President Cardoso is not very good at communicating
his empathy for the suffering of others, at giving rousing
speeches and inspiring the masses. People say "he is honest
and intelligent, but he is distant from the people."

Ted Goertzel

Continued from our last issue. 

Social Security Reform

Reforming Brazil's social security system has been a priority for Cardoso since he took office, because the system is fundamentally unjust and financially out of control. There are really two systems. One, for government employees, is extremely generous. Civil servants can retire at full salary as of their last date of employment. Federal civil servants even receive a 20 percent raise when they retire. Their pensions are raised to keep up with the salaries of civil servants who are still working. Furthermore, they can retire quite young, depending on their years of service and their age, often at age 55 or younger. Women retire five years younger than men whose contributions are otherwise equivalent. This system is a very important benefit for civil servants and helps to recruit highly qualified people. But it is one that is paid for by general taxes imposed on people whose incomes are lower and who receive much less.

The second social security system, for the common people, is a pay-as-you-go system dependent on contributions, and benefits are very low. Before 1988, benefits for rural workers were much lower than for those in urban employment, but these have been equalized. Extending full social security coverage to rural workers was perhaps the single most important measure taken to redistribute income and lessen misery in Brazil. There is also coverage for destitute elderly people and others not having any retirement coverage, but payments are low. The basic statistics are shown in Chart Twelve. [Editor's note: for technical reasons Brazzil had to omit the graphics. You can see them at http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/fhc.htm] As of 1988, 10.49 percent of the Brazilian Gross Domestic Product was used for these Social Security expenditures, of which 43.3 percent was spent on the 15.2 percent of the recipients who were in the system for government employees. Federal government employees were especially generously provided for, with the 4.7 percent of the beneficiaries who were federal employees receiving 22.1 percent of the revenue. ³³

This imbalance in the social security system is one of the main reasons Cardoso characterized Brazil not as a welfare state but as "an ill-fare state that takes from the poor to give to the rich and well-to-do." Unfortunately, it continued to be so at the end of his years in office, and he told Congress that "to correct this situation will imply arduous and very persistent efforts to liberate the Brazilian state from the yoke of privileged groups that surround it from the outside and colonize it from within."

He admitted that "other battles must still be fought," but claimed that "some important victories have been achieved in the long campaign to place the destitute majorities at the top of the priorities for public spending." ³⁴

Social security reform has met stronger resistance than most of his other reform efforts, and many observers believe that he handled it badly. Sônia Draibe states that "the reform negotiated from 1995 through to the end of 1998 was plodding, confused and incompetently managed by the government…the government failed to drive home its proposal with sufficiently strong political will—at any rate it appeared that way—and to back it up with an efficient scheme for informing and forming public opinion."³⁵

The failure to push social security reform through early in Cardoso's administration may be in part due to the fact that so many political resources were spent on the Constitutional amendment permitting Cardoso's reelection. Congressional staffers are especially well rewarded by the civil service system, and it is difficult to gain their support for other reforms when their benefits are being threatened. But Cardoso did not do a good job of explaining the reforms to the public and reassuring them that they were designed to assure security in old age for everyone. Brazil's successful demographic revolution, with low birth and death rates, has led to a rapidly aging population, and providing for the aged will be difficult in the decades to come just as it will in the United States and other countries.

The opposition to social security reform has been particularly tenacious because of Brazil's strong entitlement culture. People with government jobs simply believe that they are entitled to lifetime employment with good pay and a good retirement, even if the society doesn't really need their services, if they retire very young, or, for that matter, even if they go out on strike.

In some states there have been cases of people who have been convicted of bribery and sentenced to prison being let out on payday to collect their checks. Women simply assume that they are entitled to retire five years younger than men, without having contributed anything extra to cover those years. When people's life plans have been built around these expectations, it is very difficult for them to accept that they must be changed.

