Let me cut to the chase. It's surprising that Brazil is not a superpower. Sure, Brazil is a modestly sized power and absolutely Latin America's regional power but it could have been global.
Honestly, Brazil is like a tropical USA. Both isolated New World nations, both have an insane amount of territory and a huge amount of farmland. The United States was able to use that position and size to spread its influence to every country on Earth.
Brazil? Eh, not so much. It's a bit of a meme that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be, but never ends up that country.
I mean, Brazil has a lot going for it. Great position, huge size and large labor force. But it is also rife with corruption, relatively poor and the Earth's murder capital.
Where did it go wrong? And will Brazil ever be the country of the future? Brazil's first fatal flaw is what made it in the first place: its geography.
Brazil's geography is big. Like, really big. It has everything: forest, plains, mountains, rainforest, highlands and lots and lots of coast.
Its first major feature is one you all know: the Amazon. The Amazon Rainforest is the largest of its kind in the world. Obviously, it's not ideal to live in.
First of all, you can't farm without clearing tons of trees, so you can't eat. And second of all, there are so many bugs in rainforests that you'll probably contract some sort of deadly disease, probably COVID-AIDS. This makes a huge chunk of Brazil's territory unsuitable for humans.
The river in the Amazon does provide a ton of fresh water though allowing some small settlements like Manaus and tons of indigenous people groups. The second feature is Brazil's escarpment. Its great escarpment.
An escarpment is just the cliffs on the edge of a plateau and these cliffs are long and tall. This makes most of the Brazilian interior essentially an island away from the Brazilian coast. Building roads, tracks and any sort of pass ticket to Brazil's agriculture producing interior is much more difficult.
Not to mention that being in a hot humid tropical area building roads and infrastructure is already harder because concrete and cement needs to be dry to set. But the real problem is most people are crowded on the coast and there's lots of it. Brazil is the longest country from North to South and without the technology to clear the cliffs Brazil was basically Chile 2.
0. There's a huge divide between the people and the things that people want or need. The escarpment likely stunted Brazilian growth by decades.
Then there's the tropical issue. Tropical areas never grow as fast as temperate areas. A: They don't have a winter to freeze bugs and create coordination between people since you gotta have a seasonal deadline for crops.
And B: Tropical areas always focus on agriculture it's just too easy to grow food there. So tropical areas always become the breadbasket of the world but so far haven't really industrialized since so many people are in the agriculture business. That's why Brazil was settled and it's that settlement that was Brazil's second fatal flaw.
The way Brazil was colonized, shaped society to this day. In the early 1500s, the Portuguese started colonizing what we know as Brazil. At the time, there were around two million indigenous Brazilians.
However, unlike Mesoamerican and the Andean civilizations there were no cities or infrastructure. The native Brazilians lived in small villages, mostly tribal and certainly not under one empire. The Portuguese were using Brazil more as a stop in their African and Indian sea empires, and less of a real settlement.
Portugal used human trafficking to bring settlers from anywhere but Portugal. I mean, the Portuguese population was and still is tiny. They could never fit into a continent of people.
The first blunder of colonization is just that. While the British sent off their poor to the countryside of America the Portuguese sent off their rich to oversee productions and small cities. This wealth never left the rich, creating huge wealth inequality seen to this day one of the worst on Earth.
They had fancy estates to live in and yes, lots of money but how much infrastructure actually gets built with private investment? Almost none. It usually goes to some sort of production, to which tons went.
Brazil became an agricultural hotspot after the Europeans discovered sugar. It was the perfect climate to grow sugar cane. So like many other colonists, the Portuguese brought in African slaves.
Anywhere from six to ten million slaves were imported from West and Southern Africa. About 18 to 30 times more than the USA. It was so important to the colonists that slavery wasn't outlawed until 1888 the last country in the western world to do so.
In addition, even though Pope Paul III made a papal bull declaring that no indigenous person of the Americas was to be enslaved that didn't stop the Portuguese or anyone else really. Natives captured by Brazilian Bandeiras were forced to work in sugar plants or newly found gold mines. This insane amount of slavery caused a whole plethora of issues.
More wealth inequality, dependence on agriculture whole regions of the Northeast poor from slavery. Most of Brazil's wealth is concentrated on the Southeast region, outside of the tropical areas. The focus on agricultural production by the rich Portuguese settlers doomed its future.
