Ford’s Shutdown After 100 Years in Brazil Cedes US Territory to China

On Brazil’s east coast, the vast parking lot off Avenida Henry Ford sits empty. Shift workers once packed these spaces, next to a Ford Motor Co. plant that covers 1.8 square miles—an area larger than New York’s Central Park. On a recent weekday, a lone security car patrols its perimeter, the only sign of life.

Allison Barreto Sousa, a Ford maintenance technician for almost two decades, remembers when the company decided two years ago to shut down the plant, along with its entire operations in Brazil. Ford had a final ask: Could Sousa join a crew of 10 to perform the industrial equivalent of the last rites? They’d dismantle, piece by piece, the same equipment they’d once installed and maintained, so it could be packed up and shipped away. Sousa started the work, but memories of colleagues flooded his mind. He just couldn’t do it. “When I got married, I was at Ford. When my children were born, I was at Ford—all my good memories are somehow connected to Ford,” says Sousa, now 39. But then, “out of nowhere, came the silence. I asked not to come back.”