Brazil: One Man’s Cup of Coffee

(See Cover)

Home last week after a ten-nation tour of Latin America, Presidential Envoy Adlai Stevenson was the bearer of uneasy tidings. The leaders of Latin America’s democratic governments were still in a state of “mental shock” over the Cuban disaster; U.S. prestige was in sharp decline. Though everyone recognized the danger of Castro’s Communist Cuba, the bearded dictator loomed so large across the Caribbean that no one was willing to join in strong, concerted action against him. The one immediate hope, reported Stevenson, was a mild plan, advanced by Colombia, for a call to Castro to renounce his ties to Soviet Russia. If he refuses, the Organization of American States might then read him out of the hemisphere’s family of nations.

Venezuela would probably join an anti-Castro move. In Central America, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras would prove no problem. Argentina and Peru most likely could be counted on. But the huge, increasingly powerful nation of Brazil—the Brazil of Janio Quadros—was a bigger question mark than ever. For 44-year-old President Quadros, after a whirlwind five months in office, has proved that he is nobody’s cup of coffee except, possibly, Brazil’s.

Rebellion Invincible. Rising from nowhere to take command by the greatest popular vote in history, Jânio Quadros has burst on the world like Brazil itself—temperamental, bristling with independence, bursting with ambition, haunted by poverty, fighting to learn, greedy for greatness. Quadros cries that Brazil is a great power, if not today, then tomorrow. He shouts that he is leading a revolution, a revolt against graft and governmental inefficiency, against social and economic backwardness, against nagging Latin American feelings of inferiority before the world. “This rebellion is invincible,” says Quadros. “It is a state of mind, a collective spirit, a fact of life that has already filled the nation’s conscience and that no one will compromise or paralyze—I will not be stopped unless by assassination.”

Listening to the man and watching his antics, some in the world gave him a loud raspberry. Paris’ tart-tongued France-Soir compares him to “Marx—not Karl, but Harpo.” Yet Brazil’s common man calls him “messiah,” “the savior,” “the healer of our ills.” As Quadros flogs his nation along his chosen path, other voices can be heard calling him “paranoiac,” “autocrat,” “dictator.” Rio’s Governor Carlos Lacerda, formerly a Quadros supporter, now a bitter critic, once termed him “the most changeable, the most mercurial, the most perfidious of all men ever to emerge in Brazil’s public affairs.”

A sounder assessment is that of Rio’s independent O Globo, which wrote on Quadros’ inauguration: “He will not be easily managed by anyone. He could be a great President. He certainly will not be an easy one.”

Independence & Aid. As Quadros affects the U.S., struggling to save the hemisphere from Communism, there is the shock of an old and trusted ally suddenly going it alone. Under past leaders—Getúlio Vargas, Café Filho, Juscelino Kubitschek—Brazil could be expected to line up firmly with the U.S. on any hemisphere problem. Brazilian expeditionary troops fought in World War II, the only Latin Americans to fire a gun. But such faithful alliance is by no means assured under Quadros. Said he: “I announce a policy of independence in full exercise of national sovereignty. No signed agreement—none whatever—will remain valid or be maintained as soon as it should prove contrary to Brazilian interests and convenience.”

President Quadros asserted this “independence” soon after he took office. Staking out his own New Frontier, he greeted Adolf A. Berle, chief of President Kennedy’s Latin American task force, with icy reserve. Berle had flown to Brasilia seeking Quadros’ cooperation, or at least forbearance, in U.S. attempts to depose Castro. “Brazil,” snapped Quadros, “repugns intervention in any nation and in any form: political intervention, economic intervention, military intervention.”

The U.S. sought to thaw some of the ice. Well aware that Brazil was $176 million in arrears on its foreign-debt payments (a debt inherited from the inflationary building spree of Predecessor Kubitschek), the U.S. offered an immediate $100 million loan to help Quadros through his first 90 days. He turned it down and sent delegations behind the Iron Curtain in search of trade. He established diplomatic relations with Red Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and Hungary, talked of ending the 14-year ban on relations with Russia. He named a commission to consider closing the embassy of Nationalist China (“that island”) in favor of one from Red China (“How can the reality of 600 million Chinese be ignored?”), and announced that Brazil will vote for debate on admission of Red China to the U.N. this September.

