Brazil today boasts 1,100 privately owned helicopters (half of them in São Paulo), the world's third largest fleet and growing at the clip of 15 percent a year. For those below, condemned to battling one of the worst rush hours on the planet (on a bad day, traffic pileups can run to 160 kilometers or more), the view isn't so inspiring. But like the crowded skies, the clotted streets are emblems of the remarkable new moment in a nation that has hoisted itself from the ranks of chronic underachiever to emerging market upstart. (Read this week's magazine story, Weathering the Storm.)

The new bullishness has taken many by surprise. For half a century Brazil has been flirting with greatness, aiming for the clouds and then flaming out. At its loftiest the country has charmed a host of believers, but their convictions have wavered. Fleeing Europe to Brazil ahead of World War II, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously declared his adoptive country “the land of the future” but then lost hope in the world and downed a lethal dose of vironal in 1942, in the middle of carnival, at that. The future would have to wait.  Charles DeGaulle looked down his spacious nose at much of the world, but the Brazilians always took personally his generic snub that  "Brazil is not a serious country."

It's poetic justice of sorts that the Brazilians are looking down on much of the serious world today. In the quarter century or so I've been keeping an eye on this country, this is the first time I can recall that the dark talk of "crisis" refers not to some domestic debacle but to the mess beyond national borders. "Hey, Bush, we've been waiting 20 years to grow," scolded president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an impromptu speech the other day, referring to the global spillover from the U.S. subprime credit crunch. "Get your act together."

Except for on the football pitch or the catwalks, such hubris is new for this chronically underperforming country. Maybe it's the currency. When I first arrived in Rio, in the early 80s, with inflation topping three digits, the greenback was almighty. Converted into wads of pink and green cruzeiros or cruzados or new cruzeiros (pick your perishable banknote), a hundred U.S. dollars could buy you a week on the town. Now and then the officials in Brasília tried to do something about it, lopping three zeros off the currency and decreeing drastic price freezes, so bringing only a flicker of stability. It wasn't as bad as Bolivia, where I once saw them weighing money instead of counting it in the Chapare district, but it left the continent's biggest country dysfunctional, all the same.

I keep a box in my drawer stuffed with inflation memorabilia from those days. Lost in the rubble of half a dozen versions of soiled bank notes and a kilo or so of useless coins, there's a small paper chit with the number 2147 stamped on it. It's the waitlist number I drew for the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro air shuttle, which thanks to the price freeze during the so called Cruzado Plan, of 1986, cost $38, about half the current bus fare. When prices are kept steady, goods tend to disappear, and the Cruzado Plan was no different; Brazil's airports became flop houses as stranded passengers waited hours for an available seat.

It's not always easy to pinpoint a nation's turning point, but 1994 has to be a modern Brazilian watershed. That was the year of the Plano Real, a radical new stabilization plan named for the eponymous currency, backed this time by fiscal discipline, not a price freeze or any of the other "heterodox" hocus pocus of former plans. Brazilians were skeptical and who could blame them, after a quarter century of band-aid reforms and Monopoly money?

Today, with foreign investors tripping over themselves to pour money into Brazil, the real has outgunned the world's top 16 currencies, from Euro to Yen, gaining 13 percent against the dollar this year alone, and nearly 60 percent since 2004. To my knowledge Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen never actually turned down work for U.S. dollars, but when the rumor that she had went viral in Brazil I knew the earth had shifted in this part of the hemisphere. Now it's outbound Brazilians changing their reals into wads of greenbacks and having the time of their lives in Paris or Disney World.

You don't have to go that far to watch them frolic. The boom that has seen Brazil's economy soar has also deepened pockets. The country now boasts 20 billionaires on the Forbes list (up from just four in 2003) and 140 millionaires, a 19 percent rise year to year, against a 6 percent rise for the rest of the world. Boutique banks and private asset managers have decorated the skylines with their logos and heli-pads.

The bonanza is not just for those commuting in choppers. Climbing wages (overall payroll is up 16 percent year to year), a flood of consumer credit (growing by 30 percent yearly) and plenty of new jobs (1 million this year, 7.3 million since 2004), have hoisted countless poor into the consuming classes. Much is made of how China's surging economy has lifted tens of millions out of poverty. In fact, Dragonomics has increased the wealth gap, while Brazil has managed to reduce inequality at the same it booms. Brazil's poorest ten percent have seen their wages grow by 57 percent in real terms between 2002 and 2006, against a nine percent rise for the richest tenth, says economist and poverty scholar Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a business school.

