Brazil is the world's largest net exporter of food. Its agricultural revolution began in the 1970s, when a series of military governments poured money into rural credit and created Embrapa, the state-owned agricultural-research firm. Embrapa's scientists developed crops adapted to tropical weather, in particular brachiaria, a tall, drought-resistant grass from Africa that opened the country's vast interior to farming and cattle ranching, at the cost of massive deforestation.
Brazil's agricultural output has risen eight-fold since the 1970s, and most economists conclude this has been "land sparing"—the majority of gains came from reducing the area of land used per unit of production rather than clearing new territory. Embrapa's technicians developed varieties of soy, maize and cotton suited to tropical climates, and devised ways to farm the acidic lands of the cerrado by putting limestone into the soil.
Brazil has a herd of 239m cattle, 80% of which are zebu, an Indian strain brought to the country in the 19th century. Zebu proved more resistant to heat and parasites than European breeds. Breeding programmes have increased the average weight of a slaughtered cow by 16% since 1997. Brazil accounts for almost a quarter of the world's beef exports, a share expected to grow. The World Organisation for Animal Health, based in Paris, is expected to declare Brazil free of foot-and-mouth disease, making it harder for protectionist countries to refuse Brazilian beef imports on sanitary grounds.
ExpoZebu, held in Uberaba in the state of Minas Gerais, is the world's largest fair of zebu cattle.
Globally, some 67,000km2 of virgin rainforest were destroyed in 2024—roughly the size of Ireland and nearly twice the area cleared in 2023. Tropical deforestation added 3.1bn tonnes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, more than India added by burning fossil fuels. A pledge by world leaders at COP in 2021 to halt deforestation by 2030 is nowhere close to being fulfilled. Brazil lost 28,200 square kilometres of tropical forest in 2024, the most since 2016. Wildfires caused 60% of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon that year. Brazil suffered its deepest drought since records began in 2024, compounded by El Niño. According to Global Forest Watch, fires across Latin America released 1.15 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2024, more than all of South America generated by burning fossil fuels in 2023.
The "Legal Amazon" region encompasses nine states and 60% of the entire forest (which also spreads into Peru, Colombia and other neighbours). It emitted warming gases in 2018 equivalent to 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person for its 28m residents—almost entirely from clearing rainforest for farming—yet its GDP per person is just $5,900. The Amazon stores roughly five years' worth of global carbon-dioxide emissions and contains some 400bn trees. Its trees pull water up through their roots and allow it to evaporate through their leaves; combined with prevailing winds, this creates an atmospheric aqueduct that dumps rain on Brazil's farming heartland. Scientists worry the forest is approaching a tipping point beyond which this water-transport system will no longer sustain it.
About half of cleared Amazon land is now classed as "degraded pasture"; another 28% is used for typically inefficient cattle ranching. A typical cattle ranch in Pará produces fewer than 100 animal units per square kilometre, against around 400 on Brazil's best farms. Intensifying cattle-ranching on already-cleared land could let Brazil increase exports while allowing the forest to regrow. Imazon, a think-tank in Belém, estimates that 28% of the Brazilian Amazon has no ownership information; between 2008 and 2012, 40% of deforestation occurred in these unregistered areas.
Under President Lula da Silva, deforestation fell by 80% during his first terms (2003-11), owing to a mix of heavily armed federal agents arresting illicit loggers, blacklisting properties on which unlawful deforestation occurs from subsidised credit, and protecting indigenous reserves. Deforestation dropped by a third again between 2022 and 2023 after Lula returned to office, but the 2024 fires wiped out that progress. States bordering the Brazilian Amazon have been rolling back protections to boost agricultural output. In October 2024 legislators in Mato Grosso removed tax breaks for companies that commit to trade soya without deforestation. In April 2025 lawmakers in neighbouring Rondônia passed an "amnesty law" to forgive past deforestation, all but encouraging slash-and-burn expansion.
One study suggests the Amazon provides around $40,000 of value per square kilometre of standing forest each year, giving it a fair asset value of around $3trn. The World Resources Institute estimated the Amazon's bioeconomy—sustainable harvesting of the forest's biodiversity—was worth roughly $2bn in 2020, a pittance relative to the $120bn a year in value the forest generates as a carbon sink. Hydroelectricity generated by the Amazon's water flows meets around two-thirds of Brazil's electricity needs, saving some $660m a year.
Economists Juliano Assunção and José Alexandre Scheinkman of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Princeton University reckon that a carbon price of $25 per tonne would squeeze out cattle ranchers, since landowners could make more money by allowing reforesting—a bargain compared with the EU's emissions-trading price of around €80 per tonne.
The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) is a proposed endowment fund to be launched at COP30 in Belém in November 2025. Governments, sovereign-wealth funds and philanthropic outfits are to capitalise it with a mooted $25bn (Brazil has committed $1bn), then leverage this to around $125bn by borrowing in international markets and investing proceeds into higher-yielding bonds. It would pay governments that limit deforestation to 0.5% per year, verified by satellite imagery; a fifth of payments must go to indigenous people or "traditional communities".
