Is Brazil’s Underdog Era Coming to an End?

A number of weeks in the past, contained in the marbled hall of Brazil’s Overseas Ministry, the nation’s leftist President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, obtained a query from a journalist: “Trump stated he would announce a tariff in opposition to Brazil,” she started. However, earlier than the journalist might end her query, she was interrupted by Lula’s spouse, Rosângela da Silva, or Janja. (Brazilians love a singular nickname.)“Ah, the place are my stray canines?” Janja requested, leaving the journalists in surprised silence. She stated it once more, like an incantation. “The place are my stray canines?”Janja is thought for her off-the-cuff, salty remarks. (“Fuck you, Elon Musk,” she lately stated, at a G-20 occasion.) However the “stray canines” remark, whereas informal on the floor, cracked open an previous nationwide wound, revealing a subplot in U.S.-Brazil relations, one which Trump is unaware of and subsequently can not respect.To know its weight, one should look to an idea that’s arguably nestled deep within the Brazilian psyche: o complexo de vira-lata, or the stray-dog advanced. The phrase has turn into shorthand for a sort of nationwide inferiority syndrome—a way that Brazil, regardless of its grand ambitions and international aptitude, thinks of itself as a mutt making an attempt to hold with pedigrees. The time period vira-lata—actually “can-flipper,” evoking the picture of canines nosing by refuse—speaks not solely to desperation and an expectation of receiving nothing greater than mere scraps however to a broader anxiousness about worldwide stature. Brazilians, the idea goes, are perpetually craving for overseas validation, typically fast to dismiss and undervalue their very own beliefs in favor of imported ones. The hyperlink to Brazil’s colonial historical past is simple: their assets and other people have been exploited by the Portuguese from the beginning. Including a meta layer, when Brazilians see their compatriots act out this advanced, preening for consideration, this triggers much more chagrin about being Brazilian.For a gringa—a foreigner, like myself—to wade into this subject is controversial, though I lived in Brazil for greater than a decade. It may be misinterpreted by Brazilians as a broad criticism of their tradition, which, once more, is strictly how the stray-dog advanced works.The Brazilian playwright and essayist Nelson Rodrigues first coined the time period o complexo vira-lata within the wake of a nationwide trauma: Brazil’s loss to Uruguay within the 1950 FIFA World Cup, at house, in Rio de Janeiro. Rodrigues wrote that even future wins couldn’t strip away Brazilians’ sense that one other trauma was on the horizon, and that the nation had grown to anticipate self-failure, like “a reverse Narcissus, who spits on his personal picture.” In 2014, I noticed that concern realized when the nation misplaced once more within the World Cup, at house, to Germany. The ultimate rating was an inconceivable 7–1, and by the point Germany took a 4–0 lead, Brazil fell into silence, the internalized howl of the crushed stray canine.Different international locations have their very own variations of ingrained inferiority: in Australia, there’s the same idea of “cultural cringe,” which describes Australians’ tendency to see their work and artwork as subpar in contrast with that of Brits and People. Over time, the vira-lata advanced in Brazil has fine-tuned itself, starting first as a want for overseas validation, then turning into a want for white foreigners’ validation, and, now, most frequently, manifesting as a want for validation from america.When Janja requested the place the stray canines have been, she was referring to the various Brazilians who’ve held up Trump because the potential savior of Brazil—the man who would lastly embrace them as friends on the worldwide stage, solely to ultimately betray them. Shortly after Janja’s interplay with the journalist, Trump adopted by on his promise to slap a tariff on Brazil, saying a fifty-per-cent levy on all Brazilian exports to the U.S.—a tariff so steep that it’s nearer to a sanction. This was, in impact, an sudden kick within the nation’s stomach.“The temper proper now in Brazil is sort of like struggle,” Maurício Santoro, a fellow on the Brazilian Navy’s Heart for Political and Strategic Research, informed me. “Persons are shocked and mad.” Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela have a historical past of battle with the U.S., however the relationship between America and Brazil has principally been fairly pleasant. “So nothing ready us for what is occurring,” Santoro stated. “The place did this hate come from?”Trump’s tariff on Brazil, it appears, is much less about commerce than about his loyalty to the previous Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Trump’s ideological acolyte and Lula’s political nemesis, who’s presently on trial for making an attempt a coup d’état, amongst different prices. When Bolsonaro misplaced reëlection to Lula, in 2022, he, like his American counterpart, refused to go gently. He declared the nation’s digital voting system fraudulent and promised resistance. Bolsonaro supporters then stormed the capitol, in Brasília, on January 8, 2023, a tropical remix of the January sixth riots in Washington.The indictment in opposition to Bolsonaro, as florid as a telenovela script, included disturbing allegations, reminiscent of a plot to poison Lula and kill Supreme Courtroom Justice Alexandre de Moraes. (Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing.) The trial started in Could, and a choice is anticipated within the coming months. If Bolsonaro is convicted, he may very well be sentenced to as much as forty-three years in jail; some jail time is sort of definitely assured.“This Trial shouldn’t be going down,” Trump wrote on July ninth, in a letter to Lula saying the fifty-per-cent tariff. “It’s a Witch Hunt that ought to finish IMMEDIATELY!” In a follow-up letter on July seventeenth, this one addressed to Bolsonaro, Trump wrote that the previous Brazilian chief was receiving “horrible therapy . . . by the hands of an unjust system.”The subsequent morning, the Brazilian Supreme Courtroom declared Bolsonaro a flight danger. (He has sought refuge earlier than in Florida, the place he lived, for a pair months, after dropping the 2022 election.) Brokers raided his house and workplace, barred him from utilizing social media, and slapped an digital ankle monitor on him. “I’m a former President,” he stated to reporters. “I’m seventy years previous.” He added that it was “supreme humiliation.”Brazilians don’t appear to suppose that the Courtroom was out of line: in response to a ballot printed final Friday, solely 13 per cent of respondents thought the Courtroom’s actions have been extreme. But Bolsonaro has retained a defiant posture, taking part in a bike rally, on Tuesday, whereas carrying his ankle monitor. Trump, too, nonetheless has a maintain over among the right-wing politicians within the nation. Final week, in response to the tariff announcement, some conservative congressmen in Brazil unfurled a big MAGA flag within the chamber. The Brazilian web shortly seized on it as a visible demonstration of stray-dog-ism at its purest.Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and the founding father of analytical psychology, is credited with theorizing that whereas individuals can have complexes, complexes can have individuals. In response to Jungian thought, the best way to beat an unconscious advanced is to turn into conscious of it. That’s what’s beginning to occur in Brazil. “Trump’s conduct is uniting Brazilians, one thing that normally solely occurs through the World Cup,” Waldemar Magaldi Filho, the founding father of Brazil’s Jungian Institute of Educating and Analysis, informed me. “He’s really gluing us collectively for a bigger trigger. Now we’re a giant pack of stray canines.”What Trump miscalculates in waving round his tariff stick is that Brazilians are much less inclined than ever to cower to American may. Over the previous few years, Brazilians have been feeling themselves. The nation has tapped into a rare supply of sentimental energy with its social-media prowess. Brazil has a inhabitants of 200 and twelve million, and so they use social media prolifically, reportedly spending much more time every day on-line than customers within the U.S. do. Final 12 months, Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Courtroom justice, ordered X to take away accounts that have been spreading misinformation about Brazil’s 2022 Presidential election. When Musk refused, the Courtroom banned X. Then, a month later, Musk relented and agreed to pay a superb: dropping greater than twenty million Brazilian customers in a single day was maybe too massive a tablet to swallow.The success of “I’m Nonetheless Right here,” a Brazilian movie that garnered a number of worldwide and American awards, has additionally been an incredible supply of nationwide pleasure. After that movie’s star, Fernanda Torres, gained a 2025 Golden Globe for Finest Feminine Actor, she stated, of the opposite nominees, “Everyone deserves it, all people! So I don’t know why they selected this road canine that speaks Portuguese, however I’m so glad.” The rhetoric was acquainted, however on this case “road canine” was not being deployed in a self-deprecating means following a defeat; fairly, it was a press release of modesty made by a Brazilian who had simply claimed victory on an American stage. The arrogance of the nation is brimming such that the standard Brazilian stray canine itself, known as the vira-lata caramelo, or the caramel-colored mutt, has surged in recognition, because the embodiment of Brazilians’ pleasant, resilient, and multicultural nature. It has impressed adoption and advertising campaigns, appearances at Carnaval, and even legislative proposals that the caramelo turn into a nationwide icon.