The Man Who Tried to Sell Brazil: Inside the Salim Mattar Story

RioTimes Deep Analysis | Series: The Global Lens

Salim Mattar started Brazil’s largest car-rental chain with six second-hand Volkswagen Beetles in 1973. Forty-six years later, he walked into the Bolsonaro government to privatise 600 state-owned companies. Within eighteen months, he walked back out. His story is the story of why Brazil never quite reforms, and why international investors should read both arguments carefully before pricing the next attempt.

The Beetle that started a fleet

Belo Horizonte, 1973. The world is in the grip of the first oil shock; fuel prices are exploding; petrol-station queues are everywhere. It is the worst possible moment to start a car-rental company. Salim Mattar starts one anyway, alongside his partner Antônio Cláudio Brandão Resende, with six financed second-hand Volkswagen Beetles. The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that the two founders did everything themselves: drove the cars, washed them, slept at the office. Each brought a brother in: Eugênio Pacelli Mattar and Flávio Brandão Resende. The four-person operation grew into Localiza, today the largest car-rental company in Latin America, traded on B3 under ticker RENT3, with a fleet that crossed 240,000 vehicles in the first quarter of 2020 and has continued to expand.

The growth strategy from the start was geographic counter-positioning. Where competitors clustered, Mattar moved away. The company expanded into smaller cities, secondary airports, and interior markets where rival operators saw no scale. Within a decade, Localiza was the national leader. Two strategic decisions cemented the model. First, in 1997, the company accepted a $50 million investment from a US private-equity fund in exchange for one-third of equity. After more than twenty years of bootstrap growth, the company had accumulated approximately $40 million in retained equity. The American offer matched the entire balance sheet in a single cheque. Mattar took the money. The capital injection professionalised the company and prepared it for IPO. Localiza listed on B3 (then Bovespa) in 2005.

The second decision was the launch of the used-car division. Instead of selling off fleet vehicles to dealers at wholesale prices, Localiza built its own retail channel and sold directly to consumers. The move eliminated the middleman, captured the full margin, and turned what had been a fleet-renewal cost into one of the company’s most profitable lines. Both decisions display Mattar’s signature reflex: take a friction point and price it as profit.

A Lebanese mathematician with a Vienna bookshelf

Mattar’s intellectual formation runs parallel to his commercial one. At sixteen, in night school, a teacher assigned him Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. A year later, he discovered Friedrich Hayek. The Austrian school’s argument, that decentralised market signals process information more effectively than any central planner, became the foundational frame Mattar would carry into every subsequent business and political decision. In the 1980s, while Localiza was still in expansion mode, Mattar financed the Portuguese-language translation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, helped found the Instituto Liberal, and later co-founded the Instituto Millenium in 2000. He has described his own decision-making process as the “Lebanese accountant’s calculation”: a direct, often blunt, immigrant-tradition computation of risk and return.

The Brasília chapter

When Paulo Guedes accepted the Economy Ministry role in the incoming Bolsonaro government, he asked Mattar to lead the Privatisation Secretariat. The two men had a long relationship: Guedes, a co-founder of BTG Pactual, had helped take Localiza public in 2005 and had sat on the company’s board for three years. In 2018, the roles inverted. Mattar was sworn in on March 4, 2019, with a mandate large enough to redraw the Brazilian state: divest from more than 600 state-owned firms, sell down BNDES and other public-bank stakes in private companies, and raise close to R$1 trillion in proceeds. The strategic targets in his portfolio included Petrobras, the post office (Correios), the federal banks (Banco do Brasil, Caixa Econômica), Telebras, and Eletrobras subsidiaries.

By mid-2020, the wheels had not turned. Mattar publicly complained that a privatisation process which would take 75 days in the private sector required 11 months under federal procedures. The COVID-19 pandemic, which arrived in Brazil in March 2020, was the structural excuse offered for slowdowns, but Mattar’s complaint pre-dated the pandemic. The political coalition supporting Bolsonaro included Centrão parties whose patronage networks ran through the state companies Mattar was trying to sell. The Speaker of the lower house, Rodrigo Maia, blocked specific privatisation bills. The Senate’s Economic Affairs Committee delayed others. On August 11, 2020, Mattar resigned. He told Guedes the experience had been “unique, priceless, spectacular” as a learning exercise, and impossible as a delivery exercise.

The privatisation arithmetic, then and now

The arithmetic reveals the structural reality. The Mattar mandate was the most ambitious privatisation programme proposed in Brazil since the Cardoso administration of the 1990s. The actual delivery was modest. Eletrobras opened capital but retained a golden share for the federal government. Petrobras did not move. The post office did not move. The public banks did not move. The Lula administration that returned to power in 2023 has not reversed these specific positions because there is little left to reverse. The state retained what mattered.

The counter-argument: a libertarian on subsidies?