The World Resources Institute calculates that the area of land controlled by indigenous people in Brazil grew from 75,000 square kilometres in 1985 to 1.1m in 2017, or from less than 1% of the country to almost 13%. Protected areas rose from 130,000 square kilometres to 1.3m over the same period—combined, an area the size of the Democratic Republic of Congo now has clear ownership rights.
The government has said it will bring deforestation to zero by 2030.
Congress has grown both more powerful and more beholden to agribusiness and fossil-fuel lobbyists. A bill before the legislature would exempt infrastructure, mining and farming projects with a "small or medium-size impact" from environmental-impact assessments, in some cases letting developers judge their own impact. The rural caucus comprises almost two-thirds of lawmakers in both houses. Lawmakers in Mato Grosso are trying to have parts of the state reclassified as tropical savannah instead of Amazon, which would let farmers raze 65% of trees on their land rather than 20%.
In the past decade Congress has given itself vastly greater spending powers. In 2015 lawmakers' amendments to discretionary spending in the federal budget (some $40bn a year) represented less than 2% of the total; by 2025 such "earmarks" account for a quarter of non-mandatory spending, far higher than the OECD average.
On October 20th 2025, after more than a decade of deliberation, IBAMA, the environmental regulator, granted Petrobras, the state oil firm, a licence to explore for oil 160km off the coast of Oiapoque in the Equatorial Margin, a region near the mouth of the Amazon river believed to be rich in crude. President Lula had mounted a sustained campaign for the licence, arguing that Brazil risked missing out on trillions of reais of revenue. In June 2025 ExxonMobil, Chevron and the China National Petroleum Corporation won rights to prospect in the area. The national oil agency had put 172 exploration blocks up for auction that month, including some near the Amazon basin; only 34 found takers.
The main site Petrobras is eyeing, Block 59, lies at a depth of about 3km—almost twice as deep as the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. Brazil's energy ministry reckons investments in the Equatorial Margin could reach 280bn reais ($52bn) and create 350,000 jobs. The national oil and gas agency estimates the country's portion of the Equatorial Margin holds over 30bn barrels of oil, of which 10bn may be recoverable.
South America is the world's fastest-growing region for oil and gas; its output is forecast to increase by a third by 2030, compared with around a quarter in the Middle East and a tenth in North America. Brazil's crude production is forecast to surge by 10% in 2025, to above 3.7m barrels per day. In August 2025 BP unveiled Bumerangue, an enormous oil discovery some 400km off the coast of Rio de Janeiro—the company's largest find in 25 years. Equinor, Norway's national oil company, owns two sites nearby. Oil giants including Chevron, Shell and TotalEnergies all have growing operations in the country, and Petrobras, Brazil's state-owned oil giant, is investing to expand exploration and production.
In 2006, during Lula's first term, vast reserves were found beneath a thick layer of salt under the seabed off Rio de Janeiro. These "pre-salt" fields will make Brazil the world's fourth-largest oil producer by 2030, but soon after that the reserves will begin to run out. Without new discoveries, Brazil could become an oil importer again from 2040. Brazil's carbon emissions per barrel of oil produced are significantly lower than the global average. On December 5th 2025 Lula ordered his ministers to produce a roadmap for reducing Brazil's dependency on fossil fuels, saying oil revenues would finance the transition.
Brazil's constitution of 1988, one of the world's longest at 65,000 words, was written in the shadow of a two-decade military dictatorship. It mandates an extraordinary 90% of all federal spending, notably tying most public pensions to wage growth and requiring health and education spending to rise in line with revenue growth. It has been amended over 140 times since 1988, though most amendments merely tweak policy rather than excise its detailed prescriptions. The constitution allows the president, state governors, the bar association, trade unions and political parties to file lawsuits directly with the Supreme Court, creating a heavy caseload.
Brazil's Supreme Court combines three functions unusual for a single body: it is the chamber of last instance for appeals; it rules on all constitutional matters; and it tries criminal cases against politicians. Its 11 justices issued more than 114,000 rulings in the most recent year. To handle this, individual judges are permitted to make far-reaching decisions unilaterally. The court's costs amount to 1.3% of GDP, making it the second-most expensive judiciary in the world. Brazil has had a republic since 1889 with a tradition of coups d'état, but has now achieved 40 years of democracy and institutional stability. The court's president as of early 2026 is Edson Fachin, a sober judge who avoids the limelight; on February 2nd 2026 he proposed that the bench adopt an ethics code, appointing Justice Cármen Lúcia to draft it. The code would likely cover how judges should treat cases brought by relatives, participation in events, use of privileged information, financial transparency and social media. Some 82% of Brazilians support the code, but Alexandre de Moraes and Dias Toffoli pushed back.