In the end, the U.S. found itself supporting Quadros with the greatest outpouring of aid ever lavished on a Latin American nation. Swallowing the noisily “independent” outbursts, the U.S. sent Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon winging south to Brasilia to present a willing Quadros with the U.S. Government’s $943 million share of a $1.3 billion free-world aid package. Old loans were stretched out, new loans were granted. It is, says one top State Department official, “a damned good bet.”

Instinct & Record. To back its money, the U.S. has Quadros’ oft-repeated statement that basically “we are bound to the West by Christian formation and democratic instinct.” It also has his bright record as a champion of individual liberty and free enterprise, first as the man who helped build the city of São Paulo into one of the world’s great industrial complexes, later as governor of the entire booming São Paulo state.

In any event, there is little choice. In the drive to rebuild U.S. prestige and influence after Cuba, an obvious place to start is Brazil, which most experts regard as the key nation in Latin America. A strong, healthy Brazil does not guarantee democracy in Latin America, but it is certain that if Brazil does not make it, few other nations will. Says Hernane Tavares de Sá, ex-editor of Brazil’s leading news magazine, who now serves as U.N. Public Information chief: “If the U.S. loses Guatemala, Costa Rica and the island of Cuba, nothing very much happens. But if you lose Brazil, you lose the balance of power in Latin America.”

Jânio Quadros understands this well. “Unless we make revolutionary reforms,” he warned his Cabinet ministers, ”some day—in some unknown serra—some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil.” The fires already burn in the drought-blasted northeastern states where the Peasant Leagues of Castro Disciple Francisco Julião attack plantations and riot in the cities. Whether the leagues spread or die out depends on whether Quadros can use Brazil’s fantastic natural resources (see box) to end the misery that afflicts its exploding population. Half of Brazil’s 67 million people (to be 200 million by the year 2000) still suffer from chronic malnutrition; half are barefoot; more than half are illiterate. Only one out of three children goes to school at all; one out of six gets to high school. Lack of iodine in diet causes goiter in every sixth Brazilian; one out of three hosts intestinal hookworms. In some backland areas, every other baby dies before it is one year old. Brazil’s average life span: 46, v. 69.4 in the U.S.

The hope for a better life lies in the successful strides that Brazil has already made toward development. In the past decade, Brazil’s industrial growth has been staggering. Five years ago, Brazil had no auto industry; now it produces 180,000 vehicles a year—plus 110,000 washing machines, 150,000 television sets, 500,000 radios, 350,000 sewing machines, 300,000 refrigerators, 120,000 air conditioners. Much credit belongs to ex-President Kubitschek, who at the cost of raging inflation turned Brazilian eyes inland by building the new capital 600 miles from the coast. But the heart of Brazil beats fastest in São Paulo, where U.S. investment alone tops $1 billion. And São Paulo made Jânio Quadros.

“A Youth Already Old.” When Quadros says, “I am no plutocrat,” he means it. He was born and raised a Roman Catholic in the tiny Mato Grosso town of Campo Grande on what was then the woolly fringe of Brazil’s wild western frontier. His home was a rented room over a barbershop, where his mother, Leonor da Silva Quadros, the daughter of a small-time immigrant Argentine cattleman, tried to keep house, and where his pharmacist father, Gabriel, made life miserable for them both. Gabriel, says one of Quadros’ close friends, “was abnormal—a real villain with a mania for women, displaying constant aggressiveness toward his son and wife.” Pursued by bill collectors, the family flitted from town to town, until at 16 Jânio was finally allowed to settle in São Paulo. He took a year’s course in education, started teaching part time (for 12¢ per hour), and enrolled in São Paulo’s highly respected School of Law.

The law-school years were marked by neither great distinction nor great popularity, but by an accident. While whooping it up at a pre-Lenten carnival parade, Quadros was nearly blinded by an exploding bottle of colored ether that Brazilians happily spray around as part of the fun. When the bandage came off, his left eye was canted out about 20°. He brooded for months, turning out tortured poetry about love, Brazil’s destiny, himself:

Don’t speak to me of suffering!

I feel it in my breast.

When the sun sinks away

I murmur in brokenhearted silence.

