Brazil: no longer the country of the future?

Brazil: no longer the country of the future?

Melvyn Levitsky, University of Michigan

When I first served in Brazil in the mid-1960s as a young American diplomat stationed at a small consulate in Belem on the mouth of the Amazon River, the country was in its second year of a 20-year military regime.

Despite the galloping inflation that resulted in zeroes being regularly lopped off the currency and an authoritarian regime that brooked little public dissent, many considered Brazil to be the “country of the future.” Charles de Gaulle reportedly added the phrase, “and will always be so.” The optimism was founded on the country’s huge stockpile of mineral resources, rich agricultural land and human capital in its well-developed southern...