Nepotism is widespread. Estadão, a Brazilian newspaper, has tallied 1,860 cases before the STF or the Superior Court of Justice in which close relatives of STF members are the main lawyers; in 70% of them, the lawyers were assigned after their relative was appointed to the court. In 2023 the justices declared "unconstitutional" a law that had forbidden them from ruling in cases involving businesses or individuals linked to firms run by their relatives. Right-wing candidates are expected to sweep the Senate in the October 2026 general election, and polling suggests a majority of voters will choose legislators based on their commitment to impeaching Supreme Court judges.
According to the IMF, gross public debt will hit 99% of GDP in 2030, up from 62% in 2010—30 percentage points higher than the median among emerging markets and Brazil's Latin American peers. The nominal deficit is 8.1% of GDP, composed almost entirely of interest payments. High spending and a tangle of subsidised credit schemes reduce the effectiveness of monetary policy, forcing the central bank to push rates higher to control inflation. Short-term interest rates stood at 15% in early 2026 and Brazil's real interest rate of around 10% is among the highest in the world. The benchmark interest rate is 14.75%. The average annual rate on credit cards has risen to 452%, and one in four Brazilians say they have fallen behind on repayments. The legacy of 1980s and 1990s hyperinflation means inflation expectations are on a shorter fuse than in other large economies. The government borrows about 8% of GDP annually just for interest payments, and spent 30% of revenue in 2023 on interest payments alone. Stabilising debts would require a primary budget surplus of around 5% of GDP. When Lula came to power in January 2023 he inherited a primary surplus of 1.4% of GDP; by December 2025 the government was running a primary deficit of 0.4%. Market distrust of Brazilian fiscal rectitude is estimated to cost the country between half and one percentage point of GDP growth annually—up to $250bn over the next decade if nothing changes.
Brazil invests just 17% of GDP, barely half the rate of India. Exports are equivalent to less than a fifth of GDP, compared with 90% in open economies such as Vietnam.
Tax exemptions total 7% of GDP, up from 2% in 2003. Some $15bn a year, or 78% of the military budget, is spent on pensions and salaries, compared with roughly a quarter of the defence budget in the United States. Brazil spends roughly 10% of GDP on constitutionally protected pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to his full salary. Brazil has around 13m public employees and 40m formally employed private ones, yet the social-security deficits for the two systems are virtually the same—a global outlier. Each year the federal government loses the equivalent of 2.5% of GDP because courts order hefty pension and welfare payments. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries, despite its relatively young population. Its social-security deficit is set to rise from 2% of GDP to over 16% by 2060.
Bolsa Família, Brazil's well-regarded welfare programme, costs a reasonable $83bn, or 3.7% of GDP, per year. It pays heads of households, overwhelmingly women, a cash handout averaging 680 reais ($136) a month; only households earning less than $44 a month per member are eligible. In exchange, parents must send their children to school and get them vaccinated. Some 19m families—about a quarter of all Brazilian households—receive it, and 7m have done so for a decade or longer. The companion programme Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), piloted alongside Bolsa Família in the municipality of Guaribas in 2003, provides family farms with technical help, organises them into co-operatives and channels their produce to public schools and hospitals. Such initiatives helped reduce the number of Brazilians living on less than $3 a day from around 30m in 2002 to fewer than 7m. Spending on public health and education, at around 4% of GDP each, is in line with that of Brazil's peers.
On November 5th 2025 the Senate passed Lula's headline campaign promise: a reform raising the threshold for income-tax exemptions from 3,036 reais ($564) per month to 5,000 reais, and lowering taxes for those earning up to 7,500. It will benefit some 16m Brazilians. Plans to increase taxes on rich Brazilians, fintechs and gambling firms were meant to make the package revenue-neutral, but these have stalled.
In 2024 the real was the world's worst-performing major currency. The appreciation of the real since Donald Trump took office in January 2025 slashed food inflation.
Brazil collects more tax revenue—around 34% of GDP—than most of its peers, but the system is among the world's most complicated. Of 147 companies surveyed by Deloitte, firms with annual turnover of up to $95m spent an average of 16,200 hours a year filing taxes; the largest firms, with sales greater than $1.5bn, spent 63,000 hours. The complexity is estimated to cost roughly half a percentage point of GDP growth annually.
The headline corporate income-tax rate is 34%, high by global standards. But the effective corporate tax rate is just 16-18%, one of the lowest figures among OECD countries, because most Brazilian firms are classified under special tax regimes. The "Simples" scheme lets companies with annual sales of up to $900,000 pay as little as 4% tax on their revenue. Another regime allows companies with revenues of up to $14m to pay tax based on projected rather than actual profits. Of Brazil's 16.5m companies, only 220,000 pay the full rate of corporate income tax. Of 128 tax-break regimes, 95 are set to remain in force until 2073.
A constitutional amendment passed in 2021 says tax breaks should cost no more than 2% of GDP by 2029. Another in 2023 simplifies the morass of consumption taxes into a dual VAT system, which could boost GDP by up to 4.5% by the time it is fully implemented in 2033, according to research by the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), a university in São Paulo. The Simples regime and the Manaus Free Trade Zone—a failed industrial policy that gives the Amazonian city a gigantic tax waiver to produce white goods—have been excluded from reform, as both are enshrined in the constitution.