Despite these problems, the Cardoso government did succeed in passing part of its social security reform agenda in October of 1998. For the general public, this included minimum age and length of contribution requirements, abolishing special pensions and the right to retire on a pension proportional to length of service. For civil servants, early retirement was restricted, and a combination of age limits and time of service requirements were imposed. Some exceptionally high pensions were capped.

The reforms are not sufficient, however, to balance the system's books, to say nothing of fully correcting the inequities between social classes. The hope is that the issue has been framed in such a way that reform can continue in the next administration. Sônia Draibe is optimistic in this regard, stating that "from the standpoint of the political forces opposing the reform, the outlook is very bleak. This is not so much because of the defeats they sustained as of the dubious way they handled thorny issues, extending blanket opposition to items of the reform that were morally and socially irrefutable or making last-ditch defense of backward stances that were plainly unjust from a social standpoint. The consequent loss of political capital may prove disastrous as the terms of the next round of welfare reform are announced." ³⁶

Land Reform and
the Environment

As countries develop, all over the world, agriculture is modernized and mechanized, using less labor. Brazil is quite far along in this process, having developed a highly productive commercial agricultural industry. While critics accuse this industry of being oriented primarily towards export rather than domestic needs, in fact it includes food crops such as grain and meat as well as export crops such as coffee, sugar and soy beans that generate valuable foreign exchange. As Charts Twelve and Thirteen³⁷ illustrate, Brazil's problem during the Cardoso years was not with the production of food.

The problem is that a large number of small farmers and agricultural laborers were displaced in the modernization process. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution strengthened provisions stating that unutilized lands could be taken over by the government and distributed to landless people. But the real problem wasn't land so much as financing. Each family that was resettled required as about US$20,000 in financial support.

This money was hard to come by in a country with so many needs, and hard to justify unless the farmers would actually become self-supporting and repay the loans. The government agency that was charged with implementing this program, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform or INCRA, was bureaucratic and inefficient and spent much of its funds on salaries for staff. In the thirty years up to 1995, INCRA succeeded in settling only 218,000 families on the land.³⁸

Under heavy pressure from the Landless Farmer's Movement, or MST, which sponsored land invasions in many parts of the country, the Cardoso administration was able to accelerate the progress. In the first seven years of Cardoso's administration, 565,000 families were settled on 4,275 projects, more than twice as many as in the preceding thirty years.³⁹ This success was not at all appreciated by the MST, who hoped to provoke a crisis that would cause Brazil to abandon the large-scale commercial agricultural altogether. They sought to confiscate all farms over 1,000 hectares in size, including highly productive ones, as part of a movement to redistribute society's wealth to the masses.

Cardoso was not greatly concerned about the MST's socialist rhetoric, because he felt that it was historically out of place. The land reform the MST wanted was a 19^th century demand in a 21^st century world. Today, making a decent living from farming requires a lot of land, technical and managerial skills, and financial resources. Many of the people the MST organized to settle on the land lacked these resources and failed.

Cardoso wanted to put land reform on a more viable financial basis and, in 1999, succeeded in passing a new agrarian reform program that shifted resources from the old program to a new Land Bank Program that purchased land from large landowners and sold it to people who had the potential to obtain sufficient credit to farm it.

Another initiative has been a campaign against "land grabbing" (grilagem), the practice of simply moving into public lands and claiming title to them, often with the collusion of corrupt property registration officials. As with much in Brazil, the biggest problem is not the law as it is written but the ineffectiveness of enforcement. So the Cardoso administration began a process of computerizing and regularizing the land registration procedures.

In 1999 they had succeeded in reregistering 3,065 rural land holdings larger than ten thousand hectares in size. This resulted in the canceling of 63,000,000 hectares of land that had been irregularly registered, an area equivalent to approximately 7.5 percent of the national territory. As part of this process, Brazil's largest landowner was arrested in Manaus, the major city in the interior of the Brazilian Amazon. He had claimed to have registered territory amounting to 1.5 percent of the national territory.⁴⁰

Administrative Reform

Administrative reform does not have the emotional resonance of issues such as fighting poverty or saving the Amazon. It may, however, be of more lasting importance since Brazil's biggest problem is not passing good policies on paper but getting them effectively implemented. It is not terribly important, for example, whether Brazil has a private or a state owned telephone network. It is very important that it has one that works. Brazil has fine environmental and human rights legislation on paper, but the enforcement is often inadequate.

