STATES WITH LOCALIZED MORBID OBESITY

Oligarchic Institutional Hypertrophy and Democratic Atrophy

There is a door that opens quickly.

Behind it, contracts are analyzed, assets are protected, debts are collected, and major operations find specialists, credit, and legal pathways.

There is another door.

In front of it, someone waits for medical care, safe water, reconstruction after a flood, or an answer lost between different public agencies.

Both doors belong to the same State.

So perhaps the question is not whether the State is present or absent.

Perhaps it is:

For whom has the State learned to arrive first?

When we look only at the budget, the number of institutions, or the size of the public workforce, we may conclude that a State is large or small.

But living systems cannot be understood by size alone.

We need to observe where energy accumulates, which signals receive a response, and which parts must work beyond their limits to keep the whole system functioning.

This is where the provocation begins: some Latin American States seem to display a kind of localized morbid obesity.

The expression does not describe people, nor does it use a medical condition as a moral judgment. It serves only to reveal a disproportionate distribution of strength.

After the provocation, we can name the phenomenon more precisely:

Oligarchic institutional hypertrophy.

A State may develop enormous capacity to protect property, collect debts, secure contracts, stimulate extractive activities, and preserve certain markets.

At the same time, it may remain fragile when it comes to preventing disease, caring for children, protecting rivers, reducing inequality, or responding to emergencies experienced by territories.

The State remains strong.

Its strength has simply become concentrated in specific regions of the political body.

The unit the State still fails to recognize

The smallest unit of the State is not merely the abstract individual described in documents, registries, and laws.

It is a Body-Territory.

Every person arrives before the State accompanied by a home, a community, a history, a language, a source of water, a network of care, and a set of material conditions.

When the State supports or abandons a person, its effects travel through all of these relationships.

The worker does not arrive alone.

Those who depend on their income arrive with them.

The child does not arrive alone.

Their food, school, neighborhood, and the people who sustain their development arrive as well.

A community affected by a flood does not arrive only with a request for reconstruction.

It arrives with memories, bonds, pathways, and ways of life that cannot be fully contained in an administrative process.

When the State fails to recognize the Body-Territory, it transforms living needs into isolated requests.

The water problem is sent to one department.

The health problem goes to another.

Work, housing, education, and environmental protection enter different queues.

The Body-Territory remains whole.

It is the State that fragments it.

Perhaps this is why so many people experience the State mainly as taxation, waiting, surveillance, or punishment.

It appears with strength when demanding documents, payments, deadlines, and obedience.

Yet it may appear weakened when citizens need care, protection, or participation.

Meanwhile, those with highly concentrated capital find ways to transform private resources into legal access, political presence, communicational influence, and permanent time before institutions.

The result is a shared feeling:

The State that oppresses Body-Territories often seems available to protect and expand the power of the super-rich.

Speed also distributes power

The State does not respond only with money.

It responds with speed, attention, information, authorization, and the ability to coordinate institutions.

Every response reveals which pathways have already been paved.

When a large organization faces risk, specialists, reports, and financial mechanisms may be activated quickly.

When a community loses its source of water, it may first need to prove that the problem exists, identify who is responsible, and wait for different agencies to decide who should act.

When a company wishes to exploit a territory, it finds credit, consultants, and technical knowledge.

When residents want to understand the impacts, they may encounter lengthy documents, distant hearings, and a language that did not emerge from their experience.

Inequality does not appear only after the State has finished acting.

It may already be embedded in the architecture that decides where, when, and with what intensity the State will act.

The problem is not only who possesses more resources.

It is who can transform those resources into public priority.

When private interest becomes a general rule

Power does not live in a single room.

It circulates.

Economic advantage can buy visibility.

Visibility can produce acceptance.

Acceptance can open the way for a new rule.

That rule can create a new economic advantage.

Then the cycle begins again, now stronger.

Private interests do not need to control the State completely. It is enough for them to have greater capacity to follow decisions, hire specialists, sustain narratives, and remain present before institutions for years.

Meanwhile, most people participate in public life between work, transport, family care, and daily emergencies.

Power is also a difference in available time.

When this difference becomes permanent, private interests begin to speak as though they were the needs of society as a whole.

Concentration appears as efficiency.

Private benefit appears as growth.

