The 30 million people who live the south of Brazil are in manys ways like a separate country. Except for Portuguese language, the three southern states of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul are more similar to Uruguay and Argentina than to the rest of Brazil. They are mostly European including Italian, Eastern European, German and many other groups. The states lie in the pampas grasslands and share the famous pampas traditions of Uruguay and Argentina, including gauchos (similar to cowboys), ranching, and drinking mate. The south is also the Brazil's only extra-tropical region, beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, and gets chilly in winter.
These three southern states just held a vote on whether to secede from Brazil, called "Plebisul" (plebiscite + sul i.e. south). Plebusul is their attempt to escape from the corruption that plagues Brazil as a whole. Southern Brazil is not perfect, but its citizens feel tired of paying their taxes to fund corruption at the national scale, which has been in the world spotlight with the impeachment of President Dilma Roussef and the "Operation Car Wash" scandal. Two thirds of Brazil's national Congress is under some type of investigation.
I spent a week in the capital of Paraná state, Curitiba, in summer 2015. It was in a hostel in Curitiba that a young computer programmer from Sao Paulo on vacation said: "In your country, people go into politics to change things, to represent people. In Brazil, people go into politics to steal. They go into politics to make money, to get rich." I thought he was exaggerating at the time, but the more I read about the corruption scandals that followed and the depth of corruption in Brazil's Congress, the more he turned out to be dead-on accurate.
Curitiba is known as a global model of environmental planning and innovation. It has the highest standard of living in Brazil and is the "greenest" city in the world in terms of green space per capita. It is an extremely orderly place compared to the chaos of, say, Rio de Janeiro.
I personally could easily see southern Brazil as a separate country--and a powerful one.
Populations:
Brazil: 204 million
Argentina: 43 million
Plebisul states (three states of southern Brazil): 29 million
peru: 31 million
Venezuela: 30 million
Uruguay: 3 million
Half a million Brazilians want to break away and form a new country--Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/05/half-a-million-brazilians-want-to-break-away-and-form-a-new-country/
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