Brazil under Bolsonaro: Social base, agenda and perspectives

Notes

1. Such as high interest rates and different benefits to the financial sector, large public credits to private monopolies, moderate (yet important) social policies that had the effect of social appeasement, among others.

2. Enormous oil reserves underneath the sea on the coast of Brazil.

3. Guedes was not known in the Brazilian mainstream until very recently. According to Joana Salem and Rejane Hoeveler in an article at Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, he graduated in Chicago in 1978, but his thesis was never published and didn't receive much attention. He started teaching at the University of Chile in 1980 under the Pinochet dictatorship. It was exactly in the 1980s that Pinochet started the pension reform in Chile, forcing Chilean workers to deposit 10% of their salaries in private pension funds. Today, 30 years later, 90% of Chileans do not receive a full minimum salary when they retire. About one thousand Chilean elderly committed suicide in the last five years. Symptomatically, this is the first and major project conducted by Guedes as Minister of Economy. In the case of Chile and in the project of pension reform presented to the Brazilian congress by Guedes, the military is excluded. Cf. Brasil, novo laboratório da extrema direita.

4. One of the first measures under the government of Michel Temer, after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff was completed in August 2017, was to change the regulatory framework for the exploration of the Pre Sal areas, breaking with Petrobras's obligatory participation, and opening more space for Exxon or Shell (explicitly quoted by Temer) to have more participation in the coming auctions. Cf. Com regras mais claras, leilão do pré-sal cria expectativa positiva na economia.