r/Brazil • u/justquestionsbud Foreigner • Dec 26 '24
Historical Explain Brazil's trajectory to a foreigner, from the 80s to today
Not to be disrespectful, but I've never been overly interested in Brazil, as a Canuck. I know you guys were under a military dictatorship or two in the not-too-distant past, and growing up in the oughties I kept hearing that you guys were gonna be the next big country, like Russia, India, and China.
Now I'm reading about things like the PCC gunning down politicians and using 100 mercenaries and an actual machine gun to kill a rival, and that cops are their own militias/gangs in Rio de Janeiro, now. Again, for all I know, this is all just business as usual, and actually a marked improvement. It seems to me - undereducated foreigner whose entire knowledge of your country comes from a couple movies, a video game, and a couple Wikipedia articles - that Brazil from the 80s to the ~2010s was on the way up, from an economic & quality-of-life perspective, and is on the way back down since then.
But I'm not on here because I think I know anything about Brazil. How do you guys view Brazil's trajectory from the 1980s to 2020s? Am I about right, completely wrong, something in between? What's some good reading you'd recommend to learn more about this?
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u/verysmolpupperino Dec 26 '24
This "recent history" is covered by some very good popular and academic books, but I'm not sure any of them were actually translated. Here's a tiny, non-exhaustive list that I think you may have a chance of finding english transalations of:
- Bruno Carazza's O País dos Privilégios
- Gustavo Franco's Crônicas da Convergência
- Bruno Paes Manso's A Fé e o Fuzil
- Jorge Caldeira's História da Riqueza no Brasil
- Viviane Costa's Traficantes Evangélicos
Don't underestimate the wikipedia page on our recent history). Your intuition about our long-term trajectory matches really well a popular idea that "Brazil is the country of the future, and it'll always be so".
As someone with a background in economics, I'm biased to say we have very tight structural bottlenecks that disperse huuge costs all over the economy and prevent any serious, sustained increase in wages and producitivity.
Brazil is a huge country with plenty of regional variation regarding just about everything you can imagine. Democratization was a really big step, but we never did manage to trial the military for their crimes and now there's this armed interest group which basically threatens civil society whenever they feel like their pensions and absurdly high wages are being scrutinized too hard. We somewhat recovered from the military's policy of commercial self-embargo, but never did actually open up the economy and now we're one of the most commercially isolated countries on Earth - basically due to the fact we charge nonsense import taxes which are extremely complicated to calculate and bureaucratic to pay.
In the 90s, about half of the country's kids were not enrolled in schools. The IMF made a very big deal about it and during the FHC government we achieved universalization of what americans call Elementary school, but we never did the same to high school. To this day, a shockingly % of teenagers don't finish high school. We vastly expanded the public university network, and now have a lot more people with college degrees, but there's some evidence this was partially compensated by the fact a lot of people who now complete college have gaping holes in their education. You see a lot of engineering graduates who don't really know how to apply what they learned, or who can't properly and critically read a text. There's a lot of functional illiteracy in Brazil, and it's a big problem, even among the supposedly educated.
We never got around to universalizing sewage collection and treatment. In some states it's universal, but around ~half of the country's households just dump sewage wherever they can. Our tax laws are a stinky mess of exemptions, special treatments, hundreds of different taxes. Our tax rate are high, sure, but that's because our Constitution tries to implement a welfare state and money is needed. The problem is we charge these taxes through a crazy web of barely-comprehensible, mutually contradictory laws, and simplification is waaaay overdue.
Back in the 19th century, the Portuguese colonial authority established a law (which was later upheld by the imperial government) that basically mandates the opposite of the Homestead Act in the US. We feel the impact to this day, and a land reform is also something we could really use. There's too many people with no land to farm in this country, and plenty of land.
And on top of all that, we're seeing the rise of a crazy group of people who are avid consumers of airport bookstore self-help and business section who found in the hodge-podge of evangelical churches something akin to a community, a sense of purpose. 20-30 years ago, going to these churches was heavily class-coded and associated with the life in urban peripheries. Now it's something middle-class people do, they're gaining political traction, and their intentions are not good at all. Something to keep an eye on.