The transfer of public resources appears as inevitability.

And what could have been discussed collectively reaches Body-Territories as a rule already decided.

The Neuro Challenge Latam

How do we perceive that a rule always benefits the same people?

Not every inequality appears as visible violence. Some distributions seem natural because we encounter the rules already in place. Others are accepted because no alternative is presented, or because the cost of challenging them appears greater than the possible benefit.

The Neuro Challenge Latam proposes turning this experience into a research question:

What happens when a person realizes that they can participate in a decision—and what happens when they feel that they simply have to accept it?

We can imagine a simple task.

A group receives resources to distribute.

In one situation, everyone participates in creating the rules.

In another, the rules are defined by a distant authority.

In a third, most of the resources remain concentrated in a few people, but the distribution is presented as necessary for the system to function.

The amount received would be only one part of the experience.

We would also observe whether the person:

• understood the rules;

• considered the distribution legitimate;

• felt able to question it;

• perceived other possibilities;

• changed their decision after participating in the creation of the rules.

EEG could follow rapid moments of expectation, comparison, and outcome evaluation.

NIRS could observe prefrontal activity while a person integrates rules, consequences, and conflicts between individual benefit and collective outcomes.

But the most important point might emerge after the signal.

A person may accept a distribution because they consider it fair.

They may accept it because they believe there is no alternative.

They may reject it because they have lost trust in the rules.

They may also imagine a form of organization that the experiment had not yet offered.

For this reason, EEG and NIRS would be combined with observable decisions and first-person reports.

The signal would indicate when something demanded more attention, comparison, or effort.

The person’s words would help us understand what was being experienced at that moment.

The research would not search for a “brainwave of justice.”

It would seek to understand how different forms of participation change the experience of deciding together.

Perhaps the question is not only how the brain responds to an unfair rule.

Perhaps it is:

What changes when we stop merely receiving the rules and begin participating in their creation?

Redistributing the capacity of the State

If the problem is a concentration of capacities, a new democratic order will need to do more than redistribute income.

It will need to redistribute:

• response time;

• access to information;

• legal protection;

• technical knowledge;

• communicational presence;

• oversight capacity;

• the power to initiate an agenda;

• the authority to interrupt harm.

The State does not need to lose its capacity to guarantee contracts or organize markets.

It needs to develop, with similar strength, the capacity to protect Body-Territories and Biomes.

We can imagine communities with permanent access to independent technical teams.

We can imagine public information being understandable before a decision is made.

We can imagine enterprises required to answer the questions of the territory, rather than merely inviting it to react to projects already designed.

We can imagine mechanisms capable of identifying when the same network begins to concentrate credit, property, information, and regulatory influence.

This requires something different from a State that is simply larger.

It requires a State that is conscious of how its own strength is distributed.

Perhaps this is what the two doors at the beginning were trying to show us.

One does not need to close for the other to open.

The legal knowledge that protects a contract can also protect a spring.

The speed used to stabilize a market can also rebuild a community.

The intelligence capable of tracing a debt can also trace the wealth produced by a territory.

The capacity already exists.

The question is where we decide to place it.

The Neuro Challenge Latam begins when we realize that the State is not merely a distant institution.

It is a distribution of collective attention.

And when we recognize where that attention has accumulated, we can begin to move it.

Not to create a political body without differences.

But so that no Body-Territory must remain oppressed while a small part of the system continues to grow without limits.

Essential references

Calejon, C.; Roncaglia, A. Poder e desigualdade: o retrato do Brasil no começo do século XXI. Civilização Brasileira, 2024.

Cárdenas, J.; Nercesian, I.; Robles-Rivera, F. El presente y futuro de las élites en América Latina: captura del Estado, desigualdad y redes empresariales. CLACSO, 2022.

ECLAC. The Trap of High Inequality and Low Social Mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2024.

Lustig, N.; Martínez Pabón, V.; Pessino, C. Fiscal Policy, Income Redistribution, and Poverty Reduction in Latin America. Inter-American Development Bank, 2023.

Mosqueira, E.; Alessandro, M. State Capacities and Wicked Problems of Public Policy. Inter-American Development Bank, 2023.

UNDP. Democracy and Development Report 2026: Democracies Under Pressure. 2026.