🎖️ A new defense push

For decades, Brazilians dismissed military spending with one expression: little toys for soldiers. That shorthand captured a post-dictatorship cynicism that survived across governments. A country with runaway inequality, crumbling schools and no declared external enemies, the argument went, should not be funding hardware for an officer corps whose last large deployment had been against its own population.

But that posture is quietly changing. Behind a string of ribbon-cuttings and contract signings sits a coordinated push to turn the defense industrial base — BID, in Portuguese — into a pillar of Brazil's reindustrialization strategy. The clearest signs of the moment have come here and there, but their connections went unnoticed:

Don’t miss out! Upgrade to unlock full access. The process takes only seconds with Apple Pay or Stripe. Become a member.

We’re here for readers who want to truly understand Brazil and Latin America — a region too often ignored or misrepresented by the international media.

Since 2017, our reporting has been powered by paid subscribers. They’re the reason we can keep a full-time team of journalists across Brazil and Argentina, delivering sharp, independent coverage every day.

If you value our work, subscribing is the best way to keep it going — and growing.