There was no opposition allowed in Brazil or Indonesia, however, which meant that elites could get away with everything. Venality and violence ruled the day in Jakarta and Brasília. With a population too terrified to speak up, corruption exploded. In the early days of the Suharto regime, US oil executives bragged that they were taking advantage of exactly those dynamics as they dined in front of Barack Obama’s mother. His government, along with the US-backed Mobutu regime in the Congo, would go on to set world-historical records for corruption.4 Of course, the regime that Suharto set up was
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