerful criminal networks — remain undesignated by the U.S. as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and the designation decision rests entirely with Washington.
The October presidential election gives Lula a domestic political incentive to produce visible results from Thursday’s meeting. And Lula himself has spent the past four months being one of the loudest left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere — calling Trump’s Cuba embargo “a global disgrace,” opposing military intervention, and warning publicly that Washington risks acting like an “emperor of the world.”
Brazil’s Vice President Geraldo Alckmin confirmed the Lula-Trump visit Monday, expressing confidence that the meeting could strengthen what he described as a positive rapport between the two leaders.
“I hope this good understanding that has developed between President Lula and President Trump can be further strengthened for the benefit of both great countries, two great Western democracies,” Alckmin said.
The diplomatic language is careful. The stakes beneath it are not.
What Is Actually on the Table
The confirmed agenda covers five substantive areas — each of which carries implications that extend well beyond the bilateral relationship.
Rare earths and strategic minerals are the agenda items that Washington cares most about. Brazil holds the world’s second-largest reserves of rare earth elements after China — minerals essential to electric vehicles, advanced weapons systems, semiconductors, and the energy transition that both governments are navigating.
The United States is Brazil’s leading foreign investor and its third-largest trading partner after China and the European Union. Whatever minerals agreement emerges from Thursday’s meeting is directly connected to the counter-China strategy Sociedad Media reported on Tuesday — Washington pressing Latin American governments to source minerals away from Beijing.
A Brazil-U.S. critical minerals deal would be the most significant concrete deliverable of the Donroe Doctrine’s economic diplomacy to date.
The FTO designation is the agenda item that Lula cares most about. The Brazilian government plans to discuss cooperation on organized crime — seeking to pre-empt potential moves by the Trump administration to designate the PCC and Comando Vermelho as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a step that could trigger stricter U.S. enforcement action against Brazilian criminal networks operating in the United States and potentially open the door to unilateral U.S. military operations in Brazil.
The DESARMA program — the real-time intelligence sharing initiative between Brazil’s Federal Revenue Service and U.S. Customs that Sociedad Media reported on Tuesday — is Lula’s primary evidence that security cooperation is already happening without the FTO designation. Whether Trump accepts that evidence as sufficient is the question that Thursday’s meeting needs to answer.
The tariff issue also remains unresolved.
The Trump administration imposed higher tariffs on Brazilian goods in 2025, citing the political persecution of Bolsonaro after his conviction for the 2022 coup attempt. Months later, Trump rolled back some tariffs as ties improved, citing positive personal chemistry between the two leaders. The remaining tariff framework — and whether a broader trade accommodation is achievable given that the EU-Mercosur deal now gives Brazil an alternative — is the economic dimension of a meeting that is simultaneously about security, minerals, and political survival.
The Ramagem fallout is the most recent diplomatic irritant. The U.S. expelled a Brazilian federal police liaison stationed in Miami in April, accusing him of attempting to bypass formal extradition procedures linked to the detention of former federal deputy Alexandre Ramagem by ICE. Both governments retaliated by pulling credentials from each other’s officials before agreeing to dialogue.
Whether that episode is formally resolved on Thursday — or whether it continues to sit as an unaddressed grievance — will signal the depth of the bilateral reset both governments are claiming to pursue.
Cuba and Iran are the ideological fault lines that neither government has found a way to bridge. Lula has described the U.S. embargo on Cuba as a “global disgrace” and has opposed any form of military intervention on the island. Lula also criticized U.S. conduct in the Iran war, arguing Washington risks overstepping by relying on military and economic power to dictate global rules without respecting other nations’ sovereignty.
In an interview with El País, Lula said Trump “has no right to wake up in the morning and threaten a country.” Those positions have not changed. Thursday’s meeting will not resolve them. But whether they are explicitly raised or papered over in the interest of progress on minerals and FTO designation will determine how honest the bilateral reset actually is.
The EU-Mercosur Wildcard
The single most underreported dimension of Thursday’s meeting is the trade framework that took effect four days ago.
The EU-Mercosur trade deal entered into force on May 1 — the first time in Brazil’s modern history that the country has had a functioning free trade alternative to its U.S. economic relationship. The deal directly competes with the U.S. relationship for Brazilian export priority.
The timing is not coincidental. Lula is flying to Washington four days after Brazil formally activated an alternative trade architecture — giving him genuine negotiating leverage that he did not have when the Trump-Lula summit was originally scheduled for March. Washington can no longer assume that Brazil has nowhere else to go. The EU-Mercosur deal means that if the U.S. tariff framework is not improved and the FTO designation is not resolved, Brazil has a functional trade partner that does not come with the sovereignty complications of the Donroe Doctrine.
That leverage is real — and Thursday’s meeting is the first time Lula has been able to deploy it in person.
What It Means for the Rest of Latin America
The Trump-Lula summit is being watched from every capital in the hemisphere — not because of what it means for Brazil and the United States specifically, but because of what it signals about the Donroe Doctrine’s limits.
The doctrine has been remarkably effective at coercing and aligning smaller economies — Ecuador, Honduras, El Salvador, Paraguay have all entered the Shield of the Americas orbit with relatively limited resistance. The three large democracies that have pushed back — Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico — have done so precisely because they have the economic weight to absorb U.S. pressure without capitulating to it entirely.
If Lula emerges from Thursday’s meeting with a tariff improvement, a delayed FTO designation, and a minerals agreement — without accepting the Shield of the Americas framework, without endorsing the Cuba blockade, and without abandoning his public criticism of U.S. military overreach — it will demonstrate that the Donroe Doctrine has a negotiating track alongside its coercive one. That would be a genuinely significant signal for Colombia’s incoming president and for Mexico’s Sheinbaum, both of whom are managing their own versions of the same bilateral tension.
If the meeting produces nothing substantive — if the FTO designation remains active, the tariffs unchanged, and the minerals deal unsigned — it will confirm that the personal chemistry between Trump and Lula cannot overcome the structural divergence between a left-wing Brazilian government and a Washington administration that has publicly aligned with the Bolsonaro movement.
Domestically, the visit lands as Lula tries to reset his political narrative ahead of the October election, with polls showing his main rival Flávio Bolsonaro in a statistical tie in the runoff.
A successful Washington visit — photos with Trump, a minerals deal, the FTO threat delayed — is the kind of political deliverable that a president trailing in the polls needs. A failed visit, or worse, a summit that produces a joint statement while the FTO designation moves forward the following week, would hand the Bolsonaro campaign exactly the narrative it wants: that Lula cannot manage Washington, and that only a right-wing Brazilian government can deliver the bilateral relationship the country needs.
Thursday’s outcome will reverberate well beyond the Oval Office, and Sociedad Media will publish a full update with developments as they emerge.
