Netochka Nezvanova, menos 3%

In 2019, the Western media told you Evo Morales was ousted by a "pro-democracy uprising" because he "stole an election." Let’s look at the material reality of what the empire actually did to Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. Evo’s unforgivable sin was not electoral fraud. It was lithium. Bolivia sits on the largest lithium reserves on earth—the exact mineral Silicon Valley and the US military-industrial complex desperately need to build electric vehicle batteries and advanced weaponry. For 500 years, the imperial playbook in Latin America was simple: extract the raw materials for pennies, leave the locals in poverty, and sell the finished products back to them at a massive markup. Evo said no. He nationalized the country's natural gas and mining sectors. He lifted millions of Indigenous people out of extreme poverty. And when it came to lithium, he refused to let US corporations strip-mine it and export it raw. He demanded that Bolivia build its own battery factories, partnering with whoever offered the best technology transfer for the Bolivian people. So the empire deployed its 21st-century hybrid war toolkit. The US-backed Organization of American States (OAS) published a highly irregular report claiming there were "irregularities" in the election. Mainstream media outlets instantly screamed "fraud," ignoring the fact that independent researchers from MIT later mathematically debunked the OAS claims, proving there was no statistical evidence of a stolen election. But the empire didn't need evidence. It needed a pretext. The Bolivian military, taking cues from Washington, forced Evo onto a plane to Mexico. They installed an uneased interim president who marched into the presidential palace holding a giant Bible, declaring to the cameras: "God has returned to this house." Her security forces immediately turned their weapons on the Indigenous working class, massacring dozens of unarmed protesters in the streets of Sacaba and Senkata. And then, the imperial center got sloppy. Months later, when a user on Twitter pointed out that the US orchestrated the coup to secure Bolivia's lithium for the electric vehicle market, Elon Musk—the ultimate face of the Western tech elite—replied with a stunning confession: "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." They didn't overthrow Evo Morales to save democracy. They overthrew him to secure the supply chain for Tesla. You can wave a Bible in the presidential palace. You can massacre the Indigenous working class in the streets. But you cannot wash the blood off the batteries.

The Western media is already trying to rewrite the story of Lula’s victory. They want you to believe it was a triumph of broad democratic coalitions and institutional resilience. But the material reality on the ground tells a completely different story. Three weeks before the election, Lula was trailing in the polls. The algorithms were rigged against him. The cosmopolitan bourgeoisie that backed him in 2022 had abandoned him. So Lula stopped talking about abstract democracy and started talking about survival. He promised to cut the workweek from 44 to 40 hours. He targeted the crushing cost of public transport. He expanded the social wage. He stopped preaching to the liberal elites and started speaking directly to the factory floor and the favelas. And when the far-right took a two-point lead after the first round, the working class did what the working class always does when the system tries to erase them. They took the streets. The mobilizations on Avenida Paulista and across Brazil were the largest spontaneous left-wing uprisings in the country's history. This was not a campaign managed by political consultants. It was an organic explosion of the popular classes physically dragging their candidate across the finish line. This changes the entire calculus of Lula's fourth term. In 2022, he owed his victory to a broad coalition of elites who just wanted stability. In 2026, he owes his survival entirely to the streets. The empire threw tariffs, censorship, and disinformation at him, thinking the working class was too atomized to fight back. They forgot that when you push a population to the brink, they do not just vote. They mobilize. Lula does not owe this mandate to the algorithms, the media, or the bourgeoisie. He owes it to the workers who built the country. And the streets always collect their debts.