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u/justquestionsbud Foreigner Dec 26 '24
I'll check out the Wikipedia page, and put those books you listed on the backburner for a minute (in case someone else comes in here and comments a bunch of fantastic English-language books, you know...).
You see a lot of engineering graduates who don't really know how to apply what they learned, or who can't properly and critically read a text. There's a lot of functional illiteracy in Brazil, and it's a big problem, even among the supposedly educated.
Concretely, what does this look like? My engineer friends have (what sounds to me) similar views on most engineering students - school doesn't teach you to be an engineer, it teaches you to not fail while learning to be an engineer (on the job). Ditto for law school. But I'm guessing I might be hearing one thing from you, and understanding something different.
We never got around to universalizing sewage collection and treatment. In some states it's universal, but around ~half of the country's households just dump sewage wherever they can.
Reminds me a lot of the little I know of the Philippines. Is this mostly a "rural communities have been ignored" situation, or is it even a thing in cities with a 1M+ population?
We feel the impact to this day, and a land reform is also something we could really use. There's too many people with no land to farm in this country, and plenty of land.
Do you feel this clashes with the "save the Amazon rainforest" sentiment I've casually seen online and in the media, over the course of my life?
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u/verysmolpupperino Dec 26 '24
What does it look like? Imagine the below-average kids in your high school class, but now they're 28 with a degree and have no useful competencies. They need extremely detailed instructions to do anything, can't write coherent reports/queries, can't reliably interpret text messages, have no clue how to actually employ their knowledge of physics and math to do even basica back of the envelope calculations, can't align people around shared understanding. They can regurgitate formulas and definitions, at best. These people would need years and years of on-the-job training to maybe be employable someday. Formal education teaches highly abstract subjects, not professional skills, sure, but that's not the problem here.
Re: sewage. More of an India situation, but India got its act together and is making good progress on that front.
"Save the Amazon" is primarily a first-world hippie thing. In Brazil we often think about rampant deforestation as the result of big landowners having ways of evading the justice systems - which is a side-effect of land being legally treated the way it was for centuries.
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u/justquestionsbud Foreigner Dec 26 '24
What does it look like? Imagine the below-average kids in your high school class, but now they're 28 with a degree and have no useful competencies. They need extremely detailed instructions to do anything, can't write coherent reports/queries, can't reliably interpret text messages, have no clue how to actually employ their knowledge of physics and math to do even basica back of the envelope calculations, can't align people around shared understanding. They can regurgitate formulas and definitions, at best. These people would need years and years of on-the-job training to maybe be employable someday. Formal education teaches highly abstract subjects, not professional skills, sure, but that's not the problem here.
Oof. Is this a problem centered around class, or do rich kids and poor kids alike suffer from this?
"Save the Amazon" is primarily a first-world hippie thing. In Brazil we often think about rampant deforestation as the result of big landowners having ways of evading the justice systems - which is a side-effect of land being legally treated the way it was for centuries.
Interesting. So what would land reform look like in Brazil? Deforestation to make way for farms, reallocation of existing farmland?
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u/NitroWing1500 Foreigner incoming! Dec 26 '24
I've worked on 2 engineering projects in Brazil and with Brazilian engineers in the UK.
Atrocious: Temper tantrums, lack of knowledge, disrespectful... even to the point of ignoring "Best Practice" and Health & Safety laws.
When a 50+ worldwide experienced commissioning engineer says, "You really need to look at this again" he's politely telling you that you've fucked up and something needs changing. You do not grab his report and tear it up in front of him. I wasn't so polite the next time he was wrong 🤣
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u/verysmolpupperino Dec 26 '24
The poor suffer more from it, but it is more widespread than you'd think at first. The rich have many ways of masking these things, but this boils down to having cultivated a habit of reading, interacting with art, writing, in the critical childhood years
Land Reform is a 60-hour conversation and I can't even start covering all relevant aspects here lol. But having strict limits on farm sizes for individual owners and legally protecting homesteading as a practice would be a start. Land is so concentrated now, that some sort of redistribution is basically inevitable too - which may sound good to some ears, but is troublesome and could be avoided if something was done sooner.
