The New Yorker:

President Donald Trump has announced a fifty-per-cent tariff on the country’s products, as retaliation for the prosecution of his political ally, Jair Bolsonaro. So far, Brazil has refused to roll over.

By Shannon Sims

A few weeks ago, inside the marbled corridor of Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, the country’s leftist President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, received a question from a journalist: “Trump said he would announce a tariff against Brazil,” she began. But, before the journalist could finish her question, she was interrupted by Lula’s wife, Rosângela da Silva, or Janja. (Brazilians love a singular nickname.)

“Ah, where are my stray dogs?” Janja asked, leaving the journalists in stunned silence. She said it again, like an incantation. “Where are my stray dogs?”

Janja is known for her off-the-cuff, salty remarks. (“Fuck you, Elon Musk,” she recently said, at a G-20 event.) But the “stray dogs” comment, while casual on the surface, cracked open an old national wound, revealing a subplot in U.S.-Brazil relations, one that Trump is unaware of and therefore cannot appreciate.

To understand its weight, one must look to a concept that is arguably nestled deep in the Brazilian psyche: o complexo de vira-lata, or the stray-dog complex. The phrase has become shorthand for a kind of national inferiority syndrome—a sense that Brazil, despite its grand ambitions and global flair, thinks of itself as a mutt trying to hang with pedigrees. The term vira-lata—literally “can-flipper,” evoking the image of dogs nosing through refuse—speaks not only to desperation and an expectation of receiving nothing more than mere scraps but to a broader anxiety about international stature. Brazilians, the theory goes, are perpetually yearning for foreign validation, often quick to dismiss and undervalue their own ideals in favor of imported ones. The link to Brazil’s colonial history is undeniable: their resources and people were exploited by the Portuguese from the start. Adding a meta layer, when Brazilians see their compatriots act out this complex, preening for attention, this triggers even more chagrin about being Brazilian.

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