It's no surprise that with this agricultural history Brazil nowadays would be a powerhouse of raw material. Its land is just perfect for it. Through farming, forestry and mining, Brazil as a whole makes a lot of money.
Its economy is the largest in Latin America with a GDP of US$3. 3 trillion or US$15,000 per person. Its labor force is the sixth most populous on Earth, with 107 million workers.
These workers mainly extract raw material but industry and services make up most of the Brazilian GDP with Brazil producing a lot of steel and chemicals. But what they really produce is produce: coffee, soy, beef, chicken, milk, sugar, tobacco, cotton, maize and gold, iron, copper, bauxite, tin, manganese, niobium and nickel. Brazil is a major producer of each of these products.
If industry keeps growing in Brazil and they can process the bulk of their products at home then the world is in for a new economic power. The Brazilian population is 212 million. A quite large one, but it's not too stable.
Even though the population has doubled in about 45 years and quadrupled in 70 the population will start to shrink in about 20 years. Thirty million more Brazilians will enter the world before the collapse happens but it will still hit them hard. They don't have an insane amount of wealth or jobs, like Western Europe or Japan to deal with the demographic collapse, so things could get ugly and areas that saw higher levels of slavery are less well off.
For instance, the Northeast has a literacy rate of about 80% whereas countrywide it is around 90%. But for a middle power, Brazil has had a huge amount of migration to it throughout its history. Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans and especially Japanese came to Brazil in huge numbers, driving Brazilian growth, but they didn't settle in the countryside they went to the cities.
Brazil is a very urban country. With an urbanization rate of around 85% many living in Brazil's two largest cities: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, both in the Southeast. It's in these cities where another huge Brazilian problem reigns: Violence.
Brazil has one of the highest homicide rates on Earth and ranks number one by total homicides. ["To Brazil" playing ironically] It’s more than China, the USA, Europe and Russia combined. Many of the other top homicidals are also in Latin America.
The Spanish colonies were made much in the same way as Brazil. Rich owners coming with slaves rather than poor men coming to farm. Unsurprisingly, urban areas in the Northeast where the inequality is the worst nationwide have the highest homicide rates in the country.
Urban slums have never made crime rates go down. Gangs are commonplace and so is drug trafficking. But Brazil has recently begun a program to reduce gang-centered violence.
It has dropped the homicide rate significantly but Brazil still remains number one worldwide. It may be due to the huge amount of decentralization Brazil has had ever since its early days. The escarpment, wet infrastructure and huge coast meant most Brazilians were not linked until the modern day.
Decentralized areas tend to focus on local rule and local rule usually has a lot of corruption. Even up to the central government corruption is rampant in Brazilian politics. It's estimated that around US$40 billion is lost annually due to corruption alone.
Clientelism, cronyism and nepotism are popular and many police are prone to bribery. This was one of the many reasons for the 2013 protests and subsequent operation Car Wash to investigate corruption and money laundering through Petrobras, a state-owned company. Since the operation, at least five major political figures have been jailed and their president was impeached.
Maybe corruption and homicide are getting better in Brazil or maybe this is just a quick phase only to go back up in the future. In many ways, Brazil should have been a great power. If it was settled similar to the way the USA or Australia was with low class or prisoners coming in and trying to work their way up I think it would be like the USA today.
But instead, its geography and settlement didn't allow for that. With a long coast, massive rainforest, huge escarpment and tropical climate the Brazilians were stuck on the coast and could only produce food. That's what it has done to this day.
Brazil is one of the major suppliers of various types of foods and raw materials worldwide. Its sharp class divide between the original rich settlers and overseas slaves created a major wealth inequality today and these poor Brazilians who reside in urban areas make up one of the worst homicide problems on Earth. It doesn't help that the government is fairly corrupt stunting major progress to turn the nation around.
Brazil is the country of the future so was Brazil in the 1900s and so will Brazil be in 20 years. With a lackluster industry and a demographic collapse with a fairly poor safety net, Brazil might be screwed. But who knows?
Brazil should have always been a superpower maybe it will finally become one. If you enjoyed this video, absolutely smash the thumbs up and subscribe buttons. I'll pay you out for it.
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