Books about Brazil – Larry Rohter’s "Brazil on the Rise"

This is the first of several review pieces on books about Brazil that I’ll be writing in the coming months on the blog. Please participate in the discussion by sharing your views on these books in the comments section.

Brazil is at a crucial juncture in its history. Already the undisputed economic leader of Latin America, the country also appears poised to join China, Russia, Germany and the US in the pantheon of global powers. Long known primarily for its cultural exports like soccer and samba, today Brazil boasts thriving agricultural and manufacturing sectors that compete, and often outpace, those of traditional economic powerhouses. Significantly, its economic emergence has been driven by both its abundance of natural resources as well as the export of finished products. Today Brazil relies more on making airplanes than coffee.

Given its dramatic ascent, it is now more relevant than ever that non-Brazilians learn about the country – its history, politics, geography and the cultural traditions beyond global icons like Pele and Carmen Miranda. Educating the world, and Americans in particular, about Brazil is the impetus behind the book Brazil on the Rise, written by Larry Rohter, former South American Bureau Chief for the New York Times and the paper’s current culture writer. An enjoyable mix of historical and political analysis and personal anecdote, the book is ambitious, educational and at times thrilling. It’s also flawed, and many of Rohter’s arguments rest heavily on the same platitudes about Brazil that he sets out to demolish.

Brazil’s history followed a very different course from the rest of South America. Unlike its Hispanic neighbors, Brazilians did not rise up against their colonial overlords in Iberia. Separated from the rest of the continent by both history and language, even today many Brazilians see themselves as being part of South America rather than the culturally distinct hispanic Latin America.

Brazil’s anomalous identity vis a vis the rest of Latin America is a recurrent theme in Brazil on the Rise. The book gives readers a crash course on Brazilian history, tracing the ruthless cycles of exploitation, beginning with the Portuguese explorers who ravished the Atlantic littoral for natural resources to export to Europe. Slaves were imported from Africa by the millions to mine for gold and grow and cut sugar. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, but the profitability of rubber, found in the country’s interior, led to the development of wage slavery, which tied workers, mostly the Ameridians who survived the conquest, into a system of poverty pay and backbreaking conditions.

If the country’s unique history is poorly understood by foreigners, so too is modern Brazil. (The number of people I meet who assume that Spanish is the country’s official language never ceases to surprise me.) Despite its reputation as a hedonist’s paradise, Rohter explains that the country is in fact a deeply conservative place, with a rigid social hierarchy held intact place by long-standing conventions governing gender, race and religion.

Skin color remains of the most intractable fault lines dividing Brazil: today black Brazilians make just 58 cents for every $1 earned by a white Brazilian. In the book’s chapter on race, Rohter’s frustration at the country’s deeply entrenched bias against blacks is barely restrained, but serves as an important corrective to the widely held view that Brazil is a racial utopia.

While the book at times strikes a populist tone on class and race issues, it turns a blind eye to the social inequalities that have been exacerbated during the recent period of growth. Rohter makes no secret of his admiration for praise the free market policies adopted by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula’s predecessor. But a rise in GDP only tells part of the story of Brazil’s experience with neoliberal reforms. First, Brazil remains divided by enormous inequality, with an income disparity between rich and poor that ranks among the worst in the world. Second, Brazilian industry benefitted greatly from state protectionism in the form of high tariffs in the post-war period. The negative side of neoliberalism, which the poverty of millions of Brazilians attests to, is ignored by Rohter.

My next post will address why Rohter elides these issues, and show how his book’s thesis gives insight into his big problem with Oliver Stone.