The U.S. government has found a new villain to add to its list of accusations against Brazil. It’s called Pix. In the Section 301 report justifying the 2026 tariff hike, the USTR describes the Central Bank’s instant payment system as an unfair practice—a tool that “harms U.S. electronic payment service providers” to favor, in the document’s own words, Brazil’s “national champion.” The most obvious interpretation is economic: Washington is protecting Visa, Mastercard, and other card networks from a free state-run competitor. It’s a convenient explanation. And it’s insufficient.
The numbers do not support the theory of a commercial clash. Credit and debit card use grew in Brazil during that same period. The volume of credit card transactions rose 14% between 2024 and 2025, reaching R$ 3 trillion, and nearly half of all e-commerce volume continues to be processed through international payment networks. The real target destroyed by Pix was cash, not the card network market. Brazil today uses paper money and coins at the same rate as the United States and the United Kingdom—countries that historically had a larger share of the population with bank accounts—even though Brazilian banking technology has always been at the forefront during this period. If the dispute were solely over market share in electronic payments, the U.S. complaint would have already lost its basis. Pix and credit cards coexist, often in the same transaction. Pix’s true adversary has always been paper currency, not plastic cards bearing American logos.
The question the USTR report does not answer
If the business case doesn’t seal the deal, the question remains: what is really at stake? The answer lies in the architecture of the international financial system, rather than in competition between companies. Susan Strange, one of the founders of International Political Economy, described this type of contest with a precise concept: structural power. It is the power to determine the rules within which all negotiations take place, rather than the power to win a single negotiation. For Strange and Benjamin Cohen, who expanded on the concept as it applies to currency, the country that controls the global financial infrastructure does not need to convince anyone to follow it. It is enough that others depend on the system it operates.
Pix broke this cycle of dependence at a specific point. By building an instant payment system operated entirely by the Central Bank, without relying on agreements with international card networks, Brazil solved a problem that most countries don’t even attempt to solve: it created a domestic, sovereign, and replicable payment infrastructure. The 2026 Global Payments Report already notes other emerging countries’ interest in the technology. It is this precedent—more than the revenue lost by American card networks—that worries Washington. A payment system outside the control of Western networks, if exported, becomes a model for breaking away from the structure that the United States helped design since Bretton Woods.
We’ve already analyzed this same logic here in relation to the war in the Middle East. For those who haven’t read it yet, here’s an invitation: in “The Matrix of Power, ” we explain why, even with the growth in U.S. energy production over the past decade, the United States continues to treat control of the petrodollar as a matter of national security—because what sustains this hegemony is control over the currency in which oil is priced and settled worldwide, not the physical supply of the oil itself. Pix follows the same structural logic. The dispute revolves around who controls financial transactions in the digital world—rather than being about Brazil, Visa, or Mastercard—just as the petrodollar determines who controls energy transactions in the physical world.
The precedent Brazil is already facing: GPS
Brazil is no stranger to this kind of dependence. Every day, without realizing it, the entire country entrusts its location, its logistics, its precision agriculture, and even its air traffic control systems to a satellite network operated by the U.S. government. GPS is free, functional, and universal, but it is not neutral. It belongs to the U.S. Space Force, which can, in theory, degrade or restrict the signal in any region of the planet, as it has already demonstrated in conflict zones. The European Union built Galileo, Russia maintained GLONASS, and China developed BeiDou—not out of technological vanity, but because no country that takes itself seriously remains hostage to critical infrastructure that another state controls unilaterally.
Pix was created—even though that wasn’t the Central Bank’s official line at the time—as the Brazilian equivalent of that lesson. A payment system that does not rely on clearing through international networks, that does not pay fees to foreign intermediaries, and that cannot be suspended by a decision from a private company headquartered in another country. The comparison with GPS carries structural weight, not just rhetorical weight, because both infrastructures remain invisible until the day someone decides to use them as a tool for exerting pressure.
When Payment Becomes a Weapon
The world has witnessed this transformation before. The SWIFT network—the system that processes international bank transfer messages—has always been portrayed as a neutral, Belgium-based technical cooperative, uninvolved in politics. In 2022, the United States and the European Union disconnected Russian banks from SWIFT in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Within a few weeks, an infrastructure that appeared to be purely a technical pipeline revealed its true nature: it had always been an instrument of geopolitical power. No country that depends on a financial infrastructure controlled by a third party can assume that it will remain neutral forever. The neutrality of financial networks lasts exactly until the moment when the interests of those who control them demand otherwise.
That is why American criticism of Pix—even if formally cloaked in antitrust rhetoric—carries more weight than the defense of Visa and Mastercard. What is troubling is the example it sets, rather than the harm to the card networks. A middle-income country that builds, operates, and exports its own payment infrastructure is an exception to the expected script. Most nations connect to the international financial system through structures designed, maintained, and—when necessary—controlled by Washington. Brazil, on this specific point, has written its own rules.
Sovereignty as a Strategic Calculation
It would be a mistake, however, to turn this discussion into anti-Americanism disguised as analysis. The central issue is one of realism, not a break with the international financial system or hostility toward the United States. It is a matter of recognizing—using the same criteria that any nation should apply to its own critical infrastructure—that no country can depend entirely on a single payment, positioning, communication, or financial clearing system controlled by another power. This applies to Pix in the face of U.S. pressure. It applies equally to any attempts to replace this dependence with another, whether Chinese, European, or Russian. Structural sovereignty is the ability to avoid being held hostage by a single point of control, regardless of the external ties a country maintains.
Brazil isn’t going to stop using GPS tomorrow, nor does it have any pragmatic reason to do so. Countries need to develop alternatives to maintain their sovereignty. That is why they must demand transparency regarding how and when these infrastructures can be used as a means of pressure and maintain the ability to operate their own systems in strategic areas. The fee hike against Pix is, first and foremost, a dispute over who will write the rules for the next decade of digital finance—and whether Brazil will continue to be one of the few nations capable of writing its own.
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