Covid-19 Reveals the Similarities Between Brazil and the United States
By Jeff Manuel and Tom Rogers
(Note: This is an English-language translation of an article that appeared on the Estadão de São Paulo’s website as “Os paralelos entre o Brasil e os Estados Unidos” on September 28, 2020. Many of the statistics have changed since the article was published, especially numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths.)
In recent months, Covid-19, police killings, and right-wing populism have consumed the world’s attention. Brazil and the United States lead the world in Covid-19 deaths and police killings and both have struggled under populist presidents. This is not coincidental. The corrosive power of events in 2020 is unearthing connections that have existed for some time. As the twentieth century — the American century — recedes into history, the US and Brazil are emerging as peer nations for the twenty-first century: western hemisphere countries defined by deep, persistent racialized inequality with agricultural sectors focused on exploiting resources to feed a growing global middle class.
Curiously, most observers in the United States have overlooked obvious similarities between the US and Brazil. Pundits have compared the US Covid-19 pandemic or police killings to the EU or smaller nations. In a June 29 editorial, David Leonhardt of the New York Times argued that “American exceptionalism” explains why the US suffers so much more than other high-income nations. Historian John Barry wrote that the US learning to live with Covid-19 is “one thing if new cases occurred at the rates in Italy or Germany . . . It’s another thing when the United States has the highest growth rate of new cases in the world, ahead even of Brazil.” Commentators need to get over their shock that the US is keeping company with Brazil. Similarities between the two nations are rooted in history and likely will deepen in the coming decades.
Brazil and the US lead the world in the number of Covid-19 deaths. As of September 15, the US had over 6.5 million confirmed cases and more than 195,000 deaths. Brazil ranks second in Covid-19 deaths, with over 124,000 deaths from the disease and 4.3 million confirmed cases (third in the world). Other countries have noticed Brazil’s and the US’s connection as the twin epicenters of the Coronavirus pandemic. In late June, China’s Global Times, mouthpiece of the Communist Party, wrote, “there is no question that the US and Brazil — which account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s total cases — are the most prominent failed states in the fight against the virus.”
When it comes to police killings, Brazil is the world leader and the US follows close behind. In 2019, Brazil’s security forces killed 5,804 people while US police killed 1,536. Brazil and the US also stand out for their police disproportionately killing Black men. Of those killed by police in the US, 27 percent were Black, while African Americans make up 13 percent of the overall population. In Rio de Janeiro, three-quarters of the people killed by police in 2019 were Black or mixed-race, groups that comprise about half of the population.
Brazil and the United States are also linked as nations led by two prominent right-wing populists: Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. Bolsonaro, elected two years after Trump, adopted many of Trump’s signature phrases; his Twitter feed is littered with exhortations to “Make Brazil great again” and attacks on “fake news.” This year, Trump and Bolsonaro’s relationship has been trailed by the virus. On March 7, Trump hosted Bolsonaro at a Mar-a-Lago event that became “a Coronavirus hot zone,” as several members of Bolsonaro’s entourage subsequently tested positive for the virus. Three days after celebrating the July 4 holiday with US ambassador Todd Chapman, Bolsonaro confirmed he had tested positive for Covid-19. Both Trump and Bolsonaro aggressively push hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug with disputed potential for combatting Covid.
A deepening connection between the US and Brazil is not just a passing anomaly of 2020. The countries have long resembled each other in important areas, even if these tend to be ignored, especially in the US. Although both countries are democracies (Brazil in its most recent phase since 1985), both have high levels of economic and racial inequality. Historically, Brazil has been among the most economically unequal countries on earth, while the US has spent the past two generations marching toward greater inequality. Oxfam reports that the incomes of the richest 5 percent of Brazilians match the total incomes of the other 95 percent. Inequality persists despite the strides Brazil took during the early 2000s commodity super-cycle. Between 2003 and 2014, 29 million Brazilians climbed out of poverty. The global financial crisis quickly erased many of those gains.
Economic inequality in the US has risen for fifty years. Since 1971, each decade has ended with a smaller share of Americans living in middle-income households. In short, the US is looking more like Brazil economically. The transformation is clear to foreign observers. Diane Francis, columnist for Canada’s Financial Post, describes US society today as “a virtual ‘Brazil,’ with wealthier citizens living behind gates, security guards or in suburbs, away from poor neighbourhoods and their teeming populations of impoverished people.”
In both Brazil and the US, inequality is also racialized. The two countries had the largest slave societies in the hemisphere, with roughly equal populations of enslaved Africans and people of African descent (though the proportion of enslaved people was always higher in Brazil). Scholars have noted a deep kinship in the pervasiveness of slavery and the persistent anti-black racism that followed. Brazilians of African descent earn 20 to 25 percent less than white Brazilians, drop out of school at higher rates, and enjoy less social mobility. In the US, African American-led households earn half of what white households earn.
As scholars of agricultural and environmental history, we have researched the long-term convergence between the US and Brazilian agricultural sectors, where agricultural modernization led the countries to global leadership in the production of soybeans, beef, corn, orange juice, and cotton. Their agricultural sectors are also tightly interconnected, with US agribusiness corporations dominating crop processing in Brazil and Brazilian firms moving into the US. Brazil’s JBS, for instance, is the leading US meat-packer (its plants in both countries have been ravaged by Covid-19). Brazil and the US have raced to position themselves as the pantry for a rising Asian middle class. As East Asia’s economic and political power grows, Brazil has found a lucrative niche in exporting raw crops and ores. The United States appears likely to follow over the coming decades, withdrawing from its twentieth-century status as a global superpower and returning to a focus on hemispheric issues and exploiting the continent’s resources.
Outlines of structural similarities between the US and Brazil first appeared in agriculture and have become clearer due to Covid-19, police killings, and populist presidents. Overall, these are not just a passing coincidence but reveal the outlines of a twenty-first century global system in which the US and Brazil stand aligned as wealthy but unequal nations.
