The president of Brazil should have been ecstatic. She had just won re-election after an intense campaign in which she fiercely defended her role in making Brazil , for a few fleeting years, a rising star on the global stage. But in the days after her victory last October, President Dilma Rousseff was worried, confronted in private deliberations with her closest advisers by signs that Brazil’s triumphs were at risk of coming undone. “We went too far,” Aloízio Mercadante, Ms. Rousseff’s chief of staff, acknowledged publicly this month, describing the sense of alarm as the dust settled after the election and Ms. Rousseff and her aides grappled with the weaknesses in Brazil’s economy. It was not just the drop in […]