Brazil: the troubled rise of a global power

Shirvan (0:00)

In the center of Brazil's flag is a blue disc, emblazoned with the Southern Cross and the national adage, Order and Progress. These words signal Brazil's great power aspirations. And with the extensive mineral deposits, natural wonders like the Amazon, and roughly half of South America's landmass and population, few would deny the country's geopolitical potential. But Brazil is not for beginners, a fact concealed by a simple glance at the map. The country's landscape is rough, uneven, and ill-suited to economic development. And despite sporadic efforts at industrialization, Brazil remains wedded to an extractive economic model. Perhaps even more troubling is its fragmented internal politics, which opens avenues for foreign interference and subversion. So, what makes Brazil tick? And why is this supposed land of the future still shackled to its past?

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Close to Africa, and equidistant from Europe and North America, Brazil's central location played a defining role in its global geoeconomic significance. In 1494, Spain and Portugal split their New World Claims with the Treaty of Tortosillas, handing the Brazilian coast to Lisbon. Yet the development potential of this land was not immediately obvious. Its mountainous coastline held a natural beauty, but its lack of coastal plains and dense vegetation made it an uninviting destination for settlement. Lisbon thus doled out land grants to wealthy Portuguese, hoping they would bear the immense costs of land clearing and building infrastructures that could climb the coastal escarpments to the inland plains.

But in business, nature and human life is cheap. Whatever development took place formed around economies of scale, especially cash crops with a high value to weight ratio like sugar.

Colonial violence and European pathogens soon wiped out local indigenous peoples. And this led to the settlers to import nearly 6 million enslaved Africans over the next 350 years to make up the plantation labor force. The natural result was an oligarchic society with a large Afro-Brazilian underclass, which today accounts for half of Brazil's population.

Dependence on monoculture exports also generated powerful agribusiness lobbies such that upon independence the federal government treated their priorities as its own. Brazil thus became tied to the commodities cycle. Industries like Amazonian rubber and Sao Paulo coffee would boom only to go bust when faced with a global downturn.

Worse, the geographic concentration of the lobbies bred regionalism as different industries jostled for federal patronage. But quantity has a quality of its own, and the fact that Brazil avoided fragmentation that befell Spanish America meant that it became a regional leader almost by default.

Modern Brazil dominates the continent, bordering every South American state except for Chile and Ecuador. And these borders are reinforced by geographic fortifications, including the northern Amazon, the western Andes, and the southwestern Pantanal Swamp Lands.

This gave Brazil the cover needed to expand onto the Cerrado, a Greenland-sized tropical savanna containing most of its arable land. But going from colony to great power was not easy. Developing the Cerrado region was especially problematic. Its acidic soils require terraforming to produce conventional crops. And though it borders the Rio de la Plata river system, access to the estuary rivers is limited since Brazil's borders generally terminate above the point where the rivers become commercially navigable. This inflates transport costs, since shipments must travel to the narrow coastal plains where port infrastructure is possible. The resulting bottlenecks leaves ports like Santos, the largest in South America, prone to congestion. And the elevated interior also poses obstacles to developing national infrastructures, imposing geographic fragmentation and further exacerbating regionalism.

Even so, crisis has occasionally spurred Brazil to attempt to overcome these constraints. Collapsing global markets in the 1930s induced a payment crisis, but it also weakened agribusiness lobbies, allowing Brazil's autocratic leader Getúlio Vargas to pursue industrial development based on import substitution. His economic nationalist prescriptions included domestic subsidies, import quotas, and tariffs to shield Brazilian industries from foreign competition.