Word: brazil
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Brazil (1985). The movie too good to be seen! That's what Universal Pictures suggested when it hedged on releasing Terry Gilliam's apocalyptic satire about a man caught in the vise of bureaucracy. The studio couldn't see that Brazil does brilliantly what movies do best: create teeming, coherent worlds beyond our imagining...
...waste and mismanagement, but when it came to down-and-dirty campaigning, he seemed more like Richard Nixon. The combination worked: last week, after a heated runoff election, Fernando Collor de Mello, 40, won 43% of the vote, vs. his leftist opponent's 38%, to emerge as Brazil's first popularly elected President in 29 years. Scheduled to take office in Brasilia on March 15 to serve a five-year term, the conservative politician will be the youngest chief executive in his country's history...
Many might wonder why he sought the distinction. Brazil, with a population of 147 million, is now the eighth largest economy in the noncommunist world -- and one of the sickest. Under President Jose Sarney, who took office in 1985, it has run up the Third World's largest foreign debt ($110 billion), is being choked by bureaucracy and is mired in hyperinflation. Collor's credentials for curing those woes are slender: he served only one term in the National Congress, and the sleepy northeastern state he governed, Alagoas, has only 2.3 million people. Last week, however, Collor exuded confidence...
During his presidential campaign, Collor hammered away at the antigovernment, antibureaucracy theme. He promised to privatize many of Brazil's oversize state industries, strip away excessive layers of government staffing, crack down on waste and corruption, bring the federal budget in line with reality and reduce inflation to 3% a month -- low by Brazilian standards. He also promised to spend $94 billion on housing, education and health services for the poor. Collor's resulting popularity among the country's shirt-sleeved masses, declared a bitter Lula, is undeserved. The President- elect, he predicted, "will govern in favor of big business...
There is certainly no shortage of skepticism about Collor's chances of succeeding, even though Brazil's foreign bankers generally approved of the people's choice. "No Brazilian politician has a shred of credibility in the marketplace," says Lawrence Brainard, a senior vice president at Bankers Trust, a major Brazilian creditor. "So people will simply discard what Collor said prior to elections and see what he actually does...