Reducing Brazil's success to external factors and natural resources would be doing a great disservice to many of the other internal factors that have greatly aided the economic success since the implementation of the Plano Real. What has happened in Brazil is far more complex than what you can see happening from outside.

In fact, Brazil is surprisingly well-insulated from the rest of the world economically. After many years of horrible financial crisis, it's adopted very conservative and heavily regulated banking practices. It's got an astronomically high risk-free rate making the cost of capital high enough to discourage reckless borrowing domestically. Even borrowing cheap money internationally was shown to be risky after the exchange rates changed sharply around 2000 causing the "órphãos do cambio". Most economic success has been captured by those with access to cheap money through family and friends. Our "Rockefellers" and "Mellons" got a lot richer because they had access to enough cheap capital to go after opportunities that few others could meaning that there was little to no competition in many major industries. The Bolsa Familiar did a lot to stimulate economic activity that more equitably spread across the society (it's an interesting analog to the notion of a universal livable wage and the rest of the World should take some time to study it's impact at both the macro and microeconomic level". We're also fairly well insulated trade wise from the rest of the world by our own incompetence at the governmental level. Brazil has been remarkably short-sized when it comes to essential infrastructure. Most big projects are poorly planned if at all. We lack decent shipping infrastructure internally and our ports and airports leave a lot to be desired. We could probably have done even better if we actually had the infrastructure internally to move more of our natural resources abroad.

All in all, Brazil in the last 20 years is a country capitalizing on a lot of its potential that it couldn't capitalize on prior to the Plano Real. All the external trade like iron ore and agriculture largely served as a buffers from instabilities as we developed lots of industries internally.