Daniella Marques, Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s economic policy coordinator, made waves in a radio interview Monday Oct. 19, suggesting that a Flávio government would consider measures to curtail the functioning of Bolsa Família, a signature policy of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which has considerably cut poverty levels in Brazil since it was introduced in 2003.
Marques is a protégé of “Chicago Boy” Paulo Guedes, the Economics Minister throughout the term of Flávio’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, as president (2019-2023). Guedes appointed Marques to top posts coordinating major policy areas of the Ministry, culminating in naming Marques president of the Caixa Econômica Federal bank, one of the three largest Brazilian public banks, for eight months at the end of Bolsonaro’s term. “Chicago Boys” originated as a term for economists trained at the University of Chicago, who designed and implemented Pinochet’s savage economic bloodletting in Chile after Pinochet’s military dictatorship took power in 1973. Guedes not only graduated with a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1979, studying directly under Chicago Boys guru Milton Friedman, but went to Chile to teach during the Pinochet dictatorship.
However, another of Guedes’s economic policy protégés has so far eluded scrutiny—and perhaps the incendiary float in the shape of a nuclear missile at the Flávio Bolsonaro rally on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo Sunday Oct. 18, with “Trump: Nuke Brazil” written on its side, should raise some troubling questions. She is Susana Cordeiro Guerra, currently World Bank Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Born and raised in Brazil, trained in economics and social policy at elite U.S. universities, she rose to prominence as a leading member of Guedes’s team as the youngest-ever president of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), serving from 2019 to 2021. She was close to Bolsonaro as well as Guedes.
Her parallel U.S. career brings her simultaneously into the inner circle of the Trump family. She is particularly close to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, becoming godmother to one of their daughters (Folha de São Paulo, July 17, 2025).
