Word: brazil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week Lacerda was on the march again. After first supporting the new government of President Humberto Castello Branco, he was now in violent opposition, particularly against the economic policies designed to curb Brazil's inflationary chaos...
Political Ammunition. According to Lacerda, the government is destroying Brazil, and the man primarily responsible is Economics Minister Roberto Campos, 48, a former Ambassador to the U.S. and an internationally acclaimed economist (TIME, Aug. 2). Campos, cried Lacerda, is "a mental weakling" whose plans are "leakier than a boardinghouse showerhead." On the one hand, Lacerda accused Campos of selling out to U.S. businessmen by offering favorable deals to investors; on the other, he railed that Campos had throttled Brazil's development by imposing an unduly harsh austerity. "Instability, insecurity and disorder have been succeeded by depression, perplexity, gloom...
Presidential elections are not scheduled until October 1966, but Lacerda is already running, and he has found his best ammunition in the government's tough but necessary campaign against inflation. Before the revolution, Brazil was headed for economic disaster with a soaring inflation approaching 100% a year. By tightening credit, freezing wages, and placing a price ceiling on many agricultural and manufactured products, Campos slowed the cost-of-living increase to barely 2.9% in May. Their confidence at last partly restored, foreign investors moved back into Brazil. Yet Brazilians have never been strong on economic discipline-and they...
...real enough danger is that Campos' plan will slow Brazil's economy too rapidly, thus bringing a recession. And this is the fear that Lacerda plays on hardest. He describes his own, somewhat fuzzy economic plan as "a policy of development in spite of inflation." Instead of attacking inflation on all fronts, he would only cut back in certain "state-run monopolies." Rather than reduce credit, he wants to expand it, demands a salary policy that would increase consumer buying power, and asks an end to commodity controls. Says Lacerda: "I would give more money to agriculture...
...political and economic disarray, Brazil remains a huge, vigorously growing nation that is learning to take advantage of its universal resources. One day recently, President Castello Branco flew 350 miles south from Brasilia to preside over two impressive ceremonies. At a construction site on the Rio Grande River in Minas Gerais, a mighty dynamite blast signaled the start of work on the Estreito Dam, which will generate 800,000 kw. of power when it is finished in 1969. A few hours later and 44 miles away, Castello Branco witnessed the completion of Latin America's biggest hydroelectric complex...