DURING THE LAST FOUR decades, I lived in Brazil for some years and since then have visited the country regularly about four times a year. Returning from a weeklong visit last month, I reflected on how much has changed, for the better and worse.

The Brazilians are obsessed with politics. The constitution of Brazil was recently rewritten in excruciating detail, with minutiae that should have been left out in favor of broader principles that could then be interpreted by the courts. All the major newspapers run extensive reportage every day on the maneuverings of politicians nationwide. The political “product” is voluminous but of variable quality. And placards and notices abound citing law “such and such” or decree dated “so and so.”

Business must negotiate with an alphabet soup of state and federal authorities, many hard-strapped for cash and personnel, creating a huge and costly regulatory burden. In contrast, “Mom & Pop” outfits often operate informally and, even if caught in flagrante violating the law, plead hardship and receive a tap on the wrist and minimal fines.

Bureaucracy runs rampant through daily life. My sister-in-law is now in her third year of a protracted bureaucratic standoff with the Secretaria Municipal do Verde e Meio Ambiente (Municipal Secretariat of Greenery and Environment). She planted a flowering tree that, after reaching 30 feet high, was killed by indigenous carpenter ants. Having once been fined the equivalent of about $500 for cutting down a small pine tree in the same garden, she cautiously applied for permission to remove the dead tree. The documentary file is now half an inch thick, and every three months or so a charming employee of the secretariat turns up to assure himself that the tree is still in place and takes pictures for the record.

Brazilians are very clever with money — and they need to be. The Plano Real stifled inflation but the central bank is still not independent of the political side of the federal government. Speculative short-term, risk-tolerant dollars flood into Brazil, attracted by short-term interest rates in mid-teens percentages. Short-term interest rates at 5-7 percent a month make a business executive concentrate on the financial side of his enterprise rather than productive endeavors.

A big-city dweller in Brazil will tell you that thieves and other rascals roam the streets at will while honest people are locked up in self-imposed prisons. The presence, and need for, personal security are everywhere apparent. The middle classes live in double-gated communities behind high walls capped by high-voltage wiring and apartment blocks guarded by high steel fences and guard boxes. Sao Paulo has a vast privately operated fleet of helicopters to deliver executives to office towers to avoid the physical perils and the delays of road transport.

Technological change is absorbed rapidly. Air-conditioning is now a sine qua non and public spaces are often chilled to sweater levels! On the other hand, in Sao Paulo, at about 2,640 feet above sea level on the Tropic of Capricorn, central heating or even ancillary heating is virtually unknown, occasionally producing bone-chilling winter misery. Brazil’s use of the mobile phone is one of the most widespread in the world. The new airports are often glossy architectural marvels, but the military runs the air-control system, which is clearly overextended and underfunded. Three of Brazil’s airports rank in the top 10 worldwide for delayed departures, but the planes are full and the passengers meekly long-suffering. Still, you get a full meal and drinks service in the 45-minute flight between Sao Paulo and Belo or Rio.

In the 1960s, commodities dominated exports and still do. Whole industries, product lines and brands in Brazil were managed by expatriates from Europe and Asia, with their own country clubs, schools and churches, speaking Portuguese in the street but their native languages at home. Today, my nephews and nieces and their children are Brazilians first, speaking a Portuguese softer and more fluid than the European version, with only an occasional nod to their foreign origins.

The people are attractive, fun-loving, energetic and outgoing. Restaurants are packed and world-class shopping malls are thronged. Traffic is horrendous in any major city, with technical driving skills that are advanced but brutal. Football (futebol) continues a consuming passion, although the best players have long since decamped to the lusher fields of the European leagues. Brazilians wear baseball caps and Nike sneakers, eat at McDonald’s, drink Pepsi and Coke, listen to CNN, and like Americans as people but distrust the present administration and its foreign policy. I was startled to hear a sophisticated multi-lingual friend equate George W. Bush with Osama bin Laden as a radical evil influence in world affairs — apparently not intending hyperbole!

Urban wealth and sophistication has vastly increased and, in just over a decade, Brazil has gone from zero to second only to the United States in industrial farming of soybeans. However, rural subsistence living continues widespread and can appear idyllic. Smallholdings produce much of their own food in an amenable climate, with a bucolic domesticity reflected in beaten earth floors, rope beds, spring water, rooms without ceilings open to tile roofs, food cooked on a steel sheet over a wood fire, mongrel dogs lying in the sun and pigs and chickens rooting about in the yard. Reality introduces damp and mold, spiders, ticks and scorpions, leaking roofs, debilitating damp chills, poor clothing, elementary medical care and physical isolation.

In theory, medical care and education are available nationwide. By law, employers must provide generous benefits, 13-month salaries and contribute to retirement funds, all of which doubles the take-home pay actually received by the employee, with benefits often more theoretical than obtainable. Smaller companies are often hesitant to hire because downsizing a labor force can be prohibitively expensive — another negative aspect of over-regulation.

Brazil now enjoys a well-entrenched democracy, sophisticated in its diplomacy and looking for full participation in world affairs. President Lula (Luiz Inacio da Silva) calls President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela his companhiero but pays only lip service to “Bolivarian Socialism,” spars with President Evo Morales of Bolivia over expropriation of Petrobras’s (a Brazilian company) natural-gas operations, promotes the subcontinental free-trade market, Mercosul, but does not always follow through, flirts with and bullies Argentina and is cautious with Fidel Castro, the granddaddy of Latin American socialismo.

Lula knows which buttons to press. Although Cuba ranks below number 50 as a trading partner with Brazil, in January Lula offered financing support for a nickel-processing plant in Cuba itself. Previously, during Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista regime, the United States had mined the ore in Cuba but processed it to metal in Louisiana!

In 40 years Brazil has come a long way but Brazilians still self-deprecatingly joke that “Brazil is the country of the future — and always will be!”

Brazil is a beautiful country blessed with vast natural resources, a true democracy and a vibrant people knocking on the door for admission to the first rank of international powers. The downside is seen in endemic corruption, an unwieldy political structure, an over-sized bureaucracy with well-meant but impractical and unfunded pension rights, a plethora of costly and unenforceable regulation and perhaps a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor. Relations with the U.S. are adequate but not as good as they should be.

As a people and a government, we pay less attention to our relations with Brazil than we should.

Charles Andrews is a partner in a Rhode Island-based business importing natural stone from Brazil and other countries and is chairman of The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations.