Brazilian cowboy-influencer Pedro Henrique Biondo Matias weeps on an Instagram reel from the end of January as he crosses the border with Peru into his homeland. “It’s a joy to eat our rice and beans and to speak Portuguese again,” he tells the camera. Having ridden his mules, Ada and Oklahoma, across nine nations of both American continents as he vlogged his journey, Matias returned to Brazil for the first time in over a year for the final leg. A civil engineer and champion cattle caller with 738,000 Instagram followers as of this writing, Matias has embarked on his odyssey as an ode to Brazilian sertanejo, a behemoth cowboy-themed cultural industry underpinned by the political and economic might of the South American superpower’s world-beating agribusiness sector.
Starting in Texan cowboy outpost Fort Worth, passing through Mexico into Central America, and then from Panama into South America, Matias’s journey will come to an end deep in the interior of São Paulo state at the Barretos Rodeo Festival, Brazil’s very own cowboy mecca. Matias is a four-time winner of Barretos’s cattle-calling title using a berrante, a wind instrument fashioned from cow’s horn.
The event kicks off at the end of August, as election season hits full swing in Brazil, both the world’s fourth-largest democracy and home to more cattle than people, with 238 million bovines versus 213 million humans. Last year, the seventieth-anniversary edition of the festival saw nearly one million visits generating some $100 million in economic activity over eleven days, with a star-studded lineup of sertanejo music giants, rodeo champions atop prizewinning bulls, agribusiness magnates, and right-wing politicians from across the country.
Conspicuously absent was Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. A regular attendee and star guest of the event, he was still under house arrest awaiting trial for his failed coup of 2022, following his loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Onstage amid organizers decked out in Stetsons and jeans, Bolsonaro protégé and São Paulo state Governor Tarcísio de Freitas blasted the charges against the ex-president as a “grave injustice.” Ronaldo Caiado, then the right-wing governor of Goiás state, in the heart of Brazil’s hinterland, told the crowd: “In fourteen months, one of us will be occupying the Presidential Palace, and we will return Brazil to the Brazilians.”
The Barretos Rodeo Festival is perhaps the most visible demonstration of the nation’s economic, political, and cultural power base’s inland shift over the course of the past few decades. Brazil is no longer the country of samba and Jorge Ben Jor’s “País Tropical”; sun-soaked, soft-power postcard images of Rio de Janeiro’s beaches belong to the nostalgia of an imagined past. Today, sertanejo music—which blends Brazil’s traditional música caipira with North American country and western—dominates the country’s playlists with ballads like “Ugly Fight,” “Bad Reputation,” and “Smell of Guilt.” Themes typically include lost love and betrayal, while echoing late-capitalist tropes: performative consumption, flirting via Instagram likes, and online jealousy with an emphasis on cuckoldry. There’s even a subgenre called agronejo, a kind of blingy rap but for farmers: Instead of diamonds and platinum, it boasts of abundant harvests, cattle profits, and imported pickup trucks, the preferred vehicle of insurgent interior Brazil.
Sertanejo’s success is a nod to Texas’s cultural victory over Brazil’s farming frontier—and agribusiness’s victory over the Brazilian economy, accounting for around a quarter of its GDP. Turbocharged by social media in one of the world’s most terminally online nations, increasingly dependent on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, Brazil has fused the codes of the American West onto its own supposedly endless tropical frontier of savannah and rainforest. This expanse of natural beauty has been rapidly transformed into industrial farmland for an export machine supposedly “feeding the world,” in the argot of agribusiness barons, even as millions of Brazilians are deprived of proper nutrition.
Westward Expansion
Matias’s more than three-thousand-kilometer mule journey from the Peruvian border through Brazil’s Amazon states and across the center-west agricultural heartland to the Barretos festival covers the region you might call Brazil’s “Cowboy Belt,” where a vast chunk of the country’s resource wealth is extracted for export. Agriculturally, the belt boasts most of the country’s cattle rearing and is home to farms larger than New York City and towns where the cattle-to-human ratio surpasses ten to one. The area is rich in rare earths, among other critical minerals to have emerged recently as a geopolitical flash point. In February, Donald Trump’s government agreed to a $565 million financing deal with Brazilian rare earths miner Serra Verde, which operates in Goiás, the central western state in the heart of the Cowboy Belt.
