Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of War for Policy of the Trump administration, has gained much deserved notoriety recently for advocating the lowering of the threshold for nuclear war by promoting the production, deployment, and possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. He is also widely reported to be the lead author of the Trump administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy document calling for a return to the policies of Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial “Big Stick” in order to expel Chinese and Russian interests from the Western Hemisphere, and forcibly seize the region’s assets for the benefit of Wall Street and the City of London.
And in an Aug. 10 conference in Manila, Colby pronounced that the U.S. intended to contain China by fielding “a fully operational, resilient architecture of denial defense stretching along the First Island Chain… We will continue to speak softly. But we will continue to carry the world’s biggest stick,” Colby bragged.
In light of the Trump administration’s publicly stated intent of preventing the reelection of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by all means fair and foul—most emphatically including launching all-out financial warfare and capital flight against Brazil in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 4 presidential election (see next slug)—urgent attention must be paid to Colby’s wife of 12 years, the Brazilian economist Susana Cordeiro Guerra.
The aptly named Cordeiro Guerra, a graduate of Harvard and MIT, has for many years been close to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (today serving a 27-year sentence in Brazil for an attempted coup d’etat against Lula following the 2022 presidential elections). She is also a leading protégé of former Brazilian Economics Minister Paulo Guedes, who served in that post for the entire presidential term of Bolsonaro, from 2019-2023. Guedes named her president of the IBGE (the official Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) from 2019-2021, the youngest person to serve in that post, and she maintains close political ties with Guedes to the present, according to numerous Brazilian press outlets.
Cordeiro Guerra was named Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank on Sept. 15, 2025, and is also close to the Trump family. Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paulo reported on July 17, 2025 that Cordeiro Guerra “is a close friend of Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, who served as senior adviser to her father. Cordeiro Guerra is also godmother to one of their daughters.”
Cordeiro Guerra’s mentor, Paulo Guedes, is quite a piece of work. He is a “Chicago Boy” economist through and through, an advocate of the school of Friedmanite monetarism best known for the deadly austerity they championed in Pinochet’s Chile. Guedes received both an MS and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1979, studying under Milton Friedman personally. Guedes then taught at the Universidad de Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. He went on to co-found Brazil’s Banco Pactual (now BTG Pactual) in 1983, today the sixth largest bank in Brazil by assets and the largest investment bank in all of Ibero-America, with extensive links to prominent international speculative players such as BlackRock.
As Fox Business put it: “Guedes was given the opportunity to implement Friedman’s teachings when he was named to lead the Ministry of Economy in Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government in 2019.”