This problem is not unique to Brazil. The crises in Argentina and Venezuela, for example, may be due as much to the failure to administer policies honestly and effectively as to wrong policy choices. In his state of the nation address on August 18, 2002, Russian president Vladimir Putin observed that Russia had passed a wonderful list of reforms in only two years, but that they were not being implemented effectively.

The Economist observed that "most of the reforms bog down in the bureaucracy. Most Russians find it is simpler to pay a quick bribe than spend time fighting misrule in court. Eventually the new ways may begin to work but not any time soon. For all its potential, Russia is therefore still not an attractive place to do business."⁴¹

In Brazil, getting reforms through the legislature has often been slower than in Putin's Russia, because Brazil is a functioning democracy with a well established division of powers and active pressure groups. Many inefficient policies were locked into the 1988 constitution, requiring a long list of constitutional amendments. The constitution was amended thirty-one times since 1995.

These amendments covered issues such as abolishing a number of state monopolies, allowing foreigners to teach in Brazilian universities, creating a fund for the maintenance and development of primary education, changing the rules of the social security system, abolishing the post of "class judge" in the Labor Court system (judges who rule on labor/management disputes in particular categories of industry), allocating certain federal revenues for health expenditures in states, creating a fund for the abolition of poverty, and many other things that probably should never have been specified in the Constitution in the first place but left to legislative action.⁴² Getting all these amendments through Congress took up a great deal of Cardoso's time and energy throughout his administration.

Reforming the civil service rules required a constitutional amendment which was finally passed in 1998. Rules were changed to make it possible to actually dismiss civil servants if their services were not needed. This, however, is difficult to do in practice and usually non-tenured or probationary employees must be dismissed first. The most important and effective measures were those that placed limits on how much of their revenue states and municipalities were allowed to spend on salaries. Some states had been spending all of their revenues on salaries, with nothing left over for the programs the workers were supposed to be administrating.

Privatization is often a short-cut to administrative reform. Instead of reforming the administration of a government-owned corporation, it is simply sold to a private company. But the state retains key regulatory functions, and agencies need to be set up to administer them efficiently. In his review of Brazil's reform process, Rubens Penha Cysne observes that "Brazil has made a clear transition—perhaps a little linear (given the country's relatively lack of experience in this sphere)—from an entrepreneurial to a regulatory state."⁴³

Agencies have been set up to regulate the electricity, telecommunications and oil industries. A successful reform of the banking system was implemented early in the Cardoso mandate, which proved essential in helping the country to weather the financial storm of devaluation. This has not been extreme "neoliberalism" as in Argentina, where the foreign banks were given almost complete control of the banking system.

The Brazilian Central Bank continues to play a central role, and has assumed responsibility for state debts. The federal government shares revenue with the states, but also controls them and their banks much more firmly than in Argentina. This mix of firmer state controls with a strong private sector has enabled Brazil to weather the crises imposed by global shocks.

Administrative reform is incomplete, but significant progress has been made. The National Debureaucratization Program has made more than six hundred small but significant changes in regulations to make daily life quicker and more efficient.⁴⁴ There is a single registration system for government social programs, making it unnecessary to fill out forms over and over for different services. Civil service career lines have been restructured in keeping with more up-to-date requirements, in-service training programs have been intensified, and pay has been increased for civil servants. At the same time, the number of civil servants is being reduced, with the size of the Executive Branch work force reduced by 15 percent, or 88,000 employees.⁴⁵

Management has been decentralized, especially in the area of education, with much greater involvement of parents and local communities. Greater emphasis has been placed on getting results, instead of on implementing rules in the old bureaucratic manner. Nonprofit or "third-sector" organizations are increasingly working in partnership with government agencies. This is part of a broad, cultural change that Ruth Cardoso's Solidary Community organization has advocated. The Workers' Party has also played an important role in implementing "participatory management" in places such as Porto Alegre where it controls the city government.

