When Rousseff was impeached and the thirteen years of PT government ended in 2016, exports to China amounted to $35.6bn, which represented about 19 per cent of that year’s total exports. But in the following three years to 2019 sales to China doubled, and Brazil’s trade surplus with Beijing increased from about $5bn to $28bn. In other words, just a

Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company that back in 2010 was supposed to be Brazil’s ticket to the promised land of prosperity. Rather than helping the nation attain a trouble-free and resource-rich future, the mismanagement of the newly discovered resources contributed to the country’s growing problems. PT governments were so emboldened by th

It is not just the sheer number of Brazilian Protestants that is notable, however. Brazil has seen the rise of a particular kind of Protestantism, known as Pentecostalism. Historically, Protestantism has been a broad and multi-faceted phenomenon. It includes the modern descendants of the original Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists, the reformists

Fortaleza’s population has risen by 40.4 per cent in the last twenty years, with many newcomers concentrated in poor peripheral areas such as Palmeiras, Pirambu and Canindezinho.

The situation in Rio das Pedras was less positive, however, than it seemed. One barbarism had been kept at bay by another. Back in the 1980s community leaders had paid a group of off-duty policemen and other residents to keep out drug traffickers from the nearby City of God (Cidade de Deus), a favela whose gang violence was brought to international

In São Paulo there was a similar connection between former guerrillas and crime, although here the story was slightly different. During the 1980s, as the economy stagnated in the wake of the debt crisis of the early part of the decade, crime soared, with a number of locally based gangs vying for control of the drugs rackets. The result was a rapid

In the last two decades, however, one particular controversy has served to radicalise conservative opinion in Roraima: the creation of the indigenous reserve of Raposa Serra do Sol in the north of the state in 2005 and the expulsion from that area of a handful of farmers who had been very successfully cultivating rice. The affair has became somethi

China was another crunch issue. The foreign minister Ernesto Araújo wanted to reduce ties with China and talked about promoting links with India, Japan and South Korea. Bolsonaro himself had protested during his campaign that China was buying up Brazil and had objected to the way it was making strategic investments in areas such as minerals and ene

These commercial battles intensified in the mid-2010s because of a shift in the global trade in drugs. With the European market growing, the north and north-east of Brazil assumed greater importance as centres of distribution and trans-shipment. One of the factors fuelling this shift was the peace agreement in neighbouring Colombia between the gove