The Man Who Wants To Fix Brazil
Another Special Guest Post
Last month, we had a special guest post from one of the best accounts on X, the pseudonymous journalist, travel writer, and keen (and often hilarious) social observer, Drukpa Kunley (@kunley_drukpa). He had recently sat down with Brazilian Presidential candidate Renan Santos ("More From The Man Trying To Fix Brazil"). Kunley got another opportunity to interview Santos, and we have his highlights of their conversation below.
Before we get to that, a quick market note. Back in February, we entered an options trade on a company being called "The Nvidia of Biotech". We just exited that for a 336% profit on premium last week. For the first time in months, it passes our screens again, and we're going to dive back in. If you'd like a heads up when we do,
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Now on to Kunley's latest with the man who wants to fix Brazil, Renan Santos.
Authored by Drukpa Kunley on X
CONVERSATIONS WITH BRAZILIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RENAN SANTOS - HOW TO FIX BRAZIL
What follows is a paraphrased version of a conversation I had with Renan Santos. Renan is currently third on Polymarket’s betting odds to become the next President of Brazil (as of July 2026) and even if he does not win the 2026 election he and his party - the ‘Missão’ or Mission Party - intend to play an increasingly larger role in Brazilian politics over the coming years. Their main thesis is that while it seems like Brazil has too many intractable problems to ever properly ‘fix’ most of those problems do actually have obvious solutions and would be relatively easy to address if a party seriously intent on actually ‘fixing things’ came to power. That is, Missão want to press the ‘Fix Everything Easily Switch’.
This is the second part of a two-part article - in the first part, Renan discussed the main problems with Brazil today and how they emerged. In this part, Renan discusses how to fix those problems in practical terms:
“As a thought experiment let’s take for granted you do get into power, I want to talk about how you then actually fix all these problems we’ve identified. So on the gangs, how would a President even go about destroying them?”
RENAN: “Today, organisations like the PCC and Comando Vermelho are treated as ordinary criminal gangs. That’s a mistake. They are sophisticated organisations with military-style discipline, enormous financial resources and de facto control over large territories. In some communities they even collect taxes, enforce their own rules and decide who can enter or leave. That’s no longer ordinary crime! It’s a direct challenge to the sovereignty of the Brazilian state, it’s an armed insurgency!
The first step is to recognise that reality legally as well as politically. These organisations should be designated as terrorist organisations or, at the very least, treated under a legal framework equivalent to that used against terrorist and insurgent groups. Doing so would acknowledge that they’re not simply committing isolated criminal acts but are systematically attempting to intimidate the Brazilian people and undermine the authority of the state. Which is all true! They are!
This designation would then allow law enforcement and prosecutors to use a broader range of legal tools against them. It would make it easier to freeze assets, dismantle financial networks, prosecute those who provide logistical support, strengthen international cooperation and pursue entire criminal organisations rather than only individual offenders. The objective in all of that is not to create arbitrary executive power, which obviously my crime-sympathetic critics will all rush to portray it as, but to ensure that the legal framework matches the scale and sophistication of the threat.”
“You know on this kind of legal wrangling people hold up El Salvador a lot but there are a few differences between El Salvador and Brazil that some might say make the process of gang elimination not a direct one-to-one. Constitutionally, especially with Bukele’s use of emergency powers, but also in terms of gang structure and organisational geography. El Salvador is fairly small and MS-13 controlled actual physical territory - which Comando Vermelho does maybe sort of but PCC for example doesn’t in quite the same way. You can take a look at the experiences of say Mexico or Ecuador in tackling organised crime, countries that are closer to Brazil in size and political structure, and see how that size and how intertwined crime is with society made it more difficult to succeed. So in Ecuador right now President Daniel Noboa wants to ‘do a Bukele’ but he is finding it difficult because of the way gangs are tied into lucrative international trafficking routes, because of geography, because of constitutional barriers that stop him arresting people without credible evidence, because of the way that even if you ‘take out’ gang leaders it just causes existing gangs to fracture and new splinter gangs to emerge, like heads of the Hydra. Same thing happened infamously in Mexico under President Felipe Calderón when he decided very explicitly to start eliminating cartel leaders and it again only caused the cartels to fracture rather than destroying them and, unfortunately, lead to a large number of casualties with very little to show for it when the cartels retaliated.”
“Right which is why you have to be smart about it. While the elimination of all crime is probably impossible it is possible to very significantly reduce it even where serious gang violence is long-established in a country. Look also at the experience of Colombia, which has obviously not eliminated organised crime but did manage to lower it versus previous decades. A lot to learn from there, what was successful and what wasn't. Actually one of the reasons organised crime has grown in recent years in Ecuador is because some of it was pushed out there from Colombia as a result of these efforts. So it's a process but it's doable. That said, yeah there are ways not to do it.
