Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President will visit Costa Rica, Brazil and Colombia in the next five days, and face an array of economic and political problems that in many ways characterize overall U.S. Latin American relations. Both Brazil and Costa Rica owe huge debts to American bankers and the U.S. dominated International Monetary Fund. The need for American economic support will probably ensure at least one warm welcome for Reagan; as Business week has noted, "Costa Rica...guarantees Reagan a friendly reception because President Luis Monge knows that U.S. backing is the only thing standing between his country and financial default...
Even though Brazil is in desperate need of American help to repay its $72 billion foreign debt, its leaders have made it clear that they will not fight in the President's rhetorical cold war. One Brazilian business leader, anticipating Reagan's wish to exchange economic aid for support of American anti-socialist policies, recently said that "unacceptable or polemical" conditions of aid would be opposed. Other Latin American nations most notably Mexico and Venezuela, have strongly refused to toe that Reagen line on Cuba, Nicaragua and E1 Salvador. They are conspicuously absent from the President's schedule...
Even though the occasion was deadly serious, something of a carnival atmosphere descended on Brazil last week, months ahead of its early-spring schedule. About 50 million voters joked and gossiped as they waited at polling stations throughout the vast, rapidly developing Latin American country. The reason for Brazil's mildly intoxicated mood: for the first time since the military forces took power in 1964, citizens were freely exercising the right to choose well over 40,000 political officeholders at almost every level of government...
Only one vitally important officeholder remained exempt from the democratic process: Brazil's fifth consecutive military-appointed President, João Baptista Figueiredo, 64, who will not step down until 1985. Before the voting, Figueiredo, a folksy, blunt-spoken former cavalry general, hailed the elections as a vindication of his three-year policy of abertura (opening), the promise of a slow and gradual return of democratic freedom to Brazil. Said he: "We're going to stuff the opposition with democracy until they get indigestion...
Itaipu has taken seven years to build, and even so will not be producing at full capacity until 1989. Nonetheless, the completion of the project is clearly a long-term boon for energy-hungry Brazil, which will channel much of the dam's power to the industrial state of Sao Paulo, 660 miles away. Saddled with more than $80 billion in foreign debt, Brazil currently imports 750,000 bbl. a day of crude oil, at a cost of more than $27 million a day. Eventually, the mammoth dam could be the equivalent of a 600,000-bbl.-a-year...