Indeed, much of Brazil’s farming interior developed around wildcat gold mining in the 1700s, when groups of cruel explorers known as bandeirantes roamed in search of minerals to quarry and Indigenous people to enslave. The gold flowed from the Portuguese colony to Lisbon and on to London, where it filled Bank of England coffers, planting the seeds for the global financial capitalist model. After gold became depleted in the late eighteenth century, western parts of the interior fell into economic decline. Then, in 1938, a year after he staged a coup d’état and dissolved Congress, Brazil’s populist dictator and so-called father of the poor Getúlio Vargas began the “March to the West” to populate the sparsely inhabited region. At the time, almost all of Brazil’s roughly 41 million inhabitants lived within a few hundred kilometers of the coast; in contrast, some 1.2 million people lived in Brazil’s Center-West, according to 1937 estimates. “The true meaning of Brazilianness is the march to the West,” Vargas told the nation in a midnight broadcast on New Year’s Eve that year. “From the fertile and vast valleys, the product of the varied and abundant crops; from the bowels of the Earth, the metal with which to forge the instruments of our defense and our industrial progress.”
The march was part of Vargas’s “Estado Novo” nationalist policy, wherein economic reforms aided in industrializing Brazil and provided benefits to the working class, who received education and health and dental care for the first time. (At the same time, he ran a vicious secret police and crushed dissent.) The march often resulted in conflicts with Indigenous populations, who were expelled from their lands—in turn, deforested and degraded—to make way for agricultural colonization. This process further concentrated property in the hands of a few, exacerbating Brazil’s already long-standing agrarian inequality.
These local agrarian elites would escalate tensions during the Cold War, organizing themselves in the 1960s through groups like the Ação Democrática Mato-Grossense, a local branch of the CIA-linked anticommunist think tank Instituto Brasileiro de Ação Democrática. Not content with propagating its own ideas, the group destroyed the newsroom of a newspaper linked to the Brazilian Communist Party, publishing op-eds to disseminate anticommunist ideas in the newspaper O Matogrossense. Known for carrying military-issue submachine guns, the group organized an armed campaign to persecute alleged communists and supported the 1964 right-wing military coup, backed by the United States, that deposed the left-leaning President João Goulart, who advocated for land redistribution.
The military identified strongly with the region because “of its frontier character,” says Thiago Krause, a Brazilian historian. “Ranching and agrarian elites were very opposed to Goulart everywhere because of their fears of agrarian reform.” Expanding northward into the Amazon, the dictatorship promoted further colonization programs and infrastructure projects, building a system of federal highways that drew resources and agricultural exports from the farmlands and mining pits, at a heretofore unheard-of scale, to the shipping ports. Although the dictatorship ended in 1985, this model of extraction for export has only ballooned in the decades since. The country’s agricultural exports are now worth upward of $160 billion annually, compared to $15 billion in 2000, Brazil second only to the United States.
A new breed of conservative, anti-environmentalist politics has arisen parallel to that of sertanejo culture over the past decade.
Today, agriculture in Brazil is split broadly into two camps. Characterized by rural smallholdings and crop diversification, family agriculture is the basis of food production for the domestic market, producing the majority of domestic staples like beans, cassava, and milk. Despite their importance in keeping Brazil fed—although the country has made significant advances in fighting hunger, about 18.9 million families still face some degree of food insecurity—family farmers typically have limited access to credit, exposing them to debt; lack qualified technical assistance and the infrastructure to transport produce; and are vulnerable to climate change.
Then there is large-scale agribusiness, whose rise continues to astound. In the 1970s, Brazil was a net food importer but today is a powerhouse exporter, the result of decades of state policies aimed at supporting agricultural production. Industrial-scale farming receives vast subsidies alongside cheap credit, dubious loans, and bailouts to cover the damage from droughts or floods (which many in the sector are reluctant to blame on climate change). The core of the business is Mato Grosso, a vast farming superpower with more millionaires per capita than any other Brazilian state.
Although the industry’s main export is soybeans—Brazil is the world’s largest producer, feeding China’s soaring demand for the crop—it also produces an incredible amount of beef. Between 1990 and 2018, Brazil increased its herd size by 56 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Having slaughtered a record 42 million cattle last year, the country overtook the United States in December as the world’s biggest beef producer (it also happens to be the world’s biggest beef exporter, a distinction it has held since the 2010s).
