It's both.

> Through the math competitions, Avila discovered IMPA, where Brazil held its Olympiad award ceremonies each year. There, he met prominent mathematicians like Carlos Gustavo Moreira and Nicolau Corção Saldanha, and while still technically in high school, he began studying graduate-level mathematics.

>In Brazil, Avila could relish mathematics without the career pressures he might have faced in the United States. “It was better for me to study at IMPA than if I were at Princeton or Harvard,” he said. “Growing up and being educated in Brazil was very positive for me."

http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140812-a-brazilian-...

Come on, let's not be too hard on ourselves. He went to a Brazilian federal university and then to IMPA, which is arguably a world class institution.

Sure, he probably couldn't get where he got without moving abroad, but then most of the Brazilian top football players play for foreign clubs, and yet nobody will claim that we don't encourage kids to play football. You have to take into account the sheer economic disparity between Brazil and the developed West.

A lot of his work was developed at IMPA (Brazils Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics), which has historically been somewhat connected to french mathematics universities. But, yeah, our best minds still go abroad to become fully developed. The big problem in Brazil is that our basic education is crap. We do have good higher institutions, but a lot of the people who end up there never had a good base.