Brazil is the world's soyabean superpower. Its soyabean exports pushed past 100m tonnes in 2023, a record, and are on track to touch 110m tonnes in 2025. The country has 49m hectares planted in soya, far more than the United States' 34m hectares (which has declined by 8% since 2017 as American farmers switch to maize and sorghum). Brazilian soyabeans have a higher protein content than those grown in the United States. Brazil supplied roughly half of China's soyabean market in 2017; during Donald Trump's first trade war that share leapt to three-quarters in 2018. Trump's second trade war has cemented the shift: since May 2025 China has refused to buy any American soyabeans, creating a seller's market in South America. Brazil also needs huge quantities of soya oil for its domestic biofuels industry, providing a floor of demand even when export conditions soften. American farmers, meanwhile, are scouting for alternative buyers in west Africa and South-East Asia.
China is Brazil's biggest trading partner. Brazil's soyabean exports to China nearly doubled between 2013 and 2023. Brazil is the chief destination for Chinese investment in South America, part of more than $168bn that Chinese firms have poured into the region since 2000. China has also lent billions to Brazil as part of $111bn in state-backed loans disbursed to South American countries since 2005.
Brazil has won the football World Cup a record five times in the five decades to 2002 but has not won since. The International Centre for Sports Studies, a Swiss research centre, reckons Brazil exported 3,020 professional footballers between 2020 and 2025, more than any other country, though France and Argentina are closing in.
The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) organises both the national team's matches and a morass of domestic leagues—a national league running alongside leagues from all 27 states, often with multiple tiers. Power in the CBF is skewed: each vote by a state federation chief counts for three points, whereas first-division clubs' votes are worth two and second-division teams' only one. The system protects smaller federations at the expense of Brazil's top clubs, most of them in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which are forced to play tiny teams in an overcrowded fixture calendar. At the start of the season, top clubs play a match every three days, compared with every five or six days for leading European sides.
A succession of CBF presidents have been removed for corruption. Ricardo Teixeira, the long-time head, was ousted after FIFA bribery investigations in the early 2010s. Of his successors, one was sentenced to jail, another was banned from football for 20 years, and a third was removed after accusations of sexual harassment. A fourth, Ednaldo Rodrigues, was booted out by the courts in May 2025 after his contract was declared null because a signature may have been forged.
In recent years Brazil has legalised sports betting and allowed football clubs to incorporate as public limited companies, having previously been run as non-profit associations. In May 2025 the CBF hired Carlo Ancelotti, the Italian former Real Madrid manager, as national-team coach at a salary of €10m, with a €5m bonus if Brazil wins the 2026 World Cup.
Brazil has a population of more than 213m. São Paulo is the helicopter capital of the world: elites are whisked to and from their penthouses on some 2,000 flights a day. Almost 13% of the sertão, the arid scrubland of the north-east, is in advanced stages of desertification.
Brazil has been independent since 1822 and has suffered numerous coups since. The most recent ushered in a military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985 and killed hundreds of people. The armed forces' headquarters in Brasília was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the country's most celebrated architect and a communist. During the dictatorship the military poured money into rural credit and created Embrapa, laying the foundation for Brazil's agricultural revolution.
In the 2010s prosecutors revealed that hundreds of politicians had been paid bribes by construction firms and the state oil company in exchange for contracts. Nicknamed "Operation Car Wash", it was one of the biggest corruption cases ever uncovered. It landed Lula da Silva in jail and fuelled public fury that propelled Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in 2018.
In October 2026 Brazilians will choose a president, all 513 federal deputies, 54 of the country's 81 senators and all 27 state governors. As of late 2025 Lula is the favourite to win. The right is in disarray after Jair Bolsonaro anointed his son Flávio as his successor, a choice most centre-right parties have rejected. The left is lining up behind Lula, now 80, for his seventh presidential campaign. Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo and the right's preferred candidate, has said he will not run unless he gets Bolsonaro's blessing. Brazilians now rate crime as their most important problem. Security is mostly the responsibility of state governments rather than the president.
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's far-right former president, lost the 2022 election and on September 11th 2025 was convicted by the Supreme Federal Court of committing a coup d'état, sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison. He is barred from the 2026 presidential election. In June 2025 federal police alleged he had approved an illegal spy ring that used geolocation software to track critics and investigating officers. He remains Brazil's most popular right-wing politician but has no obvious successor; his sons Eduardo, a congressman, and Carlos, a councillor in Rio de Janeiro, have discussed continuing the dynasty.
Brazil holds nearly a quarter of the world's known deposits of rare earths, second only to China. In the 1950s a Brazilian company, Orquima, was the world's largest miner of rare earths, extracting metals from monazite sands. China came to dominate the industry after concerns about monazite's radioactivity led Brazil to tighten regulation and nationalise Orquima. In January 2026 Lula's government began preparing a national strategy for rare earths, following a decree in November 2025 that made their acquisition a national-security issue. Serra Verde opened Brazil's one functional rare-earth mine in 2024. CIT Senai ITR, in the state of Minas Gerais, is South America's first rare-earth-magnet manufacturer. Lula has dangled the possibility of a rare-earths accord with the United States in exchange for a reduction in tariffs.