This rapid ascent has turned Brazilian slaughterhouse owners into international beef barons: see, for instance, JBS, the multinational company thought to be the largest beef packer in the world. Started in the state of Goiás by José Batista Sobrinho, who arrived from Minas Gerais in the years after Vargas’s march west began, this butcher shop and slaughterhouse has transformed under Sobrinho’s sons Joesley and Wesley (and with generous government subsidies) into a world-beating meat-packer with facilities on four continents—including North America, where the company operates the largest beef plant in the United States in Cactus, Texas. In fact, JBS is now the largest beef producer in Texas; through a subsidiary, the company was also the largest single contributor to Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign.
Bullet, Bull, and Bible
When I started writing this essay at the end of January, Pedro Henrique Biondo Matias had just crossed into Acre, the Amazon rainforest border state so peripheral to Brazil’s centers of power that it’s the punch line of a national joke: “Acre, does it exist?” Matias confirmed its being with gusto. Beset by well-wishers, within the first few frames of the video, Matias receives from a young girl with a black-and-bright-pink “Texas Farm” baseball cap a teddy-bear-patterned bag containing bite-size chocolates and a fifty-reais note.
Acre, which was purchased from Bolivia in 1903 for the price of two million British pounds, is best known for its role in the rubber boom and for the environmental activism of figures like Chico Mendes. Born in the small town of Xapuri, Mendes was assassinated in 1988 at the behest of cattle ranchers for his work organizing rubber tappers in defense of the forest. Home to the Asháninka, an Indigenous group with a long history of repelling invaders, and a population that includes several uncontacted communities, Acre has a culture largely informed by tribal, riverine, and Northeastern Brazilian traditions. But lately, the state has become an entry point for refugees seeking asylum in Brazil—originally Haitians, now mostly Venezuelans—as well as a major exit point for those hoping to cross the Darién Gap to Texas. Its Peruvian and Bolivian borders have also made Acre a major cocaine-trafficking route and one of Brazil’s most violent states.
Yet even in Acre, which accounts for only 0.2 percent of the national GDP, sertanejo culture and the agribusiness machine have swallowed up local culture the way vast soybean plantations swallow up family farmers. “There is this cultural erasure of the local cultural identities of Acre, stemming from the sertanejo culture, the cattle, the music, the clothing, the way of speaking,” says Fabio Pontes, the Acre journalist in charge of local independent news outlet Varadouro.
A new breed of conservative, anti-environmentalist politics has arisen parallel to that of sertanejo culture over the past decade. This coalition—representing agribusiness groups, conservative Catholic and evangelical Christian churches, and police and military hard-liners—is often dubbed “Bullet, Bull, and Bible.” Acre is no exception to this phenomenon, and the state that historically produced left-wing leaders like Mendes is now a bastion of pro-Bolsonaro politics increasingly centered on agribusiness. Today, even the forest reserve named in memory of Mendes is a hot spot of deforestation and illegal cattle rearing.
During his stay in Acre, Matias met with Rio Branco’s Bolsonaro-loving Mayor Tião Bocalom. Bocalom, who is running for governor of Acre, describes himself as “right-wing since forever.” He has railed against current Indigenous and environmental protections in the state, claiming that they halt progress, especially where agribusiness is concerned. Similar rhetoric has been amplified by Bolsonaro’s 2018 election, with a wave of “Bullet, Bull, and Bible” politicians winning elections across the Cowboy Belt.
Bolsonaro, like his most fervent supporters in the landowning class—deeply anticommunist, nostalgic for the dictatorship, and disdainful of the country’s Indigenous population—is given to fetishizing the American frontier. In 1998, Bolsonaro, then a federal lawmaker, told the National Congress: “The Brazilian cavalry was truly incompetent. The American cavalry, however, was competent; they decimated their own indigenous population in the past and today don’t have that problem in their own country.”
When he won the presidency twenty years later, it was on a platform that promised to restrict Indigenous land demarcations. In the days and weeks after his inauguration, land-grabbers committed a wave of invasions of Indigenous communities, some citing false reports that the president had given them permission. During Bolsonaro’s mandate, environmental and Indigenous protection agencies were gutted or defanged, or their leadership staffed with stooges. Deforestation surged, as illegal loggers and wildcat miners plundered Brazil, confident the president had their back. Allegedly, some of the most reactionary factions of agribusiness helped finance Bolsonaro’s failed coup, for which he was confined to house arrest until he received a twenty-seven-year sentence last September. He will have to watch this year’s Barretos Rodeo Festival from prison, unless he returns to house arrest on health grounds.
Although Lula has regained the executive, the agribusiness caucus remains among the most powerful in Congress and routinely campaigns for reduced environmental and Indigenous protections. Some of the most ambitious infrastructure projects on the table—including highways cutting across South America, soybean cargo railways through the interior, and heavy dredging of waterways—are predicated on the smooth integration of extractive production with export markets, mostly with tacit, if not outright, approval from Lula and the Workers’ Party (PT) to which he belongs.