Mattar’s libertarian biography has not escaped criticism. The left-leaning CartaCapital magazine has argued repeatedly that Localiza grew under, and continues to benefit from, specific fiscal incentives for the car-rental sector, particularly in the state of Minas Gerais. The fiscal arrangement, which reduces effective tax exposure on rental-fleet purchases and operations, became colloquially known as the “Lei Salim Mattar” after his publicly supported re-election campaign for Minas governor Romeu Zema in 2022. CartaCapital framed the picture sharply: “Brazilian liberalism is a jaboticaba [an only-in-Brazil fruit]: businessmen with their teeth latched on to the government’s tit who defend reducing the size of the state, in general for everyone else.” The critique cuts.

Mattar’s defenders respond that selective fiscal incentives are a feature of every Brazilian sector (there is no part of the economy that operates outside the country’s distortionary tax regime) and that the appropriate liberal response is to abolish the distortions universally rather than to refuse benefits inside the distorted system. The argument has analytical merit and political vulnerability. The pattern of business leaders advocating reduced state intervention while operating inside state-provided incentive structures is a recurring feature of Brazilian political economy. International investors should read the Mattar story for what it reveals about both poles: the genuine entrepreneurial achievement of Localiza is real, and the structural dependency on Brazilian fiscal architecture is also real. Both can be true at once.

Where Mattar puts his money now

Since 2020, Mattar has invested most of his political and financial energy in what he calls the “battle of ideas.” He remains a patron of the Instituto Liberal and the Instituto de Formação de Líderes (IFL), the latter focused on training young Brazilian leaders in market-oriented economics and constitutional thinking. He has supported the “Liberdade na Estrada” initiative, which sends speakers to Brazilian universities. His thesis is that institutional reform in Brazil requires a generational shift in elite formation, not an electoral cycle. He invests, in his own words, expecting that “at some point a young person will pass through the benches of our studies and arrive there,” meaning the presidency.

In parallel, Mattar maintains direct business positions outside Localiza. The Pottencial Seguradora, the Haras Sahara stud farm, and other ventures continue to operate. He provided informal advisory support to the Minas Gerais Secretariat of Economic Development through 2023. His 2018 election cycle saw direct financial support to 28 candidates with market-aligned platforms, including Rodrigo Maia, Onyx Lorenzoni, and Romeu Zema. The pattern is consistent: build cultural and political infrastructure that outlasts any single administration.

What to Watch

• 2026 election framing. The October vote will not produce a privatisation administration. Both Lula and the most-discussed opposition candidates have publicly defended state participation in strategic sectors. The next Mattar-style mandate, if one ever comes, is a 2030 question.
• Localiza fundamentals. RENT3 fundamentals continue to anchor on Brazilian consumer credit cycles, used-car market dynamics, and the corporate-fleet outsourcing trend. The political profile of the founder is a brand-recognition factor more than a balance-sheet factor.
• IFL graduates. Whether any of the political figures emerging from Mattar-funded leadership programmes reach federal-level office in the 2030s will determine if the “battle of ideas” investment thesis pays out on his original timeline.
• Tax-incentive review. Brazil’s 2023-2027 tax reform implementation includes mandated reviews of sector-specific fiscal incentives, including those that benefited the car-rental sector. The “Lei Salim Mattar” framework will be tested.

The Rio Times read

For investors trying to understand Brazil from the outside, the Mattar story is more useful than a hundred macro reports. It captures the country’s signature paradox: an economy capable of producing world-class private operators inside a state apparatus that systematically resists reform. The Localiza success story is genuine. The privatisation failure is also genuine. The two outcomes share the same protagonist and the same operating environment. The lesson is not that Brazil cannot reform; it is that Brazil reforms slowly, partially, and with the resistance of every patronage structure embedded in the existing arrangement. Investors who price Brazil as a country where the next administration will deliver a market-reform package have repeatedly mispriced the curve. Investors who price Brazil as a country where excellent private companies can be built despite the state, and who position for sector-specific opportunities rather than top-down reform plays, have repeatedly been right.

Salim Mattar walked into the Esplanada in March 2019 with six Beetles’ worth of conviction and walked out seventeen months later with the same conviction and a clear-eyed read on the Leviathan. He has spent the years since betting on the long game. Whether that bet pays out is a question for the next generation. The Localiza he built will still be there.

Connected Coverage

Brazil’s 2026 political configuration is detailed in our Datafolha priority-area readout. Lula’s positioning on US relations sits in our Washington Post interview analysis. The TCU’s recent 90% irregularity finding on parliamentary spending is in our TCU audit readout. Eletrobras and Petrobras-era structural questions are tracked in our state-companies tracker.

Reported by The Rio Times — Latin American financial news. Filed May 18, 2026. Part of The Global Lens series on Latin American economic figures and institutional questions.