Soon after being elected Brazil’s president in late 2018, Jair Bolsonaro boasted that he would privatize 100 of the country’s state-owned companies. While this delighted markets and financial elites, the far-right Bolsonaro government’s privatization agenda has gone next to nowhere in almost three years. And the operations carried out so far either pale in significance or are surrounded by shady interests.
The majority of “privatizations” carried out by the Bolsonaro administration have involved the selling of assets in companies that are already partly privately owned. And only one 100-percent state-owned company is finally reaching the finish line on its...