Indeed, although previous Lula and PT governments’ state-led development generated mass employment and helped lift millions out of poverty, effectively creating a new lower middle class in the 2000s, they also signed off on several huge, troubled infrastructure projects: In particular, three massive Amazon hydroelectric dams that went over budget and displaced locals, while delivering far less than the promised energy, echoed the authoritarian development of the Vargas and military regimes.
Panis et Circenses
As of publishing, Pedro Henrique Biondo Matias is edging ever closer to the Barretos Rodeo Festival, an event that will likely see conservative presidential hopefuls jostle for stage time ahead of October’s election. Though agribusiness as a whole rallied around the candidacies and presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, it has so far been hesitant to side with his senator son Flávio against Lula. Flávio, who fainted on live TV during his run for mayor of Rio de Janeiro ten years ago, is widely seen as less charismatic and capable than his firebrand father.
His self-described “Bolsonaro, more moderate” style (including boasts against Jair, like “He didn’t want to get vaccinated [against Covid]; I got two doses”) initially risked alienating hard-liners, yet he seems consolidated as the right wing’s candidate, at least for now. The mostly right-leaning agribusiness sector, meanwhile, prefers the more traditional conservative likes of Goiás Governor Ronaldo Caiado, who is himself a large landowner from a political dynasty, though he currently polls in the single digits.
At the moment, Lula leads by a razor-thin margin, though some analysts expect his numbers to improve when campaign season officially starts and the power of the incumbent machine kicks in. Ultimately, however, the election is bound to become a contest between who is least rejected, as voters struggle with fatigue from long-running political polarization and a general malaise over the state of the country. Despite good numbers on employment, with decent growth and inflation mostly tamed, many Brazilians feel that the economy is the worse for wear. Homicides have fallen dramatically in the past ten years, yet the population feels more unsafe than ever, as scenes of armed assaults on citizens for their cellphones and digital bank accounts play on social media and in sensationalist real-time crime-reporting TV shows. A largely hostile, transactional Congress has made things harder still, obstructing and delaying votes while battling with the government on bills ranging from environmental licensing to combating organized crime.
Regardless of who is ultimately elected, they will have to steer Brazil’s Cowboy Belt along a turbulent geopolitical landscape. Trump’s punitive 40 percent tariffs initially brought fear and uncertainty to the sector, especially for producers of coffee and orange juice, for whom the United States is their biggest customer. Although the tariffs were mostly suspended, largely seen as an outcome of rising U.S. inflation and improved relations between the two countries, the Iran war has stoked new fears of diesel and fertilizer price hikes and shortages amid already record bankruptcies.
China is by far the biggest export client for agribusiness goods. Indeed, Brazil’s soy farmers were some of the biggest winners from Trump’s trade war, as Chinese buyers sought to procure from Brazil. That a Yankee-inspired culture on Brazil’s frontier has been driven by China’s insatiable appetite for its commodities seems to be lost on supporters of both agribusiness and Bolsonaro, many of whom have indulged in anti-China rhetoric. Bolsonaro even visited Taiwan in 2018 before being elected president; the Chinese embassy in Brasília responded in a letter that it viewed the visit with “deep concern and indignation,” stoking fears of a deeper diplomatic crisis. Later, a Bolsonaro education minister made a racist post in a mocking imitation of a Chinese accent on Twitter.
While diplomatic tensions with China increased during Bolsonaro’s presidency, so did exports and trade volumes. In the first year of his presidency, Bolsonaro visited Beijing, declaring upon arrival that he was in “a capitalist country.” Lula, for his part, has looked to deepen commercial and diplomatic ties with Beijing, having visited Xi Jinping in the first few months of his presidency. Since then, China’s direct investment in Brazil has surged, especially in energy and industry. Meanwhile, at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Dallas in March, Flávio Bolsonaro raised the specter of increased U.S. influence in the October elections by urging the assembled reactionaries to “apply diplomatic pressure to ensure our institutions function properly.”
Brazil’s fortunes, regardless of its presidential administration, will be caught between the U.S. and China—the latter perhaps Matias’s next destination, as America continues to isolate itself, the onetime cattle caller forced by changing economic tides to ride Ada and Oklahoma from Xinjiang to Guangdong to bring the gospel of sertanejo culture and Brazilian beef.