Brazil does a shock therapy after the end of cold war

minhow

First, Iam not saying that Brazil is a communist country, but that is an idea that I thought.

Brazil is a country with a huge potential, a working people, resources, good geography, but for some reason, it doesn't improve. It has a massive problem with corruption, inefficient bureaucracy, high protecionism and high taxes.

But what if, after the end of the cold war, there was a shock therapy based on models used on former communist countries? While Brazil isn't communist, it seems to share many problems that these countries had.

With a shock therapy, I mean, a huge privatization of government companies (it had in a small scale), opening to free trade, bureucratic reforms (In Brazil, bureucratics are permanent and are very hard to get fired), opening to foreign investments and many other things.

How would this country be nowadays if this POD had happened?
 
Dan1988

Dan1988

Taunay said:
Firstly, you may need someone better than Fernando Collor in that regard to win the 1989 Election @Vinization
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Problem with that is Roberto Marinho wanted Collor to win, even to the point of rigging the debates on his TV channel to denigrate Lula and favor Collor. So if there's one mind that needs to be convinced, it's Marinho's.
 

Vinization

*Looks at Collor's opening of the markets and the FHC administration* Eh...

For the sake of the thread, I suppose you could have someone who is willing to put Roberto Campos in his cabinet be elected in 1989. Who that person is supposed to be, I don't know. Maybe Afif or Silvio Santos? 🤷‍♂️
 
Dan1988

Dan1988

Vinization said:
For the sake of the thread, I suppose you could have someone who is willing to put Roberto Campos in his cabinet be elected in 1989. Who that person is supposed to be, I don't know. Maybe Afif or Silvio Santos? 🤷‍♂️
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I'll be honest, regardless of everything, having Silvio Santos as President (even to this non-Brazilian) just sounds so interesting and almost meme-worthy. Of course, he can't bring the Gate of Hope with him, nor re-engineer the Happiness Boxes as something akin to a social welfare system, but it would certainly (at least by 1980s standards - well, except for Reagan) be interesting to have an entertainer as President. (Of course, I don't know much of his politics, nor what he ran on when he tried being a Presidential candidate.)
 
wcv215

wcv215

minhow said:
How would this country be nowadays if this POD had happened?
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Given how shock therapy turned out elsewhere…not great. Poverty would increase, wealth would be concentrated even more into the hands of the upper class, hyperinflation would occur, and life spans would decline.
 

minhow

wcv215 said:
Given how shock therapy turned out elsewhere…not great. Poverty would increase, wealth would be concentrated even more into the hands of the upper class, hyperinflation would occur, and life spans would decline.
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But shock therapy was very positive in former Warsaw Pact countries, they are very developed nowadays. Even in former USSR republics, the effect was positive in long run.
 
Gukpard

Gukpard

minhow said:
But what if, after the end of the cold war, there was a shock therapy based on models used on former communist countries? While Brazil isn't communist, it seems to share many problems that these countries had.

With a shock therapy, I mean, a huge privatization of government companies (it had in a small scale), opening to free trade, bureucratic reforms (In Brazil, bureucratics are permanent and are very hard to get fired), opening to foreign investments and many other things.
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...
Brazil HAD a shock therapy and our privatisations were the second largest project of privatisations just behind RUSSIA itself.
 
Kaiser of Brazil

Kaiser of Brazil

We had it, didn't work out very well like the others said. But if you want to turn Collor (aka Patrick Bateman) into the Brazilian version of Boris Yeltsin, you need to find a way to make him less unpopular or make the elections corrupt enough that he wins a second term instead of getting an impeachment. The problem with Collor is that he was a charismatic man from a small party that came in getting into fights with the parties that controlled Congress. As we saw when someone with that same style came up 30 years earlier, he won't be lasting long.

Brazil has a system which the Political Scientist Sergio Abranches call "Coalition Presidential", the congress is divided by many parties and the President needs to act like a Prime Minister in forming a cabinet with a ruling coalition and make sure the Presidents of both houses are under his control to avoid impeachment (which is thrown around so casually that it acts like a non-confidence motion) when something unpopular is done. Collor couldn't get that, Dilma couldn't get that, and as a result both were Impeached. Bolsonaro, for instance, kept governance by doing what is essentially an elaborate bribery in giving funds to the "projects" of congressmen in return of votes.

This system is a very powerful tool to keep the Status Quo going and fostering an environment of corruption. Congress has gained way too much power in recent years, especially thanks to Bolsonaro, and this is a process which as been happening since Vargas was ousted from power in 1945. If you want Brazil to actually go through a "shock therapy" undisturbed then you need to make the Presidency far stronger in the 1988 Constitution, which won't be the case if it's drafted by people who were jailed or exiled by a Military regime centered on a powerful President with a rubber-stamp Congress.
 
wcv215

wcv215

minhow said:
But shock therapy was very positive in former Warsaw Pact countries, they are very developed nowadays. Even in former USSR republics, the effect was positive in long run.
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No it didn't. The Warsaw Pact countries saw exactly what I said would happen happen. The most successful example people point to, Poland, didn't really do shock therapy. Most of them just recovered during the move westward geopolitically. Countries where that didn't happen, in particular Ukraine and Russia, did not. Ukraine in particular was very badly off even up to the modern day. And shock therapy in Russia was such a disaster it led to Putin and the oligarchs.
 
Gukpard

Gukpard

minhow said:
But shock therapy was very positive in former Warsaw Pact countries, they are very developed nowadays. Even in former USSR republics, the effect was positive in long run.
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wcv215 said:
No it didn't. The Warsaw Pact countries saw exactly what I said would happen happen. The most successful example people point to, Poland, didn't really do shock therapy. Most of them just recovered during the move westward geopolitically. Countries where that didn't happen, in particular Ukraine and Russia, did not. Ukraine in particular was very badly off even up to the modern day. And shock therapy in Russia was such a disaster it led to Putin and the oligarchs.
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The shock therapies were one of the most traumatic episodes in the recent history of those countries and that is one of the main reason why latin america drifted to the populist left and eastern europe went to the populist right.

In Brazil you had multiple general strikes and riots thanks to that. The only south american country that didn't went so bad in it was Uruguay since they literally had a referendum about the privatisations and a solid "NO!" was given by the public. In bolivia the shock therapy went so bad that their elected president Hugo Banzer (who was a former dictator and his neoliberal policies made his democratic government be even worse than his dictatorship) privatised the whole water deposits of Bolivia to a private consortium.
 
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Slime_blob

Slime_blob

Latin American example of a very successful shock therapy is Fujimori and Peru.. He basically Singlehandedly salvaged the economy and put it like to back on track and economic boom. The economy was collapsing when he took power
 
Concerned Brazilian

Concerned Brazilian

Gone Fishin'
Warning
Burton K Wheeler said:
You need to use the report function if there are posts you’re concerned about. @ ing mods is just obnoxious and comes across as you trying to threaten people that are making posts you don’t like.

I haven’t read this thread but will if something gets reported.
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I like the idea of the thread, but some comments cross the line into politics. I will report them tomorrow.
 
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