These changes are incremental and often not dramatic, but they are lasting and important. As Cardoso puts it, they go beyond "obsolete polarities, such as statism vs. the free market, or the false separation between public and private. The objective is not the minimum state or the maximum state but the necessary state. A state that builds and strengthens the conditions necessary for the growth of the economy, and that confronts the challenge of the universal access to public services, with priority to meeting the needs of the poorest social strata."⁴⁶

This may sound like hollow rhetoric, but at the end of Cardoso's term in office, he can point to a great many tangible programs⁴⁷ that give it reality. Here are some examples:

· A Secretariat for Human Rights was established within the Ministry of Justice, and compensation was paid to the families of people who "disappeared" during the military regime.

· Gun control and money laundering legislation was enacted as part of a campaign against organized crime and street violence.

· Programs were established to protect the rights of blacks, other minorities, homosexuals, the disabled, women, children and other groups, including a program to combat violence against women.

· A program was established to combat torture, and Brazil participated in an international conference against torture.

· Programs to protect indigenous Brazilians were expanded; the Cardoso government declared 104 new protected areas for indigenous groups, with 32 million hectares, and ratified 144 additional areas that had been previously declared, with 41 million hectares. Brazil's indigenous groups are growing at a rate of 3.5 percent a year, in comparison to 1.6 percent for Brazil as a whole, largely due to improved health services.⁴⁸

· The staff of the Advocate General's Office was doubled, to provide increased public advocacy within the judicial system.

· Brazil became more active in international diplomacy, and Cardoso engaged in widespread personal diplomacy, advocating for Brazil's interests. He advocated strongly for Brazil's economic interests, especially with regard to exports to the United States and Europe.

· A seminar was held on "affirmative action" policies, and a number of government agencies began to implement quotas for Brazilians of African descent, women and disabled people, an issue which had not been seriously addressed before in Brazil.

· Brazil's electoral procedures were modernized and computerized, completely avoiding the kinds of problems in counting ballots that were so embarrassing for the United States in the 2000 elections.

· The tax reforms already detailed in the 1988 constitution were effectively implemented, with tax collection largely centralized in the federal government and resources distributed according to strict formulas. The federal government collects 67 percent of the taxes, but keeps only 57 percent, of which 43 percent goes to social security programs. The states and municipalities control 40 percent of total government revenue, and federal tax sharing provides a higher share of revenue to the poorer regions of the country.

· A Ministry of Defense was created to coordinate the three branches of the military service, and the military was modernized and updated in both equipment and training, with special attention to defending Brazil's frontier areas.

There are many other programs that could be described, and it is difficult to objectively assess the impact and effectiveness of many of these programs. Many of them are continuations and improvements of programs begun before Cardoso's administration, others are new programs that will be further developed by his successors. Perhaps the most important thing about all of Cardoso's reforms is that they were done through regular democratic processes. As Cardoso said in his report to congress, "I venture to affirm that never in the history of Brazil, and very few times in the world, have such profound transformations been conducted in the plenitude of democracy, with the participation of the whole society, and the consensus of an ample majority."⁴⁹

Conclusions

Fernando Henrique Cardoso's term of office is not quite over as this chapter is being written, so it may seem premature to evaluate his presidency. Historians will have more perspective in a decade or two. But Brazilians cannot wait for historical objectivity. They have to make decisions now about continuing or changing Cardoso's policies, and about who should lead the country for the next four years.

