Speaker

Brian Winter

Brian Winter

Editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and one of the most widely read English-language analysts of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years covering the region from residences in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.

Winter began his career at 22 as a Reuters correspondent in Buenos Aires, covering Argentina’s 2001–02 economic collapse — five presidents in two weeks, a sovereign default, a 70 percent currency devaluation — an experience he credits with shaping his lifelong focus on the interplay of politics and economic policy. He later served as vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas before becoming editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, where he also hosts the Americas Quarterly podcast. He is the author of Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller co-written with Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-written with former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir of trying and failing to learn to tango in Argentina. He is at work on a book about São Paulo, provisionally titled The Ugliest City You’ll Ever Love.

Core positions

  • Brazil’s stagnation is real but should be read against genuine long-run progress. Winter weighs Brazil’s roughly 2 percent growth and demographic decline against two decades of poverty reduction and democratic consolidation, resisting a purely ‘stuck’ framing.
  • Falling crime statistics and lived fear can diverge sharply. São Paulo’s homicide rate has fallen more than 80 percent in 25 years, yet residents report no improvement because robbery, phone theft, and a swelling street-dwelling population dominate daily experience.
  • There is no fast, clean democratic route to reducing organised-crime violence. He weighs Nayib Bukele’s rights-suspending mass incarceration in El Salvador against Colombia’s slower, still-flawed democratic reduction in violence during the 2000s, arguing the trade-off between speed and due process is real rather than illusory.
  • Cultural and intellectual capital erodes more slowly than economic capital. His frame for Argentina’s paradox of chronic decline alongside globally competitive startups such as Mercado Libre and Globant, whose founders credit macroeconomic volatility with making them unusually disciplined.
  • Correspondents covering Latin America should approach it with more humility than his own profession showed historically. He traces an earlier generation’s ‘finger-wagging paternalism’ toward the region to 1990s end-of-history confidence, since eroded by the 2008 financial crisis, the Iraq War, and the United States’ own democratic strains.

In the wiki