Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power

Brazil’s most well-known cartoonist, Ziraldo Alves Pinto, said in 2010 that his country ought to have an exclamation point after its name, considering the excitement that accompanied most discussions of the southern hemisphere’s powerhouse economy at the time. The euphoric approach was matched by the international media: a November 2009 cover of The Economist magazine showed the Christ the Redeemer statue taking off like a rocket from the Corcovado mountain. It anticipated an era of “Brazilmania.” Brazil’s 2010 economic growth of 7.5 percent seemed to confirm...