These are really two separate questions, but they tend to get blurred in Brazilian political discourse, in part because of a linguistic problem. In Portuguese, it is awkward to make the distinction that is made in English between policy and politics. Both concepts are usually expressed by the same Portuguese word, política.⁵⁰

Often people who differ very much in their politics do not really differ much in the policies they follow. At the World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre in February, 2002, for example, leaders of the city's leftist government strongly condemned the "neoliberal" Cardoso administration, the World Bank and global capitalism. In terms of ideological rhetoric and party politics, Porto Alegre's Workers Party leaders are strongly opposed to Cardoso. But on the more concrete level of economic policy, when they actually have to run a city, it is hard to see the difference.

Porto Alegre is firmly enmeshed in the global capitalist economy, producing cars by General Motors, computers by Dell, John Deere tractors, British American tobacco, and wireless communication equipment by Telefónica of Spain. Porto Alegre's own multinational corporations also compete in the world markets, including the steel producer Gerdau with plants in the United States, the Taurus handgun company, and Varig international airlines.⁵¹

The employment and economic growth funded by this successful globalization allow the Workers Party government to fund innovative social programs. This is all to the good, it is not different from the policies Fernando Henrique Cardoso and his Social Democratic Party implement.

Evaluating any administration depends on three things: values, facts and counterfactuals. Our values tell us what we wish had happened. The facts tell us what actually happened. The counterfactuals are what we believe would have happened if different policies had been followed. Cardoso and his critics do not usually differ on their values. They all want economic development, less inequality, better health and education, less crime, inclusion of excluded social groups, and so on.

But some critics doubt the intensity of Cardoso's commitment to these values. Others doubt his ability to mobilize the population on the kind of moral crusade they believe the country needs. The first criticism is unfair. Cardoso has consistently demonstrated his commitment to humane and democratic values for many years.

But the latter criticism does point to one of Cardoso's weaknesses. He is not very good at communicating his empathy for the suffering of others. He is very good at working with people face to face and getting government to work. He is not so good at giving rousing speeches and inspiring the masses. This accounts for the unenthusiastic rating he receives in opinion polls and in focus groups. People say "he is honest and intelligent, but he is distant from the people."

On the level of facts, Cardoso can be evaluated for the accomplishments and failures of his administration. We have looked at much of the evidence, and Cardoso's record certainly compares well with those of his predecessors and with those of the leaders of neighboring countries. There are areas where he has accomplished much less than he hoped, including fiscal and tax reform, political reform and reform of the judiciary.

Rubens Penha Cysne reports that "so far the proposed tax reform is no more than a pipe dream," while the political and judicial reforms are "difficult to approve."⁵² The tax system is regressive and income taxes account for too small a share of government revenue. Brazil's system of proportional representation, in Cardoso's judgment, "needs to be changed to strengthen both the political parties and the link between the elector and his representatives."⁵³ But one hears few complaints about these important issues from Cardoso's critics, because opposition to change has come largely from Congress and from powerful pressure groups that no one is eager to confront.

What one does hear repeatedly from Cardoso's critics is the claim that he has not paid enough attention or spent enough money on social programs. The facts really do not support this complaint, so one suspects that the real concern may be cuts in salaries and benefits for people who work in the social agencies. If we look at spending on programs other than salaries, we find that it actually increased significantly during the Cardoso years. As Table One shows, about two thirds of this spending is on social security benefits, which are mandated by law. But spending on health, education, housing and urban development have also increased substantially.

Table One: ⁵⁴ Federal Expenditure on Social Programs, Excluding Salaries (see table at http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/fhc.htm)

Cardoso is annoyed by critics who cite statistics about how much money is spent as an indication of the government's priorities. The important thing, as he sees it, is not how much money you spend, but the results you get. If you can get results while spending less money, so much the better. The purpose of government programs is not to provide jobs for as many state employees as possible, but to get results.

Ruth Cardoso said that, when they took office, they could not find a single area where they believed simply spending more money would get good results. They put a great deal of energy into improving the administration of social programs, getting them to focus on producing results instead of simply following bureaucratic rules. Many of these reforms have had measurable results, such as the increase of the number of families settled on farms by the agrarian reform program.