I am a youth already old.

Quadros graduated into total obscurity. He took half of a 12-ft. by 15-ft. downtown office, read his way through the life of Abraham Lincoln between the occasional shopkeepers and petty crooks who sought his services. He began sharing his dreams of someday becoming somebody with pretty Eloá do Valle, the daughter of one of his father’s druggist friends, married her in 1941 after two years of courtship. “He was,” she reports, “the ugliest man I ever met.”

The courtroom did not hold much future for a scrawny fellow with a funny eye. In 1945, when Dictator Getúlio Vargas fell, another way presented itself: politics, where offbeat appearance can sometimes be an advantage. “When he first got the idea, I was very dubious,” Eloá says. In his first race, in 1947, he fetched up 47th on the list of candidates for 45 São Paulo city council seats. Only when the Communist Party was outlawed and 14 of the winners were eliminated did Quadros get a seat.

“Let Them Watch.” All at once his pent-up rages and frustrations seemed to burst out. Like a banty rooster, Quadros flew at the graft-feathered machine of São Paulo’s Governor Adhemar de Barros. Quadros raced around the city listening to citizens’ protests and holding rallies, a rumpled, stubble-chinned reformer who sucked oranges on the platform and waved a caged rat.

At first, the machine kissed him off as “the mad Lincoln from Mato Grosso.” But soon he had everybody so mad that one politico rushed up and punched him in the mouth while he was speaking against a giveaway bill. Amid the uproar, the speaker ordered the galleries cleared. “No! No!” shouted Quadros, blood streaming from his lips. “Let the people stay! Let them watch!” By 1950, firmly established as the little citizen at war with graft, a Chaplin with a cause, Quadros won the most votes of all 900 candidates for the state assembly.

In his headlong rush, Quadros accepted help from anyone, including the Communists, who considered him a “useful innocent.” But Quadros bragged, “They’re not using me—I’m using them.” The alliance ended in 1952 when the Reds demanded control of key departments as their price for support in São Paulo’s mayoralty election. Quadros turned them down. In their wrath, the Communists tried to tie a capitalist can to Quadros with such epithets as “Wall Street stooge” and “the Esso candidate,” did their best—as they have in every election since—to defeat him. Quadros took to the streets, boasting that he owned only one pair of shoes (“Why should any man with only one pair of feet need more than one pair of shoes?”), ran on a platform of honesty and industry, won by the greatest majority in the history of São Paulo.

As mayor, Quadros inherited a city with exactly $2,212 in the bank, $12.5 million in unpaid bills, and a budget deficit of $6,000,000 for 1952. He fired 10% of all functionaries, cut nonessential spending, ended political payoffs, started 200 corruption investigations. In his outer office he hung a sign: “Sr. Jânio Quadros does not provide city jobs. Please don’t waste your time and his insisting.” He sold off the city fleet of 40 limousines (São Paulo’s morticians snapped them up), even banned coffee breaks—in the coffee capital of the world. “If I give a finger,” he said, “I lose an arm.” Within a year he had balanced the $55 million budget and started building—highways, water mains, electric lines, clinics. As industry flowed in, Jânio stepped up to the governor’s mansion 21 months later.

Lincoln & the Americans. Before taking over the governorship in 1955, Quadros made his first trip outside Latin America, a holiday jaunt to Europe and the U.S. with Eloá and his daughter Tutu. In Europe, he fell in love with London (“a man’s town”). The U.S. was not so endearing. At New York’s Idlewild Airport he had a raging two-hour argument over a lost vaccination certificate; he detested Manhattan’s bitter January cold, despite all that U.S. friends such as Nelson Rockefeller could do to thaw him out. He went to Washington to pay homage at the Lincoln Memorial, was ignored by U.S. officialdom. “Lincoln,” said Quadros later, “was one of history’s greatest men, but Americans are not like him. He was a lonely exception.”

