CHANGE: How Brazil, the darling of the developing world, came undone.

The plunge that Rousseff and the country have taken has laid bare the frailty of Brazil’s commodity-driven growth. Big parts of the Brazil model, it turns out, were glued together with kickbacks, dirty money and lies.

Rousseff herself is not accused of illegal personal enrichment but of improperly using money from government banks to cover budget gaps. A separate inquiry is examining whether her Workers’ Party benefited from an illegal campaign-finance scheme, which could lead to an annulment of her victory and force new elections.

Call it “the Venezuela model,” in which high commodity prices are used to create a facade of growth over unsustainable social spending for the poor, cronyism for the rich, corruption, and bad management.

Then of course commodity prices eventually fall and expose the rotten structure behind the facade.