The Accidental President of Brazil Quotes

“Bush nodded. “It sounds like you’ve got a real diverse country down there.” “Oh, yes,” I said. “We are truly a melting pot.” I told him about all the immigration Brazil had from Italy, Germany, Ukraine, Japan, and so on. “We also have one of the world’s largest populations of blacks, you know.” “Do you have blacks in Brazil?” Bush asked.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“Land distribution in Brazil is one of the most unfair in the world. One frequently cited statistic from the beginning of my presidency showed that 1 percent of the population controlled 45 percent of Brazil’s arable land.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“The United States had the Homestead Act of 1862, which enshrined small landholdings and laid the foundation for the world’s most prosperous middle class.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“There were many people, Brazilians included, who believed such a change was impossible. They saw Brazil as the incorrigible land of the jeitinho, the artful little trick for getting around the system. This word, and the concept behind it, were supposedly intractable parts of our national identity, the products of a society that took deep pride in flaunting the law.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“was not an economist. So, in thinking about how to solve the problem, I decided to start with the big picture. The root cause of inflation in Brazil was really very simple: The government spent more than it earned. When the budget turned up a big deficit every year, as it inevitably did, the government printed more money to cover the difference. Any grade-school student knows, however, that you can’t just print endless amounts of cash without having something tangible to back it up.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“Between 1964 and 1985, the military killed about 325 suspected leftists, while more than 1,500 were tortured, according to later estimates by Amnesty International.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“We also saw that some countries, particularly Argentina and Brazil, had been able to accommodate foreign companies without ceding control over their national interests. We postulated, then, that poor countries in a position of “dependency” on the rich ones could take certain steps toward progress in spite of the existing system. All of this sounds quite elementary and obvious now, but in Latin America in 1968, these thoughts were borderline heresy.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“Before he left, Sartre took a small side trip to Araraquara, in the interior of São Paulo state, where he had an unlikely encounter with a Brazilian of truly global stature. The episode is retold in Joseph A. Page’s fine book The Brazilians: As Sartre stood outside a building conversing with a cadre of intellectuals, down the street came Pelé, the world’s greatest soccer star, accompanied by several fans. The two groups converged on a street corner. When they separated, the intellectuals realized they were now following Pelé, and Sartre was walking alone. The intellectuals ran back down the street, a bit embarrassed, and rejoined their French hero. According to Page, many residents still refer to the spot as “Pelé-Sartre Corner.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“Depression ended, and factory output more than doubled during the 1930s. Getúlio realized that, by co-opting the new urban working classes, he could gain a powerful, up-and-coming ally and stoke the engine of economic growth.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“1980s and declared “I’m very happy to be in Bolivia,” it seemed to confirm all of our worst fears. Nothing stung Brazilian sensibilities more than not being properly recognized by the bigger and much richer continental giant in the hemisphere.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“Victory arrived unexpectedly in June 2001, when a UN AIDS conference was due to open in New York. On that same day, the United States withdrew the complaint against Brazil from the WTO. I have no doubt that this favorable outcome was decisively influenced by global public opinion.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“To make matters worse, it was clear that small-scale subsistence farming had, sadly, become extremely difficult to maintain in a modern economy. Many of the MST settlements depended on government subsidies to survive. They could wave red Che Guevara flags and rage against the unfairness of global capitalism until they turned hoarse, but that was the reality we all had to live in.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“With the support of leftist intellectuals and the Catholic Church, the MST has become much more than a movement of the poor. It boasts 1.5 million members, including television stars, samba singers, and other celebrities at home and abroad.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“advocated a blend of free-market reform and social responsibility, much like leaders such as Felipe González, the successful prime minister of Spain. Our party symbol was the toucan, the colorful Brazilian parrotlike bird with a giant beak, and we became popularly known as the tucanos.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“What we were really writing about was the beginning of globalization”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“The primary message of Dependency and Development was that the people of Latin America had control over their own fate. Under certain circumstances, we could indeed operate within the existing system. Many alternatives were possible within that system, and the fatalism that dominated the region at that time was entirely pointless, we wrote. There would, of course, be certain restrictions, and we did not advocate blind free-market capitalism.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“Meanwhile, countries that had actually undergone the dreamed-of socialist revolution— North Korea, Cuba, and East Germany, for example—suffered from sputtering economies and totalitarian regimes. To people who had embraced so-called Marxist dogma during their entire careers, the juxtaposition of these two realities was both puzzling and disturbing.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“As the Harvard historian Kenneth Maxwell observed, “Democracy in Brazil has all too often been seen as the enemy of progress, the harbinger of anarchy, disunion and backwardness.” And so, democracy itself was discarded.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir

“The Left did not regard JK favorably, given his efforts to strengthen a free market economy with participation of foreign capital. Nor was he much admired by the academy that viewed with suspicion his flamboyant democratic attitude, which usually led him to reconcile conflicting forces. My father was a federal deputy at that time, a member of the coalition of parties that supported the government.”
― Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir