Kick out Chinese companies. Free right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro from jail. Scrap tariffs on American ethanol.
President Trump has bombarded Brazil with a list of demands as Washington seeks to assert its influence across Latin America.
However, few things have provoked more outrage here than Trump's attack on PIX, the country's beloved instant-payment system that Washington cited as a key justification for its decision this week to impose a 25% tariff on many Brazilian goods.
From coconut sellers to billionaires, more than 90% of Brazilian adults -- more than 140 million people -- regularly use PIX, a government-run program that allows users to transfer money in seconds on cellphones at no cost. In less than six years since its creation, PIX now handles more transactions in Latin America's biggest economy than credit and debit cards combined.
Marcos Rosa, an evangelical pastor who spends his days visiting remote Amazonian villages, said PIX hasn't only made payments easier but also shrunk distances across the world's biggest rainforest.
"Everything happens much more quickly," he said, explaining how PIX and satellite internet mean villagers no longer spend days on the river to buy a bag of rice.
Instead, they send a PIX payment to a store in the nearest town, which loads the goods onto a boat already heading upriver. "It's been a tremendous help," Rosa said.
The Trump administration disagrees. Washington said Wednesday that, as of next week, it would impose a 25% tariff on some 3,000 goods from Brazil. It is the first country hit with duties under the Trump administration's new strategy of using Section 301 of U.S. trade law to punish alleged unfair trade practices.
Among a host of grievances, including anticorruption enforcement and barriers to U.S. ethanol imports, Washington argues that PIX has become so ubiquitous in Brazil it unfairly disadvantages U.S. payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard. There is also growing concern in Washington that Brazil and other countries are seeking to reduce their dependence on the dollar.
The Trump administration says Brazil has tilted the market toward PIX in several ways, including by requiring financial institutions with more than 500,000 active accounts to offer it. Unlike state-backed PIX, private providers, many of them American, must also cover fraud prevention, technology and shareholder returns through fees, making it nearly impossible for them to compete.
Although the latest measure spared beef, coffee, orange juice and other major products the U.S. needs from Brazil, it still covers more than $11 billion of the country's exports, according to the American Chamber of Commerce for Brazil.
The tariffs follow a yearlong U.S. trade investigation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for failed negotiations to reach a settlement, writing on X that the leftist leader had "put his own ego ahead of making a deal."
Brazil's foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, called Rubio's comments "a rude and arrogant attack." Brazil vowed retaliatory measures.
Section 301 allows presidents to impose permanent duties over trade, but it has never before explicitly targeted another country's domestic payment system, said Alisha Chhangani, an associate director at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
"This is the first example and it won't be the last," she said, calling it a warning to countries seeking greater control over their payment systems, including the European Central Bank as it develops the digital euro.
Created by Brazilian central-bank technicians in late 2020 to cut costs and boost competition in the country's banking sector, PIX has been hailed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as a model for financial inclusion in one of the world's most unequal societies. Other countries have studied Brazil's system as they design their own.
"PIX belongs to Brazil, and no one is going to make us change it," da Silva said earlier this year. PIX has helped millions of poorer Brazilians, a key segment of his political base.
Like a similar system in India called UPI, PIX has encouraged users to ditch cash and open bank accounts after years of avoiding slow and costly bank transfers. The number of active users of Brazil's financial system nearly doubled from about 77 million in 2018 to 152 million in 2023, a surge the central bank attributes in large part to PIX.
Whether buying a Porsche 911, paying bills or giving money to a beggar at a stoplight, the payment is made the same way. With PIX built into banking apps, users can send money using a cellphone number, tax ID, email address, PIX code or QR code. While larger businesses may pay a small fee, it is generally lower than card-processing charges, allowing many retailers to offer customers discounts for PIX payments.
It also reduces the need to carry cash in a country plagued by robbery.
Nicknamed PixTinder by some, PIX has even become a last resort for jilted lovers. After an ex blocks them by phone and on social media, they can still send a one-cent transfer with a short message begging for forgiveness in the transaction description.
The diplomatic spat between the Western Hemisphere's two most populous nations first erupted after Washington imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil last year, demanding an end to what it called the "persecution" of Bolsonaro, da Silva's political rival. The duties were soon rolled back, and the U.S. Supreme Court later struck down many of Trump's global tariffs, ruling he had exceeded his authority.
Polls suggest Washington's attacks have boosted da Silva ahead of October's election against Bolsonaro's son, Flávio. Many Brazilians blame the Trump-allied Bolsonaro family for the tariffs, while da Silva has cast them as an attack on Brazilian sovereignty. Brazil consistently imports more from the U.S. than it exports.
Write to Samantha Pearson at samantha.pearson@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 17, 2026 22:00 ET (02:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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