BRAZIL: Help Wanted

To nobody’s surprise, greying Roberto Cochrane Simonsen joined his fellow Senators last week in voting to oust Communists from public office.* An influential member of anti-Communist President Dutra’s party, he barely won his seat last January over Communist Candido Portinari, Brazil’s greatest painter. His own anti-Red views are well known. Besides, Industrialist-Economist Simonsen is a top-rank spokesman for São Paulo’s bustling industry, and Communists are bad for business.

The Critic. Not so predictable was Simonsen’s criticism last fortnight of the Marshall Plan. But he was being consistent. The Marshall Plan, he fears, will be bad for Brazilian business as well as for Europe’s Communists. His reasoning, as he laid it down to the Inter-American Council of Production and Commerce at Petrópolis: if Latin America must increase its exports of raw materials and foodstuffs to Europe by 30 to 50% in the next four years, as the plan calls for, another “war economy” will develop. Then workers will be drawn from industry into low-profit farming and mining; import of U.S. machinery will be difficult because Europe can’t pay for Brazilian goods in dollars.

Simonsen was heard with respect. He is no inexperienced theorist, but a self-made man, a pretty rare article in Brazil. Child of a British-born Santos bank manager and a Brazilian-Scottish mother, he started out at 21 as a civil engineer on the old Southern Brazil Railway. At 58 he is one of the wealthiest men in the country. He has been president or director of a dozen companies, now heads Ceramica São Caetano, the largest ceramic (tile, pipe) plant in South America, which employs 1,600 workers.

As founder of the influential Federation of São Paulo Industries (equivalent of the U.S. National Association of Manufacturers), he has worked persuasively to win its members to enlightened economic ideas. He wants, he says, to make Brazil a “place where a working man can save something out of his weekly pay check instead of going steadily into debt.” On such a basis, Simonsen believes, the country can build a sound economy.

The Thinker. A stocky, powerfully built man with a scholar’s face, Simonsen is not just a moneymaker. Intellectual as well as industrialist, he founded the São Paulo School of Economics, has written 17 books, including the definitive two-volume Economic History of Brazil. Recently he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He is president of the Brazilian Red Cross, belongs to a hatful of foreign scientific societies. In the Senate, where he is regarded as the best-dressed member, Simonsen takes his work seriously. He seldom speaks from the floor, but puts in hard licks on committees. Currently, he is so busy that he seldom gets home to his wife and four sons in São Paulo.

A good many Brazilians are stumped by Simonsen’s up-to-date economics, and even those who understand them do not always like them. But in hundreds of letters and telegrams that, by week’s end, had flooded his fifth-floor, book-lined bachelor apartment in downtown Rio, he was applauded for his stand on the Marshall Plan. Some of the applause was for what he said. Much was for Simonsen, the Brazilian.

*The House has yet to act before one Senator, 16 Deputies, 18 Rio City Councilmen and 47 members of state legislatures—all acknowledged Communists—lose their seats.