It isn’t just about putting people in jail - which is the most important thing but also you have to start systematically dismantling these organisations. So first their leadership must lose the ability to command operations from prison. It’s absurd that some of Brazil's most dangerous criminals continue running billion-real criminal enterprises while supposedly serving prison sentences. High-security prisons must actually isolate these leaders from their organisations. This still doesn’t happen! They don’t even do this right now, if you can believe it.
You have to stop measuring success simply by the number of arrests too. Criminal organisations survive because they make money, because there is a market niche they fill into, both nationally and internationally. Their financial networks, transport systems, illegal businesses and money-laundering operations should become primary targets. Destroying their economic power is often more effective than arresting another recruit who can be replaced tomorrow.
When the state enters an area controlled by organised crime, it cannot simply leave after a police operation. Security forces have to be followed by the re-introduction of legitimate public institutions. You have to replace criminal authority with the permanent authority of the Brazilian state. Brazil is more fortunate than Ecuador or Mexico in that its institutional structures are still much stronger, even if often incompetent. So in a way the distinction there isn’t just be tough on crime but build up state capacity. You get involved in organised crime, it has to be understood that the state is going to fuck you up. We want to change behaviours all-round, that’s the Lee Kuan Yew trick. He talks about his experience with the Chinese Triads in this way. It worked, he significantly diminished their presence in Singapore. As lucrative as certain kinds of trafficking are you have to remove as many incentives as possible.”
“So obviously to even reach this point, where you’re thinking about how to systematically dismantle gang violence, you have to get the judiciary and congress onboard supporting you. We talked before about how even though Brazil has a lot of left-leaning judges and politicians many more are better understood as not especially ideological opportunists. Does that play into your plans to get these schemes passed? How does that work in the case of reforming and / or convincing the judiciary?”
“Every institution exists to perform a specific constitutional function. Congress legislates. The Executive governs. The judiciary interprets the law. When those boundaries become blurred as they have become today, where judges especially have too much power now, democratic accountability begins to disappear. So judicial reform needs to focus on restoring that balance. Court procedures must become faster, simpler, more predictable. We talked about this before, I mean in general. For e.g. new favela evictions too. Endless appeals and procedural delays only benefit criminals and weaken public confidence in justice.
About left wing judges, Supreme Court Judges are lifetime appointees - you can’t just replace them. As vacancies arise over time future appointments should of course favour judges who understand judicial restraint and respect the constitutional limits of their office. That said, in terms of passing new legislation that helps ‘fix Brazil’ there aren’t presently so many avowed left wing Supreme Court Judges that a majority couldn’t be incentivised to support us on the important issues.”
What about the Centrão, Congress - how do you get their votes?”
“Same kind of situation. Especially in a country like Brazil you don't change politics by wishing politicians were different, you change the incentives under which they operate. The Centrão exists because Brazil's political system rewards short-term opportunism over long-term planning. Complaining about that changes nothing. If a government begins reducing violence, creating jobs and delivering visible infrastructure projects across the country, members of Congress will have strong political reasons to support those policies. Their voters will expect them to. They see which way the wind is blowing, you make the right thing to do the politically profitable thing to do.”
“Just on changing habits, is it naive to think you can ever stamp out corruption? Especially when in many respects it is a ‘cultural thing’ in Brazil”
“Yes probably but you can definitely reduce it by enforcing laws against it. We will have an anti-corruption crackdown.”
“How would you lift Brazil out of its economic malaise?”
“Brazil's productivity is currently constrained by high logistics costs, low industrial complexity and chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, among other things. So you would prioritise e.g. freight rail, port expansion, transmission grids and reliable energy to reduce transport and production costs. One of Missão’s major policies is to establish Special Economic Zones in the North East focused on sectors where Brazil has comparative advantages. Special Economic Zones, I mean something like they have in say China. You know Shenzhen? That was a Deng Xiaoping initiative. You can envision something similar in the North East. Then we have fiscal reform, and rather than subsidising consumption the state would invest strategically to crowd in private capital and increase exports, which would raise long-term productivity and wages. There are lots of examples of poorer countries that have experienced significant economic growth to the benefit of their entire population with these kinds of reforms. Look at e.g. South Korea’s economic expansion under Park Chung Hee. Brazil currently holds itself back unnecessarily.”
“Finally, de-favelisation. How do you achieve that?”
“De-favelisation requires treating informal settlements as an urban planning failure. Which, as usual in Brazil, is downstream from the problem of state failure. First, the state must eliminate criminal control and restore legal authority of course. Depending on the specific favela, some can just be demolished. In others through land regularisation residents can receive property titles which enable mortgages, taxation and investment. Redevelopment should replace precarious housing with planned districts connected to basic public goods like sanitation, transport, utilities and commerce etc. Public-private partnerships and zoning reforms can also help transform favelas into ‘fairly’ productive, integrated urban areas.”
“As you point out, the commonality underlying all these problems is Brazilian state failure. Can you ever fix that tendency towards incompetence?”
“I think it’s very possible to seriously revitalize Brazil and start changing political incentives at least.”