Back home, Quadros applied his fire-and-cut formula for reform with such vigor that by 1958, São Paulo state was clean, or nearly so. “Some rats might still be nibbling around, but I’ve set out traps for them,” he said. Then began the soundest development program in Brazil’s history. Quadros nearly tripled São Paulo’s paved highway network. He put up 1,710 miles of high-tension transmission lines, launched a power program that includes a hydroelectric project bigger than Egypt’s Aswan Dam—4,900,000 kw. initially, equal to Brazil’s entire capacity last year. The growth—plus Quadros’ personal salesmanship—proved so attractive to foreign capital that the state drew 75% of all the new investment coming into Brazil. Just before his term ended in 1959, he almost offhandedly won a federal Deputy’s seat and got ready to run for the presidency.

Slow Boat to Brasília. Quadros’ campaign was a masterpiece of unorthodox politics. Traveling to Rio, he first handed Kubitschek a face-to-face warning not to pull any tricks to perpetuate himself in office.* “Do not change the rules of the game,” said Quadros. “Listen to the people’s cry for clean, just and honest elections.” Then he vanished on a slow boat to Japan, plus points east and west, to transform Jânio the domestic reformer into Jânio the world figure.

Before long, the photographs dear to every politician’s scrapbook flooded the papers. While Kubitschek struggled with zooming inflation and dunning foreign creditors, there was Quadros posing head to head with Hirohito, with Nehru, with Ben-Gurion, with Pope John XXIII, with Tito, with Khrushchev, with just about everyone, in fact, but President Eisenhower. Said Jânio sagely on his return: “From a distance I became more convinced than ever that Almighty God destined us to become a great people.”

Quadros’ political technique was masterful. Behind the slogan “Here Comes Jânio” he ran against Kubitschek’s hand-picked candidate, piping-voiced Field Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott. To prove to Brazilians that he was no Yankee stooge, he made a mid-campaign trip to Cuba; from there he returned with the bald-faced statement that “to accuse Castro’s government, which displays absolute respect for law and propriety, of Communism is to reveal ignorance and bad faith.” He already had proof that he was no Communist puppet: the Brazilian Reds spewed out their hatred of him and openly supported Lott. Everyone remembered Quadros’ oldtime flamboyance, but he understood that Brazilians demand a dignity in their President that mayors and governors need not have—and he established that by keeping his hair combed, his suits pressed, his speeches free of personal attacks on Lott.

Early in the campaign, Quadros staged a spectacular maneuver. To get the nomination of the powerful National Democratic Union (U.D.N.), he had earlier agreed to accept the U.D.N. vice presidential candidate as his running mate. Suddenly he rejected the U.D.N.’s man and withdrew from the race. Confusion reigned: a few hair-trigger army and air force officers tried to stage a coup as a means of forcing him to reconsider. The Veep candidate resigned, the U.D.N. agreed to share Quadros with other parties, and finally Quadros announced: “You have defeated me. I return.” Return he did—free of all party commitments.

The results made political history. Quadros piled up 5,500,000 votes. 1,700,000 more than Lott, closest to an absolute majority (48%) in Brazil’s multipartied history. Then he traveled to London for the eye-straightening operation that would have been denounced as silly vanity during the campaign, but was accepted as necessary for the President of a proud nation. He stayed away twelve weeks, so long that Brazilians coined their own slogan: “Where’s Jânio?” But when he returned, only eleven days before inauguration, he was ready for action, complete with an imposing Cabinet of Brazil’s best planners, builders, and conservative penny pinchers.

Economy Begins at Home. “I am going to wield the broom,” he promised on inauguration night, “by the handle.” Where Kubitschek ran his palace like an open house. Quadros ran it like a Marine barracks. He tossed Kubitschek’s luxurious furnishings out of the executive offices, fired the fancy chef (he prefers beef, rice and beans), returned Kubitschek’s $8,000 grand piano. “Economy,” he said, “begins at home.” Aides no longer walked; they ran. Locks barred the presidential doors, and red and green traffic lights informed ministers when to knock, when to wait. In the halls, guards appeared, toting their submachine guns. “This place gives me the creeps now,” complained a palace reporter. “It’s like Kafka.”

It was also like São Paulo—on a giant scale. Loyal supporters seeking patronage soon discovered their mistake. “But after all, Mr. President,” said one old politico, “where is my place in your government?” Replied Quadros, placing his hand on his breast: “Your place is here, in my heart.” Quadros found a more practical place for Carlos Castello Branco, a political reporter whom he grilled for more than two hours on the frailties of 30 top politicians. “Castello, you have a dirty tongue,” said Jânio after the grilling. Next day, he hired him as his press chief.

