Brian Winter on Brazil, Argentina, and the Future of Latin America

Brian Winter — editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a 20-year analyst of Latin American politics who has lived in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico — talks with Tyler Cowen about why Brazil counts as progress despite its stagnant growth, the gap between falling homicide rates and lived fear in São Paulo and Rio, the region’s hardest security trade-off (Bukele’s mass incarceration versus Colombia’s slower democratic route), Argentina’s mix of nostalgia and lean entrepreneurial success, and Javier Milei’s odds of pulling off fiscal stabilisation under a strong democracy.

Key ideas

1. ‘Stuck’ undersells Brazil’s real progress. Winter measures Brazil against its own past rather than against growth headlines: two decades of poverty reduction and a solid democracy, set against roughly 2 percent growth, a fertility rate near 1.55, and the same ‘grow old before rich’ danger facing China and much of the developed world.
2. Falling homicide rates and rising fear can move in opposite directions at once. São Paulo’s murder rate has dropped more than 80 percent in 25 years to below the US national average, yet residents report no improvement because armed robbery, phone theft, and a tripled street-dwelling population dominate daily experience — a gap sharpened by fear that stolen phones will be used to drain victims’ Pix accounts.
3. Latin America’s security dilemma has one radical outlier and one slower model. Nayib Bukele jailed more than 1 percent of El Salvador’s population without due process and cut the official homicide rate below that of the United States, winning approval ratings above 80 percent; Winter contrasts this with Colombia’s messier, rights-abusing but still democratic reduction in violence during the 2000s, arguing there is no fast, clean democratic shortcut against organised crime funded by a doubling of regional cocaine production.
4. Milei’s diagnosis is right; the democratic precedent is thin. Winter agrees Argentina’s core problem is fiscal — decades of spending financed by borrowing and then money-printing — but notes that the region’s successful stabilisations (Mexico, Chile, Peru) mostly happened under one-party rule or dictatorship; Brazil’s 1990s Real Plan is the rare example achieved under democracy, which is the bar Milei must clear.
5. Cultural capital outlasts economic capital. Winter’s frame for Argentina’s paradox — a country obsessed with its own decline that still produces global tech leaders such as Mercado Libre and Globant — is that intellectual and cultural capital erodes more slowly than economic capital, and that founders forged by extreme macroeconomic volatility emerge unusually lean and resilient.

Content

Why Brazil is ‘stuck’ — and why that framing understates it

Cowen opens by asking why Brazil is stuck. Winter resists the premise: over nearly 20 years of following the country, he has watched it lift millions out of poverty and consolidate as one of the hemisphere’s most solid democracies, even as growth has slowed to around 2 percent since the end of the China-driven commodity boom. Pressed on demographics — a fertility rate near 1.55 — Winter widens the frame rather than disputing the number: Brazil faces the same danger as China and much of the developed world, ageing before it grows rich. On agriculture, the one sector that is clearly not stuck, he credits tropical geography and double harvests, but argues the larger story is infrastructure catching up: soy that once moved on one-lane mud roads now travels increasingly paved routes and improving rail links, correcting the old jibe that Brazil was ‘the most efficient farming country in the world until goods left the farm’. On economic geography, he notes the traditional core — São Paulo state (a quarter of the population, a third of GDP), Rio, and Minas Gerais (whose name recalls its exhausted gold mines) — is now rivalled by the Central West’s soy and cattle boom around Mato Grosso, a region Winter, a Texan, finds ‘virtually indistinguishable from Texas’, down to the shift in popular music from bossa nova and samba toward sertanejo, a Brazilian cousin of country music.

Migration, culture, and a fading tradition of openness

Asked about migration into Brazil, Winter traces a tradition that peaked before the Great Depression, when São Paulo’s Immigrant Inn received waves of Italian and Spanish arrivals and Brazil built the largest Japanese population outside Japan (visible today in São Paulo’s Liberdade neighbourhood, itself previously a settlement of freed slaves). That openness collapsed with the crash in coffee prices — Brazil once produced three-quarters of the world’s coffee — and has not fully returned: roughly 500,000 Venezuelan and a similar number of Bolivian migrants have arrived in recent years, a fraction of the 8 million-strong Venezuelan diaspora, with Portuguese’s relative obscurity as a world language a real barrier. On culture, Winter (self-declared Texan with ‘a guilty love for sertanejo’) notes Brazilian commentators’ own anxiety that the country’s cultural exports — once globally dominant through bossa nova, Jean Gilberto, and Gilberto Gil — have not kept pace with South Korea’s rise; he attributes this partly to other countries catching up and partly to cyclical factors, while insisting Brazil remains ‘a tremendously seductive place to visit’.

Crime in São Paulo and Rio: falling numbers, rising fear

Winter offers what he calls a genuinely complex picture of São Paulo crime: the homicide rate has fallen more than 80 percent over 25 years, from one of the world’s most violent cities in the late 1990s to a rate — about 5 per 100,000 — now below the US national average. But armed robbery, carjacking, and phone theft remain common enough that visitors and elites favour armoured cars and avoid using phones on the street; the spread of Brazil’s instant-payment system, Pix, has added a new fear, that a stolen phone will be used to empty a victim’s bank account before it can be blocked. The visible street-dwelling population has roughly tripled in a decade, a shift Winter attributes partly to the pandemic and partly to other factors he does not fully specify. Rio, he says, repeats São Paulo’s security story without the same homicide progress, complicated by milícias — paramilitary groups, often composed of serving police officers, that control organised crime across large parts of the city. Winter connects both cities’ struggles to a region-wide surge in organised crime: cocaine production across Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia has roughly doubled in a decade, and the resulting smuggling routes and money touch nearly every country in Latin America.

