ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Brazil has developed considerable soft power in the world, particularly from commercial cultural industries in television and music, but also from government initiatives like the building of its new capital Brasilia in the 1950s and the initiatives to host the World Cup and Olympics in the 2010s. It also argues that the soft power originating from Brazilian cultural industries has a distinct flavour, albeit one similar to other Latin American countries, in the way that cultural industries have developed key export genres, such as telenovelas, in a corporatist form of interaction with a series of national governments. Corporatism in Latin America is often seen as inheriting Italian and Iberian tendencies toward patrimonial, hierarchical politics and economy in which society is divided into major organizations by activity. Brazil is a large country, composed of a number of ethnic and racial groups, with very different regional cultures and with a decentralized regional political structure.
