Uneven and excessive, Brazil is the reverse of the success of China, the great country of the South that got lost in the transition that was supposed to lead to modernity.
A boy in the favela Ciudad de Dios, popularized in 2002)
There are rich countries, poor countries and countries like Brazil, where wealth and extreme poverty coexist like nowhere else. I visited one of the great cities of Atlantic Brazil in 2006. It was a pleasant city of half a million people and a diversified economy, between manufacturing and tourism. I came back ten years later and saw how much it had changed. On the way from the airport to the city center, on both sides of the road, thousands and thousands of precarious buildings had emerged. They were impoverished farmers, driven out of the world by a long drought. sertao . The city also frequented the list of the most dangerous places in Latin America. The cause was in the drug.
When I traveled to Brazil for the first time, it was a turbo-capitalist economy ruled by a trade unionist, Luiz Inázio ‘Lula’ da Silva. It came from the Workers’ Party (PT), founded in 1980 by former guerrillas, trade unionists and rank-and-file Catholics to overthrow a long dictatorship. The same one that had imprisoned and expelled Caetano Veloso, the one who tortured Paulo Coelho. Already in power, the PT acted in accordance with the currency “ Order and Progress ”That appears on the Brazilian flag. It was a respectful party to the financial markets. But he was also skilled in managing the Amazon and distributing wealth. Able to open spaces of hope with measures such as the Three Plates of Daily Food, which reduced malnutrition by 25% and lifted 24 million people out of extreme poverty.
The BRICS prophecy
In the 2000s Brazil was, with China and four other countries, an emerging country
Ten years later, Lula was in jail, accused of corruption in unclear judicial maneuvers. In 2010 the country had entered an intermittent recession that it has not yet abandoned. The script written for Brazil, that of the great country of the South that converges with the rich North, had vanished.
Jim O’Neill, an economist at Goldman Sachs, had given visibility to that script in 2001 by grouping the poor countries with the most potential (emerging countries) under the acronym BRICS, which included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They were destined to dominate the world in 2050. That vision updated the theory of the modernization of the Cold War, by which the great countries of the South were going to resemble those of the North sooner or later thanks to middle classes that would emulate their guidelines. of consumption. They were countries that “were late.” They would arrive.
Unfinished transition
The country has lost its way in its convergence with the countries of the North
Time has shown that despite the similarities (a large population, a large territory, important natural resources), the BRICS were very different. China was the great exception. Today it is the alternative to the West. Russia is a petro-state sickly obsessed with regaining its great power status. And Brazil … Brazil got lost in the transition, already with Jair Bolsonaro as a guide to nowhere.
These weeks an article by Foreign Affairs signed by Alex Hochuli, with studies in sociology and international relations at the London School of Economics and King’s College. It bears by title The Brazilianization of the world . His thesis is that not only is Brazil not going to converge with the North, but that it is the mirror in which the North must be looked at, because that is where it is heading.
Vertical division
From ‘Dancin’ Days’ to Ciudad de Dios, from the middle class to the favelas
It is not the first time that Brazil has appeared as a model of unfinished modernity. It is a country built vertically. Above, in the hills, are the favelas, from which you can see, below, the most fortunate districts. In them live middle classes with high standards of living (remember the fascinating telenovela Dancin’ Days, 1978). These are people who live on islands surrounded by oceans of poverty like City of God, the favela of Rio de Janeiro that the filmmakers Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles illuminated in 2002. It is Brazil segregated by race where electronic commerce coexists with open-air wastewater. In the 2000s, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck used Brazil as a model to characterize the increasing informalization of the labor market in the West and the emergence of armed mafias. The trail of Brazil can also be followed in the reflections of John Gray or Zygmun Baumann.
Beck, Gray, and Baumann are big pessimists. Hochuli is too. His thesis of the Brazilianization It was born with the pandemic, the organizational chaos in the face of the virus, the public perception of more political venality and corruption. He looks for the reasons for Brazil’s failure and finds them in history, in some elites that have been inhibited when the country has entered a critical phase. Also in the changes in the world economy. He says that the tools that historically made the path to modernization possible – oil, steel and rubber – no longer serve in a world where ideas are successful, protected by intellectual rights that the South no longer has access to. .
Periodically, the country emerges as a model of dystopia
Economic historian Adam Tooze is looking this week for clues to the Brazilianization . They are found in the Caribbean and Central America, where the pandemic has accentuated the degradation created by years of inequality, ecological catastrophes and extreme dependence on the outside. A reality that only appears in the media when waves of immigrants cross the border from Mexico to the United States. Tooze admits to the disappointing growth of Latin America and the Caribbean since 1987 compared to the take-off of Asia. But he concludes that Brazil is too unique to be taken as a model of what not to do.
The G7 met last week in Cornwall. Their agenda was full of difficult problems to solve. But someone, at least, seemed clear on what to do. Where to go to prevent the bad example of Brazil from spreading.
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