Word: figueiredo
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Reagan made the trip with no intention of issuing tough demands to his hosts or striking dramatic diplomatic bargains. Generating good will was the main intention. "I didn't come down here with a plan," he told Brazilian President Joao Figueiredo. "I want to ask you questions about how we can help...
...Americans felt betrayed last spring when the U.S. eventually supported Britain in its war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Last week's trip was at least obliquely an attempt to erase lingering resentment. All four countries Reagan visited are fiscally wobbly, Brazil most prominently. There Reagan reassured Figueiredo that the U.S. is not about to let Brazil's precarious economy, the world's tenth largest, collapse. Reagan also went south to reaffirm his Administration's antagonism toward the hemisphere's first Marxist regime (Fidel Castro's Cuba) and the latest (Sandinist Nicaragua...
...next day Reagan and Figueiredo, 64, were together almost constantly. The two men talked privately for 30 minutes, then summoned Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, Secretary of State George Shultz and other officials from both governments for an additional hour of discussion. Said a Brazilian official: "The conversations were very candid and yet very gentle." The Falklands, Shultz said, "didn't come up as a matter of dispute." In fact, Brazil only halfheartedly supported Argentina in the war, mostly out of a sense of continental solidarity...
After a 25-minute horseback ride around his moated ranch outside the capital, Figueiredo held a barbecue at which both the food (beef, veal, sausage and lamb) and recorded American music (Willie Nelson) were hearty, even macho. At Wednesday night's banquet, the clos est the trip came to conventional pomp, Reagan stood to offer an elaborately friendly tribute-and a faux pas at the end. "Now," he said, wineglass raised, "would you join me in a toast to President Figueiredo, to the people of Bolivia-no, that's where I'm going-to the people...
...Figueiredo has reason to feel sympathy for political exiles. As a boy, he spent years in Argentina because his father, also a general, had fled Brazil in 1938 after failing in an attempt to overthrow Brazilian Populist Dictator Getulio Vargas...