Social indicators have improved during the Cardoso years. Of course, the needs are great and much remains to be done. But resources are limited and there are many legal and political restraints on how they can be used. The complaint that Cardoso did not give priority to social programs is not justified by the facts.

Many of Cardoso's critics are socialists who have not reconciled themselves to the global ascendancy of market economics and who oppose privatization and integration of Brazil into the global economy. In this case, the dispute is not about the facts but about counterfactuals, about what might have been. These differences cannot be resolved through rational debate because they are based on deep ideological assumptions.

At the World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre the organizers refused the World Bank's offer to send someone to debate the facts with them. They had already made up their minds about the facts, their goal was to demonstrate that "another world is possible." The vision of that other world is still a bit cloudy; they know what they don't like but they aren't quite sure what to put in its place.

They say they aren't "anti-globalisation," they favor "de-globalisation," which is a very subtle difference. In general, they oppose privatization of state enterprises, favor redistribution of land, and want to break with multilateral corporations and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Petras and Veltmeyer are more specific. They believe that Brazil should default on its foreign debt and use the money to settle millions of Brazilians on small farms.⁵⁵ They also want to abandon the privatization process and renationalize Brazil's major industries.

It is difficult to argue with someone like James Petras who believes that the Argentine crisis is "the hope of a better future."⁵⁶ Cardoso, and most Brazilians, simply do not agree that the best alternative for Brazil is a collapse of capitalism. Cardoso believes that Brazil's best chance for a successful future is a strong market economy combined with effective social programs. He was elected on that platform, and he should be judged on how well he has carried it out. Judged by that criterion, he has done well.

The old joke, "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be," doesn't ring true any more. Brazil is a good place to be right now if you want to make money. International investors, who could invest their money anywhere, are sending quite a lot of it to Brazil (Chart Thirteen). ⁵⁷ Argentina, not Brazil, is the subject of today's jokes. It is "the place where bad ideas go to die." But even in the midst of their crisis the Argentines do not seem likely to opt for James Petras's vision.

This is not to say that Cardoso has always made the right decisions, or that he has not benefited from a bit of luck here and there. With hindsight, it is clear that he should have floated the Real sooner than he did. If two major crises had hit at once—say the banking crisis and the exchange rate crisis—the economy might have been thrown into a tailspin.⁵⁸

One can always speculate about counterfactuals. In my own judgment, if Lula da Silva had won in 1994 instead of Cardoso, the country would very likely have suffered a financial crisis similar to the one Argentina suffered in 2002. But judgments of this kind are subjective, and reasonable people can differ. As Brazilians think back on Cardoso's eight years in power, many of them may agree with Luis Nassif, whose column was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Here are his conclusions⁵⁹:

"Many times [Cardoso] took heavy blows in order to avoid institutional crises. This posture was sometimes confused with cowardliness. He explained that it was a matter of the institutional responsibility of the President not to throw the country into a crisis. When the interests of the country required that he take a strong position, he never vacillated. When it was necessary, Antônio Carlos Magalhães was swept off the map of federal power without hesitation.

"He made many mistakes, especially with regard to the exchange rate. He was a careless manager, many times the victim of his own intellectual arrogance. He found it extraordinarily difficult to demonstrate solidarity with the people, because of his preoccupation with not taking a populist stance.

"But, as his administration is reaching its end, intellectual circles have begun to revise their appraisal of his administration. The power of the old political machines has been reduced in some ministries. Most of the state enterprises have been privatized, the rest have professionalized management. The Presidency is no longer a magical, Freudian institution, but a political one, with the obligation to make an accounting of its acts. Fiscal responsibility has become an indispensable requirement. And all of this has been done without dismantling the state, as the savage liberals would have done.

"If Fernando Henrique Cardoso had had more managerial determination, much more could have been done. We would not have had the burden of four years of an erroneous foreign exchange policy, and the public debt accumulated during that period. But the ideal is the enemy of the good.

