Explaining Brazil

In any democratic republic, it’s normal for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to clash. That’s a sign of mutual oversight. It’s also normal for politicians to make concessions to their adversaries. That’s a sign of democracy.But the sequence of recent events in Brazilian politics has turned into a sweeping narrative about what happens when these dynamics of checks and balances slide into sheer revanchism and bargaining over the rule of law.Send us your feedbackSupport the show

In a country with 27 state governments, more than 5,000 city halls, and around 12 million people working in the public sector, calls to reform — or improve — Brazil’s civil service never really seem to go away.We talked to Brazil's special secretary for state transformation — and asked him to compare the reform proposals coming from the lower house with the Lula administration's approach. Send us your feedbackSupport the show

Carlos Nobre, head of the Planetary Science Pavilion at COP30 in the Amazon, talks to us about the conference’s results, the climate emergency we are living through, and what Brazil can still do.Send us your feedbackSupport the show

Five years ago, Brazil launched a public digital payment infrastructure — and its impact on the financial market and society has been immense.Send us your feedbackSupport the show

Over the past decade, Brazilian lawmakers have steadily built up procedures to expand their powers over the purse. That has included increasing the overall volume of congressional grants; making a large share of them mandatory spending; limiting the Executive’s discretion over when to release those funds, and creating ways to erase transparency and traceability from the process. A perfect recipe for corruption, which has now trickled down to state and municipal levels.But the Supreme Court has just ordered the three branches of government to run a nationwide awareness campaign — from December through March — to explain how congressional grants are executed. The idea: show the public where they can access information about these amendments, teach people how to track where the money goes, and encourage them to report irregularities or wrongdoing. Will that finally be enough?Send us your feedbackSupport the show