Ignoring the fact that this is not only a BR matter - it’s a LA matter as a whole…
What does living literally on the same continent matter? Do you know what “routing” means? Given that most brazilians play from southeastern/south region, the “fastest” route to VA would be via BRUSA submarine cabling - a route that has 11.000km (and that’s not even counting land cabling up to Rio de Janeiro). It’s a bigger distance, routewise, than most of Europe (Denmark, for instance, gets a little bit more than 7.000km of cabling to New York).
If you want a closer comparation, that would be the distance - again, routewise - from Japan to California. So it’s not really a matter of “living on the same continent”. It doesn’t matter at all when the fastest route is via the ocean.
Source: http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/brusa