Re-elected Dilma wins in a Brazil broken in two

Yet with a mediocre candidate like Neves -- he even lost in his home state, where he was governor -- neo-liberalism does not need enemies.

Neves predictably billed himself as the dragon who would slay what Wall Street derides as "statism" -- cutting government spending and "liberalizing" trade, code for privileging corporate US interests. At the same time Neves has never been able to capture the vote of an overburdened black woman in the favelas.

With Neves, Brazil's future Finance Minister would have been Arminio Fraga, a slick operator who, among other things, ran high-risk funds in emerging markets for George Soros and is also a former president of Brazil's Central Bank. Some of his shenanigans are detailed in More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, by Sebastian Mallaby. Fraga would have been the point man of a Soros-inspired government.

Fraga is the proverbial Wall Street predator. With him at the Finance Ministry, think J.P. Morgan controlling Brazil's macroeconomic policy. The road in fact was already paved by PSDB's eminence, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who met with key global investors -- via J.P. Morgan -- in New York last month.

Fraga was keen on destroying the Lula and Rousseff administrations' "hyper-Keynesian bet on demand" and replace it with supply, via a new "capitalist shock." Predictably, his prescription was amplified by the enormous echo chamber of conservative Brazilian media, and drowned everything else.

And as perception is reality, contamination ensued -- pressuring public spending downwards, installing major confusion among private investors, and leading Western credit rating agencies to confirm the supposed lack of credibility of the Brazilian economy.

And it's the US against the BRICS

Brazil is slowly but surely moving from the semi-periphery to being closer to the center of the action in international relations; because of its own regional geopolitical relevance and mostly because of its leading role among the BRICS. This is happening even as Washington could not give a damn about Brazil -- or Latin America for that matter. US "think tank-land," by the way, abhors BRICS.

Politically, a victory for the Cardoso/Neves neoliberals -- a ghost of the social democracy they once practiced -- would have thrown Brazilian foreign policy upside down; not only against the way the historical winds are blowing, but also against Brazil's own national interests.

As Rousseff argued at the UN last month, Brazil is trying to fight a global crisis marked by increasing inequality without provoking unemployment and without sacrificing workers' jobs and salaries. As ace economist Theotonio dos Santos stressed, the decadence of the West still exerting substantial influence over the Global South via their extensive network of collaborators, he also went one up; the key fight, as he sees it, is to control Brazilian oil.

Dos Santos is referring to Brazil's top corporation, Petrobras, currently mired in a bribery scandal -- which must be fully investigated -- that obscures the Holy Grail: the future revenues from "pre-salt" oil -- named after the billions of barrels of oil capped by a thick layer of salt lying several miles below the South Atlantic floor. Petrobras plans to invest $221 billion up to 2018 to unlock this treasure -- and expects to make a profit even if oil trades around $45 to $50 a barrel.

Politically, in a nutshell, Rousseff's narrow victory is crucial for the future of a progressive, integrated South America. It will reinvigorate Mercosur -- the common market of the South -- as well as Unasur -- the union of South American nations. This goes way beyond free trade; it's about close regional integration, in parallel to close Eurasia integration.

And starting in 2015, Brazil may be on the road to renewed economic expansion again -- largely boosted by the fruits of "pre-salt" and compounded with accelerated building of roads, railways, ports and airports. That is bound to have a ripple effect across Brazil's neighbors.

As for Washington/Wall Street, the Empire of Chaos is certainly not happy -- and that's a major euphemism, especially after betting on the wrong horse, Marina Silva, a sort of Amazon rainforest-born female counterpart to Obama's "change we can believe in." The fact is, as much as the Brazilian model of income distribution is against the interests of big business, Brazilian foreign policy is now diametrically opposed to Washington's.

On a lighter note, at least some things will remain the same. Like "Dilma's diary" -- an apocryphal, satirical, ghost-written take on the President's busy schedule published by top Brazilian monthly Piaui, a somewhat local version of The New Yorker. Here's a typical entry; "I watched a whole pirate copy of Homeland. Awesome! We stayed up late, me and Patriota [the former Minister of Foreign Affairs]. He found the whole thing extremely believable!"

Who said a "vibrant democracy" can't also be fun?