Democracy in Brazil
Hirschman, Albert 0.
At the beginning of the year, the political news in the United States was totally dominated by the results of the November elections: the takeover of Congress by the Republicans and in...
...Some attention should be paid to this "point of light" that has appeared in our hemisphere...
...q 204 • DISSENT...
...The meaning of such success is then spelled out along three principal lines...
...The overthrow of democracy in 1964 by a group of Brazilian generals was the beginning of a vicious authoritarian wave that engulfed a major part of the continent for two decades...
...The country has a considerable political impact on the rest of Latin America...
...On October 3, he won the presidential contest in the first round, with 54 percent of the votes cast (as compared to 27 percent for Lula...
...He comes full circle another fifteen years later, in his inaugural speech of January 1. Now he expresses full confidence that such a historical corner is at hand...
...He operated under considerable time pressure, for he now had presidential ambitions and, in accordance with the constitution, had to resign from any official position by March 1994 if he was to run for the presidency in October...
...Under these conditions, the accession of sixty-three-year old President Cardoso, the leader of Brazil's Social Democratic party (PSDB), on January 1 was widely greeted as a promise of genuine political renewal, the vigorous resumption of economic growth, and effective social reform...
...Ten years later, as Cardoso wrote a new preface to the English version of this book, he spoke in a far more open-ended fashion...
...The real challenge came six months later, in May 1993, when Cardoso was offered the Ministry of Finance...
...On an earlier occasion Cardoso had exclaimed: "Brazil is no longer an underdeveloped country...
...Perhaps it was largely this pressure, in addition to the economists' advice, that convinced him to take an economically promising but politically difficult course: he first pushed through Congress a fiscal reform that transferred revenue from the states to the federal treasury and increased taxes...
...Taking his distance from the earlier insistence on "structural constraints," he now emphasized the availability of "alternatives in history" and the "perception of new ways of turning a historical corner...
...Earlier in the year, opinion polls had shown him lagging behind a number of other candidates, particularly Luis Inacio Silva, or "Lula," the leader of the Workers party (PT...
...The third area in which Brazil will now have to progress is that of social justice...
...Could it be that the torch—of democratic freedom and social justice— has been passed from the North to the South...
...The success of Cardoso in the election of October 1994 is itself a remarkable story...
...Only when the deficit had been thus contained did Cardoso proceed to the plan for monetary 202 • DISSENT Politics Abroad stabilization that was actually implemented after his resignation, by his successor, in the second half of 1994...
...The previous presidential election, in November 1989, had resulted in the victory of Fernando Collor, whose erratic and mediocre performance came to an early end in October 1992 when he was suspended (and eventually impeached) for corruption by the Congress...
...Previously, Cardoso was widely (and internationally) known as a political sociologist who had opposed the military regime...
...By now inflation had been running for some time at 30 percent a month (equal to a hyperinflation rate of over 1000 percent a year) and had proven to be a resilient disorder...
...With the help of a select group of economists, Cardoso undertook to learn what had worked and what hadn't in previous stabilization attempts and elaborated a program of his own...
...The "most precious gift" is liberty and democracy: here Cardoso speaks with considerable emotion—and some self-criticism—of the "people of my generation who learned about the value of liberty upon losing it...
...There is little doubt that Cardoso will want to make advances in social justice into the major accomplishment of his administration...
...At the beginning of the year, the political news in the United States was totally dominated by the results of the November elections: the takeover of Congress by the Republicans and in particular the installation of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House...
...The vice president, Itamar Franco, took over as president for the two years of Collor's unexpired term...
...He knows only too well how much intellectuals are given to presenting situations in terms of such inescapable dilemmas...
...The major unmet challenge for the country is the fight against hunger, poverty, and violence, and the achievement of substantial advances in health, education, and housing for the majority of the people...
...After the 1964 coup, he lost his academic appointment and spent a short period of self-exile in Chile...
...He asked Cardoso to join his government, first as minister of foreign affairs...
...With one hundred and fifty-five million people, Brazil is, after the United States, the second most populous nation in the Western Hemisphere...
...Inflation now dropped to the low single digits while a new currency, the real, was introduced and remained stable in relation to the dollar...
...The second task is economic development based on monetary stability...
...His country, he is convinced, is not facing a tragic dilemma between growth and distribution or between liberty and equity...
...They may well exist, but in that case it is the task of a political leader to devise ways around them...
...It is an unjust country...
...It turned out to be most helpful to Cardoso to be able to point to the success of his policies straight from the hustings...
...In the case of Cardoso, this generalized expectation was particularly easy for voters, because he had come to his task not as a monetary specialist, but as a broad-gauged intellectual who had learned much about the art of politics, serving as a federal senator since 1986...
...Together with a Chilean colleague (Enzo Faletto) Cardoso had written a highly influential book, Dependency and Development in Latin America, in the late sixties...
...Here he had joined a group of other Latin American analysts who, dismayed by the economic difficulties of late industrialization and by the new tendencies toward political authoritarianism, felt that Latin America's economic and political development was reaching a dead end...
...There is little doubt that Cardoso owed much of his success to the feat of stopping an inflation that had become a major curse of daily life in Brazil...
...It is also a major industrial power (turning out, for example, 1.5 million cars in 1994), and an increasingly important exporter of sophisticated industrial and diversified agricultural products (coffee is down to 2.5 percent of total exports...
...Now that hyperinflation has been overcome, growth has already resumed and will be sustained...
...From June on, Cardoso gained steadily and eventually overtook Lula, whose populist platform proved to have limited appeal...
...Soon he returned to his country to build up, with his wife, Ruth, a prominent anthropologist, an independent social science center in SA° Paulo, with the help of the Ford Foundation...
...SPRING • 1995 • 203 Politics Abroad Watching Fernando Henrique Cardoso and his team on January 1 in Brasilia, I could not help recalling an earlier hopeful inauguration, that of John F. Kennedy, and his famous phrase "Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans...
...When the Brazilian military decided to "retire from power" in 1985, the country returned to democratic forms, but then had to contend for almost a decade with weak or corrupt leaders as well as with economic instability and a recurring tendency to hyperinflation...
...Minimal attention was given to a simultaneous event: the inauguration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso as the first social democratic president of the United States of Brazil...
...In a sense Brazilians treated him as citizens have often treated victorious generals: having won a major battle or a war, they are appointed to the highest office, in the expectation that they will now be able to solve other major problems of their country...
...Rapid industrialization had made Brazil into a "miracle" country during a good portion of the postwar period...
...He repeats several times a colloquial expression: Este pais vai dar certo —this time this country will do things right— it will succeed...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