Only 13% of Brazil's exports go to the United States, worth $43bn a year; some 28% go to China. On July 9th 2025 Donald Trump pledged tariffs of 50% on Brazilian exports, citing a "witch hunt" against Jair Bolsonaro. On July 15th the US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, started investigating Brazil's trade practices, including "electronic payment services"—an apparent reference to Pix, the popular instant-payments system launched by the central bank in 2020. On July 18th the State Department revoked the visas of most Brazilian Supreme Court judges and officials connected to Mr Bolsonaro's prosecution. On July 30th Marco Rubio placed sanctions on Alexandre de Moraes under the Global Magnitsky Act—an action usually reserved for dictators and warlords—and Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs of 50% on many Brazilian imports from August 6th. He cited Mr Bolsonaro's "politically motivated persecution" but did not mention trade imbalances, perhaps because Brazil runs a deficit with the United States.
On November 20th 2025, in response to domestic pressure, Trump removed most of the tariffs on many of Brazil's exports to the United States, including staples such as coffee, beef and fruit.
Goldman Sachs reckons the tariffs may lower growth by 0.4 of a percentage point to around 2% in 2025. Economists at the Federal University of Minas Gerais reckon some 110,000 Brazilians would lose their jobs if the tariffs come into effect, mostly in agriculture. More than a third of unroasted coffee beans imported into the United States come from Brazil; the vast majority of imported orange juice comes from Brazil too; beef imports are growing fast. Brazil's national confederation of farmers, usually a Bolsonaro stalwart, condemned the "political nature" of the tariffs.
Brazil is one of the world's most closed economies: 86% of imports face non-tariff barriers (compared with 77% of imports to the United States and 72% globally).
Rio de Janeiro is Brazil's second-largest city (after São Paulo). Its metropolitan area has some 12m inhabitants. Violence costs the state of Rio around $2bn a year, or 1% of local GDP, according to the National Trade Confederation. Every elected governor of Rio state in the 21st century has been jailed or impeached on charges related to corruption.
The Red Command (known as CV) is Rio's biggest gang. According to researchers at Fluminense Federal University and a group of security-focused charities, around 1.7m people in the city live under the control of militias—armed groups formed by former policemen in the 1990s that now engage in trafficking, extortion and property-linked money-laundering—and a similar number live under the control of the CV.
Jogo do bicho, a popular illegal lottery, is deeply embedded in Rio's working-class neighbourhoods. The bicheiros, or bookies, often finance samba schools and exercise considerable political clout.
Cláudio Castro, the previous state governor and a member of Jair Bolsonaro's Liberal Party, was barred from office for eight years in March 2026 for illegally using public money to boost his electoral campaign in 2022. On October 28th 2025 he ordered a raid into dozens of slums targeting the leaders of the Red Command. The operation killed over 130 people—the deadliest police raid in Brazilian history, surpassing the 111 killed in the Carandiru prison massacre in São Paulo in 1992. Since taking office in 2021, Mr Castro presided over three of Rio's four deadliest operations.
President Lula da Silva called an emergency cabinet meeting; his justice minister called the raid "very bloody" and offered condolences to the families of "innocent people" killed. The UN Human Rights Office said it was "horrified". Several right-wing presidential candidates, including Tarcísio de Freitas, flew to Rio to praise Mr Castro. Under Mr de Freitas's mandate as governor of São Paulo, police killings increased by 60% the previous year. Nearly half of voters think security has deteriorated under Lula, according to Paraná Pesquisas.
Rodrigo Bacellar, the head of the state assembly, was detained in March 2026 on suspicion of obstructing an investigation into a local official linked to the CV, and of being tipped off about a police raid by the judge in charge of the case. That judge was subsequently imprisoned by order of Brazil's Supreme Court. Bacellar denies wrongdoing. The Supreme Court was due to rule on whether Rio's next governor would be elected by popular vote or chosen by local legislators, given Castro's disqualification. In April 2026 a Senate committee probing organised crime began considering recommendations including a call for federal action in Rio to address what it termed "the systemic infiltration" of crime in public institutions.
In 2018 militia associates shot dead Marielle Franco, a Rio city councilwoman, and her driver after she criticised illegal militia-linked property projects. The assassination shocked the nation. In February 2026 the Supreme Court sentenced Chiquinho Brazão, a former federal congressman, and his brother Domingos, a member of Rio's audit court, to over 76 years in prison for ordering the killing. The state's former police chief was also jailed for accepting money to derail probes into the brothers. Franco's killer, Ronnie Lessa, was a sniper and arms dealer.
Brazil may be the second-biggest single-country cocaine market in the world. First Capital Command (PCC), a Brazilian gang, is one of the biggest criminal outfits in the global cocaine trade, sometimes pushing service-providers into semi-permanent alliances. Drug money in Brazil often funds illegal gold-mining.
