The Geopolitics of Brazil: An Emergent Power's Struggle with Geography (Part One)
20 Nov 2012
South America is a geographically challenging land mass. The bulk of its territory is located in the equatorial zone, making nearly all of the northern two-thirds of its territory tropical. Jungle territory is the most difficult sort of biome to adapt for human economic activity. Clearing the land alone carries onerous costs. Soils are poor. Diseases run rampant. The climate is often too humid to allow grains to ripen. Even where rivers are navigable, often their banks are too muddy for construction, as with the Amazon.
As the tropics dominate South America, the continent's economic and political history has been problematic. Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana are fully within the tropical zone, and as such always have faced difficulties in achieving economic and political stability, though the discovery of external pageoil in Venezuela improved that country's economic trajectory. Throughout the tropical zones nearly all of the population lives within a few dozen kilometers of the coast. For the most part, however, those coasts are not naturally sculpted to encourage interaction with the outside world. Natural ports – deepwater or otherwise – are few and far between.
There are, however, two geographic features on the continent that break this tropical monotony.
The first is the Andean mountain chain. The Andes run along the continent's western edge, giving rise to a handful of littoral and transmountain cultures physically separated from the continent's eastern bulk and thus largely left to develop according to their own devices. Colombia and Ecuador straddle the tropics and the Andes, with their economic cores not being coastal, but instead elevated in the somewhat cooler and dryer Andean valleys, which mitigates the difficulties of the tropics somewhat. Farther south are the arid transmountain states of Peru and Bolivia. Peru has achieved some degree of wealth by largely ignoring its own interior except when seeking resource extraction opportunities, instead concentrating its scant capital on the external pagede facto city-state of Lima. In contrast, landlocked Bolivia is trapped in a perennial struggle between the poor highlanders of the Altiplano and the agriculturally rich region of the lowland Medialuna.
The combination of mountains and jungle greatly limits the degree to which states in this arc – from French Guiana in the northeast to Bolivia in the southwest – can integrate with each other or the outside world. In all cases, basic transport is extremely difficult; tropical diseases are often a serious issue; there are few good ports; agricultural development is both more labor and capital intensive compared to more traditional food-producing regions; humidity and heat hinder conventional grain production; and the ruggedness of the mountains raises the costs of everything.
Historically, the only way these states have achieved progress toward economic development is by accepting dependence on an external (and usually extraregional) power willing to provide investment capital. Without this, these states simply lack the capital generation capacity to meet their unique and staggering infrastructure challenges. Consequently, the broader region is severely underdeveloped, and the residents of most of these states are generally quite poor. While some may be able to achieve relative wealth under the right mix of circumstances, none has the ability to be a significant regional – much less global – power.
The second exception to the tropical dominance of South America is the temperate lands of the Southern Cone. Here, the summers are dry enough to allow traditional grains to ripen, while cooler weather – especially winter insect kills – limits the impact of disease outbreaks. Unlike the scattered populations of the Andean region, the Southern Cone is one large stretch of mostly flat, moderately watered territory. The bulk of that land lies in Argentina, with significantly smaller pieces in Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil. The only remaining country on the continent is where the temperate Southern Cone overlaps with the Andean mountain zone: Chile, one of the world's most physically isolated states. It takes longer to fly from Santiago to Lima than it does to fly from London to Moscow, and longer to sail from Santiago to Buenos Aires than it does from New York City to London. Chile consequently does not participate significantly in the politics of the Southern Cone.
In stark contrast to the mountains and jungle that dominate the majority of South America, the Southern Cone flatlands are the best land on the continent. Their flatness, combined with their natural prairies, lowers the cost of construction, and the temperate climate makes them rich agricultural zones. But the real advantage lies in the region's river structure. The Parana, Uruguay and Paraguay rivers combined with the Rio de la Plata – a massive estuary that empties into the Atlantic between contemporary Buenos Aires and Montevideo – are all navigable for a great portion of their length.
Moving goods via water costs about 10 to 30 times less than moving the same goods by truck. Such riverine transport systems therefore generate massive amounts of capital with little difficulty compared to land-transport systems. Collectively, this river network overlaying the agricultural flatlands is known as the Rio de la Plata region.
These rivers are particularly valuable for agricultural regions such as the Rio de la Plata. Wheat, corn, soybeans and the like suffer from a weak value-to-bulk ratio – oftentimes transporting them great distances can only be done at an economic loss. Water transport allows for foodstuffs to cheaply and easily be brought not just downstream but to the ocean and then the wider world. external pageRussia presents a strong contrast to the Rio de la Plata region. Its famines often directly result from the inability to bring foodstuffs to the cities efficiently because its navigable rivers are not well situated – meaning foodstuffs must be transported by truck or train.
The most important geographic fact on the continent is that the Rio de la Plata region's rivers are navigable both independently and collectively via a system of canals and locks. Only the external pageGreater Mississippi River network of North America has more kilometers of interconnected maritime transport options. This interconnectivity allows greater economies of scale, greater volumes of capital generation and larger populations, and it greatly enhances the establishment of a single political authority. In contrast, the separate rivers of the North European Plain have given rise to multiple, often mutually hostile, nationalities. Argentina controls the mouth of the Rio de la Plata and the bulk of the navigable stretches of river. This leaves the Uruguayans, Paraguayans and Brazilians at a disadvantage within the region. (Brazilian power is greater overall than Argentine power, but not in the critical capital-generating geography of the Rio de la Plata region.)