The familiar pay cuts and graft investigations poured from Quadros’ desk along with some sharp measures to free Brazil’s inflation-tied economy. He virtually eliminated the government-rigged exchange rates that subsidized imports of oil, wheat and paper—a painful reform long advised by the International Monetary Fund. He welcomed foreign capital with open arms, gave Western Union a contract (over nationalist protests) to set up a new communications system for Brazil, gave Ford the go-ahead for a new tractor plant, while turning down a Czech tractor deal. He spent, too, with caution. When a state governor begged $400,000 for a fisheries project, Quadros promised $80,000. “I was a governor myself, your excellency, and I sympathize. But I don’t want to leave here with my wallet emptied.”

Running the country almost single-handed (“I am one man alone”), he installed a Telex communications system beside his desk, with two fingers banged out a steady stream of bilhetinhos to government offices around the nation. Once, very early in the game, he Telexed a Cabinet minister’s office: “The President has been waiting for you since 7 a.m. I would like to know when you plan to arrive.” Answered the minister’s man at the keyboard: “Colleague, the minister will arrive when he arrives.” Brazil’s chief executive tapped back: “This colleague here is the President. Tell the minister I want him immediately. J. Quadros.”

All day, every day, a steady stream of delegations got the green light to line up before the President and listen to his plans for Brazil. One group of farm leaders stood waiting in his office for what seemed an eternity while Quadros finished scribbling some message. Quadros’ old gold Patek Philippe pocket watch ticked on the desk, beige curtains closed out the view, the ever-present portrait of Abraham Lincoln stared down from the wall. “Then,” says one of the farmers, “he looked up and started talking without greeting us or asking us to sit down. We stood silently for 48 minutes while he talked intensely about his farm plans and requirements. Suddenly a power failure put out the lights, but he kept right on talking without the slightest hesitation. It was uncanny, standing there in pitch darkness listening to the President’s disembodied voice from across the desk.”

Project by Project. From the beginning, Brazilians could not help admiring Quadros’ directness, his humor, his resistance to compromise, his un-Brazilian talent for chopping red tape. But he seemed to have no overall goals. Editorial writers questioned his ”unplanned and impetuous” administration. “Quadros distrusts abstract planning,” answered a close adviser. “He prefers to build up a program project by project.” The projects are beginning to take form:

¶ HIGHWAYS. Expenditures of $1 billion over the next five years to raise the total network from 19,000 to 27,000 miles, and paved mileage from 4,800 to 13,200.

¶ POWER. Increase installed capacity from 5,000,000 kw. to more than 9,000,000 kw. by 1965 and 15 million kw. by 1970. Cost: $1 billion, half Brazilian, half foreign.

¶ EDUCATION. Reverse the Kubitschek practice of emphasizing universities and ignoring grammar schools. Goal: to increase literacy from 48% to 70% in five years. ¶ HEALTH. Eliminate the corruption that swallowed Kubitschek’s ealth plan to iodize salt (to prevent goiter), use preventive measures to control malaria, trachoma, yaws, filariasis.

¶ NORTHEAST REFORM. Combat the spreading influence of Communist-infiltrated Peasant Leagues with intensive land reform, major development under a Cabinet-rank administrator. Amount allocated to date: $160 million.

¶ INDUSTRY. Provide all government help necessary to double steel production to 6,000,000 tons yearly by 1965, set up task forces to help develop specific industries: fertilizers, petrochemicals, tractors, machine tools, heavy equipment. Says Quadros, in a policy statement worthy of Dwight Eisenhower: “Industry is primarily the task of private enterprise, but government must provide the necessary conditions for growth.”

Thin-Skinned Threat. Elected virtually without party affiliation, and lacking the usual bloc support of nationalists, leftists, rightists, military or labor, Quadros has earned many enemies with his foot-trampling ways. To criticism, he answers only that “the people are with me” and makes it clear that he considers his landslide vote a mandate to exercise the powerful executive authority vested in Brazil’s U.S.-style constitution. “Democracy’s enemies believe that democratic authority is loose, insecure and timid, accommodating and yielding,” says Quadros. “They are mistaken. Democratic authority based on the majority’s will must be just but firm, bold and decisive, always ready to correct its own mistakes but always sworn to discipline, morality and the general welfare.”