When Brazilian authorities declared they would force down or shoot any suspicious plane over the Amazon in late 2004, cocaine trafficking shifted from the air to rivers. A study by Leila Pereira of Insper, a Brazilian university, finds that over 1,400 murders between 2005 and 2020 can be attributed to this shift—more than a quarter of all murders in the area during that period.
Drug gangs regularly run their own candidates in Brazilian elections. Fintech firms have supercharged money-laundering: in 2024 Brazil boasted 1,600 fintechs, only about a fifth regulated by the central bank. According to Fernando Haddad, the finance minister, such firms laundered 52bn reais over four years. Stablecoins are widely used by traffickers: a laundering group known as the Criptoboys converted 19.4bn reais ($3.6bn) into crypto between 2017 and 2023 for numerous clients, many of them traffickers.
In late 2025 the Central Bank ordered the liquidation of Banco Master, a mid-sized bank whose business model was based on selling bank-deposit certificates with unusually high interest rates. Brazil's deposit-insurance fund will shell out $7.5bn-10bn to reimburse savers, the largest such compensation in Brazilian history. Gabriel Galípolo, the head of the Central Bank, stood firm against political pressure from the Centrão—a group of ideologically fluid parties that control Congress—and from members of the judiciary to save the bank. He has since asked lawmakers to give the Central Bank full administrative, budgetary and financial autonomy, beyond the operational autonomy it already enjoys.
Pix is an instant-payments system launched by the central bank in 2020. It spurred competition in Brazil's previously fusty banking sector by offering low-cost infrastructure on which upstart firms can provide financial services. That increased competition has also undercut American payment firms like Visa and Mastercard.
In response to Donald Trump's tariffs, Brazil unveiled a $6bn credit package including tax holidays and state-purchasing guarantees, which spooked investors given already strained public finances. Coffee exporters, hit with an American tariff of 50%, have stepped up shipments to North Africa and the Middle East, where sales volumes rose by three-fifths in the past year. In August 2025 Lula spoke with Narendra Modi about closer ties, including digital-payments links, and with Xi Jinping about deepening trade; Mr Xi declared relations with Brazil to be "at their best in history". America buys only a seventh of Brazilian exports, down from a quarter two decades ago. Chinese investment in Brazil surged by over 60% in the first half of 2025, compared with the same period in 2024.
Brazil is gradually raising import taxes on EVs to 35% by 2026, having previously allowed them in tariff-free. It has carved out an exemption for BYD while the Chinese carmaker establishes a factory in the country.
Brazil's constitution states that international relations must be based on non-intervention and the peaceful settlement of conflict. The country shares a border of over 2,000km with Venezuela. Brazil holds the world's second-largest deposits of rare earths, a group of 17 elements used in the production of electric vehicles and weapons.
After the American capture of Nicolás Maduro in January 2026—the first time US armed forces directly deposed a sitting president in South America—Lula organised calls with the leaders of Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Spain, France, Russia and Portugal; Brazil also sent medical supplies to a kidney-treatment centre in Caracas hit by American bombs. But Trump excluded Brazil from discussions about Venezuela's future. Brazil's position as South America's leader was weakened: Brazil, Colombia and Mexico condemned the incursion, but Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay were jubilant. Some Brazilian generals have discussed restarting the secret nuclear programme Brazil abandoned in 1990.
The EU-Mercosur free-trade agreement, finalised in early 2026, creates one of the world's largest free-trade blocs, covering almost a fifth of global GDP measured by purchasing-power parity. Brazil has also accelerated efforts to strike a trade deal with Canada.
Brazil runs a trade deficit with the United States of roughly $30bn a year in goods and services—unusual among large emerging economies. Relations between Lula and Donald Trump thawed after they met at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025. Trump praised their "excellent chemistry". On November 20th he removed most of the tariffs on many of Brazil's exports, including coffee, beef and fruit; he appears to have all but forgotten Mr Bolsonaro. Lula has also courted China, meeting Xi Jinping twice in the past year.
In May 2025 Lula was the only leader of a big democracy to attend Russia's commemorations of the end of the second world war, where he tried to convince Vladimir Putin that Brazil should mediate an end to the war in Ukraine. Neither Mr Putin nor anyone else listened.
After America struck Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, Brazil's foreign ministry "strongly condemned" the attack as a "violation of Iran's sovereignty and international law", putting Brazil at odds with Western democracies. Lula's foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, defended the government's record, citing Brazil's chairmanship of the G20 in 2024, during which Lula launched a global alliance against hunger and poverty and put forward a proposal for taxing billionaires.
Lula does not speak to his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, because of ideological differences. Having led the UN mission to stabilise Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Brazil now does little as the country collapses.
In March 2025 Lula visited Japan to promote Brazilian beef, courting a market that imports most of its beef from the United States. His ministers have also met Chinese bureaucrats to discuss ways to increase Brazilian agricultural imports, probably in place of American ones.