"As his government reaches its end, the commentaries are becoming less passionate, as the political work is being completed, we are able to see the results of the process. There is no doubt that, in the future, we will look back with nostalgia on the times when FHC called the politicians into the Palace and, half an hour later, a conversation had aborted political crises that, in other times, would have paralyzed the country."

As this is being written, Brazil's attention is focused on the race to succeed Cardoso. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Workers' Party's perennial candidate, is ahead in the polls. But he was just as far ahead at this point in the last two presidential campaigns, and many observers believe that the candidate of Cardoso's party, José Serra, is more likely to win in the end. The Argentine collapse has put the country in a cautious mood, making it reluctant to break with a team that has kept it above water for the last eight years.

But even if Lula were to win, all indications were that he would not reverse Cardoso's major policy initiatives.⁶⁰ Nor would Antônio Garotinho, the left-leaning governor of Rio de Janeiro who is close to Serra in the polls, or any other viable candidate.

Cardoso felt confident that "the quality of the work undertaken by the federal government will be recognized in the ballot box.⁶¹ It seems clear that Cardoso's key policies will continue, even if the politics changes. In 1994, the British Marxist Perry Anderson predicted that "Cardoso will be the best president in the history of Brazil."⁶² Eight years later, he should feel no need to regret his statement.
 

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³³ Draibe, op. cit., p. 114.

³⁴ Cardoso, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, op. cit., p. 45. "O Brasil, por esse critério elementar, era um exemplo acabado de Estado do mal-estar social, que tirava dos pobres para dar aos ricos e remediados. Reverter esse quadro implica esforços árduos e muito persistentes para livrar o Estado brasileiro do jugo de grupos favorecidos que o envolvem por fora e o colonizam por dentro. Outras batalhas ainda terão de ser travadas, mas algumas vitórias importantes já podem ser destacadas na longa campanha para colocar as maiorias destituídas no topo das prioridades do gasto público.

³⁵ Sônia Draibe, op. cit., p. 121.

³⁶ Sônia Draibe, op. cit., p. 121.

³⁷ These tables are from Graeff, op. cit.

³⁸ Cardoso, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, op. cit., p. 192.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Land statistics from Cardoso, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, p. 195.

⁴¹ Putin's speech as summarized in The Economist, April 20, 2001, p. 50.

⁴² The amendments are listed in Cardoso, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, pp. 478-479.

⁴³ Rubens, Penha Cysne, "Macro- and Microeconomic Aspects of the Reforms," in Renato Baumann, op. cit., pp 39-40.

⁴⁴ Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, p. 509.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 510.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 503. "é uma empreitada que passa pela superação de dilemas obsoletos, como estatismo versus livre mercado, ou a falsa identificação entre o público e o estatal. O objetivo não é o Estado-mínimo nem máximo, mas o Estado necessário. Um Estado que construa e fortaleça as condições necessárias ao crescimento da economia e enfrente o desafio da universalização do acesso aos serviços públicos, com prioridade parao atendimento às demandas das camadas mais pobres."

⁴⁷ All of these, and many more, are described by Cardoso in the chapter on "Democratização do Estado in the Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, available at: http://www.planalto.gov.br/publi_04/reformadoestado.pdf.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 499.

⁴⁹ Cardoso, Mensagem ao Congresso Nacional, Introducção, p. xx. Atrevo-me a afirmar que nunca na história do Brasil, e muito poucas vezes no mundo, transformações tão profundas foram conduzidas na plenitude da democracia, com a participação de toda a sociedade e o consenso de uma ampla maioria.

⁵⁰ Perhaps the best way to express the difference in Portuguese is to distinguish between políticas governamentais or publicas and políticas partidárias or eletorais.

⁵¹ Simon Romero, "A Leftist City Makes Money to its Own Drummer," The New York Times, February 4, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com

⁵² Rubens, Penha Cysne, "Macro- and Microeconomic Aspects of the Reforms," op cit., pp. 56, 84.

⁵³ Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Mensages ao Congresso Nacional, op cit, p. 476. "precisa de mucanças que fortaleçam ao mesmo tempo os partidos e o vínculo do eleitor com seus representantes."