One danger is that Quadros may mistake his own iron will for that of Brazil and turn from democrat to dictator. For all his reforms, there are warning signals in his thin-skinned threat to arrest opponent Lott for a post-election article critical of his regime, in his dismissal of a top foreign-office official for disagreeing with him, in his three-day shutdown of a radio station belonging to an opposition newspaper.

So far, at least, Quadros’ “democratic authority” has come down just as hard on the Castroites and Communists who seek to subvert Brazil. When leftist students rioted in Recife over the university’s refusal to let Che Guevara’s Argentine mother, Celia. deliver a Castroite harangue, Quadros sent in the Brazilian navy and marines. Fanning out into the inflamed northeast, they raided Peasant League strongholds to round up propaganda smuggled in from Castro’s Cuba, and arms. In Brazil’s labor movement, once heavily Communist-infiltrated. Quadros’ men are working to cut the Reds “off at the knees.” The unions used to be able to get handouts from the Kubitschek government. “Not any more.” says Quadros’ Labor Minister Francisco de Castro Neves. “I’m not playing games with them. I deal directly with democratic union leaders, and with nobody else. Already we have torn open the clenched fist of Communist control of many unions.” Says Quadros himself: “Communists only profit from the ignorance that afflicts many of my countrymen. They have no interest whatsoever in a democratic and prosperous Brazil. They seek only to exploit misery.”

Brazilians pooh-pooh any lasting effect from Quadros’ flirtations behind the Iron Curtain. They argue that Quadros insists on trade first, before any serious talk of diplomatic exchanges. Of the $2 billion in paper deals drummed up in the East, realistic Brazilians expect only a fraction. Says a senior U.S. diplomat in Rio: “If Khrushchev thinks he can make a sucker out of Quadros, he’s badly mistaken.” Adds Foreign Minister Afonso Arinos: “Brazil will not recognize the Soviet Union offhand, and will not recognize Red China for two or three years—certainly not until it is accepted at the U.N. We are committed to vote for debate on the Red China issue, but will not vote in favor of Red China’s admission.”

The Fourth Force. What Quadros apparently is serious about is Brazil’s emergence as a great and independent power —a “fourth force” taking cues from no one. “In five years.” he says. ”Brazil will be a great power. And I will be free.” Such a course naturally gratifies Brazil’s —and Quadros’—sense of importance. Brazilians argue that it also benefits the U.S. and the hemisphere. At home it undercuts Red influence over Brazilians, whose natural resentment at U.S. wealth leads them left. In the hemisphere, Brazil can be a better ally of the U.S. as a strong and independent democracy dealing on equal terms. “The Americans tend to be overpowering,” says Quadros. “I intend to treat them like a lover—an apache lover.” Adds a ranking Brazilian diplomat: “We cannot accept Communism in Cuba permanently. But if we take sides too soon, we lose all influence. We will no longer be able to act effectively to achieve our main objective, which is the same as yours: to restore Cuba to the American community.”

Although Quadros has contradicted his supporters many times before, the leading U.S. expert on Brazil, former Ambassador John Moors Cabot, agrees that the U.S. must encourage Quadros to travel his own road. “Our problem,” he says, “is to see Brazil through the present troubled period of transition. We may not like the fact that Brazil has adopted what President Quadros describes as an independent foreign policy and what we might describe as a neutralist one. We must consider the measures we contemplate from the viewpoint of whether they will tend to make Brazil independent and whether they will tend to make Brazil democratic and friendly.”

Jânio Quadros puts it in Brazilian terms: “Through its immense size, its natural riches, and the dedicated efforts of its 70 million people. Brazil is now asserting itself as a great nation. We have created, without any doubt, man’s most successful civilization in the tropics. All that my government seeks is to discipline our national development. We don’t want to become merely another power involved in the world struggle. Instead we want to be a positive force, capable of contributing toward a real peace based on justice and respect for human rights.”

*Kubitschek was constitutionally barred from succeeding himself.