Lula has poured money into reviving Brazil's pharmaceutical sector, seeking "medical sovereignty" after the covid-19 pandemic exposed its weakness; Brazil's share of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) produced domestically was just 5% at the start of the pandemic, lower than in Bangladesh. More than 700,000 Brazilians died of covid. Since 2023 the health ministry's budget has risen by 30%; in 2024 BNDES, the state-owned development bank, more than doubled health-care lending. A broader "health-economic-industrial complex" programme has a budget of around $11bn and aims to increase the locally produced share of medicines and medical equipment from 45% in 2024 to 70% in 2033. The Butantan Institute, a São Paulo state research outfit run by Esper Kallás, developed Butantan-DV, approved in November 2025—the world's first single-dose dengue vaccine and Brazil's first fully home-grown vaccine. On May 4th 2026 its chikungunya vaccine was approved; a Zika jab is in development. A factory being built near Rio de Janeiro will quadruple Brazil's capacity to finish part-processed vaccines. A 2025 rule change speeded up clinical-trial approvals at Anvisa, the regulator. The "Knowledge Brazil" programme spent over $100m in 2025 to lure 600 scientists home; another $40m was set aside for research abroad. Nearly 7,000 researchers left Brazil between 2015 and 2022.
In response to Donald Trump's tariffs, Brazil has pursued deeper integration as a shield for its sovereignty. Celso Amorim, Lula's chief adviser, calls deepening ties with trading partners "a vaccine against arbitrary moves from any one power". Brazil is one of the World Trade Organisation's most litigious members, filing the fourth-most complaints after America, the EU and Canada. With the WTO enfeebled, Brazil is looking beyond it. After 25 years of delay, Mercosur, the South American bloc led by Brazil, is close to ratifying a pact with the EU; the agreement would open Brazil's public contracts to foreign bidders, phase out export taxes on key goods and bring environmental and labour rules closer to EU standards. Brazil has also concluded a free-trade deal with the European Free Trade Association, is finalising one with the UAE and is in talks with Canada, India, Japan and Mexico.
Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, run by Rice University in Texas, 12.5m slaves were trafficked from Africa between 1500 and 1866; of the 11m who survived the voyage, some 5m disembarked in Brazil, compared with 400,000 in the United States. Each of Brazil's economic booms before emancipation—sugar, gold, cotton, coffee—depended on slave labour.
In the 2022 census, published in 2023, for the first time more Brazilians identified themselves as brown or black than white. In the 1940s almost two-thirds described themselves as white. The shift reflects decreasing stigma as well as demography.
Valongo Wharf, a dock in Rio de Janeiro's port area used to disembark a million Africans, was the biggest slave port in history. It was discovered during renovations ahead of the 2016 Olympics. The ships that docked there carried cruel names such as Charity and Happy Destination. Nearby, builders renovating a home found a mass grave containing the remains of tens of thousands of slaves.
Between 2010 and 2022 the number of Brazilians who claim to practise candomblé and umbanda, two Afro-Brazilian religions, tripled to almost 2m. In 2023 more tourists in Rio visited "Little Africa"—a neighbourhood considered the birthplace of samba—than went to the statue of Christ the Redeemer or Sugarloaf Mountain. Zumbi dos Palmares, who led the largest-ever settlement for runaway slaves (20,000 people at its peak), was captured and decapitated by the Portuguese in 1695. November 20th, the date of his death, has been a federal public holiday since 2024.
In May 2025 the largest-ever genomic study of Brazil, published in Science, showed that although Brazil is home to more people of mixed race than anywhere else in the world, mass sexual coercion probably played a role: 71% of Y chromosomes came from people with European ancestry, whereas 42% of mitochondrial DNA came from people with African heritage, and 35% from indigenous ancestry.
In 2021 black Brazilian workers earned around 60% of the monthly income of white workers—a gap barely changed since 1986, and lower even when controlling for education. Less than half of black Brazilians over 25 have completed secondary school, compared with almost two-thirds of whites. In 2024 darker-skinned people made up 83% of those killed by Brazilian police. In 2012 racial quotas were introduced in federal universities.
Trade between Brazil and Africa grew from $5bn in 2002 to $26bn in 2012 during Lula's first two terms. Lula opened 19 embassies in Africa and visited the continent more than any other president. Trade nosedived after the "Operation Car Wash" corruption scandal engulfed Petrobras and Brazil's construction giants, and fell further under Jair Bolsonaro.
Since returning to power in 2023, Lula has rekindled relations. At a gathering of African presidents in Ethiopia he described his visit as "one of my most important trips ever" and pitched Brazilian research into drought-resistant crops as the basis for closer ties. Brazil's climate and soil are similar to those in central and western Africa, but it produces far more food thanks to Embrapa, its public agricultural-research agency. In May 2025 Brazil hosted some 40 African agricultural ministers and took them around Embrapa's projects in the country's arid backlands. The agency opened an office in Addis Ababa in September 2025. In 2025 Nigerian businessmen lobbied their parliament to legalise cattle imports from Brazil, which promptly sent planeloads of cows and bulls.
