You are spot on with the corruption and graft and need to have eyes wide open to how it can impact you from a business standpoint. I have been to Brazil and can tell a few stories. Not a Brazil anecdote, comes from Mexico but when someone was shipping a box back to Europe the postal clerk actually said: “do you want the official price, or the price to get it there.”
Much of this is economic in nature…if the country is poor and people are scraping to survive, it leads to that kind of behavior. At the top end it obviously buys influence…never enough money for people running the show, not enough for the people on the other end of the spectrum.