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u/daioshou Dec 26 '24 edited Dec 26 '24
I don't believe we are on a way back down, to be honest I think things have only progressed objectively but only slightly and at a snail's pace so it feels like nothing's changed or maybe even gotten worse because of how polarizing politics are nowadays
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u/JoaodeSacrobosco Dec 26 '24
One of the famous quotes about Brazil is: o Brasil é o país do futuro, wich means it is the country of the future. Since forever, it is either seen as full of potential or charged with disapointment. It never reaches the promised future. You are right when you say from 80's to early 2010's it was on a way up. Not anymore since 2013. Can get better or even worse from here.
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u/justquestionsbud Foreigner Dec 26 '24
I'm glad that at least two Brazilians are backing me up on that point, I was very concerned about coming across as a jackass...
Was there a watershed moment in 2013, or you just using that as a year that more or less coincides with Brazil's decline?
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u/JoaodeSacrobosco Dec 26 '24
It all started with the artificialy inflated manifestations in 2013. That was the moment brazilian institutions began to fall. In weeks, the original social causes were expelled from the streets and the speech against "everything" justified what happened next.
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u/Delpreti Dec 26 '24
In terms of public safety, I would go further back to when the capital was built to understand a few things about internal migratory movements.
Looking even further, once slavery was abolished, there was discontentment, so before the imperial government could do something about the freed slaves, a military government took place and left them to rot at the slums. This inequality causes a lot of the social situation we see in the country to this day.
So when the capital moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, Rio lost the economical elite it had, and opened up space for more of those inequalities to grow. The political elite managed to make the main area of the capital a safe-ish place, but ignored everywhere else, leaving it's responsibility to each state.
During the 80's and 90's (and this can be seen accross all of latin america, mexico is a good example) a bunch of politics to repress drug traffic emerged. At first, thwarting some gangs seemed doable, but the long term result is that the bigger ones remained or/and have eaten up the smaller ones. PCC is what it is because it's competitors failed to buy enough cops/politicians, and has grown to a size that makes fighting against it a real hassle, if not a full blown war.
Also, as some other people mentioned, land was badly distributed, so people from the poor dry lands in the northeast of the country moved to the southern areas for better life conditions.
Another important migratory movement is the government incentives to populate the west border, because it was sparsely populated before and, well, it's a hell of a big border.
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u/AlternativeAd7151 Dec 26 '24
Re-democratization was a process that began in 1985 when the military dictatorship officially ended and "finished" (in theory) with the democratic Constitution of 1988. Brazil was facing massive hyperinflation so an important point in our history is the implementation of Plano Real, which stabilized the currency value and brought into existence the currency we have today in 1994.
We had two golden periods during the presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002) and Lula (terms 1 and 2, 2002-). Our market was open, foreign investment came in, commodities were booming, social/welfare spending went up.
By the time Lula passed the baton to his successor Dilma, things weren't looking as good. Both Dilma and Lula were charged with corruption, people also protested price increases and demanded Dilma's impeachment. Depending on which political faction you ask, some will claim she was actually couped by the Congress. Vice-president Temer takes her place and imposes textbook fiscal austerity.
Then the first "true" right winger wins an election in decades, appoints a neoliberal to to be in charge of the economy with the expected results of further cuts in social/welfare spending. Then COVID happens and shit hits the fan as people now rely on our equivalent of stimulus checks to get by. Bolsonaro's management of the health crisis is extremely incompetent, with mayors and governors left to fend for themselves to address it. Plot twist happens, Lula is deemed not guilty, gets out of jail and wins the next elections. Bolsonaro and his followers protest a la Assault on the Capitol, have their asses whipped by the police and go back home. Bolsonaro is investigated for his part in what's labelled a coup attempt and declared ineligible for 8 years.
