Brazil: The Cabinet Maker

Brazil is a giant land of such confidence in its future that it is often neglectful of its present. At a time when its foreign debts were increasing, its reserves almost gone, and its 75 million people plagued by inflation, Brazil’s President João Goulart turned to the game he likes best—politics. He confronted his problems by shuffling his Cabinet for the fourth time in 22 months.

First he kept everyone guessing. Every day, from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m., Goulart’s futuristic presidential palace at Brasília was besieged by Congressmen, Senators, governors, labor leaders, industrialists, generals, and special pleaders of every stripe and shape. To each delegation, Goulart, always smiling, gave his “full support.” He was, he said, intending to create a “homogeneous” Cabinet of kindred spirits dedicated to his three-year stabilization plan. Plane traffic in and out of Brasília was so heavy that the country’s four major airlines set up temporary counters in the lobby of the Congress building, and as a gag Deputies went around greeting each other, “Hello, Mr. Minister.” Goulart himself flew off to Rio for two days to confer with army generals and politicians.

As it turned out, the principal effect of the changes was to drive from the Finance Ministry Francisco San Tiago Dantas, a brilliant, opportunistic politician whom the U.S. regarded as a man doing his honest best to carry out a needed austerity in Brazilian affairs. Having obliged the spenders by removing Dantas, Goulart quieted the savers by appointing in his place Carlos Alberto Alves Carvalho Pinto, 53, a hardheaded governor largely responsible for Brazil’s most fabulous success story, booming São Paulo state. Goulart’s choice as Foreign Minister was more controversial—his own chief presidential adviser, Evandro Lins e Silva, 51, a onetime criminal lawyer, the man who accompanied Goulart on his 1961 trip to Red China and the man regarded as the most influential far-leftist in the Goulart camp.