Brazil grabs chances to turn superpower

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Brazil, the superpower that never was, for the first time in decades has shown its stuff. The outsider may be excused, until this week, for beginning to wonder if the country still had what it takes. The story: military rule, repression, torture and grandiose overspending including a nuclear weapons' program, followed by parliamentary chaos, inept presidential rule, only to be bested next by a corrupt one. And all the while more economic mismanagement than the rest of Latin America put together.

The last time Brazil went to the polls was November, 1989. Then one was struck by the deep pessimism prevalent in the country. No one believed that any of the politicians on offer could brake the country's headlong rush into economic catastrophe. On the one hand, the front runner was a TV game-show presenter. On the other, the man who became president, drawing ahead only at the last moment, was the daredevil racy-looking former governor of an insignificant state who couldn't wait to get his hands into the till.

With such a circus, it's hard to remember that only 10 years ago when Angus Maddison published his World Economy in the Twentieth Century he described Brazil, along with Taiwan, as the champion of the twentieth century's economic growth race. While world production had risen 13-fold between 1900 and 1987, Latin America's had increased 32-fold. But Brazil was unquestionably number one. And when Latin America crashed, it crashed the hardest. The world recession of the 1980s and the ensuing debt crisis hit Latin America so hard that it lost its wind for the best part of a decade. But while Argentina, Mexico and even Peru conquered near hyper-inflation, Brazil appeared to luxuriate in economic madness, its currency adding zeros almost faster than the printing presses could turn.

Earlier this year, last week's presidential victor in his previous role as finance minister applied the necessary political muscle and acumen to pull Brazil out of its nose dive. Now, with a newly confident and optimistic electorate behind him, Fernando Henrique Cardoso has the mandate to put Brazil back on the high road and turn this country, even today the 10th largest economy in the world, into a hemispheric superpower that can, before too long, overtake Mexico and even Canada, and one day stand eye to eye with the United States itself.

He has an awful mess to clean up: a crime rate out of control and the most skewed distribution of income on the planet. If there is no other country in the world with so many abandoned street children, there is certainly no other where the same street children are hunted down like rabid dogs for extermination.

Brazil has managed to unite the worst of feudalism with the worst of capitalism in a terrible fusion that has created an explosion of social disintegration.

Brazil has always liked to indulge in what, for visitors, is pure fantasy -- Copacabana beach, the carnival and the samba. But fantasy without purpose other than gratifying the insatiable hedonistic ego of those that have made it, is a dangerous witches' brew. Brazil has supped from this cauldron for too long.

Brazil has now to return to its past and in it there is much to be proud. This is a country that hasn't been to war since 1870 -- and, indeed, whatever horrors Brazil has recently gone through, it has avoided the recourse to belligerency, either at home or abroad. This, too, is a country that, revolted by one single miscarriage of justice, abolished the death penalty 140 years ago. It is also a country where race has never been codified into legalized disadvantage. Informal barriers certainly persist, but if you're black and you make it you've been able to marry whom you please and live where you want.

Now the job of Brazil's newly-elected president is to bring the virtues of Brazil -- tolerance, gregariousness and lack of pretension -- into its modern age. This means imbuing the country with a sense of discipline, starting with Cardoso's great achievement, a stable currency. It means collecting taxes from the well-to-do. It means a massive program of privatization for the overstuffed state sector. It means land reform, the single most pressing issue before Brazil. The feudalistic distribution of land is the root of so many of its present-day urban woes -- broken families, depressed wages and the lack of prudent investment by the land-owning class.

For a day or two, Brazil deserves to savor its moment of glory. Then the hard work of building a world class economy can commence.