The announcement was greeted with euphoria. Politicians said the discovery would launch a new era for the country. The former president, Lula da Silva, described the pre-salt layer as a "winning ticket" for Brazilians.

Now, ten years later, the country is in an economic and political crisis. Unemployment has reached 12 million people. In the oil industry, bad decisions by the government turned the supposed benefits of the pre-salt discovery into a fiction. There has been a hemorrhaging of private investment, research and innovation have dwindled, while engineers trained in Brazil's best universities can instead be found manning newsstands or running small businesses.

Who Stopped The Black Gold?