And while the middle class in the developed world moans about slipping downmarket, Brazil's just keeps on rising. Some 20 million Brazilians have moved up to the middle class in the last decade, and are now putting 800 new cars a day on the road in São Paulo alone. Sound exaggerated? Check out rush hour.

A competing jumble of climate change negotiations have turned the forum itself into a debate topic as polarizing as the carbon markets and global targets being proposed. Not one, but two extra groups have joined the G8 at Hokkaido, each with the potential to reach its own set of conclusions. The G8 + 5 group brings major developing emitters like China and India into the fold, and the Major Economies Meeting (MEM), George  W. Bush’s brainchild, adds three other big carbon emitters—Indonesia, Australia and South Korea—into the mix. Together, the groups account for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington would prefer to settle the major points at the MEM before tackling the unwieldy 200-country United Nations gatherings, which are coming up against their deadline for a post-Kyoto treaty to be approved in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Coming out of Hokkaido empty-handed will make pre-Copenhagen talks this fall just that much messier.

Still, while none of the three groupings at Hokkaido will likely produce a major consensus on emissions caps, they are producing a lively diplomatic chess match. E.U. members, who want the group to commit to steep cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, are butting heads with Bush over his unwillingness to commit to numerical targets. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is trying to broker a compromise. With a more green-friendly Obama or McCain administration only months away, Fukuda apparently believes that a tussle with Bush is counterproductive. Instead, he’s pushing for agreements on less-polarizing issues, such as encouraging carbon capture and storage technology for coal power plants, promoting nuclear energy and lowering tariffs on clean technology.

Rolando Andrade/AFP-Getty Images
Protesting Prices: Farmers and their supporters demonstrate against the Government for raising export tariffs on soybean products in Rosario, Santa Fe province

By Brian Byrnes

In Argentina, history tends to repeat itself. Every decade or so, the country implodes in crisis: coup d’etats, dictatorships, hyperinflation, devaluation, crime--all trademarks of Argentina’s self-fulfilling prophecy of repeated and gross governmental failure.
 
The wounds of the 2001 economic collapse--popularly blamed on outside forces like the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street--have just barely healed, but Argentina once again looks to be on track for a meltdown, and this time it could be sparked by a showdown on the Pampas.
 
A conflict between the fledgling government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Argentina’s influential farming sector over export taxes on commodities has dragged on since mid-March, and decimated the presidenta’s popularity. According to a poll released on May 22 by Poliarquia Consultores, Kirchner’s approval rating sank to 26 percent this month, down from 56 percent in January. This sharp decline was precipitated by the government’s inability to resolve the export-tax stalemate, but it has been deepened by the openly hostile stance that Cristina has taken with the farmers, and just about everyone else.

By Brian Byrnes

The Queen’s honeymoon was over before it even began. Less than 72 hours after she donned the azure-and-white sash as Argentina’s first elected female president, her highness had already gone to battle.
 
Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s reputation as strong-willed, outspoken and sometimes flippant had earned her the faux-royal title, and it was proven in spades on December 13,  when she took the podium at the Pink House in downtown Buenos Aires to blast U.S. allegations that  Venezuela's Hugo Chavez had tried to fund her presidential campaign with clandestine petrodollars.
 
With pointing fingers and a steely glare, “garbage” was how she described a U.S. prosecutor’s charges that a suitcase from Venezuela stuffed with $800,000 in cash had been destined for her campaign coffers before it was detained at a Buenos Aires airport in August. Fully aware of the moment, Cristina played the gender card, vowing not to be “pressured” because she was a woman and -- in a not-so-subtle dig at the Bush administration -- promising to strengthen relations with “friendly” countries, like Venezuela.
 
Not exactly a winning start for a president who was expected to improve ties with the U.S. following a frosty four-and-a-half years under her predecessor (and husband) Nestor Kirchner, who routinely blamed the IMF and Wall Street for Argentina’s catastrophic economic collapse in 2001. Cristina--with her penchant for globetrotting, high fashion and political discourse--would surely be able to patch up foreign relations, or so everyone thought.

Politicians on both sides of the partisan divide in the U.S. rarely miss a chance to beat the drums over the perils of the immigrant tide and the imperative to "secure our borders." That might be a good idea. With the world's largest economy on a slide, the dream of making America is looking less lustrous every day, and now the U.S. risks seeing one of its most dynamic and creative sources of human capital blow away with the prairie dust. 