⁵⁴ Table One is from Graeff, op. cit.

⁵⁵ Petras and Veltmeyer, op cit., p. 139.

⁵⁶ James Petras, "You have to take action from below," The Labor Standard, http://www.laborstandard.org/New_Postings/petras_on_argentina.htm

⁵⁷ This chart is from Graeff, op. cit.

⁵⁸ See William C. Smith and Nizar Messari, "Democracy and Reform in Cardoso's Brazil: Caught Between Clientelism and Global Markets?" for a discussion of alternative scenarios. Available in Jeffrey Stark, ed, The Challenge of Change in Latin America and the Caribbean, Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001, or online at http://www.miami.edu/nsc.

⁵⁹ Luis Nassif, Folha de São Paulo, 9 March 2002, op. cit. "Muitas vezes suportou tiroteios pesados, a fim de evitar crises institucionais. Essa postura chegou a ser confundida com pusilanimidade. Ele próprio explicava que se tratava de responsabilidade institucional de presidente, de não jogar o país em uma crise. Quando o interesse do país exigiu posições firmes, jamais vacilou. Quando precisou, ACM foi varrido do mapa federal sem que FHC nem sequer piscasse.

Errou muito, especialmente na política cambial, que quase compromete sua obra política. Foi um gestor descuidado, muitas vezes vítima de sua própria arrogância intelectual e com uma dificuldade extraordinária em demonstrar solidariedade ao seu povo, devido à preocupação de não parecer populista.

Mas, à medida que seu governo vai chegando ao final, em muitos setores intelectuais tem início um processo inédito de reconhecimento de sua ação política. As armas da fisiologia foram reduzidas a alguns ministérios. A maior parte das estatais de mercado foi privatizada, as demais tiveram a gestão profissionalizada. A Presidência deixou de ser uma instituição mágica e freudiana para se transformar em um poder a mais, com obrigação de prestar contas de seus atos. A responsabilidade fiscal tornou-se valor irreversível. E tudo isso sem que houvesse o desmanche do Estado, como pretendiam os liberais selvagens.

Houvesse mais determinação gerencial de parte de Fernando Henrique, muito mais poderia ter sido feito. Não haveria o atraso decorrente de quatro anos de política cambial errada nem a dívida pública acumulada no período. Mas o ideal é inimigo do bom.

À medida que seu governo vai chegando ao fim, as avaliações perdem o passionalismo, a obra política vai se completando, permitindo entender o fim do processo, não restam dúvidas de que haverá saudades dos tempos em que FHC chamava os políticos no Palácio e, meia hora depois, uma boa conversa abortava crises políticas que, em outros tempos, paralisariam o país.

Quem acompanhou o dia-a-dia desses quase oito anos sabe que o país poderia estar numa posição muito à frente, houvesse determinação administrativa de FHC. Mas quem olha para a Argentina se dá conta de que fazer a transição do velho para o novo regime, preservando o país e as instituições, talvez tenha sido o feito mais importante da moderna história política do país. Luís Nassif - lnassif@uol.com.br

⁶⁰ Thomas Traumann, "Pensando um Governo Lula," Revista Epoca, April 22, 2002. http://www.epoca.globo.com.br.

⁶¹ Panorama Brasil, "FHC diz que sucessor dará continuidade ao seu trabalho," April 30, 2002, Yahoo! Noticias at: http://br.news.yahoo.com/020430/13/3l05.html  "a qualidade do trabalho empreendido pelo governo federal será reconhecida pelas urnas"

⁶² Quoted in Petras and Veltmeyer, op cit., p. 157.

This is the second and final part of the concluding chapter of the Portuguese edition of Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil to be soon published in Portuguese by Editora Saraiva. The chapter is called "Eight Years of Pragmatic Leadership in Brazil." The book's author, Ted Goertzel, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, in Camden, New Jersey. He can be reached at goertzel@crab.rutgers.edu 

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