Race, identity, and the long reckoning with Brazilian racism

Asked what he has changed his mind about on Brazilian race relations, Winter points to a striking shift in self-identification: the share of Brazilians identifying as Black or mixed-race in census data has risen from the upper 40s to about 56 percent over a decade — not because the underlying population changed, but because more people are willing to claim that identity with pride. He situates this within a longer reckoning: Brazil imported more than 5 million enslaved people from Africa between the sixteenth century and 1850, more than ten times the number brought to the United States, producing racial dynamics that are, in his account, both different from and in some ways larger in scale than the American story. Unlike the United States, formal segregation never took hold in Brazil, partly because centuries of racial mixing made it impractical — but Winter argues the country has only recently confronted the long-standing elite claim that Brazil was free of racism, replacing it with an acknowledgement of a distinct but real racism of its own.

Bukele, Milei, and Latin America’s hardest trade-off

Cowen raises Nicaragua and Cuba as evidence that police states can achieve safety, and asks whether this strengthens the case for Nayib Bukele. Winter agrees the comparison is apt: Bukele has jailed more than 1 percent of El Salvador’s population over a year — proportionally equivalent to jailing more than 3 million Americans — without due process for many detainees, and El Salvador’s official homicide index has fallen below that of the United States, however uncertain the numbers, producing approval ratings above 80 percent. Winter argues a slower, harder alternative exists: building professional police forces and judiciaries and prosecuting through trials, the route Colombia took in the 2000s under President Álvaro Uribe, which involved serious human-rights abuses (a military later found to have killed thousands of innocent people) but achieved a dramatic and durable fall in violence under democracy. On Colombia’s puzzle — steady long-run economic growth alongside chronic violence — Winter credits geography: Bogotá sits atop a mountain amid plateaus that make the country, by some development-agency comparisons, as hard to govern centrally as Afghanistan, producing a competent capital that has never defaulted or suffered hyperinflation alongside vast territory federal authority never fully reaches. The same trade-off frames Winter’s read of Javier Milei: his diagnosis of Argentina’s chronic fiscal deficit, financed alternately by borrowing and money-printing, is correct and shared by most mainstream economists, but the precedent for fixing it under democracy is thin — Mexico’s 1980s–90s stabilisation happened under one-party rule, Chile’s began under Pinochet, Peru’s followed Fujimori’s closure of Congress, and only Brazil’s 1990s Real Plan succeeded fully within a functioning democracy.

Argentina: nostalgia, lean startups, and the psychoanalyst’s couch

On why Buenos Aires’s Jockey Club retains its cachet, Winter locates it within a broader national pattern: Argentina, unlike future-oriented Brazil, is ‘obsessively focused on its past’ — a country that was among the ten richest in the world a century ago and has since slipped into the middle of the pack, a decline he has spent ‘too many hours’ of his career studying since covering the country’s 2001–02 economic collapse (five presidents in two weeks, a sovereign default, a 70 percent currency devaluation) at the start of his career. Yet Winter does not see nostalgia and creativity as contradictory: Argentina’s cultural and intellectual capital, he argues, erodes more slowly than its economic capital, and founders of global companies such as Mercado Libre (a genuine Amazon competitor) and Globant credit the discipline of building a business amid constant macroeconomic upheaval with making them unusually lean and durable. He also notes, without fully explaining it, that Argentina holds the world’s highest per-capita rate of psychoanalysis, a habit so normalised that friends discuss it as casually as errands. Uruguay, by contrast, offers a genuine turnaround story: a small country of 3.3 million that halved poverty from 50 percent after Argentina’s 2001 collapse spilled over its border, by building fiscal consensus, tightening bank regulation, and deliberately diversifying away from dependence on its larger neighbours.

Livability, happiness, and the region’s unfinished business

Asked to pick a city for a young family relocating anywhere in Latin America, Winter chooses São Paulo over Buenos Aires or Santiago for its combination of economic opportunity, relative safety, global integration, and — despite Cowen’s objection that it is simply ugly — an unusual ease of assimilation for outsiders, a theme he is exploring in his forthcoming book on the city, The Ugliest City You’ll Ever Love. On the region’s well-documented tendency to report happiness above what its income levels would predict, Winter agrees, while cautioning against reducing the region to either its dysfunction or its charm; the two, in his account, coexist. Reflecting on the profession, Winter says the hardest thing to teach younger correspondents is humility, describing an earlier generation of Anglo-American journalists (himself included, by implication, when he started at Reuters) who wrote about Latin America with a ‘finger-wagging paternalism’ rooted in 1990s end-of-history confidence — a certainty since eroded by the 2008 financial crisis, the Iraq War, and the United States’ own democratic strains. He closes by naming an unfinished frontier in his own coverage: indigenous culture, largely absent from the cosmopolitan cities (Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City) where he has lived, and newly urgent given emerging evidence that as many as six million people may have lived in the Amazon at the time of Portuguese contact, unsettling the old assumption that Brazil was empty land in 1500.

See also

• Brian Winter — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host