I'm Brazilian, currently living abroad in Europe. However, I'm back often to visit family, so I'm not out of touch with the country. I love Brazil and miss it a lot.

Brazil is a unique country. Like every country, including rich ones, it has its own set of advantages and challenges. I think that most people have an excessively negative image of Brazil, because of the reputation of it being unsafe. In reality, even though it's not as safe as Europe or Japan, it's not nearly as bad as people generally think. Outside of the big cities it's totally fine.

The main problems in Brazil in my view are wealth inequality and corruption. Brazil needs a big political reform to make it really hard for government officials to commit crimes without going to jail. Corruption is a problem because it's not punished, and people at the lower income levels see how this works and see no good way to get out of poverty. It's the main reason many turn to crime, because they see no future. Most people have a good heart and care for each other, though. Brazil has a kind of human warmth which is hard to find elsewhere. That's why many foreigners that go to Brazil say that the best of Brazil is its people, and they are right.

For people curious about Brazil, I recommend going to YouTube and just doing a search for "Brazil" (or "Brasil", for local videos). Recently, with the opening of visa free travel for a few countries, like USA and Japan, a lot of YouTubers started to visit and discover Brazil as a destination, and their videos can give you a rough idea of what to expect if you go. There are also many foreigners that moved to Brazil and make videos about their experience as well. Rio is very beautiful and all, but I don't understand why the obsession with it, I think it's much better to visit somewhere off the beaten path, like Florianopolis, or the Northeast, where Brazilians themselves go for tourism.

For other Brazilians, what I have to say is that Brazil also has many things to be really proud of, like being one of the greenest economies on Earth for its size, with over 80% of electricity coming from renewable sources, and increasing over time. Most cars in Brazil can run on any mixture of Gasoline and Ethanol, due to locally developed flex fuel technology, and I believe EVs will take a back seat to fuel cell ethanol vehicles in the future, so don't feel bad there aren't so many Teslas around. Ethanol is already available everywhere, unlike EV charging stations.

Brazil produces 6x more food than it consumes, so it helps to feed the world (see also Embrapa). However, it also produces airplanes, and other high tech products, even having its own small semiconductor industry. Brazil has a very advanced banking system that puts many developed markets to shame.

Brazil has if not the best, close to the best food in the world, including our local variations on Italian, Japanese and other cuisines, along with our own unique dishes, fruits, etc, which are not found elsewhere. Our culture is rich, with many genres of music unique to Brazil, like choro, which is unfortunately not so well known outside.

Brazil has tremendous biodiversity, and natural beauty in many forms. There are so many places worth to visit, like: Jalapão, Iguaçú falls, Lençóis Maranhenses, Chapada Diamantina, thousands of kilometers of beaches, beautiful islands like Ilha Grande, Ilhabela, Fernando de Noronha, too much to list all here.

Brazil is, paradoxically though, very closed, isolated. Search YouTube for the interesting custom car scene in Brazil to try to understand this a bit. Asianometry also recently put out an excellent video on Brazilian computer industry. In part there is this excessive protectionism, which leads to some commercial isolation, but also immigration is not like in the past when lots of Japanese and Europeans came, even if more recently more and more people are moving to Brazil. Things are more expensive in Brazil in part because of this strategy, which I actually do understand, because Brazil is one of the few countries that can be self-sufficient on most things (tech being a sore exception). When there are wars like now, not being too dependent on the outside world provides the country with stability.

When I retire, I'd like to go back to Brazil. If you mostly ignore the government like most people, and have enough money to be at least in the middle class, I think Brazil is a really great place to live, and I say that having lived in various parts of the developed world.