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.
For a gringa—a foreigner, like myself—to wade into this topic is controversial, even though I lived in Brazil for more than a decade. It can be misinterpreted by Brazilians as a broad criticism of their culture, which, again, is exactly how the stray-dog complex works.
The Brazilian playwright and essayist Nelson Rodrigues first coined the term o complexo vira-lata in the wake of a national trauma: Brazil’s loss to Uruguay in the 1950 FIFA World Cup, at home, in Rio de Janeiro. Rodrigues wrote that even future wins couldn’t strip away Brazilians’ sense that another trauma was on the horizon, and that the country had grown to anticipate self-failure, like “a reverse Narcissus, who spits on his own image.” In 2014, I saw that fear realized when the country lost again in the World Cup, at home, to Germany. The final score was an inconceivable 7–1, and by the time Germany took a 4–0 lead, Brazil fell into silence, the internalized howl of the beaten stray dog.
Other countries have their own versions of ingrained inferiority: in Australia, there’s the similar concept of “cultural cringe,” which describes Australians’ tendency to see their work and art as subpar compared with that of Brits and Americans. Over time, the vira-lata complex in Brazil has fine-tuned itself, beginning first as a desire for foreign validation, then becoming a desire for white foreigners’ validation, and, now, most often, manifesting as a desire for validation from the United States.
When Janja asked where the stray dogs were, she was referring to the many Brazilians who have held up Trump as the potential savior of Brazil—the guy who would finally include them as peers on the global stage, only to eventually betray them. Shortly after Janja’s interaction with the journalist, Trump followed through on his promise to slap a tariff on Brazil, announcing a fifty-per-cent levy on all Brazilian exports to the U.S.—a tariff so steep that it’s closer to a sanction. This was, in effect, an unexpected kick in the country’s belly.
“The mood right now in Brazil is almost like war,” Maurício Santoro, a fellow at the Brazilian Navy’s Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told me. “People are surprised and mad.” Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela have a history of conflict with the U.S., but the relationship between America and Brazil has mostly been quite friendly. “So nothing prepared us for what is happening,” Santoro said. “Where did this hate come from?”
Trump’s tariff on Brazil, it seems, is less about trade than about his loyalty to the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Trump’s ideological acolyte and Lula’s political nemesis, who is currently on trial for attempting a coup d’état, among other charges. When Bolsonaro lost reëlection to Lula, in 2022, he, like his American counterpart, refused to go gently. He declared the country’s electronic voting system fraudulent and promised resistance. Bolsonaro supporters then stormed the capitol, in Brasília, on January 8, 2023, a tropical remix of the January 6th riots in Washington.
The indictment against Bolsonaro, as florid as a telenovela script, included disturbing allegations, such as a plot to poison Lula and kill Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. (Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing.) The trial began in May, and a decision is expected in the coming months. If Bolsonaro is convicted, he could be sentenced to up to forty-three years in prison; some prison time is almost certainly guaranteed.
“This Trial should not be taking place,” Trump wrote on July 9th, in a letter to Lula announcing the fifty-per-cent tariff. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!” In a follow-up letter on July 17th, this one addressed to Bolsonaro, Trump wrote that the former Brazilian leader was receiving “terrible treatment . . . at the hands of an unjust system.”
The next morning, the Brazilian Supreme Court declared Bolsonaro a flight risk. (He has sought refuge before in Florida, where he lived, for a couple months, after losing the 2022 election.) Agents raided his home and office, barred him from using social media, and slapped an electronic ankle monitor on him. “I’m a former President,” he said to reporters. “I’m seventy years old.” He added that it was “supreme humiliation.”
Brazilians don’t seem to think that the Court was out of line: according to a poll published last Friday, only thirteen per cent of respondents thought the Court’s actions were excessive. Yet Bolsonaro has retained a defiant posture, participating in a motorcycle rally, on Tuesday, while wearing his ankle monitor. Trump, too, still has a hold over some of the right-wing politicians in the country. Last week, in response to the tariff announcement, some conservative congressmen in Brazil unfurled a large MAGA flag in the chamber. The Brazilian internet quickly seized on it as a visual demonstration of stray-dog-ism at its purest.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology, is credited with theorizing that while people can have complexes, complexes can have people. According to Jungian thought, the way to overcome an unconscious complex is to become aware of it. That’s what’s starting to happen in Brazil. “Trump’s behavior is uniting Brazilians, something that usually only happens during the World Cup,” Waldemar Magaldi Filho, the founder of Brazil’s Jungian Institute of Teaching and Research, told me. “He’s actually gluing us together for a larger cause. Now we’re a big pack of stray dogs.”
What Trump miscalculates in waving around his tariff stick is that Brazilians are less inclined than ever to cower to American might. Over the past few years, Brazilians have been feeling themselves. The country has tapped into an extraordinary source of soft power with its social-media prowess. Brazil has a population of two hundred and twelve million, and they use social media prolifically, reportedly spending far more time each day online than users in the U.S. do. Last year, Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered X to remove accounts that were spreading misinformation about Brazil’s 2022 Presidential election. When Musk refused, the Court banned X. Then, a month later, Musk relented and agreed to pay a fine: losing more than twenty million Brazilian users overnight was perhaps too big a pill to swallow.
The success of “I’m Still Here,” a Brazilian film that garnered several international and American awards, has also been a great source of national pride. After that film’s star, Fernanda Torres, won a 2025 Golden Globe for Best Female Actor, she said, of the other nominees, “Everybody deserves it, everybody! So I don’t know why they chose this street dog that speaks Portuguese, but I’m so glad.” The rhetoric was familiar, but in this case “street dog” was not being deployed in a self-deprecating way following a defeat; rather, it was a statement of modesty made by a Brazilian who had just claimed victory on an American stage. The confidence of the country is brimming such that the typical Brazilian stray dog itself, called the vira-lata caramelo, or the caramel-colored mutt, has surged in popularity, as the embodiment of Brazilians’ friendly, resilient, and multicultural nature. It has inspired adoption and marketing campaigns, appearances at Carnaval, and even legislative proposals that the caramelo become a national icon.