Brazil has long been considered Latin America's cinema laggard. Mexico has won over two dozen Academy awards and boasts over 7,000 cinema screens, twice as many as Brazil. Argentina has two Oscars and Chile three. In 1992, amid a deep recession, only three locally made films got a national release. Glauber Rocha is considered the country's most celebrated film-maker, though in the 1960s a Brazilian agent trying to promote his work in Europe lamented that "nobody is interested in our films."
The entertainment landscape was long dominated by Rede Globo, which produced telenovellas in-house with the country's best actors, screenwriters and directors under contract, preventing them from working for other companies. In 2002 the government set up Ancine, the cinema regulator, which collects data on Brazilian films, determines the number of days films are exhibited and controls a fund for local film-makers. In 2011 the "Paid TV Law" lifted restrictions on foreign ownership of cable TV channels, allowed telecoms firms to compete, and mandated that paid channels broadcast at least three and a half hours of Brazilian content every week during prime time, half of which had to be independently produced. This broke Globo's monopoly: independent production houses mushroomed. Paid-television penetration rose from around 15% in the 2000s to almost half by the mid-2010s. Jair Bolsonaro's government cut funding for the arts, including Ancine.
Over half of Brazilian films shown in cinemas in 2025 sold fewer than 1,000 tickets. Industry focus has shifted to streaming platforms. The Senate is discussing a "streaming law" that would force platforms to produce more local shows, display them on their home pages and pay Ancine's tax benefiting local film-makers.
In 2025 the Brazilian film "I'm Still Here", set during the military dictatorship, became the first Brazilian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and won an Oscar. In 2026 "The Secret Agent", a drama by Kleber Mendonça Filho, was nominated for four Academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has since 2016 expanded its 10,000-strong membership across continents; more than a fifth of members are now from outside the United States.
Brazil has built the world's most sophisticated biofuels industry over the past half-century. It is the second-largest producer of ethanol (an alcohol that powers cars) and the third-largest of biodiesel (which fuels heavy vehicles). Government-mandated blending ratios—30% ethanol in petrol and 15% biodiesel in diesel—are among the highest in the world. Three-quarters of Brazil's light vehicles are "flex-fuel", able to burn anything from pure petrol to the 100% ethanol sold at ubiquitous álcool pumps.
The programme began under the military dictatorship after the 1973 oil crisis. Brazil was then importing 80% of its fuel; processing excess sugar-cane juice into ethanol was a natural solution. By the mid-1980s, 96% of new cars sold ran on ethanol. When the first flex-fuel cars went on sale in 2003, the government launched a parallel programme to promote biodiesel derived from soyabean seeds. Despite being one of the world's largest crude-oil exporters, Brazil still imports 10% of its petrol and 25% of its diesel; biofuels reduce this dependence. President Lula da Silva sees biofuels as a way to bolster sovereignty and curb greenhouse-gas emissions without alienating farmers, who grow the feedstocks.
India and Japan are both working to adopt Brazilian biofuel expertise.
Brazil is a regional outlier on abortion. The procedure is permitted only if the mother's life is at risk, if the pregnancy resulted from rape, or if the foetus has anencephaly. Argentina legalised abortion until the 14th week in 2021; Colombia followed in 2022; Mexico decriminalised in 2023. In practice, even Brazil's limited rights exist largely on paper. Doctors who provide legal abortions are often denounced by colleagues. Clandestine procedures are the norm. Brazil's maternal mortality rate is higher than in any other large Latin American country.
Around 14,000 girls aged 14 or younger give birth every year. Research by Debora Diniz of the University of Brasília suggests nearly 15% of women have an abortion before turning 40, despite the barriers. Rich women tend to fly to Argentina or pay private doctors; poor women turn to unregulated back-street providers.
Public support for abortion is in decline. The evangelical caucus in Congress quadrupled in the decade to 2024, reaching 210 of 513 representatives. The Catholic caucus has 199 members; the two blocs often vote together on social issues. Only 17% of lower-house members are women, compared with 30% in Colombia and half in Mexico. The share of "nones"—atheist, agnostic or unaffiliated—doubled to 15% between 2014 and 2024, according to the Pew Research Centre, but they have no congressional caucus.
In 2024 a prominent evangelical deputy tabled a bill equating abortion after 22 weeks with murder, carrying a penalty of up to 20 years—higher than the maximum for rape. The bill was being fast-tracked before protesters stalled it. A case to decriminalise abortion up to 12 weeks has been before the Supreme Court since 2017; only two justices have ruled (both in favour) and there are no plans for a full hearing before the October 2026 general election.
Polling by Premise, a Washington-based research firm, commissioned by The Economist in 2025, found that nearly 70% of Brazilians say China's popularity is growing in their country. Brazilians think China has fairer and more transparent trade practices than the United States, and that China respects them more than America does.
Man has made his bedlam; let him lie in it.