There are already troubling signs. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank reports that the flow of dollars Latin American and Caribbean immigrants send back home is slackening. In 2007, Latins living in the U.S. remitted $66 billion to their native countries. That's not half bad (a record amount, in fact) but what drew the Bank's attention was the modest 7 percent increase over the previous year. Until then the flow of dollars back home had been expanding at double digit rates every year. Last year the nominal sum of incoming migrant dollars actually fell in Brazil, from $7.4 billion to $7.1 billion.

Call It the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.  

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent,  tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva).  At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of  cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.

In Brazil these days, armor is the new normal. From bullet-proof luxury rides to the caveirão, a police assault wagon built like a tank, Brazilians have fortified themselves against the hazards of modern living. In Rio, one evangelical Christian church in a crime-ridden favela is raising a steel-plated, 30-meter containing wall to keep the flock from harm's way when the shooting starts. So fashionable is the concept these days that Brazilians have even come to believe that their charmed economy is innured to world economic downturn.

No doubt there is some ground for optimism. Inflation is under control. Hard currency reserves are topping $160 billion, a continental record. Foreign debt is history. And while the largest economy on earth skates on the edge of recession, Brazilian officials confidently project growth of 5 percent or more this year, or, if the international markets tank, "maybe a little less," shrugs Finance Minister Guido Mantega. Give us your best shot, the bulls in Brazil seem to be saying, for Latin America's drowsy  giant has not only stirred but "decoupled" - or broken free - from the vagaries of the globe's overlord economy. 

Photo: Associated Press

"Ego," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once memorably observed, "is the little Argentine in all of us." The truth of this pithy maxim never ceased to impress me during the 27 months when I was stationed in Buenos Aires in the late 1980s as Newsweek's South America correspondent. The Argentines' capacity for self-absorption seemed endless and would express itself in a number of ways, from the collective obsession with a storied past, when Argentina ranked among the world's ten richest countries in the early decades of the early 20th century, to the need to highlight their more European society and culture vis-a-vis those of their Latin American neighbors. To this day, the international news sections of Buenos Aires' leading dailies regularly feature stories analyzing how Argentina is factoring into the calculations of top policymakers in Washington, as if the editors at those newspapers can't quite bring themselves to tell readers that their country barely flickers on the radar screens of the Bush White House or Condoleezza Rice's State Department.

Latin America's rainmakers are not in the habit of eating humble pie. Until just the other day, after all, hyper-popular leaders like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could do just about what they pleased, leaving their political foes little choice but to stand by and stew in frustration. But if recent events are any indication, the Latin charismacrats may have to get used to an unsavory set of new rules.

Across the region, democracy is biting back. On Dec. 1, Venezuelans handed Chávez a stinging defeat by turning down a 69-point referendum proposing everything from curbing private property to unlimited reelection. It was El Comandante's first loss at the ballot box, and a sign that the ballyhooed Bolivarian revolution will not be implemented by steamroller. Nor are things looking so rosy for Chávez's closest disciple, Morales, the coca-leaf grower-turned-messianic leader, who vowed to recreate Bolivia by recasting the constitution to redeem the country's teeming poor and forgotten. Now he presides over a nation riven ethnically, between the destitute indigenous majority and the relatively well-heeled light skinned heirs of the Spanish colonialists; geographically, between the hardscrabble Altiplano and the fertile, oil-and-gas-rich lowlands; and ideologically, between the left-wing nationalists who blame foreigners for Bolivia's woes and the globalists who want desperately to connect to world markets. So volatile is the political climate, the constituent assembly had to finish drafting the new constitution under military guard.

Those of us who've had the misfortune of sitting through one of Hugo Chavez' interminable diatribes quietly savored the moment during last week's Ibero-American summit when Spain's King Juan Carlos bluntly asked the Venezuelan president "Why don't you shut up?"

The royal outburst occurred on the final day of the international parley in the Chilean capital of Santiago, at a point when Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was politely asking his South American counterpart to cease referring to Zapatero's right-wing predecessor Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist." True to form, Chavez kept talking through Zapatero's comments even though the Venezuelan leader's microphone was turned off--at which point the usually courtly monarch could no longer contain himself and uttered the words so many of us in Latin America's foreign press corps have been longing to hear.