I don't actually know; but I'm gonna take an "educated guess." And I'm guessing they're extremely profitable, precisely BECAUSE they're in Brazil. And those other facilities in Eastern Europe are probably all gold mines too, as long as you live somewhere else, and have your profits wired to your home in the West.
There are others here, I'm sure, who are old enough to remember when Pittsburg smelled like sulfer, even if you were 50 miles away. And when the Rouge River, and Zug Island, in Detroit, were so fowl that dioxins didn't want to live there. And when the visibility in Gary Indiana was measured in feet, rather than miles. And the air in Cincinatti was a perpetual pink color. And Lake Erie was the world's largest septic tank, and Cleveland and Toledo were awful. And more.
And nobody spent a penny on anything that wasn't profitable in the very, VERY short term. The future didn't matter. Even people who were sick and dying in the present weren't really a problem, as long as they didn't have lawyers, and didn't live right next door to the folks who collected the profits.
And I'm guessing that that's the way mills in Brazil, and the Eastern Bloc, are still running today. We certainly saw plenty of that when the Iron Curtain rotted away, and Western folks got their first good look inside the sewer we once called the Soviet Union.
I bet I could build a world class, major size, seriously profitable steel mill right here in Philadelphia, if all I cared about was making profits right now. I'd recruit strong-shouldered kids right out of junior high (so they wouldn't finish high school and have any real prospects besides working for me). And I'd let them live in company dormitories - free rent, and free meals at the employee's cafeteria, so I wouldn't have to pay them real wages. And there's a million cubic miles of coal, in the mountains just west of here. I could build a short, private railroad, and get all I needed, cheap. Then I could run coke ovens and blast-furnaces with raw smoke and soot pouring out of the stacks, and I could turn Jersey black with smog. I'd bring ore up the Delaware River in iron boats from all over the world, and I'd dump crud and pollution by the megaton right back into that very same water. I'd buy a big chunk of land where the city is currently planning to build high-end riverfront housing, and I'd use it to store huge mountains of scrap steel, for recycling and making cheap alloys. I'd run the mills all day, and all night, and I'd expect every furnace to produce at capacity, or the bastard in charge of it would be unemployed before the next heat had cooled.
And I'd sell low-cost, decent quality steel to buyers on five continents; and I'd make money that people in Brazil and Poland wouldn't believe. And I'd live 20 miles from the mills, upwind, in the tree-covered hills near Valley Forge. And I'd go down in history as a wealthy man, revered by my peers for creating jobs, and for supporting the arts, and for appearing in so many newspaper photographs with well-known politicians and movie stars.
And every sane person on Earth would hate me, for very, VERY good reasons.
I really, REALLY abhor short-term thinking. Humans are capable of more, and better.
KG