Brazil’s neck-and-neck election offers test for growing pro-Trump Latin American bloc

Sunday’s poll pits the leftist incumbent Lula against the son of a former far-right president convicted of staging a coup

• ‘No one disrespects Our Lady’: fears for Brazil’s patron saint grip country ahead of election

Shortly after his controversial speech to the United Nations general assembly in September, Donald Trump gathered a dozen like-minded Latin American leaders and boasted that rightwing candidates had won all seven presidential elections held in the region since he began his second term.

“Everybody I’ve endorsed has won,” the US president said in New York to most of the leaders of the Shield of the Americas, an anti-drug cartel coalition of 15 countries governed by the right or far right.