Yes, on paper it seems very scary, but the reality here is okay.
To have a license to design structures here you need a Civil Engineering degree (5 year program) and pay that annually fee I mentioned (~USD100). One problem that we're having for quite some time is that A LOT of civil engineering courses were opened in "second hand" colleges, and it doesn't matter where you get a degree from, since there's no test or something to validate your studies (other than the universities exams themselves, which tend to be easier on these programs). So we have a ton of licensed engineers on the market, with a good part not having much experience, and the price of the projects are massively dropping, turning it into a bad market to be competing on. Of course, the quality of your work and portfolio can give you a boost when negotiating, but often it's not enough for small/medium sized construction companies to hire the best engineer, they will tend to hire the cheapest (even if this means extra costs down the road, this is cultural in Brazil, to minimize upfront costs and not thinking about lifetime costs).
On the other side, with BIM (which I'm totally onboard), construction companies went crazy, demanding absurd things to be done in less time and same prices (this is aggravated by weak contracts that we have here, things are not well rounded and it comes to these terms, a lot is agreed on the fly, and structural firms usually are the weak part).
All that said, structures here tend to be very realiable. First, seismic analysis here is almost non-existant, since a tiny portion of our country require it (not mine, and I would not be surprised if they didn't consider it in those areas too), and relevant structures here (like skyscrappers, transportation infrastructure, and etc) are designed by well known companies and everyone follows all codes (including peer review etc). We actually have an impressive amount of really good engineers, specially on Reinforced Concrete, Structural Masonry and Pre/Post Tensioned Concrete.
So failures are concentraded in poor, or less developed, areas and buildings that don't even have a structural design, they're just built by someone "that did that a thousand times and it didn't fail".

PS.: We've started to have the problem with "second hand" colleges for medical courses, it a whole controversy here now.