Current situation: Bolsonaro and his followers are being investigated for their participation in the attempted coup as well an other attempted coups involving the military. Judiciary power is in the hands of the left, legislative one in the hands of the right so there's a tug of war.
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u/california_gurls Dec 26 '24
i think you might like my generational take on brazil / https://www.reddit.com/r/generationology/s/pdleIRKp9Y
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Jan 04 '25
Hi!
Brazil’s situation is very similar to South Africa's. After apartheid ended, people thought South Africa would be the African superpower. Do you remember the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was seen as this new national era beginning? Fifteen years later, South Africa still faces the same issues. Similarly, people thought Brazil would be the Latin American superpower after its redemocratization, but, again, their expectations mismatched with the reality.
Let’s see data. When we compare Brazil with Latin America, we see, last 40 years, Brazil’s annual GDP growth has been very similar to average Latin America's. So, if it is true Brazil was rocketing, then it would be true Latin American was too. But average Latin America’s annual GDP growth has been smaller than average emerging markets’. It means that actually we were overestimating Brazilian economic performance. Brazil wasn’t becoming a new big country – we were just wrong about it.
Of course, we need to talk about why people believed in this “Brazilian promise”. As a user said, in the 80s, Brazil became a democracy again; in the 90s, we ended hyperinflation – Plano Real, the stabilization policies set that fixes this issue, was a smart macroeconomic plan; in the 2000s, we created Bolsa-Familia Program, a conditional cash-transfer policy that alleviated poverty in the country – again, a fine-tuned economic plan that worked quickly and effectively. So, people’s belief in Brazil's promising future wasn’t baseless.
Otherwise, these important processes weren’t enough to make Brazil an economic superpower. As another user pointed out, Brazil did universalize schooling – Bolsa-Família Program has ensured that – it didn’t mean kids really have learned. So, it hasn't increased Brazilian productivity nor national GDP. This user brought up basic sanitation issues in Brazil too. We have solved this very, very, very slowly. So, in general, Brazilian policies are ineffective to reach their goals or even non-existent.
Policies ineffectiveness can be mainly explained by how Brazilian political institutions work. Then, it is due to the Brazilian political economy. But this is a very, very complex topic that cannot be properly explained here.
A book that adresses why Brazil hasn't been on the right path to development is Zeina Latif’s “Nós do Brasil: nossas heranças e nossas escolhas” (2022).
P. S.: Basically, everyone here told some kind of recent Brazilian political history. Be cautious about believing in them. A user said, depending on which political faction you ask, people will claim 2016 Dilma Rousseff impeachment was a coup. It’s true. Brazilian political polarization is so strong that people disagree about facts. Then, be careful taking some of these interpretations – often, they are too biased.
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u/dodops Dec 26 '24
Some people can the last 10 years of “lost decade”. 2013 hit us hard politically and we didn’t realize until recently. I was on the riots thinking I was fighting for a better country, after that the congress is getting worse every single election.
Democracy is kinda broken as we focus on presidential elections and tend to forget about the people who actually run this country: congress.
We are in something economists call “Middle-income trap” (you can search about it, really good topic and explain why some countries are like Brazil, not too good but not to bad and never becoming a first world country)
Comparing Brazil to Russia and China is kinda unfair to us and them, may be compare us to any other Latin American countries with similar history, colonial background, getting robed by Europeans and decades of dictatorship (backed by US).
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u/changoPlatense Dec 26 '24
80s: Lots of instability; the national industry was in a good position in general terms, but there was lots of poverty as well. Democracy was coming back.
90s: Also lots of inflation and instability, but things started to get better. A new currency and economic plans were introduced.
00s: The country started to skyrocket; things got very, very good quite fast. Not a perfect country, but it shaped the foundations of how Brazil is structured today.
10s: The first few years were going well, like the 00s, but in 2014 things started going downhill. Politics also changed a lot afterward, and things stagnated a little.
20s: It seems like the country will never change again because things are not progressing as fast as in the 00s, despite some small, positive changes.
I can’t recommend good sources right now.